In an abrupt jolt to the White House, President Barack Obama announced Monday that chief of staff William Daley was quitting and heading home to Chicago, capping a short and rocky tenure that had been expected to last until Election Day in November. Obama budget chief Jack Lew will take over the job.
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This report was provided by Breaking Gov affiliate, Huffington Post.
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The President has been clear that every federal dollar spent must generate a positive return for the American people and that as we tackle our long term fiscal challenges, we must root out waste in government. One area that we know we can do better in is with the thousands of duplicative data centers that sprung up across the last decade.
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This article originally appeared as a White House blog post.
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These data centers – some as big as a football field, others as small as a closet – represent billions in wasted capital that could be better used to improve upon critical services for American taxpayers. By closing data centers, agencies are on track to save taxpayers billions of dollars by cutting spending on wasteful, underutilized hardware, software and operations as well as enhance our cybersecurity; shrink our energy and real estate footprints; and take advantage of transformational technologies like cloud computing to make government work better for our nation’s families. Keep reading →
Calling it a “monumental first step in addressing security in cloud computing,” Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel announced the official launch of the long-awaited Federal Risk Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) today.
FedRAMP provides a standardized “do once, use often approach” framework for cloud security; one VanRoekel said will save money and reduce staff time needed to conduct security assessments, thus allowing the government to better purchase and leverage cloud technologies. Keep reading →
The White House has unveiled a new government web site section designed to help accelerate the environmental review and permitting process for 14 high priority infrastructure projects.
The new Federal Infrastructure Projects Dashboard is also intended to bring greater public attention to the projects, and the promise of jobs associated with them, said Jeff Zients, deputy director for management and chief performance officer at the White House Office of Management and Budget in a blog post yesterday. Keep reading →
Government Executive magazine’s cover story, “A Thousand Cuts,” by Joseph Marks, paints a graphic picture of what it is like to be in government today. Here’s a list of the various directives that direct many of these cuts.
President Obama’s Campaign to Cut Waste was launched in June 2011, but it started earlier than that. It was presaged in his 2011 State of the Union address, when he said the government needed to be reorganized. While that hasn’t happened yet, there are a number of initiatives federal managers have been inundated with to develop plans and implement. Keep reading →
In the old days, Congress would disagree over the federal budget for a few months before coming together to pass a budget by the start of the new fiscal year on October 1. This changed in the 1990s. The budget has since become a political battleground with Congress rarely passing a budget on time. The current fiscal year is no exception with the Super Committee looking at deficit reductions and elections looming in 2012.
This fiscal year 2012 has started under a Continuing Resolution (CR). CRs are normally a simple pro-rata allocation of the prior fiscal year that funds the government while Congress works toward a solution. For example, the current CR provided 45/365 (Oct. 5 to Nov. 18) of last year’s funding levels, minus 1.5%, to Executive Branch Agencies. Congress passed a “minibus” on Thursday containing three appropriation bills but most of the government is under another CR until December 16. Keep reading →
President Obama signed an executive order today directing federal agencies to limit the number of electronic devices issued to federal employees, expand their use of teleconferencing in lieu of travel and reduce the volume of documents the government prints each year.
Agencies have within 45 days to develop plans to reduce by 20 percent the combined federal spending associated with these and other expenses, including what agencies spend on vehicle fleets and the production of “non-essential items” for promotional purposes. Keep reading →
Federal government efforts to identify and track federal information technology investments remain insufficient to curtail duplicative spending, according to the latest in a series of a reports released by the Government Accountability Office critical of government IT spending practices.
The GAO report, released Oct. 27, took primary aim at the the White House Office of Management and Budget, and the way it categorizes and tracks IT investments, citing a number of principle shortcomings, although those familiar with OMB’s operating levers note the problem goes beyond OMB. Keep reading →
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 (see image above) 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.
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After a decade of enormous budget increases the American intelligence community’s budget will probably decline by billions of dollars, Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper said here.
Clapper told more than 3,000 people at the annual Geoint conference that the intelligence community’s budget had been handed in to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. “We are all going to have to give at the office,” Clapper said. The bulk of the cuts will come from accounts labeled information technology, he said. Keep reading →