With its 2017 federal budget, the White House is highlighting a number of management programs to streamline government, impacting everything from how agencies buy their technology to how they handle office space and security clearances.
In a management breakdown entitled "A Government of the Future," the Office of Management and Budget outlined a number of policy plans, including:
The National Background Investigations Bureau
The Office of Personnel Management said in January that it was creating a new office to handle the federal government's background checks for security clearances.
The new office, called the National Background Investigations Bureau, would replace the Federal Investigative Service and be run by a presidential appointee. The NBIB will still operate under OPM, but its information security would be managed by the Department of Defense.
The budget allots $95 million in additional funding for NBIB's IT systems, and White House said the new bureau will provide a stronger system for OPM's secure data.
"These changes build upon the administration's efforts to improve how the federal government performs security clearance determinations, and protect the safety of American citizens and of our nation's most sensitive information and facilities," the breakdown said.
Expanding Category Management
In an effort to pare down its acquisition redundancies, the administration is continuing its push for category management in 2017, especially when it comes to information technology procurement.
"Specifically, by the end of 2019, the administration aims to save at least $10.5 billion on IT in the areas of hardware, software, telecommunications, and outsourcing; and half of all IT spending should be under government-wide management where agencies utilize best-in-class government-wide solutions and adopt category management principles," the Office of Management and Budget said in its breakdown.
The pièce de résistance of the category management strategy is the Acquisition Gateway, an online portal built to provide contracting officers with information and ease of access for their procurement needs.
The General Service Administration said recently that the portal hit 5,000 users in October 2015 and the goal is to double that by the end of 2016. GSA director Denise Turner Roth said in a conference call that the agency would continue to assess the portal's success throughout the year when determining its acquisition services.
"We are constantly looking at Acquisition Gateway and the support and development of that tool," she said. "As that tool grows, the complexity of the group could grow, but that is something we are evaluating over time."
Reducing the federal footprint
Another place the government is looking to slim down is in the amount of real estate it holds.
Since freezing the growth of office space in 2013, the federal government dropped 21.4 million square feet in office space by the end of 2014.
In 2017, agencies will continue to assess their real estate portfolios through the Federal Real Property Profile, a database constructed by GSA and OMB to identify areas for real estate efficiencies.
The administration said it also anticipates another round of BRAC closures to further reduce federal real estate holdings.
