Why GPRA Can’t Be Shored Up
The Man Who Believed the Assignment
I.
Daniel Smith came to Washington in the summer of 1996 with two suitcases and a conviction.
The conviction was this: that the government was better than anyone knew, and that the reason nobody knew was that the government could not explain itself.
He was twenty-three. He had a degree in public administration from a state school his parents had not heard of until he enrolled, and he had read The Federalist Papers the way other young men read box scores. He believed — sincerely, unfashionably — that the American state was one of the great cooperative achievements of the species, and that it was being slandered daily by people who had never seen it work.
He got an internship at the National Institutes of Health. He was assigned to an office in Building 31 with a window that looked out on a parking lot.
And then he saw it work.
II.
The Human Genome Project was six years old that summer and still, in most rooms in America, a rumor. Daniel walked past the labs on his way to the copier. He did not understand what he was seeing. He understood only that people were doing it at ten o'clock at night, in worn cardigans, for salaries that would have embarrassed a second-year associate at any firm in the District.
There was a woman named Ruth on the fourth floor who had spent nineteen years on the pathophysiology of a single class of immune cell. Nineteen years. She had a child in high school who had never known a year in which her mother was not working on the same problem. Daniel asked her once, in the elevator, whether it ever felt long.
"It's the only thing I want to do," Ruth said. She seemed puzzled by the question. "Why would I want to do something else?"
There was no patent at the end of Ruth's work. There was no exit, no acquisition, no vesting cliff. There was a paper, and then another paper, and somewhere out past the horizon of her career there was a possibility — not a promise, a possibility — that some child not yet born would not die of something.
The best minds in the country were in these buildings. Not all of them. But enough that Daniel walked to the Metro in the evenings feeling something close to vertigo at the gap between what he had seen and what the country believed.
Because the country believed the government was a joke. The country believed it was fraud and waste and abuse, a phrase Daniel came to hate for its lazy trimeter. And the country believed this, in part, because when Congress asked the government what it had accomplished, the government could not produce an answer a human being could read.
He saw the budget documents. He saw the Congressional Justification that year — nine hundred pages of appropriation language, obligation tables, object class breakdowns. Salaries and expenses. Travel and transportation of persons. Rental payments to GSA. It was all true. Every number in it was true. And it said nothing at all.
Nowhere in nine hundred pages did it say: Ruth has been at this for nineteen years and she is close.
III.
That was the summer Congress was talking about the Government Performance and Results Act.
Daniel read it in a photocopied packet, sitting on the floor of a group house in Adams Morgan with a beer going warm beside him, and he felt the specific electricity of encountering your own inarticulate belief in someone else's finished sentences.
The Act said: agencies shall state what they are trying to do. They shall say how they will know if they are doing it. They shall report what it cost, and what it achieved, and they shall do this in language that a member of Congress — a busy, non-expert, well-meaning member of Congress — can actually use.
Yes, Daniel thought. Yes. That is exactly it.
The problem had never been that the work was bad. The problem was that the work was illegible. GPRA was a translation project. Somebody had to sit between Ruth and the Committee and build the sentence that connected them. Somebody had to be able to say: this much money, this goal, this progress, and here is the evidence.
He decided that night, on the floor, with the warm beer, that he would be that somebody.
He would be a budget officer.
It was, he understood, an unglamorous ambition. His roommates were interviewing at law firms. But it seemed to him that the leverage was here — that a thousand press releases about government efficiency were worth less than one honest schedule that showed what the money bought. The idealists all wanted to be the scientist or the senator. Nobody wanted to be the person who made the two of them comprehensible to each other.
Fine. He would do it. Somebody had to.
IV.
The people doing the science are not the people who can design mutually exclusive cost categories.
The interagency training was held in a windowless room at OMB with bad coffee and a facilitator from a consulting firm.
Daniel took notes the way he had taken notes in college — verbatim, in a black composition book, because he did not yet know which parts would matter.
The facilitator explained the requirement. The agency would define strategic goals. Beneath the goals, objectives. Beneath the objectives, performance goals with measurable targets. And then — this was the part Daniel underlined twice — the agency would present its budget request against that structure. Every dollar of the appropriation, distributed across the goals.
