The Office of Management and Budget has a new-found ally in its effort to convince Congress to make government more accountable and transparent — bloggers.

And it plans to use them.

Following the successful effort of bloggers to expose the senators secretly holding up a bill to promote government transparency, Clay Johnson, OMB’s deputy director for management, said he’d like their help shining a light on lawmakers’ disinterest in other administration initiatives like competitive sourcing, work-force reform and the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART).

“This is infantile. It’s foolish,” he said of lawmakers’ failure to take notice of PART, a questionnaire that rates the effectiveness of government programs. “What? You don’t want us to pay attention to whether programs work or not? I’d like to put some bloggers on this.”

Johnson spoke Sept. 26 at a luncheon sponsored by the IBM Center for the Business of Government and the National Academy of Public Administration. Interviewed following the event, he said 10 bloggers representing various groups attended the president’s Sept. 26 signing of the bill that will create a searchable database of all government grants and contracts.

The bill, sponsored by Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., was stalled for weeks in the Senate because of an anonymous hold. Anonymous holds are often placed on bills to block their consideration on the Senate floor, but news that a bill to promote government transparency had met this fate emboldened watchdog groups and bloggers from all corners of the political spectrum to mount a campaign to uncover the “secret” senator or senators.

The effort, which succeeded in prompting Sens. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, and Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., to remove their holds on the measure, resulted in swift passage of the bill.

Johnson said the purpose of the one-hour meeting at the White House was to get the bloggers’ input on the database and what kinds of features they’d like to see there, but he indicated that this won’t be the end to the administration’s dealings with these groups.

“We plan to meet with them again,” Johnson said. “We plan to stay in touch.”

While he doesn’t expect the bloggers to jump on everything OMB promotes, Johnson said their alliance is a natural one. “Their interest in the bill was in transparency and accountability. These are the things that make government work better. Everything we work on is about making government work better. I was thinking [during the meeting], ‘Have I got some things for you,’ ” he said. “They might be impressed or unimpressed with certain ideas, but the more discussions we have, the more we may change things for the better.”

OMB Director Rob Portman also acknowledged the bloggers’ efforts as part of his remarks during the luncheon. “The bill passed more easily than anyone expected,” he said. Portman, a former congressman from Ohio, said it’s often hard to get lawmakers to pay attention to things like the Program Assessment Rating Tool and electronic government because “it’s not going to get them lots of votes back home.”

“Members of Congress want immediate political reward,” he said. “It’s important to provide information to Congress about the importance of better management. . . . We need to spread the word to make it a politically substantive and rewarding experience. It’s a tough sell to some members of Congress, but that’s just the way it works.”

Johnson said getting congressional buy-in is often an issue of education. “Causing our programs to be more effective should be good politics. Often problems occur when there’s a lack of understanding by their staff,” he said. “There’s also a fear of change and a fear of the unknown. That’s our challenge. If they don’t get it, we have to try harder.”