Something smells

The White House is stripping a good governance provision from the budgeting process that requires agencies to set goals and meet them in order to get funding, lifting the protocols just before President-elect Joe Biden takes office.

The memo, posted to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) website on Christmas Eve, completely deletes from a government guidance the requirement that agencies do strategic planning and publicly share progress in meeting their goals.

[...]

The process was created as a result of the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA), a bipartisan law aimed at tying budgeting to results.

“All of this is embedded in here because it represents the priorities the administration is trying to accomplish, and of course the budget is one of the principal tools that they have to get stuff done,” Robert Shea, associate director at OMB during the George W. Bush administration who is now a principal at consulting firm Grant Thornton LLP, previously told The Hill.

[...]

“It is co-opting the prerogative of the Biden administration to mold its own budget process,” Shea said of the A-11, which is typically only revised once a year. But Thursday’s memo is the second time this year that the White House has updated it.

“No one knew they were working on updating it at all,” said the source familiar with the discussions.

“This is very close to the transition and is not normally when you’d be looking to revise this.”

  The Hill

So what does that tell us?