Someone raised a hand. What about the overhead?
"Allocated," said the facilitator. "The circular is explicit. Resources should be fully costed, with centrally funded administrative services and support costs allocated to each program."
Daniel wrote it down and felt, again, the electricity.
Fully costed. That was what would force agencies to explain ALL that they do and make it consistent and defendable. If the rent and the lawyers and the IT and the Director's suite all had to land somewhere — if there was no junk drawer, no residual, no "other" — then the schedule would be true, and if it was true it would be useful, and if it was useful then somewhere on Capitol Hill a staffer would open it and understand, for the first time, what Ruth's nineteen years had cost the taxpayer and what they had bought.
Every dollar lands once. Nothing omitted. Nothing counted twice.
He drove home that night thinking it was the most beautiful assignment anyone had ever given him. He thought of ways to defend that nineteen years with nothing to show yet except the advancement of human knowledge about how our bodies work – is the very point. Who else would fund it – he was ready to write the true story and defend it.
V.
He was, by then, twenty-six, and he had a real job: budget analyst, then budget officer, at an agency small enough that he was one of four people who understood how the money actually moved.
He understood how the money actually moved. This is worth dwelling on, because it is the thing that everyone outside a budget office fails to grasp about the people inside one.
Daniel knew that the appropriation came in three accounts. He knew which account paid for the building and which one couldn't. He knew that the Office of the Chief Financial Officer was funded out of a working capital fund that billed the programs, and that the billing formula was a fiction inherited from 1987 and never revisited, and that this meant one division was subsidizing another by about four hundred thousand dollars a year, and that nobody had ever asked. He knew where the money was. He knew what it was doing. He could have drawn you the map on a napkin.
What he did not know — what he could not know, because it had not been decided — was what the goals were.
So he went to ask.
VI.
The first meeting was with the program directors. Twelve of them around a conference table, and Daniel at the end with his composition book and a one-page handout explaining the requirement. Ruth was there.
He explained the assignment. He explained that he needed a goal structure — a set of categories that covered everything the agency did, so that every dollar could be assigned to one and only one of them.
He explained exhaustive and he explained mutually exclusive, and he watched twelve faces go politely, opaquely blank.
Then a man named Whitcomb, who ran the largest division, said: "With respect, this isn't a question for you. If congress wants our goals, that is for us."
Daniel said he wasn't sure he followed.
"The goals," Whitcomb said, "are what we're trying to achieve. You don't know what we're trying to achieve. You know what things cost. Those are different." There was a murmur of agreement around the table, the particular warm murmur of a room discovering it has a shared grievance. "This is a program question. We should be the ones defining this."
And Daniel — this is what he would think about for years afterward, at four in the morning, when the thing that woke him was not the fraud but his own manners — Daniel said: That's fair, but the goals have to cover the whole budget - all of it covered so I need to help with that part.
And the managers said, we will tell you what we want to do, you worry about the budget part after. That is your job.
So they had the next meeting without Daniel, and the next, and the next.
Of course the scientists should say what the science was for. Of course he, a twenty-six-year-old with a composition book, should not be the one deciding whether the agency's purpose was to advance understanding or to deliver interventions. He had come to Washington precisely because he believed the people doing the work were better than the people describing it.
So he handed them the assignment. He said: you write the goals. Take a month. I'll build the numbers around whatever you give me.
They took four months.
VII.
What came back was seven pages.
Daniel read it three times at his desk with the door closed.
Goal 1: Advance the frontiers of knowledge to improve human health and well-being.
Goal 2: Foster excellence, innovation, and collaboration across the research enterprise.
Goal 3: Ensure that the benefits of discovery are translated equitably to all communities.
Goal 4: Cultivate a workforce and infrastructure worthy of the mission.
Goal 5: Educate scientists of tomorrow from communities underrepresented in science.
And beneath each one, four to seven objectives, each of which was a sentence of the same kind: Strengthen. Enhance. Promote. Support. Leverage. Catalyze.
