SAN DIEGO| It’s been more than a year since President Obama formally kicked off the “Campaign to Cut Waste” in a June 2011 executive order. Some agencies, though, seem to be taking the charge to reduce administrative costs more seriously than others, a newly released survey of chief financial officers and other federal financial managers indicates. Although 45 percent of respondents said they have been getting “good results” from the campaign, almost as many (44 percent) said they had little to report, were just getting started, had laid plans to start, or (uh-oh) hadn’t done anything, according to the unscientific survey, sponsored by the Association…
Browsing: OMB
The Office of Management and Budget can no longer ignore the signs that Congress probably isn’t going to get its act together and avert devastating sequestration cuts by the end of the year. Acting Director Jeff Zients today issued a memo to agency leaders that said OMB will start discussing how sequestration could be implemented over the next few months. In his memo, Zients repeatedly reminds Congress that the whole point of sequestration was that it was so bad and devastating that they had no choice but to agree on a way to reduce the deficit, and prods them to…
Granted, it’s been a long time since Mitt Romney ran Bain Capital, the private equity firm that has taken a central role in the presidential election campaign. But considering the intensity of President Obama’s attacks on the presumptive Republican nominee’s record at Bain, it’s perhaps worth mentioning that a senior Obama administration appointee had money invested with the firm—at least until a few months ago. Last year, acting Office of Management and Budget Director Jeff Zients held roughly between $116,000 and $315,000 in what his annual financial disclosure report describes as “Bain Capital Fund VII.” OMB released the report, which requires…
New guidance from the White House seeks to get agencies to break “bloated, multi-year” projects for information technology acquisitions into more manageable chunks that can be delivered quickly and for less money. Lengthy acquisition and IT development efforts to deliver massive new systems over years lead to projects that wasted billions of dollars and arrived years behind schedule, Joe Jordan, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy administrator, and Steven VanRoekel, the federal chief information officer, said in a June 14 blog post. By the time some projects launched, technology was obsolete, the officials wrote. The guidance is meant to show IT, acquisition, finance and…
It’s transition time at the IBM Center for The Business of Government, where Executive Director Jonathan Breul is retiring at the end of the month. On deck to replace him is Dan Chenok, a senior fellow at the center whose forte is information technology. Before joining the center a decade ago, Breul had been a top official at the Office of Management and Budget, where he handled government-wide management issues and oversaw implementation of the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act, according to a news release. He started at the center as a senior fellow, becoming executive director in 2007.…
In anticipation of the government’s annual small business procurement scorecard this summer, a group of small business advocates and watchdog groups has asked top federal procurement officials to stop practices that inaccurately reflect how close agencies have come to meeting their goals. The scorecard measures the percent of federal prime and subcontract dollars awarded to small businesses, including women owned small businesses, small disadvantaged businesses, service disabled veteran-‐owned small businesses and small businesses operating in Historically Underutilized Business Zones. The federal government’s goal is to award 23 percent of its contract dollars to small businesses each year. During fiscal 2010, the federal government…
Casual observers might be forgiven for thinking that things are a bit slow over at the Government Accountability and Transparency Board. This is the 11-member panel, you may recall, created last summer by President Obama as “a critical next step” in White House efforts to cut costs, crack down on fraud and open up the government’s books to the public. Almost five months after the board’s chairman, Earl Devaney, retired, Obama hasn’t named a replacement. During the same time, the panel, made up mostly of inspectors general and financial management folk, has met just once, in April. But work on recommendations…
The Office of Management and Budget on Wednesday unveiled a 12-month roadmap for agencies to speed adoption of mobile technologies and improve public access to their digital data and services. “We need to produce better content and data, and present it through multiple channels in a program and device-agnostic way,” OMB said in the long-awaited strategy. “We need to adopt a coordinated approach to ensure privacy and security in a digital age.” The strategy, “Digital Government: Building a 21st Century Platform to Better Serve the American People,” includes 29 action items for agencies, the federal Chief Information Officers Council, OMB…
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will meet tomorrow to vet Joe Jordan, the President’s nominee to lead the Office of Federal Procurement Policy. Jordan joined the Office of Management and Budget in December as a senior adviser on procurement issues — the standard setup for potential nominees. Former OFPP Administrator Dan Gordon left the office Jan. 1. Members in the contracting community have expressed concern that Jordan’s nomination could be held up by the elections but no signs of that yet. Industry and federal officials are eager to get a leader in place. “In this time of budget austerity, procurement policies…
Starting this summer, agencies must begin using a new process to review their information technology portfolios for wasteful spending and opportunities to share services, the administration said last Friday. The new process, called PortfolioStat, is a “face-to-face,” data-based review that will help chief information, financial and acquisition officers to collectively “consolidate the acquisition and management of commodity IT, reduce duplication” and ensure that IT purchases align with their agency’s needs and mission. PortfolioStat will build on the administration’s TechStat sessions, which look at specific projects as opposed to the portfolio as a whole, according to a March 30 memo from…