OMB: A Change in Tone

WFED’s Jason Miller reports that the Office of Management and Budget wants to change its stripes and “move away from command and control toward a focus on collaboration.”

The old National Performance Review tried do this and failed. At the time, NPR’s recommendations to “Reinvent OMB’s Management Mission” and “Improve OMB’s Relationships with Other Agencies” were seen as so controversial, that the formal recommendations were never printed. But this time the effort is being led from the inside by Jeff Zients, OMB’s deputy director for management.

Zients spoke today at a conference co-sponsored by George Mason University and the Government Accountability Office. Zients said OMB will go “from oversight to partnership; from shipping reams of guidance to a two-way dialogue around how we achieve the desired outcome; from transparency not just for accountability but for idea flow and to find the best practices and share them broadly; from ad hoc engagement with stakeholders such as Congress to regular communication."

He also said that OMB is developing a new set of management goals and is about 80 percent completed and it “may be a few more months until the methodology is final.”

He re-emphasized several points he made at a conference earlier this month, noting that “execution determines success or failure and it’s most challenging in government.”