He sat with it for a long time.
It was not bad writing. It was moving.
But he could not put a dollar in it. He looked at Goal 5 – that one he recognized, one scientist he knew wanted to have a program to attract and mentor female and minority scientists – she wanted this to happen but it has not happened. No such program exists.
Then he thought of all the money the agency spends on vaccines and vaccine distribution – all the logistics money spent – it is hard to say logistics money spent on getting vaccines distributed - advances the fronteirs of knowledge. If you’re being very honest it isn’t directly covered in any of the five goals. So where, Daniel wondered, does he put all the money spent on the logistics of the vaccine program?
Next Daniel took a single grant — a five-year award to a lab studying protein folding — and he tried to place it. Did it advance the frontiers of knowledge? Yes. Did it foster excellence and collaboration? It was a multi-institution consortium, so yes, obviously. Did it translate benefits equitably? The consortium had a minority-serving institution as a partner, so yes. Did it cultivate the workforce? It funded four postdocs. Yes.
One grant. Four goals. All four true.
He tried it the other way. He took Goal 3 — ensure that the benefits of discovery are translated equitably — and he tried to find the money in it. Which appropriation line was that? Which division? Which contract, which FTE, which square foot of leased space? It was not a thing the agency bought. It was a quality the agency hoped its purchases would have.
You cannot cost an adverb.
And then he went looking for the rest of it — the parts that were not glorious. The general counsel. The FOIA office. The mail room. The nineteen people in the Office of the Chief Information Officer. The rent. The rent was eleven million dollars.
There was no goal for rent.
Of course there wasn't. Nobody writes a strategic plan that says Goal 5: Pay for the building. The program directors had written down the things they were proud of. Naturally. Every person in that room had answered the question they were actually asked, which was not how does the money divide but what are we for.
And the answer to what are we for is never mutually exclusive, and it is never exhaustive, and it does not have a line for rent.
He had asked twelve honest people to do a job, and they had done a different job, beautifully, and it was not the job.
The thing that was most disappointing to Daniel is what he wanted to do – he wanted to do what the assignment called for – make what he saw being done every day – clear. Tell the story with the American people’s taxpayer dollars directly behind the work he saw.
He wanted to say that altruistic brilliant people are getting paid lower than industry salaries to do the long range, not for profit science, that could cure disease and help us understand how our own bodies are built. The kind of science no profit driven company would do, but benefits all of us. He wanted this to tell the story; but advancing frontiers, fostering excellence, and ensuring benefits – these goals do not tell the story he saw, and he knew it.
VIII.
He went back to them.
He was careful. He brought a draft. He said: I've tried to build the schedule against your structure and I'm running into a problem, so let me show you.
He showed them the protein-folding grant landing in four goals at once.
He said: if I put it in all four, the total is four times the appropriation. If I split it, I need a basis for the split, and I don't have one, and neither do you, because there isn't one. If I put it in one, I have to pick which — and any pick I make is a statement about your science that I am not qualified to make and you have not authorized.
He showed them the eleven million dollars of rent with nowhere to go.
Whitcomb looked at the page for a while.
Then he said: "So put it in Goal 1."
Daniel said: all of it?
"The rent supports the research. The research is Goal 1." Whitcomb shrugged, not unkindly. "Daniel, you're overthinking this. It's a budget document. Nobody reads it."
IX.
He escalated.
He wrote a memo to the CFO. It was four pages, it was scrupulously polite, and its argument was simple: the schedule we are about to submit cannot be made accurate, and I would like the record to reflect that I said so.
He proposed alternatives. He proposed building the goal structure from the appropriation up — starting with the accounts, the divisions, the actual cost-bearing categories, and naming them in mission language rather than starting with mission language and hunting for costs. He proposed a residual line, honestly labeled, for the things that were not goals. He proposed, if all else failed, publishing the schedule with a stated methodology and a stated uncertainty, so that at least the reader would know what they were holding.
The CFO read it. The CFO was not a bad man. The CFO said: "I hear you. That's a real concern. Let's make sure we hear from the program side too."
