"Jeff Zients Will Lead Reorganization of Federal Government"

[Clio the Leo]

Jeff Zients Will Lead Reorganization of Federal Government
Posted by Dan Pfeiffer on January 30, 2011 at 10:29 AM EST

As the President said in the State of the Union address, winning the future will take doing what we can do now to prepare America to compete in the global economy for decades to come. That means out-educating, out-innovating, and out-building our competition; restoring fiscal responsibility to remove the burden of deficits and debt; and reforming our government so that it is more effective, efficient, and open to the American people. As the President put it, “We cannot win the future with a government of the past.”

The fact is that we live and do business in the information age, but the last major reorganization of the government happened in the middle of the last century. Over the past few decades, there has not been a business or large organization that has not rethought, retooled, and revamped how they did their job to respond to a growing, more competitive global economy and an ever-changing technology landscape. Yet too often, it seems that the federal government is stuck in the age of black-and-white television while we are competing in the age of the iPad.

For millions of Americans, this can lead to frustrating encounters trying to get the services you need and a waste of taxpayer dollars. For many businesses, it means that they may not have all the assistance they need to compete around the world. For instance, we have more than a dozen different agencies involved in exports. They all work with well with each other, but this is certainly not the optimal organization or allocation of resources if you were designing a system from scratch.

The President believes that we need to reform our government to make it better organized and better equipped to support American competitiveness. We want to ensure that we're aligning all of the resources we have into negotiating the best agreements, enforcing our trade rights, supporting our exporters and promoting their products.

That is why the President has asked Jeffrey Zients, our nation’s first Chief Performance Officer (CPO), to lead our reorganization effort. Our first focus will be looking at trade and exports to see how we can better reform these functions to give American companies a leg up in the global economy.

For the past two years as CPO and Deputy Director for Management of OMB, Jeff has led our Accountable Government Initiative (AGI), the President’s initiative to make government more efficient and effective, open and responsive. On his watch, we have cut government waste, bringing down the amount of improper payments on our way of reducing them by $50 billion by 2012; starting to get rid of unused federal buildings and property; overhauled how IT is purchased and used, saving billions; and deployed the latest technologies to make it easier of people to get the information and services they need from their government.

more...
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/01/30/jeff-zients-will-lead-reorganization-federal-government

[opihimoimoi]

1. KnR'd

[golddigger]

2. Delete for wrong info.