Word around town is that Joseph Jordan, an associate administrator at the Small Business Administration, has been tapped to replace outgoing Office of Federal Procurement Policy Administrator Dan Gordon. The Office of Management and Budget won’t confirm that Jordan is the nominee for Gordon’s job, which requires Senate confirmation. But Jordan has been named as a senior adviser to Jeff Zients, the federal Chief Performance Officer and OMB’s deputy director for management. Jordan will start advising Zients and his senior staff on policy and procurement matters this month. Jordan did not respond to requests for an interview. Being brought on as a senior…
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There’s some apparent good news coming from the White House this afternoon on the improper payment front, according to a news advisory. At 2:30 p.m., Office of Management and Budget Director Jack Lew and three other top administration figures are holding a conference call “to discuss the administration’s progress cutting wasteful improper payments by nearly $18 billion’’ the advisory says. FedLine had asked about this last week and was told the data was being finalized. Presumably these are figures for fiscal 2011 versus fiscal 2010. Not clear is whether the nearly $18 billion figure is a cut in absolute terms…
A review of federal information technology investments found that agencies spend far more than the $79 billion reported on the government’s web-based IT tracking system, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office. The IT Dashboard only provides investment data for 26 agencies, the report noted. The website does not include spending data for 61 other agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Central Intelligence Agency and legislative and judicial branch agencies. OMB encourages small agencies to use the IT Dashboard, but they choose not to, according to the GAO report released Wednesday. While administration officials often quote…
Contrary to what recent experience might suggest, the Senate can occasionally get something done. Witness yesterday’s approval of two Obama administration picks whose nominations had been dangling for months. Around noon, the Senate confirmed Heather Higginbottom on a 64-36 vote to become deputy director at the Office of Management and Budget. Later that evening, lawmakers also signed off 74-26 on the nomination of John Bryson to be the next Commerce Secretary. Both nominations had been stalled by Republican objections. Higginbottom, who had been policy director for the 2008 Obama presidential campaign, more recently served as the number two person at…
Go figure: The humble muffin has become a government change agent. In what is probably the first-ever Office of Management and Budget directive with a connection to overpriced baked goods, Director Jack Lew is ordering agencies to take stock of their conference spending and report back by Nov. 1. The impetus, of course, is that newly released report by the Justice Department’s inspector general that uncovered numerous examples of questionable expenses at DOJ conferences from October 2007 through September 2009. What really caught the attention of politicians and the media, however, was the finding that muffins at one Washington gathering cost more than $16 each. No matter that the hotel in question…
Starting next week, the public will be asked to brainstorm and submit ideas for improving federal websites. Through the National Dialogue to Improve Federal Websites, set to launch Monday on USA.gov, citizens and web experts can share ideas about user experiences, design and content of federal websites. Those suggestions will guide how federal websites are created, used and managed in the future. People can submit and vote on ideas, and General Services Administration will moderate the two weeks of online discussion. The initiative is part of a larger effort by the White House to cut waste and improve customer service. In…
Institutions can wait for written requests to disclose federally-funded researchers’ financial ties to pharmaceutical companies and other corporate interests, according to a final rule issued by the Health and Human Services Department Thursday. This is a change from the proposed rule brought by the agency in May 2010, which would have required institutions to post information about conflicts of interest on a publically available website. The final rule requires research institutions to determine if a researcher’s financial ties or interest in an outside company could bias or present a conflict of interest with federally funded research. It would apply to HHS’s National Institutes of Health, which received…
Sen. Chuck Grassley asked the Office of Management and Budget this week for internal communications that could show who is trying to limit a rule that would require federally-funded health researchers to disclose their corporate ties. A recent article in Nature magazine said that OMB, which is reviewing the proposal, is gutting the rule of the requirement that researchers’ outside financial interests be posted on a publicly available website, instead allowing institutions to choose their own disclosure methods. That will likely to make it much harder for members of the public to find these details, Ned Feder, a senior staff scientist with the Project on Government Oversight, told Nature. …
The White House will announce today that former Microsoft executive Steven VanRoekel will replace Vivek Kundra as the federal chief information officer, according to an administration official. VanRoekel left his post as managing director of the Federal Communications Commission in June for an executive director position with the U.S. Agency for International Development. His Twitter account, @stevenvDC, has already been updated to reflect his new position as federal CIO. The New York Times reported the news early Thursday. At the FCC, VanRoekel headed the agency’s new media efforts and the redesign of FCC.gov, which operates in a cloud computing environment. Prior to…
Atingle with suspense over what President Obama may be contemplating in the way of a government restructuring? Keep atingling. It could be several months before the reorganizer-in-chief decides exactly how to proceed, one of the leaders in that effort said Thursday. “This is hard,” Lisa Brown, co-director of the Government Reform Initiative at the White House budget office, said in an interview. Obama “doesn’t do it lightly. He really is trying to figure out what the right answer is.” Together with Jeffrey Zients, the budget’s office deputy director, Brown was in charge of putting together streamlining recommendations for the president, who…