Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACTThe Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) was the most recent attempt in U.S. federal performance-based budgeting innovations. This article investigates the development and implementation of the PART in the federal budgeting process. Over 1000 PART reports from 2004 to 2008 were retrieved from the PART official website. The effects of the PART ratings are examined in a set of regression models with a group of control variables that are known to influence federal budget decisions. The models show positive, but not statistically significant, results. Therefore, not enough empirical evidence is found that program appropriation was impacted the PART ratings.Keywords: PART, performance-based budgeting, normative budget theory, measurement.IntroductionPerformance-based budgeting is nothing new in public sectors. It derives from a very simple question - why spend limited funds on some programs or organizations when the measures reveal that other programs or organizations are more effective at achieving the political objectives behind the budget's macro allocations? The historical development of performance-based budgets includes a series of four major government-wide budgeting initiatives attempted since World War II: the Budget and Accounting Procedures Act of 1950, the Planning-Programming-Budgeting System implemented in 1965, Management Objectives initiated in 1973, and Zero-Based Budgeting initiated in 1977. Each was an analytical technique that embraced one of the major management concepts of its era with the goal of improving the quality and the influence of policy decisions. However, all of the reforms were insular, begun and conducted the executive branch with Congress given no role and the public screened from view (U.S. General Accounting Office, 1997). Such reforms generally did not carry over from one presidential administration to the next.Federal efforts in rationalizing budget decisions the intervening decades resulted in the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) under the President's Management Agenda's budget and integration initiative (Kettl, 2000; U.S. General Accounting Office, 2003). The PART was designed as an effort to improve the efficiency of the federal government (see, e.g., Blanchard, 2008; Breul, 2007b; Redburn et al., 2008; Shea, 2008). But, the PART appears to appeal to a deeply entrenched desire within the public administration community to find a way to budget by performance or for (White, 2012). The PART was intended to provide a consistent system to evaluate federal programs as a part of the Presidential budget decision process (U.S. Office of Management and Budget, 2002) and sought to overcome issues in the Government Performance and Results Act implementation such as insufficient use of information in budget decisions (Dull, 2006).The PART was a questionnaire consisting of approximately 30 questions (the number varies slightly depending on the type of program being evaluated). Federal managers were required to answer these questions about their program purpose and design, strategic planning, program management, and program results. Programs were given ratings based on the answers. These ratings were weighted to a given percentage each section. The program purpose and design section was weighted to 20%, the strategic planning section was weighted to 10%, the program management was weighted to 20%, and the program results section was weighted to 50%. The ratings weighted to the given percentage were added together to produce an aggregate score that ranges from 0 to 100. This aggregate score was indicated in a qualitative rating as follows:Rating RangeEffective 85-100Moderately Effective 70-84Adequate …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.019 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".