And Daniel understood, standing in that doorway, that he had just been converted from an officer into an opinion.
His objection — which was a factual claim about arithmetic — had been received as a point of view, to be weighed against other points of view, and the other points of view belonged to people who did not have to sign the page, but had more authority inside the organization.
X.
The examiner's call came in September.
Daniel had submitted the budget materials without the goal schedule and with a two-page note explaining why. He had rehearsed the conversation in his car. He was going to explain the double-counting. He was going to explain the rent. He had brought the protein-folding grant as an example, because it was concrete and undeniable, and he believed — he genuinely believed, at thirty-one years old, having by then been in Washington for eight years — that if he could just get someone at OMB to look at the arithmetic, they would see it.
The examiner listened. She was not hostile. She sounded tired.
When he finished she said: "Okay. But we can't accept the justification without the schedule."
Daniel said: I understand. That's why I'm calling. I'm telling you the schedule can't be made accurate.
"Right," she said. "But it has to foot."
There was a pause on the line in which Daniel felt something in his chest reorganize itself permanently.
He said, slowly: I'm telling you the numbers won't be true.
"And I'm telling you," she said, "that the columns have to sum to the appropriation. Look — I don't make the circular. If it doesn't come in with the schedule we'll have to hold the submission, and if we hold the submission you're looking at a stop-work. Do you want me to send you an example? Interior does a nice one."
She was a person with forty agencies and a deadline, holding the only instrument anyone had given her, which measured one thing.
Whether it added up.
XI.
He built it.
That is the part he never found a way to say out loud, in all the years afterward, without his voice doing something he didn't like. Not they made me. Not I had no choice. There is always a choice; the choice was to resign, and he did not resign, because he had a mortgage and a daughter and because — and this is the true reason, the one he only admitted to himself much later — because he still believed the system could be fixed from inside it by a person who stayed.
He sat down on a Sunday in October with a spreadsheet.
Goal 1 got the research divisions. Goal 2 got the collaboration office, which existed, and the training grants, which sort of fit. Goal 3 — equitable translation — had no budget line anywhere in the agency, so he took twelve percent of the extramural awards, because twelve percent of the awards had a community partner named in the abstract, and he wrote a footnote explaining the twelve percent that he knew no one would read.
The rent went to Goal 1.
The general counsel went to Goal 1.
The Chief Information Officer went to Goal 4, cultivate a workforce and infrastructure worthy of the mission, because the word infrastructure was in it.
The vaccine money went nowhere so he left it off. The rent belonged nowhere, so he hid it under research. Lab research belonged in three places so he put it in three, and the triple count nearly offset all the lines that went nowhere.
The schedule footed because his mistakes cancelled and the leftover figure that needed to get on the chart to get it to match the full budget – he put it in the aspirational goal that doesn’t actually exist at all.
He sat with that for a while. The only test anyone had ever applied to this document — the only property OMB would hold up a budget over — was a property that two offsetting fabrications could satisfy exactly as well as the truth.
The research if triple counted, almost made up for the missing vaccine money that was left off completely.
He moved four hundred thousand dollars from one column to another at eleven at night because the columns had to sum to the appropriation and they were four hundred thousand dollars short, and there was no principled place for it, and so he put it where it would make the sum come out.
Then he printed it.
Then he signed it.
The schedule footed. Every column summed. Every dollar landed exactly once. It was, in the only sense that anyone had ever tested, perfect.
He drove home and sat in the driveway with the engine off for twenty minutes.
XII.
They loved it.
He had expected, at worst, indifference. What he got was praise.
The schedule went into the Congressional Justification. It was clean. It was clear. It had five goals and a total that matched the appropriation to the dollar, and a staffer on the Hill said — this got repeated back to Daniel three times, by three different people, each of whom thought they were paying him a compliment — that it was the first time anyone had shown them what the agency actually spent its money on.
The Deputy Director put it in a speech.
The schedule appeared in the annual report. Then in the strategic plan. Then, reformatted, on a poster in the lobby: a pie chart, five wedges, in the agency's colors.
