PRESS RELEASE Contact: Anna Oman, 202/234-8494, aoman@ombwatch.org OMB Watch to Congress: Flaws Make PART a Useless Evaluation Tool WASHINGTON, June 13--OMB Watch told Congress today that the Bush administration's Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) draws biased conclusions about federal program efficacy and should thus continue to be largely ignored by Congress. Adam Hughes, OMB Watch's director of federal fiscal policy, testified on PART during a hearing held by the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Subcommittee on Federal Fiscal Management, Government Information, and International Security. PART is a performance appraisal system adopted by the White House's Office of Management and Budget in 2001. While billed as objective, PART is, in fact, a tool to attempt to manipulate spending along the lines of the president's budget, according to Hughes. "PART continues a troubling trend we have seen in other executive branch initiatives and even congressional proposals--namely, a trend to arrogate increasing power to the White House, even in areas that by constitutional design have been committed to Congress," Hughes testified. "For this reason alone, PART should be approached extremely cautiously by those outside the administration." Hughes described PART as a tool with deeply embedded biases and subjectivity allowing OMB considerable power to manipulate political and policy outcomes when the tool is implemented. "Both by the design of the tool and as the mechanism is implemented, PART systematically ignores the reality of federal programs and judges them based on standards that are deeply incompatible with the purposes that federal programs are expected to serve," Hughes explained. "As one agency contact described it, PART assessments are tantamount to a baseball coach walking to the mound to remove his pitcher and then chastising him for not kicking enough field goals as he brings in a new pitcher." Hughes advised Congress to approach PART reviews with a high degree of skepticism and use the long-established congressional structures within the oversight, authorization, and appropriations processes to conduct more thorough program review and results investigations. Hughes' testimony is available here. ### OMB Watch is a nonpartisan watchdog research and advocacy organization that promotes access to government information, accountability, and citizen participation in government processes.