What have been the effects of the GPRA Modernization Act, passed in 2010? The content of the Act reflected a growing consensus among policymakers that prior federal preformance reforms -  the Government Performance and Results Act, and the Bush-era Program Assessment Rating Tool - had failed to meaningfully increase the goal of expanding the use of performance data among public managers. The skepticism of policymakers was supported by empirical research, as Moynihan and Lavertu (2012) used employee survey data to demonstrate that these prior reforms appeared to have increased reporting compliance, but done little else to improve the use of performance data for decisionmaking.  

The designers of the Modernization Act set forth the explicit goal of improving performance information use among federal managers, and established new governmentwide routines to this end. These included routines to create very visible "high priorty goals" and "cross-agency priority goals" for tasks that are shared across multuple units. Perhaps most significantly, the Act sought to put in place new routines of data use, requiring that all significant goals be considered in quarterly performance reviews. These changes, as with previous reforms, introduced new transaction costs on federal employees. Those transaction costs will be worth it if the Modernization Act achieves its goal of changing federal employee use of performance data.

This paper offers the first systematic attempt to assess whether the Modernization Act is worth it. Using a 2012 Government Accountability Office employee survey, we assess the impact of these new routines on performance information use. The data allows an analytic strategy that uses involvement in those routines as our primary independent variable, and examines if this involvement is correlated with different types of performance information use. We can include a wide variety of controls, including agency fixed effects. Using this same strategy, prior reforms have failed to show evidence of success (Moynihan and Lavertu 2012), but initial analyses suggest that the new routines established by the Modernization Act are actually increasing the use of performance data for substantive decisionmaking processes. 

References

Moynihan, Donald P. and Stéphane Lavertu. 2012. “Does Involvement in Performance Reforms Encourage Performance Information Use? Evaluating GPRA and PART.” Public Administration Review 72(4): 592-602.