We have a proliferation of tools to evaluate federal agencies’ performance and effectiveness. This article explores how effectiveness and performance values are distributed across government agencies based on three well-known assessment instruments used during the Bush administration: the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Management Scorecard, the Performance Assessment Rating Tool (PART), and the Best Places to Work (BPTW) survey. A cluster analysis of the scores from these assessment tools allows us to examine the topography of the agencies in terms of the relationship between the tools and the context of performance, namely, the type of mission carried out by the agencies. Depending on the policy mission type, some agencies fare better in some assessment measures than others. By comparing scores from PART and OMB Scorecard with the BPTW survey, we also find a complex picture when leadership-driven performance metrics are compared with the results of an employee-based assessment of organizational effectiveness.
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