Budgeting. (From the Library).

"Performance Budgeting--The Next Budgetary Answer. But What is the Question?"

Bernard Pitsvada and Felix LoStracco

Journal of Public Budgeting, Accounting & Financial Management, Spring 2002, pp. 53-73.

The final implementation stage of the Government Performance and Results Act is performance budgeting, which presents "varying levels of performance, including outcome-related performance, that would result from different budgeted amounts." When GPRA was passed in 1993, the evidence about how difficult it would be to implement was speculative and derived largely from what people said. Studies sponsored by individual congressional leaders and the General Accounting Office have assigned low scores to most agencies for performance reporting. Organizational realities in the federal government today make performance budgeting impractical. A tremendous surge in the amount of uncontrollable spending over the last four decades has significantly reduced the portion of the budget that can be influenced by outcome data. Mandatory spending, which includes interest on the national debt and entitlement programs, now accounts for two-thirds of the federal budget. And much of the discretionary spending is not really open to choice (e.g., defense). The reality is that politicians and managers only use performance information when it produces results with which they agree; data is nor enough to replace political support and political judgment. Couple this with the facts that measuring outcomes is inherently subjective and that federal accounting systems often fail to record dollars and workloads at the same time, and one wonders if performance budgeting is worth the effort at the federal level. Despite these realities, OMB intends to continue with a push toward performance-based budgets in fiscal year 2003. The authors, meanwhile, recommend that GPRA implementation be reevaluated. Performance budgeting's positive future impact lies in improved accounting systems that can gather measures and identify outcomes for managerial use, without political gamesmanship and a mountain of paperwork. Unfortunately, the federal government has yet to achieve this step. Journal of Public Budgeting, Accounting & Financial Management is available fr om PrAcademics Press, 21760 Mountain Sugar Lane, Boca Raton, FL 33433 (561/362-9183), or www.pracademicspress.com.