With the release of the President's FY 08 budget, the Office of Management and Budget has completed reviews of almost every federal program using their review mechanism — the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART). To date, nearly 1,000 federal programs, representing 96 percent of all programs, have received at least one review with the PART. Unfortunately, the PART continues to be an ineffective tool for objectively evaluating program performance, has little to do with even the president's own budget proposal, and adds additional burdens and distractions to program management and implementation. The PART system has created a duplicative and only marginally useful system that many agency program staff treat merely as a compliance exercise. It is time for the administration to discontinue the charade of claiming the PART is an unbiased tool to help with budgeting and management. PART Results Almost Completely Ignored in Budgeting OMB states it hopes the PART will more closely align program performance and budget requests to make sure taxpayer dollars are being invested wisely. Yet according to the president's budget, the suggestions developed by the president using the PART over the last few years have had very little impact on program budgets. In 2006, out of almost 1,000 federal programs, only seven were terminated by a Congress controlled by the president's own party, saving $230 million — or 0.0082 percent of the total federal budget. Four other programs were reduced, saving $300 million, according to FY 08 budget documents. In the previous two budget proposals, OMB developed a list of programs for elimination that were supposedly not getting results after being reviewed with the PART, even going so far as to mention those lists of programs in his State of the Union address. However, once the list of programs were released well after the budget, OMB Watch analyses showed only one-third of the programs on each of those lists were actually reviewed using the PART (see FY 06 and FY 07 analyses). In his FY 08 budget, the president once again writes that performance review of all federal programs was used to select 141 programs slated for reduction or elimination for failing to meet performance criteria. The budget cites that these reductions and eliminations should save $12 billion. Yet just as in past years, the budget documents failed to include this list of programs or their respective PART scores with the budget release — so we are unable to tell if the PART actually influenced the construction of this list. As soon as the administration makes the list of programs available, we will conduct a similar analysis as in past years. Incidentally, the list of 141 programs referenced in the FY 08 budget is strangely similar to the list produced with the FY 07 budget, which also consisted of 141 programs (see the FY 07 list). Our analysis of that list found that 68 percent of the programs had yet to even be reviewed by the PART, and only 8 percent of them had actually received a failing mark (ineffective) under Bush's own measurement tool. It is unclear why the president keeps touting this system of program evaluation in budget after budget when the data show that both Congress and the president himself do not rely on the results of the reviews to inform budget decisions. PART Creates Increased Management, Compliance, and Data Burdens The problems with the PART extend beyond its seeming disconnect from presidential budget requests and ultimately, actual allocation of federal funding. Ironically, the PART process itself is a wasteful exercise that diverts resources and energy from the implementation of government programs. In the years since the PART was first introduced, the review process has often forced program managers and agencies to alter their existing management and performance review practices, institute new and costly data collection structures and systems, generate independent reviews and analyses from outside the government, and overlay this performance initiative with previous government efforts. These alterations to program management have created an entire compliance system within itself that distracts energy and resources from achieving program goals. While the President's FY 08 budget states that the PART was "built upon GPRA requirements by creating an objective, evidence-based and easy-to-understand questionnaire about program design, planning, management, and performance," it actually is often in conflict or complicates other government wide reform initiatives. Collecting new types of data within agencies for OMB in order to comply with the PART rating system is often constrained by the Paperwork Reduction Act, which requires agencies to reduce the number of data elements collected. Further, the PART and the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA), the performance measurement initiative of the Clinton administration enacted by Congress, are often in conflict with each other, creating added management difficulties and increased compliance burden within agencies. This conclusion has been supported by multiple analyses, including ones by the Government Accountability Office. Furthermore, there are significant obstacles to the data collection that PART demands. Agency data collection is constrained by the Paperwork Reduction Act, which requires agencies to obtain OMB approval before conducting any information collection that asks the same questions of ten or more people. Additionally, data collection efforts, especially the independent evaluations PART expects programs to rely on, can be expensive, but PART does not excuse programs that cannot collect the expected level of data because of a lack of funding. OMB itself is responsible for these obstacles, even as it penalizes programs for running into them. Between this Catch-22 and some of the other absurdities of the PART, program staff have learned to treat PART evaluations as a compliance exercise instead of a guide to better management. OMB Watch has conducted extensive, in-depth interviews with agency staff involved in PART assessments at the program level. We have heard repeatedly that agency staff have spent considerable time "gaming" the PART system — learning the pressure points and pitfalls to avoid negative scores and consequences. A performance appraisal system so widely regarded as a mere compliance exercise offers little diagnostic benefit for agency program managers and is simply another indication that it is better that PART scores are not more closely related to budget allocations for programs. While Data is Suspect, Access is Excellent The data, evaluations and ratings produced under the PART have myriad problems and biases, and their value is questionable, but the public's access to the PART materials through is excellent. OMB's introduction of the website last year greatly expanded the access and ease of use of the data for novice users. Subsequently, improvements to the website have given more access to advanced users and analysts to export larger batches of the data for additional analysis. The website is an excellent example of how the government should make information accessible to the public. Conclusion There is little evidence in the FY 2008 budget, or in past year's budgets, to support the presidential rhetoric that results are the basis of his funding decisions. When data on the development of budget recommendations based on PART reviews has been provided in the past, the connection between the PART and proposed budgets has been shown to be highly dubious. And this year, the administration has continued its practice of delaying the list of reduced or terminated programs until after the dust settles from the budget release. The fact that the budget release continues to omit the specific list of programs the president has deemed not getting sufficient results casts significant doubts on the sincerity of the president's stated goals. The president's rhetorical focus on performance and results seems to be just that — merely a smokescreen providing political cover for a Bush agenda that seeks to promote particular ideological policies while drastically reducing the size of the federal government.