Government Reform, Political Ideology, and Administrative Burden: The Case of Performance Management in the Bush Administration

Th is article examines how ideological diff erences between political offi cials and agencies may have aff ected the implementation of an ostensibly nonpartisan, government-wide administrative initiative: the George W. Bush administration’s Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) review of federal programs. Th e analysis reveals that managers in agencies associated with liberal programs and employees (“liberal agencies”) agreed to a greater extent than those in agencies associated with conservative programs and employees (“conservative agencies”) that PART required signifi cant agency time and eff ort and that it imposed a burden on management resources. Further analysis reveals that diff erences in reported agency eff ort can be explained partly by objective diff erences in the demands that PART placed on agencies—liberal agencies were required to evaluate more programs and implement more improvement plans relative to their organizational capacity—and partly by the ideological beliefs of employees—on average, liberal managers reported more agency eff ort, even after accounting for objective measures of administrative burden.