Pennsylvania’s Dark Board Governing A Pennsylvania state board created by law in 2017 to review billions of dollars in tax credits and government spending quietly stopped meeting three years ago an…

The Path to a Results-Forward Budget Barrett & Greene (blog by Laura Larsen) For decades, budget season has followed a familiar script: departments submit requests based on what they received l…

Evaluation Competencies in an Age of Collapse American Evaluation Association (Scott Chaplowe) Evaluation was built for stable systems, and we no longer have those. Evaluation cannot afford a doubl…

A KPI Needs Four Distinct Owners PuMP Academy Like a puppy or kitten, if no one takes personal ownership of a performance measure, it will die a slow death. Conversely, if the puppy or kitten has t…

Rising stars in the Democratic Party are promoting their tech modernization teams in a post-DOGE political landscape.

From Data to Decisions Substack (Manish Srivastava) An essay on why the next generation of digital government needs an architecture for evidence, reasoning and accountability. The author discusses …

WEBINAR: Collaborative Performance Management (Tues., Sept. 8, 1 p.m. Eastern) Center for Accountability & Performance This webinar will explore how public managers can make performan…

WEBINAR: Collaborative Performance Management (Tues., Sept. 8, 1 p.m. Eastern) Center for Accountability & Performance This webinar will explore how public managers can make performan…

Three Cheers for Performance Audits Barrett & Green While the work from many state and local-level performance shops is put to good use, it’s clear that performance audits don’t always have the…

It’s been quiet on the accountability and performance news front this past week, but there is an interesting job announcement: City of Baltimore, Department of General Services: Office of Performan…

Effective Performance Management in the Federal Government PATimes (Andrew Vaz) By emphasizing execution, accountability and continuous improvement, the President’s Management Agenda can help …

Less Oversight and Accountability Government Executive In a new report, the Partnership for Public Service noted that the average Cabinet inspector general office has shrunk by 19 percent sinc…

Assessing and Improving Effectiveness U.S. Government Accountability Office A new GAO report concludes Federal programs do not consistently manage their performance. Its work often finds progr…

WEBINAR: Performance Management: Not Just for Reporting (Thur, July 23, 1 p.m. Eastern) Center for Accountability & Performance Performance management at all levels of government (and…

Looking for a Performance Culture? LinkedIn (Mark Hocknell) A productive workplace culture is a blend of the way work gets done and how the work gets done. These are foundations…

I Came to New Mexico for a PhD and Stayed to Make Government Work Better Substack (Sarah Dinces) Most state legislatures keep their budgeting and evaluation teams separate. But in New Mexico, they …

WEBINAR: Building Resilient Evaluation Procedures (Tues., June 30, 1 p.m. Eastern) Center for Accountability & Performance  How do we keep evaluation and performance management p…

Big Changes to Federal Grants Management on Horizon Governing (Jed Herrmann) The federal Uniform Grants Guidance is the bible that every state and local government grants manager lives by when…

Building City-Level Data Capacity Bloomberg Cities Network (Oliver Wise) A growing number of city-level data teams are taking a nontraditional approach by starting with the problem, demonstrating q…

Resource of the Week:  Evidence Act One-Stop Hub Data Foundation Federal agencies are required by law to publicly post their plans for collecting evidence on how well their programs work.…

WEBINAR: Implications of the President’s Management Agenda for States and Localities (Tues., June 9, 1 p.m. Eastern) Center for Accountability & Performance Attendee takeaways will be…

Evidence and Policymaking: An Organizational Approach Public Administration Review (Johan Christensen) Evidence-informed policy-making not only depends on the rigor and relevance of the resear…

How San Diego Links Spending to Results Substack/Department of What Works An independent evaluation office is connecting rigorous evaluation to the policy and budget decisions that shape the lives …

Performance-Built Budgets Barrett & Greene This article summarizes a webinar focusing on the use of performance measures in the budgeting process.  It highlights the successes of…

Understanding Performance Management from the Bottom-Up Public Administration Review (Leif Kongsgaard; Open Access PDF) This article provides a cutting-edge perspective of how frontline employ…

WEBINAR: Can Budgeting be Based on Performance? (Tues., Apr 28, 1 p.m. Eastern) Center for Accountability & Performance (free) New AI-driven tools may make it easier for governments to tra…

When Data Challenges You to Change Barrett & Greene (Michael Jacobson) Over a decade, King County, WA (Seattle) decided to gather data from community members about their priorities and our…

Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, called on lawmakers to "ultimately fix the broken process that got us into this mess."

The McNamara Fallacy of Metrics Substack (Jono Hey) The McNamara Fallacy is a belief in easy-to-measure quantitative metrics at the expense of ignoring hard-to-measure qualitative factors. FY24 Fed…

Governments are entering a transformative period of redesign—not another modernization or digitization cycle

The Futures Mandate: How to Embed Foresight in Governance Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies This brief provides a good overview of international trends in addressing the challenge of planning…

The Federal Executive Councils bring together policy makers and practitioners to provide input on policy, address challenges collaboratively, and share best practices.

Performance Management Checklist Barrett & Greene Here’s a handy checklist of a dozen proven pieces of advice to improve your organization’s performance management system! How You Count Matters…

Easy Measures Barrett & Greene States and localities often measure their success, but too often they focus on data that’s easier to collect but may be less helpful in achieving a desired result…

Accountability in Public Administration: From Concepts to Empirical Tests Handbook of Accountability Research (2026) Public accountability is a crucial element of democratic governance relating tho…

Performance Comparisons Between Single vs. Collaborative Government Services Urban Affairs Review (gated article) This study examines whether general-purpose governments vs. their collaborativ…

A Guide to Measuring Performance: The City of Berkeley, CA Edition Barrett & Greene The Berkeley, California auditor’s office is well-known for the attention it pays to the measurement of perfo…

Human-Machine Collaboration for Strategic Foresight Public Administration Review (gated article) This is a case study of an innovative pilot project conducted by an Australian state government…

OPM’s Challenge of Creating High Performance Cultures Government Executive (Howard Risher) To help federal agencies operate like modern high-performance organizations requires an understanding of t…

What Does It Take to Make Public Data Usable? Substack/Rebecca Mbaya This Substack account spotlights visionary changemakers in Africa. This interview spotlights a Namibian data analyst who moves b…

Measuring GSA  Performance in Acquisition Reform Federal News Network Ed Forst, the new administrator of the US General Services Administration, calls his agency “the engine room that mak…

The U.S.

Report co-authors Margie Graves and Michael J. Keegan Government today stands at a crossroads.Global change continues to accelerate—through disruptive technologies, increasingly complex cross-national...

Combatting Fraud Using a Risk Assessment Framework U.S. Government Accountability Office In 2023, GAO surveyed 24 federal agencies against its Fraud Risk Framework and found a third didn’t ha…

COMMENTARY | Americans' declining trust in government has been an oft-discussed trend for decades, but it turns out that it's neither unique to government nor Americans. So what is happening to instit...

Combatting Fraud Using a Risk Assessment Framework U.S. Government Accountability Office In 2023, GAO surveyed 24 federal agencies against its Fraud Risk Framework and found a third didn’t ha…

COMMENTARY | Americans' declining trust in government has been an oft-discussed trend for decades, but it turns out that it's neither unique to government nor Americans. So what is happening to instit...

Report co-authors Margie Graves and Michael J. Keegan Government today stands at a crossroads.Global change continues to accelerate—through disruptive technologies, increasingly complex cross-national...

Unintended Consequences of Performance Contracting LinkedIn (Peter Ndaa) When accountability systems are mistaken for performance systems, organisations learn how to comply, not how to improve. Par…