In January, President Obama signed the Government Performance and Results Modernization Act of 2010 (GPRA Modernization Act), updating a nearly 20-year-old law in an effort to increase government efficiency through funding choices. In April, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued its first directives to federal agencies on how to implement the new legislation, and Congress has begun to conduct oversight related to the measure.

The original Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) – passed in 1993 and signed into law by then-President Bill Clinton – helped shift the government from measuring its activities or agency outputs to measuring federal agency outcomes by evaluating the impacts a program or agency may have on the public or a segment thereof. In short, GPRA attempted to institutionalize performance budgeting, which creates a tighter connection between the amount of money Congress appropriates to a federal agency and how effectively the agency’s programs accomplish stated goals.

The Obama White House championed the GPRA revamping in part as a way to refocus the performance tool and move away from the controversial Performance Assessment Rating Tool (PART), which was developed by the Bush administration to measure program performance unrelated to GPRA's statutory requirements. Good government groups, including OMB Watch, criticized PART as a vehicle for inserting ideology into the funding of programs through the routine act of reviewing performance.

The revamped GPRA will begin introducing short-term performance reviews, conducted every quarter, of specific, high-priority performance goals related to an agency's core mission. The GPRA Modernization Act also seeks to institutionalize the sharing and use of best practices among federal agencies and the introduction of cross-agency goals.

The Obama administration hopes those cross-agency goals, along with the communication necessary between agencies to work toward them, will help eliminate some of the waste inherent in supporting multiple federal programs and agencies working on the same problem, recently detailed in a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report – mandated by the GPRA Modernization Act – on government waste and overlapping programs.

On April 14, OMB released its initial directives for federal agencies to follow when implementing the new law. The April guidance sets the stage for further, more specific guidance over the next year. Until release of those later directives, agencies are required to identify a chief operating officer (May 2), name a performance improvement officer from among senior executives (June 1), and begin reviews on near-term, high-priority goals (June 30), which each agency identified in its fiscal year (FY) 2011 budget. In addition, agencies must begin thinking about the priority goals they each will submit for the FY 2013 budget.

To examine how federal agencies are doing in implementing OMB's latest directives, two subcommittees of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a joint hearing on May 10. Jeff Zients, the government's chief performance officer, told the subcommittees that he expects most agencies to meet their near-term deadlines and that a new website, performance.gov, will debut soon. The website will publish the names of each agency's chief operating and performance improvement officers, as well as an agency's performance against its priority GPRA goals.

John Griffith of the Center for American Progress recently rhetorically asked in a Government Executive piece whether the GPRA Modernization Act – suffused with government-speak about goals, data, and reviews – is just "another bureaucratic exercise in futility." Griffith says, "[N]ot necessarily." "When done well," he contends, "regular, goal-driven reviews can boost institutional performance dramatically."

Indeed, as Paul Posner, a professor of public administration at George Mason University and a well-known expert on government, recently reminded the joint Senate hearing, "[GPRA] is a success story and [those in and around government] shouldn't forget this." For a public that is habitually cynical about government and adheres to the conventional wisdom that Washington "will never make progress" and that "reform is a fool's errand," GPRA has enjoyed "17 years of sustained progress through three administrations."

That is not to say that the effort will not face challenges. Success of the GPRA Modernization Act, like the original law, is going to require buy-in by the senior leaders of federal agencies. As John Kamensky – a senior fellow at the IBM Center for the Business of Government and a key player in the design of the original GPRA legislation – acknowledges to Griffith, "For agency senior leaders to make that commitment, the reviews must cover issues that they see as critical to their mission." He adds, "This will likely require agencies to rethink their existing set of priority goals."

With that said, the Obama administration shows no sign of soft peddling this reform. Indeed, the White House's entire Accountable Government Initiative, which seeks to increase federal government performance using open government reforms to fight waste, fraud, and abuse, dovetails directly into the larger context of GPRA modernization and the idea that taxpayers should only pay for what works in the federal government.