Why PART? The Institutional Politics of Presidential Budget Reform

Abstract

The George W. Bush administration’s Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) follows a sequence of president-initiated budget reforms. The pattern is puzzling in that past reforms have tended to drain staff resources, failed to take hold, and yielded little or no political advantage. Given the track record of past initiatives, why has the Bush administration chosen to invest Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and agency resources in PART? This article briefly traces PART’s development and, placing the initiative in the context of contemporary research on the institutional presidency, attempts to make sense of the sustained appeal that rationalizing reforms have held across administrations. An account of reform as problem solving is developed. Set against the changing architecture of budget and administrative politics, reform is prompted by the interplay of evolving management concepts and two persistent problem types: Reform holds at least the potential for enhanced budget control where any leverage is valued and responds to the dilemmas of managing policy competence in the modern institutional presidency. The article concludes with a plea on behalf of institutional theories built on realistic models of how actors interpret and respond to the conditions prevailing in administrative politics. The George W. Bush administration’s Program Assessment Rating Tool, or PART, is ambitious, carefully crafted, and if history is a guide, probably doomed. Since its initiation in 2002, PART’s worksheets have guided Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and agency staff through assessments of the design and performance of hundreds of federal programs, ‘‘PARTing’’ about 20 percent of programs each year. The president’s fiscal year (FY) 2006 budget, the first of Bush’s second term, demonstrated a commitment to use PART to target program reductions, as the administration endeavors to rein in a budget deficit that exceeded $400 billion in 2004. ‘‘My budget,’’ President Bush announced in his 2005 State of the Union address, ‘‘substantially reduces or eliminates more than 150 government programs that are not getting results, or duplicate current efforts, or do not fulfill essential priorities. The principle here is clear: Taxpayer dollars must be spent wisely, or not at all’’ (Bush 2005). Evidence regarding PART’s leverage as a tool for The author is grateful to Peri Arnold, Donald Kettl, Patrick Roberts, Rachel Girshick, and Clinton Brass for valuable guidance and feedback; and to Sarah Binder and members of the Governance Studies program of the Brookings Institution for their hospitality and encouragement while this project (slowly) took its current form. Address correspondence to the author at mdull@polisci.wisc.edu doi:10.1093/jopart/muj004 Advance Access publication on January 12, 2006 a The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org. JPART 16:187–215