Obama chooses leader for government reorganization
President Barack Obama has chosen the federal chief performance officer to lead in developing a plan to reorganize the government.
President Barack Obama has chosen Jeffrey Zients, chief performance officer of the United States, to lead the work on developing a plan to reorganize the federal government, the administration has announced.
The administration will first tackle the agencies operating around trade and exports to help U.S. companies get ahead in the global economy, Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, wrote on the White House’s blog.
“The president believes that we need to reform our government to make it better organized and better equipped to support American competitiveness. We want to ensure that we’re aligning all of the resources we have,” he wrote. Zients was announced as the leader of the reorg effort in a White House blog post dated Jan. 29.
In his State of the Union address Jan. 25, Obama said his administration will develop a proposal over the coming months to merge and consolidate the government. He then plans to send the proposal to Congress for a vote.
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“We should give [citizens] a government that’s more competent and more efficient," he said. "We can’t win the future with a government of the past."
Along with Zients, Lisa Brown, assistant to the president and staff secretary, will help in the reorganization undertaking. Brown was a co-chair of the agency review working group for the Obama-Biden Transition Project. The transition project went on after the presidential election in 2008, as the newly elected administration prepared to take office.
Although Zients and Brown will use resources from the Office and Management and Budget for the work, they will also look for help and insight from the business community, experts, and the people who run the programs that will undergo close evaluations.
"It seems that the federal government is stuck in the age of black-and-white television while we are competing in the age of the iPad," Pfeiffer wrote.