The culprits are our elected government officials. And yet they have been re-elected over 90% of the time.
If you have worked in any corporation as a senior manager, you would have known “Performance Metrics.” Everything we propose to do and everything we do have to have timely measurable performance metrics. Clearly defined Performance Metrics are critical for any business proposal to get through senior management approval and receive operating budget approval from the finance department.
In every monthly or quarterly operations review meeting, the managers in charge of products, services, sales, marketing, HR, and Finance will present to the audience how they have or have not met their performance metrics. These performance metrics review meetings are dreaded by all who attend them. It is like lining up the ducks and shooting them down individually. We all know that the survival of our careers and the continuation of funding for our groups will depend on these performance metrics at these review meetings.
When a manager comes in with repeated underperformance of their metrics, they know other managers will shun them. The underperforming manager’s operating budget (funding) can become spoils that other performing managers could compete for. The underperforming group may be merged with other groups. Their original charter may be diminished or eliminated. Nobody will even remember that a group/manager has existed as part of the corporate fabric in another month or quarter.
In the corporate world, accountability is in plain sight. A manager or a leader could receive the best funding and be responsible for managing a large group of employees and enjoying the prestige of fame and financial rewards if they continue to deliver according to their promised performance metrics. If they fail to deliver on their promises, they will be made accountable swiftly and without hesitation.
To sum up the above, corporate leaders are promoted and rewarded not based on their fancy promises but on the actual delivery of their responsibilities, measured by objective metrics at regular intervals. Corporate leaders can only keep their budget and their jobs if they deliver to their measurable metrics.
Now, let us turn our attention to the elected political leaders at the state and federal levels. Everyone made fancy promises to us when they were running for their seats. But their promises do not come with performance metrics, do they?
You can pick a policy your political leader has advocated, and you have voted for them. What were the performance metrics (expected benefits) of that policy? How would those expected benefits be measured? When did those performance metrics (expected benefits) ever been reviewed? The answers were CAMPAIGN MESSAGES ONLY, NOT AVAILABLE, and NEVER.
Our political leaders gave us their fancy promises to get elected. They know that once elected, there will not be consequences for not delivering on their promises. When their policy was challenged as it had not delivered any benefits, they could throw something together and claim it delivered the expected benefits even though they were never defined with measurable results.
With the lack of performance metrics in government, we cannot examine our social, economic, and military policies to identify those that work and those that don’t and implement remedies when needed. And hence we have a poorly performing government run by our non-accountable elected officials up and down our political systems.
The solution to getting our government back to serving our nation efficiently and effectively is to make them accountable. When they are not, fire them swiftly without recourse.
How? Make every new law, especially laws that spend tax dollars, and change our tax code to have a Sunset Clause.
What is a Sunset Clause? It is a date when the laws will expire. Our Congress can bring the about-to-expire laws for a new vote to extend them. The new vote to determine if the laws should be extended will force the politicians to face the public again. If the expected benefits from the laws have not been evident, then said laws will likely expire per the Sunset date. The politicians who advocated for and ran on the laws will be made known in this process. It is still up to the voters to count how many promises they have made and how many laws they promoted have failed to deliver their promised benefits.
The Sunset Clause is a weaker version of the Corporate Performance Metrics with Quarterly Reviews, as mentioned at the beginning of this article. The nirvana is for our political system to incorporate Performance Metrics on each new piece of law and force the new laws to undergo periodic performance reviews. But that is too complicated for our already messy political systems. So, the simpler version is to force the law to have an expired date and a re-vote of the law. That will do two things for our nation (1) force nonperforming laws (bad laws) to expire (2) force politicians to have to be accountable for their promises.
Performance metrics and Quarterly Reviews have worked for decades, if not centuries, to push the performance of our corporations to be efficient and effective. It is not perfect; it is much better than our current political systems that allow political leaders to have no accountability for delivering their promises or keeping their jobs.
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