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Young Feds Can Do More With What They Learn on ExpectMore.gov
By Robert Shea
Over the last few years, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has been working with federal agencies to assess -- objectively -- the performance and management of each and every single program in the federal government. These are rigorous assessments, conducted by career civil servants of the agencies and OMB, and use a standardized approach—including approximately 25 basic questions to gauge a program’s performance and management.
The purpose is to find out what’s working in government... and what needs to improve. The ultimate goal of this effort is simple: By clearly defining a federal government program’s objectives, measuring its success, holding ourselves accountable, and demanding improved performance every year, we can continue to get more for less for the American people.
Last February, OMB launched a website (ExpectMore.Gov) to share the findings with the American public. The site allows anyone to easily see which federal programs are working... and which ones are not. Each assessment provides a program overview, some of the key findings of the assessment, and the follow-up actions and plans agencies are taking to improve the program. The information is presented clearly and in an easy-to-read format... no “governmentesse”... just candid, jargon-free (and acronym-free!) language.
To put it simply, we believe that if Americans know more about what and how we -- the federal government -- are doing, they’ll hold us more accountable for our performance. It's an idea that is certainly catching on... more than two million people have visited the site in its first six months online.
But ExpectMore.Gov isn’t just a tool for the public. It’s also a very important and effective tool for young Feds (actually all Feds) to use to improve their own agency’s performance.
How?
Surf ExpectMore.Gov and check out the assessments of other federal programs and see how they compare to your program. You can find out how your peers are defining the goals of their programs, how they’re measuring success, and what they’re doing to improve program performance. So if you’re a young Fed at FEMA, for example, you might be interested in browsing through all 19 of the disaster relief related assessments on ExpectMore.Gov and see how the “competition” is doing.
As much as ExpectMore.Gov is a great tool to connect citizens with their government (and hold their government accountable for important results), it’s also a great tool for anyone who wants to be a better public servant. Good ideas and success aren’t really worth anything unless they are shared and replicated... so take a look through ExpectMore.Gov to find out whether some of the best practices and ideas from other programs can be adopted into your own.
Someone once said, “I never met a good idea I didn’t like.” You’ll meet plenty of good ideas on ExpectMore.Gov and you’ll like the way it can help you become a more effective, results-driven Fed!
One of the Bush administration’s rising stars, Robert J. Shea is Counselor to the Deputy Director for Management and the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. He heads the President’s Budget and Performance Integration Initiative. Before coming to the White House, he was Counsel to the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee and before that Professional Staff Member with the U.S. House of Representative’s Committee on Government Reform.
