By Alyssa Rosenberg There are a lot of different ways to measure success or failure in the Bush administration. Brookings' Saban Center has its Iraq Index. You can track jobs lost, the National Debt, whatever economic factor you want. But one thing I've always found particularly interesting is how the administration itself rates the job it's doing not on any specific issue but on management of the executive branch agencies and the departments. The latest President's Management Agenda Scorecard shows some pretty negative results, according to my colleague Robert Brodsky. The administration thinks that six departments and agencies are doing a worse job of managing human capital than they were a quarter ago, and eight departments and agencies have backslid on their e-government initiatives. Those are areas where the government's committed to improving, because e-government is increasingly a key way that citizens get access to services and information, and because Baby Boomer retirements mean that agencies and departments have to be able to position themselves as highly competitive employers of choice to ensure they have enough people to keep government up and functioning. This stuff may not be as sexy as issue-related metrics, but it's worth watching. Neither of the candidates is discussing federal management much, but as more and more federal workers retire, it will become clear how many services, from air traffic control to disability claims processing, rely on a healthy federal workforce, strong acquisitions processes, updated federal IT, you name it.
