OMBlog

Holding Contractors Accountable

As guardians of the taxpayers’ dollars, we have an ongoing responsibility to do business with contractors who place a premium on integrity, performance, and quality--and not do business with firms who are proven bad actors and put Americans’ hard earned dollars at risk for waste, fraud, and abuse. Having an effective suspension and debarment program to exclude bad actors is an important part of making sure we live up to our responsibility to maximize the return on every dollar spent and deliver a higher quality of service to the American people. 

From the start of this Administration, President Obama has been committed to making sure agencies cut contracting costs and better protect taxpayers from cost overruns and poor performance. Today, we are taking our commitment to protecting taxpayer resources to the next level by directing agencies to ensure they are fully equipped to suspend or debar contractors and other recipients whenever necessary to protect the government’s interest. For far too long, Americans’ tax dollars have been put at risk in the hands of bad actors and as part of the Campaign to Cut Waste we are stepping up accountability. For years, agencies have had the discretion to suspend or debar contractors and other recipients from doing business with the Federal government for a specified period of time in order to protect the government from future harm from bad actors who put tax dollars at risk – such as by knowingly selling counterfeit parts, billing for work not performed, destroying records, or committing other offenses that demonstrate a lack of business integrity or business honesty. Despite the important protection that suspension and debarment provide, too many Federal agencies have, for too long, failed to adequately use these tools.  

A Salute to the VA For Its Excellence In Serving Those Who Served Our Nation

Veterans Day is almost here so, even as we celebrate our Veterans, it is timely to showcase the great work of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in meeting the President’s challenge to make government work better -- delivering more mission for the money.  It is especially timely because, on Wednesday, November 9, VA received the prestigious Palladium Balanced Scorecard Hall of Fame Award for Executing Strategy, putting it in the select company of the world’s best-managed public and private enterprises .

VA’s mission begins when a servicemember’s ends.  As Abraham Lincoln so memorably said in his second inaugural address, VA’s job is “to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan.”  In practice, this broad mandate translates to providing veterans with medical care, a variety of benefits, and a final resting place of dignity that does justice to their service.

To deliver more mission for the money, VA Secretary Eric Shinseki and Deputy Secretary W. Scott Gould are tapping into the power of well-framed goals to galvanize action across a large and complex organization.  They are using the Balanced Scorecard to communicate and cascade their organization’s top priority goals into clear expectations across the organization, and reinforcing the importance of these goals with frequent measurement of a suite of measures and challenging reviews of progress to find and fix delivery problems.

News from OFPP

Today, Dan Gordon, the Administrator for Federal Procurement Policy, announced that later this year he will be leaving the post to serve as Associate Dean for Government Contracts Law at the George Washington University Law School.

President Obama appointed Dan Gordon as the Administrator for Federal Procurement Policy in 2009 in order to turn around the explosive contracting growth of the last decade and re-instill accountability, drive fiscal responsibility, strengthen the acquisition workforce, cut out waste and rebalance the relationship between the federal government and the contractors that support our agencies.  In Dan, he selected someone with decades of experience working with the federal procurement system, in private practice and at the U.S. Government Accountability Office.  When Dan began at the White House, he brought with him a commitment to openness and integrity, combined with a strong sense of what we needed to do to improve the federal acquisition system, after too many years of neglect. 

Driving Reforms and Results in Federal Grants

Since the outset of this Administration, OMB has been aggressively pursuing any and all avenues to streamline government management and improve the way that we do business.  From cutting contracting costs, to re-evaluating IT investments, to reducing the Federal Government’s real estate footprint, we have made tremendous strides to-date.

Today, I’m excited to announce another important step in this effort, as we look to reassess and reform the way that the Federal Government approaches grant making.  As our budgets tighten, it is essential for the Government and its grant recipient partners to do more with less and to target waste, fraud, and abuseof taxpayer dollars.  To do this, we must harness the energy of the Federal grants community to ensure that every dollar spent benefits Americans in a meaningful way.  That is why OMB Director Jack Lew is establishing a new Council on Financial Assistance Reform, to ensure that we are delivering, overseeing and reporting on grants in the most effective way possible.  More than 25 Federal agencies award grants that range from supporting lifesaving research and improving access to health care to fighting corruption and combating terrorism. These grants go to States, local and tribal governments, non-profits, universities, hospitals and others -- improving the lives of millions of Americans every year.  Under the leadership of the new Council, these agencies will make more effective use of taxpayer dollars to improve Americans’ lives.

