OMB DDM Ueland: ‘The time for action is now’

The Office of Management and Budget is readying a new President’s Management Agenda. While the timeline for release and the specifics are still to be determined, Eric Ueland, the deputy director for management at OMB, was clear on the PMA’s theme.

“The time for action is now for the federal government,” Ueland said yesterday during the Government Efficiency Summit sponsored by Government Executive. “We in the Trump administration need to deliver the change the President demands. You’ve seen what the President wants to change in his executive orders, his budget, his work to right size and reorganize departments and agencies. You’ve seen it in his appointments of Russ Vought and Dan Bishop to run OMB, neither of whom are wall flowers when it comes to driving purposeful change. You’ll see it in the forthcoming President’s Management Agenda, new executive orders, actions by secretaries and agency heads and certainly how we handle budget negotiations this fall.”

Ueland said his office is working to develop the PMA, conferring with agencies and getting feedback to help focus in on what are going to be key priorities on behalf of the President.

“We will have an announcement in due course,” he said.

While details of the PMA will be forthcoming, Ueland signaled a few areas of focus for OMB.

He laid out four priorities:

• The reorganization and reform of the federal government.
• Fixing procurement.
• Restoring the Made in America effort
• The smart use of technology in the 21st Century

Eric Ueland is the deputy director for management at OMB. (Photo: Jason Miller/FNN).

“[The President] wants action and he expects results, and because the time for talking is over and the time for action is now, we’re working hard to deliver every single day and sometimes well into the night,” Ueland said. “Too often in the past, the ‘M’ in OMB stood for mumble, muffle and muddle. Under President Trump and Director Vought, it now stands for action. We’re now the office for action and budget, not the office of inertia and budget, and ladies and gentlemen, watch us act.”

The reorganization and reform of the government is well underway with agencies reducing the size of their workforces and the consolidation or elimination of agencies or offices.

“Unlike his predecessors, President Trump came to town actually with a plan to address [the hiring, size, efficiency and accountability of the federal workforce] using every tool available to him. The President and his administration have eliminated hundreds of thousands of nonessential positions across all agencies and departments. We have new performance guidelines in place for employees, for accountability, delivering efficiency and achieving priorities, including a new schedule of policy career and extending suitability from pre-hire to post-hire,” he said. “When we hire into the federal government, we are putting merit first. We want to streamline hiring to 80 days from first offer to first sign on. We’ll get there by ending outdated processes and tearing down barriers blocking our nation’s best from joining the federal workforce dedicated to one mission: making America great again. And as we reduce and refocus the workforce, we need to right size the federal footprint too.”

Ueland said one key piece of the reform and reorganization effort is consolidating and modernizing federal human resources systems. He said agencies spend at least $2 billion a year to maintain legacy and fragmented systems.

“It’s a patchwork [of systems]. All of them are from 20 to 50 years old. They need a boatload of federal and commercial software products to operate, and are more and more fragile and subject to hacking — or even worse — every single day,” he said. “With our partners at the Office of Personnel Management, we’re going to fix that. Under OMB Senior Financial Management Leader Steven Billy, we’ve empowered departments to organize themselves free of special interest diktats and long expired bureaucratic empires that were ripe for dismantling.”

OPM has tried two times in the last three months to award a contract for a new HR system, only to bring in the General Services Administration for the third attempt.

43 federal buildings sold

Another piece of the reform and reorganization agenda is the selling off of federal buildings.

Acting GSA Administrator Stephen Ehikian said at the event that the government has sold 43 buildings since January.

“The story there is, it’s not the proceeds from the sales are great, but we have a lot of deferred maintenance. If you own a house or a condo, you know if your roof is leaking, the plumbing is broken, the electricity, it doesn’t get better over time if you don’t fix it. That’s kind of been the problem, 10 years ago deferred maintenance was like $5 billion across the portfolio. Now it’s $20 [billion] and I think that’s probably conservative,” he said. “We sold [43] buildings so far, that’s been $200 million in proceeds. The story there is also, we unloaded $200 million deferred liabilities.”

Ueland said the Trump administration isn’t going to hold off for years while Congress decides whether to fund building upgrades.

“Instead, the day we close the building, we’ll slap a for sale sign on it, as is, all legal buyers welcome. No reasonable offer refused because the time for talking is over. The time for action is now,” he said.

Another area OMB is pushing for action on is modernizing technology. Starting with reducing the number of federal websites. Ueland said in January OMB determined agencies hosted 7,000 websites, each with their own rules and own operations.

“We’re going to fix that. We’ve already identified and are fully underway, reducing the number of federal websites by 1,000 to bring the overall count down to 6,000. This 15% reduction is just a first step. We’ll continue to consolidate websites so when Americans use the web to find what they need, it’s going to be easier and simpler and much more direct,” he said.

Improve CIO effectiveness

Another area OMB will focus on is making agency chief information officers more effective and organized.

Ueland said many agency CIOs don’t have a common view of their “value proposition” and the best way for them to work inside their departments and across the federal enterprise.

“They barely even coordinate well with each other. They don’t share common missions, best practices or even technology solutions. This has to stop,” he said. “The federal government has spent too much taxpayer money on information technology to have spent too little time ensuring better results. OMB is going to break down barriers, ensure integration, and drive for outcomes to lend value to agencies and departments and ultimately to taxpayers. Otherwise, CIOs will end up as just another back office function where you think you go to find a replacement charger cord, complain about your failed efforts to connect with Wi-Fi and demand the latest handheld which, oh, by the way, will take way too long to procure. So we’re going to fix all that, because the time for talking is over. The time for action is now.”

Ueland added that one big question the Federal CIO Greg Barbaccia and his team are trying to figure out is the best way to organize and remove redundancies across the community.

“OMB is making sure that the authorities, both inside the department and across the entire federal government, are much clearer, much crisper, much better aligned and have quantifiable, measurable outcomes, so that when a department turns to a CIO, the CIO is actually able to deliver, and a secretary or director knows that with confidence, this can actually get done,” he said.

The post OMB DDM Ueland: ‘The time for action is now’ first appeared on Federal News Network.

Vicky