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Discourse about performance has hidden the political, ethical, and normative stakes of public management reform with respect to the state’s role and action. The basic problem is that actors from the top down are given incentives—not to achieve the fundamental objectives of public policies, but to directly improve their scores, whatever the means employed, along the performance indicators used to evaluate them. Data objectivity relies upon measurement conventions that are not immune to political motives. The author raises questions on how to reconcile performance and social justice; comparability issues; norms embedded in technical matters, hence without public debate; and political fabrication of data. Research should invest in the emergence of a new political register, that of the cognitive representation of situations.