DC government agencies don't want you to read their performance plans

A lack of planning, oversight and accountability within DC's executive branch

“Performance planning is the foundation for how we operate and evaluate our government. At the beginning of each fiscal year, each agency [is] asked to develop a performance plan. The performance plan describes new initiatives that improve the quality of their services and highlights metrics that meaningfully gauge their progress against goals.” This is how DC’s Office of the City Administrator (OCA) describes the annual planning process. On paper, this sounds like good, data-driven government and accountability. In reality, many of DC’s public safety agencies have woefully inadequate performance plans and some even claim to target worse performance. Many of these plans most likely reflect copy-pasting past year’s plans with minimal critical thinking.

In DC’s local government, agencies are run by leaders that are appointed by the Mayor and then (usually) confirmed by the Council. On a day-to-day basis agency leaders report to Mayor Bowser and her City Administrator while answering indirectly to the Council through periodic oversight questions and hearings. DC’s City Administrator Kevin Donahue was previously the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice (DMPSJ), which is relevant because that “cluster” of agencies (an official government term, not a euphemism) is what this post will focus on. Currently all of these agencies report directly to Deputy Mayor Lindsey Appiah. The shortcomings in these performance plans matter because:

1. Many of the performance “targets” are nonsensical (like targeting more juveniles to be re-arrested than in past years) so it’s unclear what these agencies are even trying to accomplish

2. The plans often miss key aspects of the agencies’ operations which suggests they are not a priority for the administration

3. The vast majority of performance metrics in these plans are only released publicly on an annual basis; making it incredibly difficult for the public or media to hold agencies accountable in a timely manner

To start with a particularly egregious example, the Department of Corrections (DOC) performance plan has “targets” that would be worse performance than their current operations on 11 out of 20 performance measures (a sample is highlighted with a red dashed line below). These are critically important measures like “Inmate on Inmate Assault Rate” and “Inmate on Staff Assault Rate”:

In addition to the screenshot above, the DOC’s targets also call for worse performance on several recidivism and compliance related measures. The DOC has a $198M budget and is responsible for ~1,600 detainees so it’s hardly a minor agency. The fact that a majority of its performance measures have ridiculous targets and that this somehow escaped notice from anyone in DOC, DMPSJ or OCA leadership is incredibly concerning.

The Mayor’s Office on Returning Citizen Affairs (MORCA), which is also focused on the important work of reducing recidivism, likewise has nonsensical performance targets. Every single target for Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 has been copy-pasted from FY 2022 despite actual FY 2022 performance being better than the new target:

We’ve already seen the Department of Youth Rehabilitative Services (DYRS) plan in a previous post on DC’s juvenile justice system but it has disappointing similarities with the DOC plan by calling for more recidivism, assaults, injuries and abscondence:

One of the common critiques of the Bowser administration is that they only pay lip service to rehabilitation when trying to reduce recidivism. These DOC, MOCRA and DYRS performance plans certainly don’t appear to have received any kind of skeptical review by anyone from agency leaders to Deputy Mayor Appiah to City Administrator Donahue.

The Department of Forensic Sciences (DFS) has targets for worse performance on 8 of 15 performance measures. These include measures related to evidence handling and DFS’ testing for the public health part of its mission. What is more egregious is that there are no performance measures related to outsourcing evidence testing. Because the crime lab lost its accreditation, evidence has to be outsourced to accredited Federal or private labs. This is arguably the most important thing that DFS does to help solve crimes and secure convictions but it is nowhere in DFS’ performance plan. The performance plan almost reads like it is for a “normal” lab but unaccredited DFS is not in a normal situation. Instead of focusing on how they can help fight crime now, the plan talks about a lot of other activities that are simply not as important. This inadequate plan should be interpreted alongside DFS’ recently-uncovered efforts to withhold information from its oversight board (and I encourage anyone interested in DC’s crime lab debacle to read this article). One oversight board member sent this resignation letter outlining DFS’ actions:

The mess at DFS probably warrants its own post but it’s a reason why they shouldn’t get the benefit of the doubt when they put together a performance plan that omits their most important activity and calls for worse performance on a majority of their measures.

The Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (ONSE) has had serious challenges in trying to prevent violence in DC. It has not had a permanent director for over 600 days, just received a 12% budget cut and has been less successful than the OAG’s similar Cure the Streets program. Their performance plan is a mix of very unambitious goals, measures with no data or targets and a target for significantly worse performance in the Pathways program:

Not every agency has quite so many problems in their performance plans; but there are still a few concerning targets that slipped through whatever review process there was for these plans. The vast majority of of DC Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department (FEMS) targets make sense but they do have worse targets for a few measures like smoke alarm installations. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) has worse targets for the toxicology examinations (relevant to data on DC’s opioid crisis), the Child Fatality Review Committee and the Developmental Disabilities Fatality Review Committee. The Office of Police Complaints only has 4 performance measures but 1 of them is a target calling for worse performance as it relates to timely investigations. The Office of Victim Services and Justice Grants (OVSJG) has a target of more kids being truant year-over-year. While the Office of Unified Communications (OUC) has a lot of problems running DC’s 911 system their performance plan’s targets are mostly fine; the problem is that they are not anywhere close to hitting those target.

