Our society lets markets handle the production of most things that are easily measured and asks government to produce things that are harder to quantify. This makes it easy for government agencies to suffer mission creep, meaning they start doing things other than the purposes for which they were created because the new things are easier to measure or have a more powerful political constituency.
Back in 1993, some bright bulb in Congress tried to solve this problem through strategic planning. Specifically, a law called the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) required every federal agency to write a plan that specified the outcomes the agency was trying to produce and showed how each part of the agency’s budget contributed to those outcomes.
Like so many other planning ideas, this one hasn’t worked. Instead, it has become just one more hoop for agency officials to jump through, adding to taxpayer costs without producing any results.
