Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions

Floor Speech

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Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, I rise to offer new legislation that I urge all my colleagues from both sides of the aisle to support. I am pleased to be joined by Senators CARPER, AKAKA, LIEBERMAN, COLLINS, and VOINOVICH as original cosponsors of this bill. The legislation we offer today, the Government Performance and Results Modernization Act of 2010, is directly aimed at improving operations and quantifying results across the Federal Government.

I think most of my colleagues know I am a business guy. In fact, I have spent more time in the business world than in the public sector. I have always tried to apply commonsense business practices to the work of government, in my former job as Virginia Governor and now as Senator. This is a point I think most of us on both sides of the aisle would acknowledge:

If I ran a business or if we ran any business the way we run the Federal Government, I would be out of business in short order. If we do not change--as we hear the kinds of folks across America say: We want to see more efficiency from our Federal Government--if we do not change, our government might get run out of business as well.

As chair of the Budget Committee Task Force on Government Performance, over the last 18 months I have been looking into how we use data and information to improve government operations. Over the last year, our task force has held a series of hearings, meetings, and conversations with public and private sector leaders from every level of government to learn more about what works and what does not work. Here is what we have learned.

At the beginning of every President's administration, it seems an entirely new performance agenda is established. The Bush administration had the President's Management Agenda, and the current administration has its own accountable government initiatives. With this frequent change in approach every 4 to 8 years, it is difficult to ensure that we are consistent in the data we collect, use the best tools and technology to analyze it, and then put the necessary accountability in place to orderly track performance and the basic functions of what government does. Let me give you a couple examples.

Agencies produce literally thousands of pages of data each year, but too often we do not use it. We do not use it in Congress. Public interest groups do not use it. Enormous efforts are put into collecting this data, and then it sits on the shelf. Typically, this performance data is only reported once a year, so it is often too late by the time we discover whether we are improving or falling behind.

We also do not compare the results of similar programs. Too often, so many of our government functions are siloed by agency or Department and rarely is this data analyzed in any kind of crosscutting fashion. We in the task force took a look at this. We looked, for example, at workforce training programs across the Federal Government. We are currently funding 44 separate Federal programs in 9 different departments to support workforce training. We all would agree that in a changing world, workforce training is key to America's competitiveness. But 44 programs in 9 different departments without any kind of crosscutting analysis? No business could operate that way. And it is not just workforce training. In food safety--a piece of legislation that we are working on that I and I know the Presiding Officer hope we pass before the end of the year to put new food safety standards in place--in food safety, we currently fund 17 different entities within 7 different departments involved in food safety activities. So how can we assess what is working and what is not working?

In short, government operates in silos. We report by agency and by program, but we do not know what we are doing in government in any particular project area or specific policy goal area. We need a better system that enables us to review the results of each program as a whole in terms of how they feed into a policy objective, where we are having the most impact, and, candidly, where we could find some room to cut or curtail.

Our Federal performance system also needs to increase the accountability of senior agency leadership. In many agencies, the performance planning and reporting is disconnected from the senior officials and not part of the daily operations of the agency. In other words, somebody's got this task, but their functions of performance audits and measurements and metrics do not have a direct line of reporting to whoever the chief operating officer of the particular agency is.

I can say that at the State and local level, we have actually made some progress in changing this around. Let me parochially start with what we did in Virginia. This chart I have in the Chamber is a little bit busy, but we created a Virginia Performs Web site. We use this to track progress we are making in key policy areas that are important to Virginians. So whether it is the economy, education--and we set commonsense goals that everyone can agree on across party lines, and then we look at the measurement criteria that lead to that goal. This is one of the reasons Virginia has earned the recognition as the best managed State in the country.

It is not just happening in Virginia, though. In Indiana, a different tool has been created. It is called the Transparency Portal by GOV Mitch Daniels. It again tries to bring transparency to the policy goals. Then we can argue about how we get there or how we ought to fund how we get there. But unless we have common agreement on the goal and then see which programs lead to that goal and measure the effectiveness of the individual programs, we are not going to get, particularly in these budget-constrained times, the best value for our Federal tax dollar.