The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) only has 1 of 7 performance measures with a “worse than current” target. In general the performance plan is fine (MPD also has an entire “Strategic Plan” that I reviewed here) and the main critique one could make is that MPD has a lot more data that they could release regularly but choose not to. The main area of opportunity here is in clearance rates (i.e. the % of crimes that are “closed” with an arrest or “extraordinary" means) which normally are only shared once a year despite being incredibly important. However, thanks to recent legislation MPD just began posting clearance rates for several important crimes. The fact that clearance rates have fallen significantly this year should prompt serious analysis and action since this undermines deterrence and public trust in the police:

In addition to each agency’s performance plan there is also a similar plan for the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice (DMPSJ). The performance measures here are mostly administrative (like “community meetings attended”) but they do provide a possible explanation for why agencies set low/worse targets. The Deputy Mayor herself has a performance measure of “Percent of cluster agencies that ”Met” or ”Almost Met” 75 percent of fiscal year KPIs” apparently referring to the performance measures we’ve reviewed throughout this post. If the highest-ranking official in the Public Safety and Justice “cluster” is trying to boost their performance in this metric that would then be an incentive for all of the subordinate cluster agencies to pick low (or even nonsensical) performance targets:

The Deputy Mayor’s FY 2022 accomplishments are also quite concerning:

• They cite as an “accomplishment” that they “made significant progress in understanding the intricate web that is the public safety and justice ecosystem.” DC does have a very complicated “ecosystem” but the fact that grasping this was listed as the very first accomplishment of the Deputy Mayor’s office rather than simply an entry-level requirement probably doesn’t instill confidence among Washingtonians nervous about crime.

  • It’s also not clear that this is even true. The Bowser administration has repeatedly ignored or missed key enforcement and rehabilitation gaps in DC’s local-Federal “ecosystem” as explored in this post.

• They cite progress towards bringing the parole board under local control but that process is generally considered to be dead

• The third (of three) accomplishments boils down to a reorganization and a decision to hold some staff retreats

The performance plans would be more innocuous if these public safety agencies were generally high-performing. But in agency after agency we’ve seen deep operational failures, misallocation of resources and often toxic leadership. In that context the lack of concern or attention to detail in these plans fits a deeply disturbing fact pattern consistent with dysfunctional governance.

The Bowser administration has deftly managed to almost completely insulate the Mayor from any political blowback for their mismanagement of DC’s public safety agencies. The Mayor’s entire public image is that she and her team are the “adults in the room” protecting the public from her “extremist” and “irresponsible” opponents. The Washington Post’s Editorial Board uncritically repeated this conventional wisdom in their 2022 endorsement and a separate “stay the course” message (bolding is mine for emphasis):

• “The District has been blessed with sober, stable leadership, but voters should remember it was not that long ago that its government was in dysfunction and its finances in disarray.”

• “Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) has provided capable and steady leadership, made all the more remarkable by the fact that a year into her second term the global covid-19 pandemic hit. Her sure-footed response — executing a shutdown of the city virtually overnight, setting up testing and quarantine sites, overseeing a vaccination effort with a high rate of participation, navigating a reopening of D.C. that put students back in the classroom — makes her uniquely qualified to continue to lead the city as it seeks to come back from the difficulties of the past two years.”

One way this narrative survives is that in media coverage problems are often attributed to an agency (DYRS, OUC, DFS etc.) but successes are attributed to the Mayor’s personal brand. This has allowed the Mayor’s political standing to “defy gravity” and maintain approval even among voters that are very unhappy with the government she is in charge of. Public safety practitioners and savvy media consumers know that when it comes to running DC’s crime-fighting agencies the truth about the Bowser administration is much more complicated than the prevailing narrative. Her own team says “Performance planning is the foundation for how we operate and evaluate our government” but multiple key agencies clearly put little to no thought into their own plans. Multiple Bowser administration leaders who are incredibly detail-oriented when it comes to delivering pitch-perfect political talking points apparently signed off on these agency performance plans that had obvious, glaring flaws. If the administration lived up to their own rhetoric about deliberate, data-driven governance we’d all be better off and frankly it’s what Washingtonians deserve.

I want to close by acknowledging that this is Thanksgiving week and I am sincerely thankful for everyone who has supported this publication. I’ve had a lot of help in terms of feedback, ideas and people sharing my work with others. I especially want to thank the frontline workers in DC’s public safety system who do incredibly hard jobs and as sources have been essential in helping translate the data into real, human terms.