DDM Weichert to exit government
The federal government's top management official is leaving the Office of Management and Budget for a job in the private sector.
Margaret Weichert, the Trump administration's management director and for a time the acting personnel chief, is leaving government in mid-March, the White House announced on Feb. 14.
Weichert will be joining Accenture as a managing director. Before joining the Office of Management and Budget in 2017, she was a principal at Ernst & Young.
Weichert's Valentine's Day announcement comes two years to the day since she was confirmed to serve as deputy director of OMB for management.
"My goal has been to spark key transformations to better align government with leading practices from the private sector. Through the hard work and commitment of our team, we are now at a natural turning point, where the vision for transformation is clear, and the teams are successfully implementing against that vision," Weichert said in a statement supplied by OMB. "I am ready to pass the baton on knowing that the team is ready to continue to lead change going forward."
OMB said a successor will be announced prior to Weichert's departure.
At OMB, Weichert focused on improving the agility the federal government through efforts such as the cyber reskilling academy and creating and implementing the President’s Management Agenda, which championed IT modernization and automating certain processes so that federal workers could focus on more high-value work. She also led the effort to push digital services resources once housed centrally at the U.S. Digital Service away from its OMB headquarters and out to agencies.
Weichert also oversaw the Office of Personnel Management as acting director after Jeff Han Tien Pon's sudden departure, widely believed to have taken place because Pon was slow-walking Trump administration plans to merge OPM into the General Services Administration.
As acting OPM head from October 2018 to September 2019, Weichert redoubled the effort to achieve the merger, which was stalled and ultimately blocked legislatively by Congress. A plan to revive the union was included in the Trump administration's fiscal year 2021 budget request, but it appears any move to combine the two agencies will require legislation as well as the completion of a congressionally mandated study to analyze the impact of the merger.
Federal News Network first reported the news of Weichert's departure.