Reforming Washington re-building our government for "we the people"
Diagnosis: A Bureacracy Out of Control
• Federal government employs 8,000 senior executives supervising more than 2.6 million civilian employees.
• The Congressional Budget Office says it is “unaware of any comprehensive information about the size of the federal contracted workforce.”
• The GAO estimates that almost $125 billion was spent through improper payments. This $125 billion in improper payments and fraud represents a figure larger than the market capitalizations of 17 of the largest 50 American companies.
• To pay for it all, Washington is projected to spend $3.7 trillion in 2015, with nearly double the amount of debt since President Barack Obama took office.
Prognosis: Without Intervention, Continued Expansion of Government, Greater Loss of Trust
• The sheer size and remoteness of the federal bureaucracy has caused the American people to lose trust in their government.
• Past reform efforts have only built on a bureaucratic foundation that is fundamentally flawed, resulting in one layer of bureaucracy on top of another.
Treatment Plan: Five Principles to Restore Government’s Ability to Serve
• Accountability - Establish a government-wide culture that holds managers and employees accountable for their success or failure in meeting performance objectives — with real consequences in either case.
• Analysis - Define each program’s performance objectives, identify and evaluate the resources available to meet them and establish objective metrics to measure the cost and value of operations.
• Reforms - Encourage bold experimentation to create efficiencies that eliminate waste and duplication and improve service delivery and remove the existing departmental silos to encourage sharing of what we learn across agency lines.
• Taxpayer Feedback - Solicit and utilize feedback from citizens on government services and agency policies.
• Public Reporting - Treat taxpayers as citizen-owners of their government by readily and visibly communicating our progress in making government more efficient and cost-effective.