In the Valley with Steven VanRoekel

Tonight, I’ll be making my first public appearance as Federal CIO at an event at the Churchill Club in Palo Alto, CA – a fitting venue to talk about my priorities and vision for the Federal IT landscape. In my remarks, I’ll focus on my plan for doing more with less and devising solutions with a “shared first” and a “future first” perspective to yield a higher return on our IT investments, increase productivity, and improve the way the government interacts with the American people. 

I’m looking forward to sharing these ideas tonight in California, and I’m also excited to hear from you. I hope you’ll take a few minutes to share your thoughts about my plan by sending an email to futurefirst@cio.gov or DM me via Twitter at @stevenvDC.

For those of you who can’t make it out to California, my remarks will be live-streamed here at 7PM PT, 10PM ET – so please tune in!

Steven VanRoekel is the Federal Chief Information Officer

For Sale: Cutting Waste By Getting Rid of Excess Real Estate

Over the years the federal government accumulated tens of thousands of properties that are no longer needed, wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars annually on upkeep. Last June, President Obama directed Federal agencies to end this waste and improve the management of the government’s real estate by getting unneeded properties off our books – setting an initial goal of netting $3 billion in savings by the end of 2012. Since then, agencies across the government have been hard at work scrutinizing their real estate holdings and identifying properties that have outlived their utility.

Today, I’m pleased to report that these efforts are paying off. Agencies have already identified real estate savings opportunities that exceed the President’s goal, and that put the federal government on pace to shed $3.5 billion in real estate costs by the end of 2012. To help track the Administration’s progress with these efforts – and to give the American people an unprecedented window into the government’s management of federal real estate – today we’re launching two new online tools.

The first is an updated White House Excess Property map that uses new data to pinpoint the location and status of federal properties that agencies have targeted for closure or consolidation. Ranging from small sheds in rural locations to sprawling warehouses and office complexes in urban and suburban areas, the map shows some 12,000 properties scattered all across the country. We’re also rolling out a new dashboard on Performance.gov that allows the American people to track the Administration’s progress in meeting the President’s $3 billion goal. The dashboard now shows that agencies plan to surpass the President’s goal by the end of 2012 and have already achieved $1.5 billion in savings through a combination of sales, consolidations, canceled projects, and reduced maintenance and utility costs. And in the coming years, we’ll continue to target more and more unneeded properties that squander billions of dollars and make the government less efficient. 

One such property is the U.S. General Service Administration’s (GSA) West Heating Plant, a two-acre property in the Georgetown section of Washington, DC. It’s been 10 years since this facility last played a role in the boiler and pipe network that heats many of the capital’s government buildings. In the decade since it was last in use it has racked up $3.5 million in maintenance costs. The plant was retained as a back-up for emergencies, but GSA has determined the facility is no longer needed and ready for closure so we are labeling it “excess” today. Getting this property off the books is a win-win for the American people. It will eliminate maintenance costs, ensure that this property will be put to a more productive use, and could earn the government tens of millions in revenue from potential sales proceeds. This is exactly the type of waste and inefficiency the President and Vice President pledged to root out when they launched the Campaign to Cut Waste.

Closing these types of facilities represents important progress, but more work needs to be done in the long-term to get excess properties off our books. For too long, the sale of excess federal real estate has been slowed by a process fraught with delays and hurdles. 

That’s why in his budget last year, the President put forward a proposal called the Civilian Property Realignment Act – legislation that would cut through red tape and politics to accelerate the disposal of unnecessary government properties well beyond 2012. We look forward to continuing to work with Congress to ensure passage of this legislation to end wasteful Federal spending on properties that we simply do not need and return billions of dollars to American taxpayers. 

