Well, that didn’t take long. Less than 24 hours after holding a hearing on the candidacy of Jacob “Jack” Lew to become the next Office of Management and Budget director, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has set next Tuesday for a confirmation vote on sending his nomination to the full Senate, according to a just-released notice. Lew’s nomination also needs the blessing of the Senate Budget Committee, but no word yet on when that vote will be.
Browsing: OMB
The Office of Management and Budget says hundreds of millions of dollars in budget reductions are expected to come from the restructuring or cancelation of selected financial system modernization projects. OMB acting director Jeffrey Zients and controller Danny Werfel will announce today the fate of financial system modernization projects that were halted for review last month. In August, a total of 26 IT projects were identified as “high risk” and subjected to a thorough review before moving forward. Improvement plans are being developed, and they should include details of projects risks, new contractor performance metrics and more rigorous project…
President Obama is urging the Senior Executive Service to embrace his accountability agenda, according to a memo released today. “As the most senior managers in the federal government, you know how essential the work you and your colleagues do is to the nation,” Obama told more than 7,000 SES members. “You also are aware what happens when your best efforts are thwarted by outdated technologies and outmoded ways of doing business. “You understand the consequences of accepting billions of dollars in waste as the cost of doing business and of allowing obsolete or under-performing programs to continue year after year.”…
Politico is reporting that federal chief performance officer Jeffrey Zeints will be the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget until Peter Orszag’s replacement, Jack Lew, is confirmed by the Senate. Rob Nabors, a former Orszag deputy who has been serving as senior adviser to President Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, will return to OMB as acting deputy directo, Politico reports. When Lew is able to take over, he’ll face a tough road trying to advance the administration’s budget-cutting efforts, as my colleague Steve Losey reported recently.
Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag will appear at the Brookings Institution Wednesday, where he’ll give his last public speech before departing the government. The White House said he will speak about the Obama administration’s economic and fiscal accomplishments and its future plans, as well as take questions from the audience. But if Orszag really wants to grab the crowd — and we all know how much of a charmer he can be — his speech will go something like this:
The Obama administration has yet another dashboard on the way. Dan Gordon, head of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, told Federal Times in a statement that the administration will launch a dashboard to track agencies’ progress on acquisition reform later this summer. The administration has had its much-ballyhooed IT dashboard up and running for about a year, and is working on another dashboard to track agencies’ progress toward “high priority performance goals.” Dave McClure at GSA is also working on something called a “citizen dashboard” that we probably won’t see until sometime next year. Some agencies, apparently realizing that…
The water metaphors were flowing at yesterday’s Senate Budget Committee hearing on federal contracting. In his opening statement, Office of Federal Procurement Policy administrator Dan Gordon mentioned the massive growth in government contracting over the last decade. He said that acquisition workers “couldn’t cope with this tsunami of buying that was taking place.” Not to be outdone, Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse later said that “more than half a trillion dollars a year and climbing is clearly a geyser of taxpayer funds that needs to be carefully watched.” Either way, it sounds like taxpayers are taking a bath.
President Obama has just selected Jacob Lew to replace Peter Orszag as Director of the Office of Management and Budget. More to come.
The Office of Management and Budget has officially tabbed the Homeland Security Department to oversee cybersecurity in the executive branch, as OMB indicated would be the case in April. A memo this week from OMB Director Peter Orszag and federal cybersecurity coordinator Howard Schmidt gives DHS responsibility for: • overseeing the government-wide and agency-specific implementation of and reporting on cybersecurity policies and guidance; • overseeing and assisting government-wide and agency-specific efforts to provide adequate, risk-based and cost-effective cybersecurity; • overseeing the agencies’ compliance with FISMA and developing analyses for OMB to assist in the development of the FISMA annual report;…
The Office of Management and Budget has released a list of 20 financial systems modernizations projects that it will review, under the terms of a memo it put out last week. There are 20 projects at 18 agencies included. OMB has said that about 30 projects will be reviewed, so there’s probably still some more information to come here. OMB says that “in a limited number of cases” OMB, the Financial Systems Advisory Board and the agency in questions are “still determining whether certain systems appropriately fall within the scope of this review.”