Daniel stood in front of the poster one morning holding a coffee and looked at the twelve percent.
XIII.
And then he emailed the CFO and told him – I am not doing it again next year, and the CFO said, I understand now we have the splits, I will do the table next year and I will sign it.
The first audit finding came fourteen months later. It was mild, almost apologetic in its language: the agency's cost allocations to strategic objectives were not supported by contemporaneous documentation.
Which was true. There was no documentation. The documentation was Daniel, on a Sunday in October, with a spreadsheet.
He was called into a meeting to explain the remediation plan. He did not write the remediation plan. He came to understand, over about six weeks, that the remediation plan had been written by a vendor.
The vendor proposed a time and attendance system.
It cost — the first year, with implementation — a little over two million dollars. It would allow every employee of the agency to allocate their hours, in increments of a quarter hour, against the strategic objectives. This would produce, the vendor's slide said, an auditable evidentiary basis for the agency's performance-based cost allocations.
Daniel said, in the meeting, that this would not make the numbers true. It would make them documented. Those were different things. You could not fix a broken category structure by asking two thousand people to code their hours into it; you would only be distributing the error across two thousand people and calling the result data.
He was told that the finding had to be closed.
XIV.
They bought the system.
And Ruth — nineteen years on a class of immune cell, a daughter now in college, still in the worn cardigan, still there at ten o'clock at night — Ruth got an email explaining that beginning the first of the month, she would be required to allocate her time, in quarter-hour increments, across five strategic objectives.
She came to Daniel's office. She had printed the email. She was not angry. She was something worse; she was bewildered.
"I don't know what this is asking me," she said. She put the page on his desk and pointed at Goal 3. "Ensure that the benefits of discovery are translated equitably. Daniel, I look at cells. I've looked at the same cells since 1988. Is that Goal 1 or Goal 3?"
And Daniel — the budget officer, the one who understood how the money actually moved, the man who had come to Washington to build the sentence connecting Ruth to the Committee — Daniel looked at the woman who had given nineteen years of one life to one problem, and had to tell her that the honest answer was that it did not matter, that she should pick one, that no one would ever check, and that the number this produced would be printed in a document, and audited, and put on a poster in the lobby.
She said: "But that isn't true."
He said: "No."
She looked at him for a moment.
Then she went back upstairs and coded her hours, because she was a good employee, and because she did not want to make trouble, and because she assumed — the way every honest person assumes, when confronted with an absurd requirement from an institution they respect — that somebody, somewhere, must have a reason.
Two thousand people at that agency coded their hours that year. Then two thousand did it again the next.
The lie did not stay on Daniel's desk. A lie that is documented must be sustained, and to sustain it you need everyone. You need Ruth. You need the postdocs. You need, eventually, every grantee, and every subrecipient of every grantee, and the case manager in a treatment clinic in Ohio typing a woman's answers into a tablet, a meals on wheels volunteer in Mississippi were given the reporting codes to pick from, then given training, then told they can use up to 20 percent of their grant money to report back against the categories.
The fiction had been pushed down. It was resident, now, in two million keyboards. And every one of the people typing assumed the person above them had a reason.
XV.
He kept fighting.
He wrote to the Committee. Twice with his name on it, and then — after the second letter produced a call to his CFO and a conversation about lanes — anonymously, four more times, on a personal laptop from a coffee shop in Silver Spring, laying out the arithmetic in language he tried to make impossible to misread.
He never got a reply. Years later, he saw a committee report complaining that agency budget justifications were drowning in pleonasm and devoid of useful information, and he sat at his kitchen table and laughed until his wife came in to see what was wrong.
He testified once, briefly, to an interagency working group. He was thanked for his input.
He went to conferences. He found, to his surprise, that there were forty or fifty people in the country who understood exactly what he was talking about, and that all of them were budget officers, and that all of them had signed the same page.
They would find each other at the coffee urn, and one of them would say something like so how's your twelve percent, and everybody would laugh, and it was the loneliest laughter Daniel had ever been part of.
XVI.
And then OMB reversed, or rather codified what had already happened inside agencies.
