Assessing performance budgeting at OMB: The influence of politics, performance, and program size in FY 2005

This article investigates the impact of performance, as measured by the OMB performance budgeting initiative called Performance Assessment Rating Tool (PART), on recommenda-tions in the President’s budget. In a multivariate analysis using data from the FY 2005 budget, with appropriate controls for the political content of programs, we find that the PART scores have a statistically significant impact on budget decisions within OMB. We find that PART scores have a larger impact on small and medium sized programs than on large programs. We also find that the ‘‘results’ ’ component of PART scores has a smaller impact on budget decisions than the ‘‘program purpose’ ’ component, a finding which tends to contradict the goal of performance budgeting to redirect resources to programs that produce results. The relative unimportance of the ‘‘results’ ’ component may be due to the lack of good outcome measures for most programs in PART