The Paradox of Implementing the Government Performance and Results Act: Top‐Down Direction for Bottom‐Up Implementation

Abstract

Research on the implementation of the Government Performance and Results Act generally has not considered how the strategic plan, annual performance plan, and annual performance report are produced and used. Are the documents good decision and management tools, as the act intends, or are agencies internalizing them to meet the unique needs of their organization? Interviews with representatives of 14 cabinet-level federal agencies suggest that implementation of the act is not standardized. Instead, it is influenced by the unique challenges that agencies face. Further, there is a relationship between the implementation challenges and the overall use of the documents.In early public administration literature, the politicsadministration dichotomy is simply explained as politicians making policy decisions and assigning programs and tasks to government agencies (Wilson 1887). Bureaucrats, in turn, create programs that meet legislative intent. Through laws and statutes, politicians are able to control bureaucrats by specifying the details of implementation, thus assuring consistent implementation. This can be seen as employing a one-size-fits-all mentality that is similar to the "one best way" of the classical theorists (Taylor 1911). Thanks to the neoclassicists (Simon 1945) and other recent theorists (Williams 2000), we know that such proverbs of administration are ill-advised. Yet, in the Government Performance and Results Act (Public Law 102-63), we see exactly this type of behavior by politicians. They attempt to reform government by imposing procedural controls, giving no attention to structures, institutions, and actors. These kinds of actions do not foster visionary governance; instead, they invite micro-level bureaucratic control. They are changes directed at program management, not public policy.In the recent round of reform efforts, Congress and the president used a top-down mandate-the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA)-to define and drive the internal processes of federal government agencies. The act requires the development of three documents (strategic plan, annual performance plan, and annual performance report) that together serve as an effective and efficient management tool to inform decision making and budget allocation by external funding sources. It is also meant to open up the planning process to provide points of access for various agency stakeholders. The act requires consultation with internal and external stakeholders during the development of the documents. These documents are linked to the budget requests of each agency in an effort to align performance with resource-allocation decisions. The GPRA specifies a bottom-up implementation process that will yield documents that inform internal management decisions while providing accountability to external stakeholders; thus, it imposes procedural controls rather than addressing structural issues.The paradox of the GPRA is that it uses a top-down, one-size-fits-all policy direction to mandate a bottom-up implementation approach. This to...

Accountability in Higher Education: Exploring Impacts on State Budgets and Institutional Spending Patterns

“…Further, by holding public agencies accountable for performance, policymakers are able to get more "bang for the buck" by spending less money on programs that do not work and more on those that do. While performance budgeting has become ubiquitous at all levels of government in America over the last fifteen years (Kettl 2000;Melkers and Willoughby 1998;Moynihan 2006a), empirical research has generally found only limited evidence that performance information has a meaningful impact on budget decisions, particularly at the state and federal levels of government Lewis 2006b, 2006a;Joyce 1999;Long and Franklin 2004;Moynihan 2006b;Radin 2000). Why have policymakers been so apt to adopt performance mechanisms if they do not use the information that these systems generate ?…”

Mandatory Targets and Environmental Performance: An Analysis Based on Regression Discontinuity Design

“…What was missing in this literature is the motivations and behaviors of the local agents for implementation. The second wave of policy implementation scholars have thus focused on the bottom-up strategies in policy implementation, with explicit focus on the motivations of the street-level bureaucrats [16][17][18]. The development and application of performance management across government entities represents efforts to integrate the top-down approach with the bottom up approach to policy implementation [17].…”

Developing performance audit in Spanish local government: an empirical study of a way forward

“…One aspect of NPM (Azuma, 2005) has been a focus on improved performance, and Holmes (1992) described a recurring theme of public sector reform involving both improving performance and enhancing accountability. Some authors argue that the implementation of performance measures has often been the critical link that impacts the success or failure of government programmes (Long and Franklin, 2004).…”