The fiscal 2015 White House budget request includes a set of reform priorities falling into four areas – effectiveness, efficiency, economic growth, and people and culture – and OMB’s budget preparation guidance calls on agencies to continue investing in cross-agency priority goals in their fiscal 2016 submissions, with a particular focus on customer service, IT delivery and employee engagement.
Agencies should also focus on efforts to improve infrastructure permitting, and on implementing insider threat and security clearance reform, the guidance said. (USCERT has just issued a guide on insider threat mitigation: http://www.us-cert.gov/security-publications/Combating-Insider-Threat.)
As part of demonstrating how priorities were considered during budget formulation, agencies should include a separate section identifying any proposed changes to existing funding levels or authorities that will further management agenda priorities or impact the achievement of these priorities (for example, smarter IT delivery and cybersecurity initiatives), or any steps an agency is taking as part of the agenda’s efficiency efforts to achieve cost savings that enable the agency to redeploy funds to core mission activities.
Agencies also should use the results of current strategic reviews they had to publish with the fiscal 2015 budget to inform their 2016 submissions.