I believe Washington has much to learn from these local and State level examples in setting goals, holding managers accountable, and using performance metrics in a consistent, user-friendly way. State and local decisionmakers do not have to wait to look at the results once a year. They do it constantly. That is what we did in Virginia. That is what we need to do in our Nation's Capital as well.

In addition to this reporting and crosscutting, we also need to recognize that not all of these burdensome reporting requirements are of equal value. So the task force has focused on reducing reporting requirements to identify what reporting might be consolidated or eliminated. If you get overwhelmed with data at certain points, the data becomes somewhat less useful. So we want to focus these agencies on what are the key determinants on which they ought to report. I do not want to just add new reports and data requirements on agencies. There are bookshelves all over this town sagging from the weight of unread reports. So we must streamline and modernize what we are currently doing, and we need to examine outdated and overlapping agency reporting. We should only collect information that is useful.

The Government Performance and Results Modernization Act addresses many of our findings to improve the operations and results across government.

First, it will require all agencies to produce real-time data on results. As I mentioned earlier, in the past, agencies would report on performance only once a year. This bill would require agencies to post results quarterly so the public and Congress can use that real-time information about what works on targeted goals. With today's technology and if you are collecting data on an ongoing basis, there is no reason we should have this information only come out once a year. A quarterly requirement will allow us to correct and fine-tune on an ongoing basis.

Second, the bill requires agencies to post data on a single public Web site. This Web site will contain performance information from across government so we can see how we are performing and how national priorities such as education, public health, and safety, are being met. Again, I go back to Virginia Performs, which works. You agree on a top-line policy goal, and then you see across agencies how all these different programs feed in. So posting this on a single public Web site rather than having Members of Congress or the public sort through the myriad of sites right now is a step in the right direction.

Third, agencies will be required to identify low-priority programs that are not adequately contributing to the overall results. Now, this is controversial. Every agency likes to talk about its best performing programs. No agency likes to talk about which programs really are not getting the job done. But as we face increasingly budget constraining times, we must make sure we look not only at the winners but that we have the agencies themselves put forward those areas where programs are not meeting the goals.

Fourth, we need to take important steps to improve the accountability of the senior officers in government agencies. We formally establish that agency deputy secretaries are the chief operating officers and hold them accountable for the results the agencies are looking for. Again, you have to have a chain of command so somebody knows who is the chief operating officer and those people who are performing are responsible and those metrics are reported to that chief operating officer. We also establish a performance improvement officer who reports directly to the COO and, again, works across agencies to meet our crosscutting goals.

We also feel these efforts will generate ``back office'' savings, and we have as a policy goal--I do not believe this will be a stretch--a literally 10-percent reduction in written reports.

We sometimes get overloaded with data. We want to fine-tune the data. We want to make sure the more useful data is reported on a more regular basis, that extraneous amounts--some of the kind of burdensome stuff that has been put in in the past that may no longer be relevant--we want to eliminate. And within the agency, we want to make sure there is a clear chain of command.

I think the Government Performance and Results Modernization Act moves us forward in a major way. So this legislation--commonsense business practices, bipartisan, in an effort that will meet the 10-percent reduction in agency reports; the effort, finally, to make sure we can look at policy goals not by individual department or agency but across programmatic areas; the same kinds of business techniques that are used in Fortune 500 companies all across America and, for that matter, all across the world--will bring these best practices into the Federal Government and make sure we do not have this kind of start-and-stop effort that has, unfortunately, plagued modernization efforts over the past.

I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle--since this is bipartisan supported--to join in this effort. As we think about many of the major issues
that we kind of fight through in these remaining days of this Congress, I hope, for this kind of commonsense piece of legislation, that we could get the time needed to get it passed. Again, I urge my colleagues to join us in this effort.

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