While Nancy Fitchner’s SAVE Award winning idea to let veterans take home their unused prescriptions from Veterans Affairs Department hospitals will be the one included in the 2011 budget, that doesn’t mean the Office of Management and Budget is ignoring the 38,000 other ideas that were submitted to its first SAVE Award contest. On the same day Fitchner was honored at the White House, OMB Director Peter Orszag told agencies to adopt some “common sense ideas” that were submitted and can be implemented without congressional action. In a Dec. 21 memo, Orszag said in the short run agencies should: Make…
Browsing: Agency Management
Congratulations to Nancy Fichtner, a Veterans Affairs Department employee from Colorado, for winning the first ever SAVE (Securing Americans Value and Efficiency) Award contest. Her money saving idea: Allow veterans to take home the medications they use while at the hospital, instead of tossing the prescriptions in the trash when veterans are discharged. The idea would not only save the government money, but veterans too. Fichtner’s idea beat out 38,000 other ideas submitted by fellow federal employees in the contest designed to harness the experience of frontline employees to save the government money. Her idea was one of four finalists…
Congratulations to the four finalists in the Office of Management and Budget’s first SAVE (Securing Americans Value and Efficiency) Award. OMB staff narrowed down the 38,000 entries received between Sept. 23 and Oct. 14 to the following four: Allow citizens to make Social Security appointments online This idea came from Christie Dickson, who works for the Social Security Administration in Alabama. Allowing online appointment scheduling will free up Social Security staff to handle other inquiries on the phone, Dickson told OMB. Approximately two-thirds of Social Security phone calls she receives are for appointments, and it would save time for both…
Contractors could face suspension, debarment or financial penalties if they fail to return and report an improper payment made by the government…even if the improper payment is the government’s fault. That’s what an executive order meant to curb the government’s rate of erroneous payments will say, Peter Orszag, Office of Management and Budget director, told reporters during a Nov. 17 briefing on the value of improper payments made by the government in 2009. Currently, contractors face no penalties when the government discovers an improper payment was made. All contractors have to do is pay back the sum without interest or…
Update: Nearly 2,800 ideas for greening the federal government have been submitted so far through the White House’s GreenGov Challenge. Those ideas have been voted on more than 93,000 times since voting began Oct. 19. Federal employees and military service members have until Saturday to make their suggestions and cast their votes. ———————————————————————————————– Original post: Think you have a great idea for how the government can reduce its environmental footprint? The Obama administration wants to know it. The White House is challenging federal civilian employees and military service members to come up with ways in which the government can get…
A request for our readers: I know OMB’s new performance management guidelines are still pretty new, and I’m sure many agencies haven’t had a chance to discuss them yet. But if your agency is planning to apply for the extra program evaluation funding that’s available in 2010, send me an e-mail — I want to hear from you.
OMB director Peter Orszag sent an 8-page memo to agencies today outlining new performance management guidelines. Here it is (pdf). Thoughts to come later this morning once I’ve actually had a chance to read it…
President Barack Obama issued an executive order this afternoon that requires agencies for the first time to measure and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Obama nixed an earlier idea, included in a draft executive order I reported on back in August, to set a governmentwide percentage target. Instead, each agency must recommend its own target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. It will be up to the heads of the Council on Environmental Quality and the Office of Management and Budget to approve those targets. Obama’s order also sets new requirements for cutting gas and water consumption, reducing landfill waste and…
Earlier today I previewed reports the Government Accountability Office and the Defense Department Inspector General will release tomorrow highlighting the depth of auditing problems at the Defense Contract Audit Agency. But these watchdogs are not the only ones with concerns about DCAA’s audit management. The Wartime Contracting Commission — a bipartisan, congressionally chartered panel tasked with making recommendations to improve contingency contracting — released this report today calling on DCAA to abandon the all-or-nothing approach it takes when rendering opinions on contractor business systems. In December, DCAA scrapped its opinion that allowed business systems with minor deficiencies to be deemed…
Accenture, OMB Watch and the Georgetown Public Policy Institute have a new report out (.pdf) on improving the government’s performance management system. If you’ve been following the Obama/performance management discussion for a while, you’ve probably heard many of the recommendations before: modify PART to focus on outcomes rather than numerical outputs; encourage federal managers to use the results; give Congress more input into the process. But it’s nice to see those ideas compiled into one report — particularly now that OMB has a chief performance officer who might act on them.