That was 2011.
The word came down in a revision to the circular. There was no announcement, no hearing, no vote. There was a new edition of a document, and in the new edition, the section that had contained the requirement — resources should be fully costed, with centrally funded administrative services and support costs allocated to each program — did not contain it anymore. The section number was reassigned to something else. The phrase performance budget simply stopped appearing.
In its place: a website. Goals, objectives, milestones, quarterly reviews, goal leaders, priority goals, a dashboard with green and yellow and red.
No dollar column.
And the authority to define the goals and the measures — the assignment Daniel had gone to Washington to carry, the one he had handed to the program directors in a conference room in 1999 because they told him it wasn't a finance question — that authority was now formally, theirs. It was in the statute. Goal leaders. Program managers. The people who did the work would say what the work was for. They don’t know the budget. They expressly do not want to know. So the goals would never tie to costs, never not duplicate costs or cover everything the agency does, and they could officially include something a manager wants to do but spends no money against.
The doctors picked the goals. The goals had no dollars. The dollars stayed in the appropriation accounts, where they had always been, where Daniel could have drawn you the map on a napkin at any point in the entire eighteen years if anyone had given him the authority to do it.
And the schedule he had forged — the one that footed, the one on the poster — was no longer required.
Nobody told him that. He found out by reading the circular.
Nobody rescinded the time and attendance system either. Along with the parallel financial system that codes expenditures to the same 5 categories, across all of HHS, they cost eight hundred thousand dollars a year to maintain. Two thousand people still coded their hours into five strategic objectives that no longer had to reconcile to anything at all.
XVII.
Last spring Daniel was asked to prepare a document for a new agency initiative, and he opened a legal pad — he still uses legal pads — and he started, out of an old habit of thoroughness, by listing everything he would have to produce that year. Submissions he builds with input and work hours that extend to every employee in the organization.
The strategic plan. The annual performance plan. The annual performance report. The Congressional Justification. The Agency Financial Report. The Summary of Performance and Financial Information. The Agency Priority Goals, quarterly. The Cross-Agency Priority Goal contributions, quarterly. The Budget In Brief. The Federal Program Inventory submission. The Evidence Act learning agenda. The Evidence Act capacity assessment. The Annual Evaluation Plan. The Enterprise Risk Management profile. The internal control assurance statement. The improper payments risk assessment. The improper payments sampling and estimation plan. The DATA Act submission, monthly. The FFATA subaward reporting. The Single Audit corrective action plans. The IG's top management challenges response. The GAO recommendation status update. The records management self-assessment. The Section 508 accessibility certification. The Federal Managers' Financial Integrity Act statement. The FISMA report. The Privacy Act SORN reviews. The Paperwork Reduction Act clearances. The training certifications — cybersecurity, ethics, records, harassment, insider threat, each annual, each tracked, each auditable.
And then the ones that were nobody's law and everybody's requirement. The performance scorecard one administration had wanted, in green and yellow and red, still generated, still reviewed. The progress on audit findings. The equity assessments a second administration had required, still on the books, still collected from every grantee. The plain-language rewrites. The customer experience surveys. The one-page summaries with the pictures. The table that says you spend money on diversity and inclusion. The new one that certifies you do not.
He wrote them all down. It took two pages.
He looked at the list and understood, with a clarity that had nothing to do with anger, that not one of these had ever been removed. Every administration had added its vocabulary. None had subtracted one. And every one of them was still enforceable — an Inspector General could still write a finding against any line on that page — which meant that he would continue, producing every single one, for an administration that had left, for a purpose that had lapsed, for a reader who did not exist.
He thought about the fact that no one had ever added it up. Not OMB. Not GAO. Not CBO. In thirty years, nobody had been asked what the machine cost, because the machine was made of accountability, and it is very difficult to get anyone to audit an audit.
He thought about Ruth, who had retired in 2019, and who in her last decade had spent — he had actually calculated this once, and then wished he hadn't — something like nine full working weeks of her life entering her hours into categories he had invented on a Sunday in October to make a column sum.
