GOVERNMENT CAN WORK: The Clinton administration achieved significant gains in government performance. FEMA, for example, earned widespread praise for its management of disaster response. And the veterans health system was transformed into the single best health provider in the country, significantly outperforming the private sector. But performance eroded after eight years of the Bush administration's misguided policies, rampant cronyism, and special interest influence. Inexcusable personnel decisions and general lack of concern at the highest levels of government for FEMA's core mission led toÊan agency that was completely unprepared for Hurricane Katrina.ÊSimilarly, the Bush administration was hardly concerned with ensuring that its prescription drug plan got the best bang for the taxpayer's buck.ÊAccording to one study, drugs purchased by seniors under Medicare Part D can cost 30 percent more than the exact same drugs purchased under Medicaid. Simply put, America cannot afford a government that does not maximize value and results for the American people, because government is too important.ÊSocial Security reduced poverty among American seniors by 75 percent; traditional Medicare provides essential care while controlling costs far better than the private sector, and Americans can trust their food supply because of the FDA.ÊEvery dollar wasted is a dollar that can't advance these and other critical needs, and it is a dollar that plunges us deeper into debt.

GRADING GOVERNMENT: Nevertheless, not every program is a model of efficiency.ÊOne important step towards building a more efficient government is to ensure that the federal government and its agencies set challenging, outcome-driven goals and then evaluate programs according to whether they advance these goals.ÊSadly, the federal government's existing performance evaluation tools are not up to this task.ÊRatings under the Bush administration's Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) often had little to do with a program's performance. In the same year as FEMA's botched response to Hurricane Katrina, PART rated that agencyÕs disaster response program as "adequate." Pre-Bush tools devolved into a bureaucratic paperwork-producing exercise, largely ignored by executive branch decision-makers and Congress because they set too many low-priority and low-risk goals that failed to test government in a meaningful way.ÊOne area needing particular attention is tax expenditures.ÊBecause Congress appropriates federal discretionary funds every year, spending programs are annually re-evaluated to determine whether they deserve funding.ÊYet the government gives over $1.2 trillion annually in tax breaks -- twice as much as the entire non-military discretionary budget -- to various industries and individuals, and these tax expenditures are not subject to regular review.ÊBillions of dollars worth of annual tax breaks to oil companies deserve at least as much scrutiny as a multimillion dollar program intended to educate low-income children, yet the budgeting process focuses far more on the latter.

THE BUSINESS OF GOVERNMENT: Government needs to set good policy, but it also needs to order paper and hire staff, and the Bush government was particularly inattentive to these operational needs.ÊBetween 2000 and 2005, the amount of no-bid and single-bid contracts paid by the federal government grew from $67 billion to $145 billion, a 115 percent increase.ÊThe overall annual cost of contracting also skyrocketed under Bush, growing 86 percent to $377 billion during the same five-year period. Obama is reversing this trend.ÊSince taking office, the Obama Administration identified $19 billion in savings from contracting reforms, and it plans to cut $40 billion annually by 2011. Obama's transparency reforms also help keep spending under control. A federal website known as the IT Dashboard, for example, tracks every single dollar the government spends on information technology, empowering the Veterans Administration to identify $200 million in overdue or over budget projects. All of these projects were temporarily halted; many will be killed entirely.ÊAdmittedly, these reforms have not transformed government into a model of efficiency -- the federal hiring process, for example, remains a mess -- but they do prove that government can provide real value to the taxpayer, and they demonstrate that progressive government can deliver such efficiency

(Excerpted from The Progressive newsletter...)