Stopping the waste of taxpayer dollars is a priority for this Administration. Particularly in these tough budgetary times, we have a responsibility to deliver the American people an efficient, effective government that makes smart use of its resources. By aggressively targeting unneeded federal real estate, that’s exactly what we are doing. 

Doing More with Less By Consolidating Nearly 1,000 Data Centers

Stopping the waste of taxpayer dollars and optimizing government operations is at the heart of the Campaign to Cut Waste. That’s why during these tough budgetary times, the President has made clear that he expects agencies to do more with less.

One way we are delivering on the President and Vice President’s commitment is through the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative - an initiative to shutdown data centers we don’t need and consolidate and optimize those that we do. Data centers store data for agencies across the government, requiring significant energy to run and cool equipment, and they can be as small as server closets or as large as a football field. This past summer, we announced that agencies had identified 373 data centers to be closed by the end of calendar year 2012, with 81 closed already.  

Today, agencies released updated data center consolidation plans that are projected to save upwards of $5 billion. These plans reflect the Administration’s commitment to stretching taxpayer dollars even further – slashing waste and inefficiencies and focusing on improving services for the American people.  After more than a year of consolidation work, agencies now plan to close 962 data centers through 2015, with 472 to be closed by the end of the next calendar year. 

Tackling Waste in Contracting

As part of the Administration’s Campaign to Cut Waste, OMB’s Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) released guidance today to reduce wasteful duplication in federal contracting.  Too often in the past, agency spending for many commonly-used items was fragmented across multiple departments, programs, and components, which means that agencies often spent time writing hundreds of separate contracts, with pricing that varies widely.  The result is a waste of limited staff time and energy, and prices that are not as good as they should be. At a Cabinet meeting earlier this month, Vice President Biden pointed out that by leveraging their purchasing power agencies can save taxpayer dollars. He directed each agency leader to conduct a waste and efficiency review, targeting unnecessary or inefficient spending in areas like contracting. 

OFPP’s new guidance will aid agencies in eliminating waste and carrying out the reviews ordered by the Vice President by addressing concerns, raised by GAO and others, that agencies may be unnecessarily duplicating each other’s contracting efforts. This guidance requires agencies to prepare ”business cases” - analyses to ensure they aren’t duplicating an existing contract and that they are getting the best value  for taxpayers- before they establish or renew certain interagency and agency-specific contracts for commonly-used goods and services, such as office supplies and wireless services. Doing this kind of due diligence and comparison-shopping is something that many families across the country do, and it is especially important that the Federal government weigh all the options before entering into large contracts and agreements whose scope would overlap contracts that already exist.  In the business case, agencies are required to balance the value of creating a new contract against the benefit of using an existing one, and whether the expected return from investment in the proposed contract is worth the taxpayer resources. Insisting on that cost/benefit analysis in the business cases should go a long way to avoiding duplicative contracts.

Investing in What Works: Voluntary Home Visiting Programs

On Thursday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced $224 million in grants to states to provide evidence-based, voluntary home visiting programs for some of our most vulnerable children and families.  For those who haven’t followed this important new initiative, which President Obama first proposed on the campaign trail, here’s a quick recap.

Rigorous research has shown that high-quality home visiting programs – through which at-risk families can choose to receive home visits from trained professionals like nurses and social workers – can make a positive difference for children and families on a range of outcomes, including child health and development, school readiness, and parent employment, as well as helping to prevent child abuse and neglect.  In addition, independent non-partisan organizations estimate that every dollar spent on evidence-based home visitation yields significant savings to federal, state, and local governments.

President Obama first promised a large-scale investment in home visiting during his 2008 presidential campaign.  In his first Budget in the spring of 2009, he proposed directing significant new resources to states to support evidence-based home visiting.  The Administration then collaborated with Congress on legislation creating the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program, which was enacted as part of the Affordable Care Act in 2010.  The new program will provide a total of $1.5 billion over five years for evidence-based home visiting.  It relies on a tiered evidence structure that focuses investments in programs that have been rigorously evaluated and shown to have positive impacts on children and families, while also supporting the development and evaluation of other promising approaches.