Nine weeks. Out of a life spent looking at one class of cell, because it was the only thing she wanted to do, because why would she want to do something else.
He thought: I came here to make the government legible.
He thought: I have spent twenty-nine years making it illegible, at enormous expense, and every single step of it was compliance.
He sat for a long time in an office with a window that looked out on a parking lot.
Then he wrote, at the bottom of the second page, in the same handwriting as everything else:
Should I go?
And under that, after a while:
If I go, who tells them?
XVIII.
The other budget officers left.
It never looked like an exodus, because it never happened faster than one at a time. A retirement here. A move to a contractor there, for double the salary. A woman he had known for eleven years, who had built her agency's cost model from the accounts up and could tell you to the dollar what the mail room cost, took a job at a think tank and did not say goodbye to anyone.
The new ones were bright, they were credentialed, many of them had master's degrees. They arrived on their first day and were handed the file.
Fifteen years of time and attendance data. Two thousand employees, quarter-hour increments, coded against five strategic objectives, going back further than any of them had been alive in this business. Cost allocation models with documented methodologies. Crosswalks. Reconciliations. Audit trails with minimal findings, because the systems had been bought.
The new budget officer would sit down with all of it and try to make it make sense.
And it would not make sense. Of course it would not. Goal 3 had twelve percent of the extramural awards in it because on a Sunday in October, in a year before they were born, a man had counted the abstracts that contained the phrase community partner. Goal 5 held a plug. The rent was research. The vaccine logistics were nowhere at all, and the triple-counted lab money had covered the hole so neatly that no one had ever looked for it.
The new budget officer would stare at this and feel a specific, familiar shame — the shame of the intelligent newcomer who cannot follow the reasoning and assumes the failure is his own.
I'm new. It's complicated. There must be a rationale I haven't found yet.
And then, because he was diligent, he would go looking for the rationale. And he would find the data. Fifteen years of it. Thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of entries, every hour accounted for, every quarter-hour coded.
And he would think: well, this is documented.
The data was all that survived. And data, to a young person who has been taught that data is the antidote to fiction, looks like a foundation.
He watched them arrive and trust it. One after another. They cited the twelve percent in their own analyses. They built on it. One of them presented a variance report to the Deputy Director explaining a shift in the Goal 3 allocation, and the explanation was thoughtful, and internally rigorous, and entirely about a number that had come out of nowhere in 1999.
Daniel said none of this is real many times. And he was, told back, no one reads it, but they require it.
So the fiction did not merely persist. It matured into evidence. And the newest, smartest, most rigorous people in the building were now its defenders — because they had checked it against the data, and the data agreed with it, because he had built the data to agree with it.
XIX.
Daniel is a fictitious character and the categories doctors picked here are fictitious though the point and errors they demonstrate are true, but the accomplishments listed below, that NIH achieved in the timeframe of this narrative – those accomplishments are real, and you probably haven’t heard of all of them because they never got written up in a report that sounded like the one Daniel dreamed of.
And here is what happened, out the window, at NIH.
Between the summer Daniel arrived and the spring he sat down with the legal pad, the age-adjusted cancer death rate in the United States fell by about a third.
A measured rate, against a peak in 1991. Something on the order of four and a half million people did not die of cancer who would have died at the old rate. They are not identifiable. They do not know who they are. They are simply — statistically, indisputably — here, walking around, in a country that spent those same decades being told the government could not accomplish anything.
Five-year survival across all cancers went from sixty-three percent to seventy. For children, from fifty-eight percent in the 1970s to eighty-five.
Invasive cervical cancer among women in their early twenties — the first cohort to receive the HPV vaccine as adolescents — fell sixty-five percent in seven years. A vaccine against a virus, preventing a cancer, in a generation of women who will never know they were spared, because you cannot feel the absence of a tumor, and NIH made the vaccine possible, and few people know and it.
HIV became a chronic condition. A twenty-year-old starting antiretroviral therapy in 2010 could expect roughly a decade more of life than one starting in 1996. Some of them are grandparents now.
