Improving Performance and Making Government More Accountable

Today the Administration opened performance.gov, a site that provides a window into the Obama Administration's approach to improving Federal Government performance and ensuring accountability of senior officials for achieving results.

Performance.gov tracks our progress on the Administration’s efforts to create a government that is more effective, efficient, and responsive. Importantly, the site is also a valuable tool for sharing best practices across the government – supporting learning and coordination across agencies.

The Administration is strongly committed to investing in what works and fixing or cutting what does not. As part of this effort, the Administration is leading the “Campaign to Cut Waste,” a government-wide initiative to eliminate wasteful spending and get the most for the taxpayers’ dollars. 

The central components of this effort are represented as eight areas of focus on performance.gov: Acquisition, Financial Management, Human Resources, Technology, Performance Improvement, Open Government, Sustainability, and Customer Service.  For each of these areas of focus, the site provides access to management dashboards, data, and descriptions of best practices – information to inform the public and to support the work of Federal users as they track their performance and strive to make government work better for the American people. Agency leaders are using this data to run regular data-driven reviews to find higher impact, lower cost ways to improve their programs and operations supported by each agency’s Performance Improvement Office. 

The site makes it easier than ever to get more details on how your government is performing. For example, you can document the Administration’s headway on reducing improper payments in all of the biggest programs. You can also track progress on the President’s directive to save billions of dollars in contracting and to increase competition for government contracts. And you can see how agencies are doing in managing their major IT projects, transitioning to the cloud, and shutting down hundreds of data centers.

These examples represent just part of the wide ranging data available now consolidated on performance.gov.  I encourage everyone to visit the site and see how the Obama Administration is working to make government more accountable to you. 

Jeff Zients is the Deputy Director for Management and Chief Performance Officer.