Has the performance of the procurement system improved: a 25-year perspective

We are coming up next year on the 25th anniversary of the country’s first and perhaps only governmentwide management reform program organized around a coherent theme: the Clinton administration’s “reinventing government” effort.

In 1993, the first year of the Clinton administration, I went on leave from my job at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, where I was a professor of public management, to take a Senate-confirmed position in the Office of Management and Budget as administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy. That office of 30-odd civil servants did not buy anything itself but had the lead role in formulating governmentwide procurement policy.

At the beginning of the 1990s, the thinking about how to manage well in government began to turn toward performance. As political scientists William Gormley and Steven Balla have written, “The concept of performance came to rival accountability as a standard for evaluating executive branch agencies.”

The concept came into its own early in the Clinton administration. In March 1993, President Bill Clinton launched the National Performance Review, led by Vice President Al Gore and later renamed the National Partnership for Reinventing Government. The resulting report, “From Red Tape to Results: Creating a Government That Works Better and Costs Less,” was released that September. One of the first laws Congress passed in 1993 was the Government Performance and Results Act. Suddenly, the words “performance” and “results” were everywhere.

The events of 1993 launched major changes in the procurement system, which has continued to evolve in the past 25 years. In general, that evolution has seen the procurement culture shift its focus from compliance to performance, yet despite that shift, it is hard to say that the system’s performance has improved.

That is due in part to the fact that the changes in procurement coincided with an increase in problems for contract management. The system was getting better, but contract management was getting worse — so much so that we haven’t noticed net improvements.

For the rest of the article, go to: https://fcw.com/articles/2017/12/06/kelman-25-years-of-acquisition-reform.aspx