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By: FEDweek StaffThe Trump administration wants to reduce the burden imposed on federal agencies by OMB, GSA and OPM, according to a document providing further details on the cross-agency priority goal of “shifting from low-value to high-value work” under the recently issued President’s Management Agenda.
The four strategies toward that goal are: improving the return on investment of OMB guidance; reducing compliance requirements from the central management agencies; eliminating outdated congressionally mandated reporting requirements; and reducing compliance requirements imposed by individual agencies.
“While OMB management guidance promotes efficiency and effectiveness across the federal government, OMB has historically lacked regular processes to assess the burden on agencies and to rescind or modify requirements over time,” it says regarding the value of OMB guidance. OMB is evaluating existing guidance and is considering how to regularly assess and minimize the burden, it adds.
This will include, in the short run, rescinding or modifying outdated guidance to agencies, revising Circular A-11 to reduce the burden on agencies, and developing a measure of estimating the burden for issuances of new guidance.
In addition, “OMB will work together with OPM and GSA partners to identify burdensome compliance requirements for agencies related to human capital and general services, and how to reform them to free resources for high-value mission-critical work.”
Elements of this are to include streamlining SES certification procedures; improving talent management and succession planning; rescinding outdated guidance; and eliminating burdensome data-collection requirements for agencies.
It adds that the administration’s fiscal 2019 budget proposal asked Congress to repeal some 400 statutory reporting requirements on grounds that they are unneeded or outdated.
