Four years after President Obama created the post of chief performance officer to some fanfare, the job is now vacant, a spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget confirmed this week. “OMB does not currently have a chief performance officer,” Ari Isaacman Astles said in an email to FedLine. “The responsibilities of the CPO are being handled by the OMB management team.” Back in April 2009, Obama had tapped Jeff Zients, who became OMB’s deputy director for management, to also serve as chief performance officer. In that role, Obama said at the time, “Jeff will work to streamline processes, cut costs,…
Browsing: Lisa Brown
There’s been no official announcement (to the best of FedLine’s knowledge, anyway), but the federal government now has a new top performance official, at least temporarily. “Acting chief performance officer” was the title that Lisa Brown used in a Friday post on the Office of Management and Budget’s official blog. Brown, whose Obama administration assignments have hitherto included assistant to the president and staff secretary, helped assemble the White House’s blueprint for reorganization of federal trade and export agencies. Until recently, the federal chief performance officer was Jeff Zients, who also served as OMB’s deputy director for management. But Zients…
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…
Well, chalk one up for congressional bipartisanship: Democrats and Republicans alike agree that lawmakers should have a say in the Obama administration’s government streamlining agenda. “Reorganization of the executive branch is a shared responsibility,” Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., the respective chairs of the main House and Senate government oversight committees, said in a Friday letter to Jeffrey Zients, one of the White House management officials leading the effort. Issa and Lieberman go on to ask for “a tentative timeline for development and implementation of the reorganization proposal, as well as regular updates during the review.”…