Snippets of Peter Orszag

By Elizabeth Newell

OMB Director Peter Orszag spoke at a Government Executive leadership breakfast this morning, and we have stories posted on his comments on federal pay and combating distrust in government. But a couple other comments stuck out at me.

On the SAVE Awards:

Orszag strongly insinuated that many of the cost-saving ideas submitted through the SAVE awards process were not worthy of transparency. While he said the primary reason that only four of the ideas were make public was to allow for candid internal discussions, he made several jokes about the quality of the ideas and said "many were not as promising as one might have hoped for." Here are some other quotes on the awards process.

"On a quality- adjusted basis, we might be a little below [the more than 38,000 ideas submitted]. We had a selection process for highlighting and including in the budget the best ideas... I think the issue really is similar - and we're continually evaluating this question - to the internal discussions on the budget. Before decisions are made, what is the balance of transparency versus preserving the discussion."

"What I'd like to do is take the maybe four or five hundred of them that were at the bottom of the distribution and share them with you to give you an idea of the somewhat sordid process we went through."

On a management agenda:

Orszag also made it pretty clear the administration won't be spending time coming up with a catchy name for their management agenda, a la the Bush Administration's President's Management Agenda (PMA) or the Clinton era National Performance Review (NPR).

"I don't know that a cute name is what's necessary. I think what we need to do is do the hard work. If we succeed in significantly transforming the IT backbone of the government and working with [OPM Director] John Berry on significantly improving not only the hiring part but the other components of the human capitol agenda, those will be huge, lasting fundamental changes that will make the federal government work better for decades to come. There are other additional things that need to happen that we're acting upon - contracting a good example - but in terms of the underlying core function of the federal government across every agency, that IT backbone and a high-performing workforce are, I think, the two foundational pieces to an improved federal government."