Tools of Control? Comparing Congressional and Presidential Performance Management Reforms

• Published date: 01 July 2021
• Author: Alexander Kroll,Donald P. Moynihan
• Date: 01 July 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13312

Research Article

Tools of Control? Comparing Congressional and Presidential Performance Management Reforms 599

Abstract: Presidents are claimed to have a stronger interest in an effective bureaucracy than Congress because they

must be responsive to the public as a whole rather than narrow interests. We examine this claim in the context of

multiple waves of U.S. performance management reforms: the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) of

1993, the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART ) (2002–2008), and the GPRA Modernization Act (GPRAMA)

of 2010. Using four waves of federal employee surveys spanning 17 years, we measure reform success as employees’

purposeful use of performance data as a result of being exposed to routines embedded in the reforms. We find that the

legislative-led GPRAMA is associated with more purposeful data use on aggregate while the PART executive reform

succumbed to a partisan pattern of implementation. Statutory reforms are less likely to be experienced as ideological

tools than executive branch reforms used by the president to impose control over agencies.

Evidence for Practice

• Management reforms that depend on the discretion of federal employees for full success run the risk of

failure if they are seen as partisan efforts of control; this risk is greater among executive-led reforms.

• Legislative management reforms are sometimes thought to be less likely to be successful because they are the

product of bipartisan compromise; but such processes of compromise ensure greater longevity, opportunity

for improvement, and nonpartisan implementation.

• GPRAMA is associated with purposeful performance information (PI) use among federal managers, a break

with decades of failed federal performance management reform efforts.

“American bureaucracy is not designed to

be effective. The bureaucracy arises out of

politics, and its design reflects the interests,

strategies, and compromises of those who exercise

political power.” So begins Terry Moe(1989, 267)

in his canonical framing of bureaucratic politics,

The Politics of Bureaucratic Structure. Moe offered an

intuitive explanation for why the bureaucracy fails

to meet expectations: It must respond to a political

rationality rather than a technical rationality. His

account contrasted a form of bureaucratic realpolitik

with the naiveté of the good government ethos

embedded in public administration scholarship: “for

the most part, those who study and practice public

administration have a thinly veiled disdain for politics,

and they want it kept out of bureaucracy as much as

possible” (1989, 267).1

Moe’s (1989) account of bureaucratic politics is

influential, but the underlying logics it outlined are

too often accepted as a given rather than empirically

tested. In Moe’s framing, legislators and executives

have very different approaches to bureaucracy.

Legislators are responsive to special interests and “not

intrinsically motivated by effectiveness or efficiency

or coordination or management or any other design

criteria” (1989, 281). By contrast, the executive must

answer to the public as a whole rather than specific

interests, and therefore, Moe says “their ideal is a

rational, coherent, centrally directed bureaucracy that

strongly resembles popular textbook notions of what

an effective bureaucracy, public or private, ought to

look like” (1989, 280).

It is difficult to directly test such claims since there

are few instances when legislators and executives

reveal their competing logics for how to structure

the bureaucracy in the same area. However, for

governmentwide reforms of performance systems,

they have done exactly that. In this article, we

examine the pattern of reform implementation

across three performance management reforms, the

Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) of

1993, the Bush administration’s Program Assessment

Rating Tool (PART) (2002–2008) and the GPRA

Modernization Act (GPRAMA) of 2010, using survey

data from four different time periods: 2000, 2007,

2012/13, and 2016/17. Our approach allows for a

Alexander Kroll

Florida International University

Tools of Control? Comparing Congressional and Presidential

Performance Management Reforms

Georgetown University

Donald P. Moynihan

Donald P. Moynihan is McCourt Chair

at the McCourt School of Public Policy at

Georgetown University. He studies the

performance of public organization and

how individuals experience the state.

Email: donald.moynihan@georgetown.edu

Alexander Kroll is an associate

professor of public policy and

administration in the Steven J. Green

School of International and Public Affairs

at Florida International University. His

research interest is in the management

of government organizations, the use

of performance systems, and the role of

organizational behavior in improving public

services.

Email: akroll@fiu.edu

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 81, Iss. 4, pp. 599–609. © 2020 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13312.