Friday, March 04, 2011

Lowering our costs

Congress is all atwitter about cutting the federal budget. It would be nice if they would start acting to do so in a rational way. One place to start is with the GAO report issued this week which discusses a number of areas where duplication is rife. The Center for American Progress has developed a brief questionnaire which could be used to winnow down the GAO's list to a manageable few. I'm sure that other organizations have developed similar tools as the basic questions are rather obvious to anyone with some experience in resource allocation and strategic planning:
  • What goals across government is the program contributing to?
  • What impact does the program have on achieving those goals?
  • Does the program work well with other programs to maximize collective impact and minimize duplication?
  • How cost effective is the program compared to others?
  • Is the program well run? Have there been delays or cost overruns?
  • Does the program learn from experience and improve in response?
Nothing magical there. How does this compare to Congress' approach?

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