The dawning of the 2009 summer marked the birth of PART, otherwise known as Bush administration’s Program Assessment Rating Tool. This tool saw a lot of opposition from other programs as it was considered less effective. This prompted the Congress to depart from its ideas and sought to fight for the American ideas and goals instead of ideological performances (Stalebrink & Frisco, 2010).
With differences in ideas, the Congress that saw the creation of PART had little involvement with it and other agencies, departing from it saw its failure. PART had a limitation in collaborating with the Congress in its development as the members of the Congress had little or no say on how to lead the agency with effectiveness.
Even when it came to Unified Republican control, in their assessment, found that they had no backup in terms of support. Instead, what the Congress gave back was intensive opposition. Even when it came to institutional incentives, PART was faced with challenges as interest groups always protested from cuts that were imposed on federal programs (Stalebrink & Frisco, 2010).
All this was due to resistance attributed to the congressional organisation that acted as an agency because it was always responsive and accountable. Legislators also had different ideas. With their business and financial experiences (obtained from previous campaigns through PAC’s- political action committees), the legislators would have been supportive towards PART.
However, due to the time they had spent serving in the Congress, they gave less support to PART (Dull, 2009). Almost all the initiatives developed by PART were not freely accepted by the congress. This led to PART’S failure because all the administrations turned to be in support of the Congress. The Congress largely ignored PART and was hostile towards it.
Therefore, there was a weak linkage between the two. Clearly, support towards significantly decreased as their goals differed significantly. In addition, by the existence of separate powers- the presidency and the congress, a fight of control emerged, especially in budget control. This control was mostly used as a political or administrative tool.
In fact, there has been an argument the congress might not have won the battle of the budget control thus resulting into making no effort to support PART (Wildavsky & Caiden, 2003). Congress’ view towards PART was that it was a tool of the White House to take over the policymaking authority given to the congress.
In addition, the congress saw PART’s main objective as to have a larger share of power, which in turn would lead to reduced legislation control and effectiveness (Dull, 2009). Bush administration’s failure to involve the congress in the initiation and development of PART partly led to its failure primarily because it was seen as a way of exploiting the and make it easy for the president’s ideas be implemented.
This meant that the congress was not politically important and by involving the congress, it would have been keen on how the budget process would have taken place. To sum up on the failures, the Bush regime was attributed to poor managerial governance. As an example, the initiation of PART made the administration receive additional negative perceptions.
The political situation was negatively affected because there was lack of acknowledgement on the legislative part, which was the congress (Wildavsky and Caiden, 2003). If only the government involved or consulted the congress and the ideologies that were on the process of implementation had the American citizens in mind, PART would probably have succeeded.
References
Dull, M. (2009). De-PART: Assessing the legacies of the program assessment rating tool for management and budgeting. Columbus, OH: Public Management Research.
Stalebrink, O. J. & Frisco, V. (2010). An examination of the congressional reaction to OMB’s program assessment rating tool. New York: Longman.
Wildavsky, A., & Caiden, N. (2003). The New Politics of the Budgetary Process. New York: Longman.