As we just mentioned, the trend in the direction of performance measurement is creeping out beyond just OMB's PART system. New evidence: "Sen. Wayne Allard (R-Colo), chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on the Legislative Branch, said he was looking into the possibility of requiring legislative agencies to follow the GPRA during a hearing yesterday on budget requests for the Library of Congress and the Government Accountability Office (GAO)." (Read more.) If brown is the new black, performance is the new cost-benefit analysis: a highly technical measurement process that presumes to base subjective decisions on notionally neutral and objective data, while hiding in its very technical complexity the political volatilities that actually drive decisionmaking. At present, it is the dumber, less sophisticated cousin of CBA. As the practical policy applications of performance measurement increase, however, count on performance discourse to become as technically abstruse as CBA, thus making it ever more difficult to discern the political motives hidden in the numbers.