There was a time in my life, when I was a good lil' Republican (I'll pause for a moment to allow you to pick your jaw up off the floor as you imagine such a time), and I used to think, like all good lil' Republicans do, that performance based budgeting was the cure for all our ills.  It does make a lot of good sense on paper.  At a simple level, it appeals to our parental instinct to treat government like a child (as opposed to the other way around which is more common), and not give your child his or her allowance unless their chores are done properly.  It works for parents (most of the time).  Why can't it work for government?  The simple answer is that in the government/citizen relationship, we give up power to government in order to perform certain tasks.  Parents on the other hand never cede power to children.  They merely delegate, and retain dictatorial rights at all times.

Anneliese Dickman at the Public Policy Forum blog writes today about performance based budgeting for the City and County of Milwaukee, and I would recommend against these ideas.  The budget is an awesome draw for agencies and government workers.  Tax dollars, which are forcibly collected at gunpoint from citizens, are an incredible carrot, and when dangled in front of government agencies, will cause those agencies to do whatever they have to in order to at it.  More importantly, they will take the easiest route to get that money.  This generally has grave consequences for the citizenry as the easiest route is rarely the one intended by policy makers, are almost never the best one.

One excellent example of performance based budgeting run amok is the War on Drugs^TM.  In the 1990's, fresh from the Republican Wave of Change and the Contract With America, Congress began tying federal funds for police forces to the number or drug arrests they made.  The more drug arrests they made, the more money they got.  You could even get grants from the Department of Defense for assault weapons and phased out military gear so that your small town police force could have it's very own SWAT team.  And now because there was money to be used that could help your police budget, making arrests because more important than finding and fighting crime.  Even if no charges were eventually filed, drugs would be confiscated, and arrests would be recorded so that the money would keep flowing.  Non-violent offenders will be gone after instead of dealers and violent offenders because you can catch more non-violent offenders for less cost and risk, which does more to satisfy the federal requirements.  As has been seen throughout the country, this has deadly consequences as SWAT teams are deployed in appropriate situations, killing innocent people.  CATO has published a very comprehensive white paper on this topic which is worth your time to read.

The lesson is clear.  In order to get that money, government agencies will find ways to meet the stated performance indicators, but rarely do they meet the intent of the indicator.  Reports will be falsified.  Dummy data will be created.  If arbitrary dates are set to get something done, "that date will be met", but the work won't have been done.

Performance based budgeting is really about laziness when it comes right down to it.  Instead of actually working with agencies to determine what and how they should do things, and then determining what that will cost, people would much rather tell agencies to "figure something out, and if it works, we'll pay you."  The end result is the same lack of oversight that Republicans are complaining about today.  The only difference is that the money got shifted differently.

There simply is no replacement for actual oversight and hard work.  More importantly, it's much easier to oversee something the smaller it gets.  If we would stop entrusting government to do more and more, it would be much easier to manage.