The GPRA is an admirable action by Congress. Performance is held in high esteem in American culture. We love winners in education, business, military, government, private life, sports, and even in politics. In the hands of the politicians, though, performance often undergoes some distortion. Three comments may be made about the GPRA based upon personal experience with performance-based processes.
Performance is defined in terms of the user.
After some initial surveys, IDA decided that the effectiveness of IACs could best be judged by contacting IAC users. However, there were a number of instances where quantitative and qualitative information could be gleaned after the fact to show that IACs were indeed productive and had achieved results worth the investment on IACs. The judges of performance, and their tools, must be defined. Congress may think of themselves as the user, or of the American public as a user, and the measures of performance selected by the Federal agencies may have no significance to the 500 politicians on the Hill. Performance may be used as a tool to select out those who do not perform.