Thursday, September 27, 2007

GAO: How Performance Budgeting Can Help

21st Century Challenges: How Performance Budgeting Can Help, GAO-07-1194T, September 20, 2007

Summary (HTML) Highlights Page (PDF) Full Report (PDF, 20 pages) Accessible Text

Excerpt:
"The federal government is in a period of profound transition and faces an array of challenges and opportunities to enhance performance, ensure accountability, and better position the nation for the future. A number of overarching trends—including the nation’s long-term fiscal imbalance— drive the need to reexamine what the federal government does, how it
does it, and who does it. The term "performance budgeting" encompasses a range of approaches, activities, and processes but they all have in common the idea of more explicitly linking resources to results. As such it holds promise as a means for facilitating a reexamination effort. Reexamination can enhance the government’s capacity to assess competing claims for federal dollars by arming decision makers with better information both on the results of individual programs as well as on entire portfolios of programs and tools—encompassing a wide range of discretionary, entitlement, tax, and regulatory approaches—addressing common goals."

Document at http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d071194t.pdf