And in December of 2023, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first CRISPR gene therapy in human history, and what it cured was sickle cell disease — a disease that for a hundred years had been a sentence, borne overwhelmingly by Black Americans, treated for most of that century with palliation and apology.
At NIH they edit the patient's own cells. They give them back. The cells do not sickle.
The tool that did it came out of basic research into how bacteria defend themselves against viruses.
Nobody in the private sector funded the sickle cell research that led to the cure. Nobody could have. There was no business case. There was no market. There was a woman in a worn cardigan, somewhere, at ten o'clock at night, following a question because it was interesting, funded by a public that never met her.
That is what a national research budget is. It is a country buying, on behalf of people not yet born, a set of answers that no one can predict and no one can price.
And Ruth is in that history. Not with her name on it — that is not how it works. Her name is on forty papers, and the papers are cited, and the citations are cited, and somewhere four steps downstream is a mechanism that became a target and a target that became a drug. Daniel looked it up once. It took him an afternoon. He is not a scientist and he could not follow all of it, but he followed enough to know that a woman on the fourth floor of a building with a bad parking lot spent nineteen years — then twenty-nine, then thirty-four — on one class of immune cell, and that people are alive because she did.
Nine of those weeks she spent entering her hours into a category he invented to make a column sum.
And here is the thing Daniel cannot get past, that he turns over at four in the morning, that he has now spent twenty-nine years failing to explain to anyone with the power to fix it:
None of that is in the report.
Not one line of it. Not the four and a half million. Not the sixty-five percent. Not the children going from fifty-eight to eighty-five. Not the cure — the actual, literal, first-in-human-history cure — for a disease that had never had one.
The report says: Goal 1: Advance the frontiers of knowledge to improve human health and well-being. $1.6 billion.
The report says: Goal 3: Ensure that the benefits of discovery are translated equitably. Twelve percent.
He came to Washington because he believed the government was better than anyone knew, and that the reason nobody knew was that the government could not explain itself.
He was right.
He was right about all of it, and he still is, and that is the unbearable part — that the diagnosis was correct and the cure was worse than the disease, and that he has spent his working life building the machine that made the thing he loved less legible than it was when he found it.
The 1996 Congressional Justification told you nothing, and it took nine hundred pages to do it.
The current one tells you nothing, and it takes twice as many, plus a website, plus a dashboard, plus two million people entering quarter-hours into categories that reconcile to nothing, plus a compliance apparatus whose total cost no one has ever calculated — because the apparatus is made of accountability, and nobody audits an audit.
They cured sickle cell disease.
He sat for a long time in an office with a window that looked out on a parking lot.
Then he wrote, at the bottom of the second page, in the same handwriting as everything else:
Should I have walked out all those years ago?
And under that, after a while:
If I go, who tells them?
He did not have an answer to the second question.
He has not left. The thing he came to fix is still broken. He fears he broke it further. It is still worth fixing.
He is still writing letters and witnessing.
This is a fictional story told to illuminate something that is shockingly complex and difficult to make people understand. So, is it really like this? Is it government wide? Here is what examiners found:
In its major review of GPRA implementation, GAO concluded:
1. Only one of the six agencies whose reports it closely reviewed clearly linked its costs to the achievement of performance goals or objectives.
2. GAO found managers struggled with the system.
GAO surveyed federal managers across government.
Managers reported continuing difficulty with:
setting outcome-oriented goals,
measuring performance,
collecting useful performance data,
developing meaningful outcome measures,
especially in research agencies, where outcomes are inherently difficult to quantify.
3. GAO found that
· fewer than half of federal managers received relevant training in results-oriented management.
· and
· managers lacked the authority, training, and incentives needed to implement GPRA effectively.
That's government-wide.
4. GAO also found that agencies were linking funding requests to higher, more general levels of expected performance rather than to specific performance goals.
In other words, the connections were vague, not precise.
Although Daniel is fictional, the management dilemma he encounters was not unique to one agency. GAO found that managers across government struggled to establish meaningful outcome measures, collect useful performance data, and link costs to performance goals. In one government-wide review, only one of six agencies clearly linked costs to the achievement of performance goals or objectives.