Levels of Value Integration in Federal Agencies' Mission and Value Statements: Is Open Government a Performance Target of U.S. Federal Agencies?

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12937
• Author: David H. Rosenbloom,Suzanne Piotrowski,Alex Ingrams,Sinah Kang
• Date: 01 September 2018
• Published date: 01 September 2018

Levels of Value Integration in Federal Agencies’ Mission and Value Statements 705

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 78, Iss. 5, pp. 705–716. © 2018 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12937.

Levels of Value Integration in Federal Agencies’ Mission and

Value Statements: Is Open Government a Performance Target

of U.S. Federal Agencies?

Abstract: The Barack Obama administration advanced open government initiatives to make federal administration

more open, accountable, and responsive to citizens. Yet a question remains whether federal administrators took notice.

This article examines changes in the extent to which U.S. federal agencies have integrated the three core principles

of open government—transparency, public participation, and collaboration—into their performance planning. By

analyzing 337 annual performance plans of 24 major federal agencies from fiscal years 2001 to 2016, the authors

found that, overall, the level of integration of open government into performance planning has been trending higher

since the early 2000s. During the Obama presidency, integration initially rose sharply but later declined. Findings also

show that agencies’ stated core values regarding open government are not consistently integrated into their performance

plans. The implications of these findings for incorporating democratic-constitutional values into holistic performance

management are considered.

Evidence for Practice

• U.S. federal agencies can, and do, incorporate democratic-constitutional values into their performance

management schemes.

• Agencies with open government values explicitly listed in their value statements are no more likely than

other agencies to include open government in their performance plans. In other words, agencies’ stated core

values are not consistently integrated into their performance plans.

• The declining level of integration of open government activities into performance planning may result in less

attention, reduced investment of resources, and weaker efforts by federal agencies to foster more transparent,

participatory, and collaborative governance.

• It is important for agencies to incorporate democratic-constitutional values (which are not central to agency

mission but are important governmental attributes in their own right) into performance planning. Models

such as the GPRA Modernization Act may offer a starting point for balanced approaches.

A

continuing concern for contemporary public

administration scholars is whether a highly

focused emphasis on managing for central

mission results and ever-greater programmatic

performance levels diverts agencies’ attention

and resources from promoting broader but less

immediate public values that underlie democratic-

constitutional government (Bryson, Crosby, and

Bloomberg 2014; Dahl and Soss 2014; Piotrowski

and Rosenbloom 2002). Diminished investment and

attention to public values could also be an unintended

consequence of how agency performance has been

defined, measured, and pursued under the successive

pressures of the “reinventing government” movement,

New Public Management practices, the Government

Performance and Results Act (GPRA) of 1993, the

GPRA Modernization Act of 2010, President George

W. Bush’s President’s Management Agenda (2001)

with its attendant “traffic-light scorecards,” and

President Barack Obama’s efforts to improve agency

rulemaking (e.g., Executive Order 13563, section 6

[2011]). Democratic-constitutional government

depends on public values such as representation,

citizen participation, transparency, and individual

rights.

The goal of this article is to address these dilemmas

of democratic-constitutional government through

a study of performance planning and public

value integration. A framework is developed for

understanding levels of value integration in U.S.

federal agencies, and a 15-year analysis is conducted

to determine whether integration of some values has

diminished or progressed. According to Hood (1991),

conflicts among administrative values cannot be

ignored. In practice, however, less immediate values

may be eclipsed by pressure to show results and cost-

effective performance in agencies’ main programs and

Suzanne Piotrowski

Rutgers University–Newark

David H. Rosenbloom

Renmin University of China and American University

Sinah Kang

Rutgers University–Newark

Alex Ingrams

Tilburg University

Sinah Kang is a doctoral student in the

School of Public Affairs and Administration

at Rutgers University–Newark. Her

research focuses on crowdsourcing public

participation, coproduction of public

services, and open government in general.

E-mail: sinah.kang@rutgers.edu

David H. Rosenbloom is Chinese

Thousand Talents Program Professor

in the School of Public Administration

and Policy at Renmin University of

China and Distinguished Professor of

Public Administration in the School of

Public Affairs at American University,

Washington, DC. His work focuses on

public administration and democratic-

constitutionalism.

E-mail: rbloom313@hotmail.com

Suzanne Piotrowski is associate

professor and director of the Transparency

and Governance Center in the School of

Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers

University–Newark.

E-mail: spiotrow@newark.rutgers.edu

Alex Ingrams is assistant professor

in the Institute of Governance at Tilburg

University. His research interests are

government transparency, accountability,

and open government, as well as other

topics focused around the intersection of

technology change and governance reform.

His latest work is on open government

reform in the United States and the United

Kingdom.

E-mail: a.ingrams@uvt.nl

Research Article