Performance.gov site to go public soon
Recent budget cuts will hamper effort to improve the website’s functionality, though, OMB’s Zients tells a Senate panel.
Public access to the long-anticipated website Performance.gov will be achieved "within the next few weeks," Chief Performance Officer Jeffrey Zients told a Senate panel on Tuesday. But because the final fiscal 2011 budget agreement Congress passed last month cut the Electronic Government Fund, the site may not include the "more robust enhanced functionality that makes it user-friendly" by the original deadline of October 2012, he said.
Speaking at a hearing on implementing the 2010 Government Performance and Results Modernization Act, Zients said the act "requires a move from the production of static, printed agency performance plans and reports to more dynamic, accessible and useful on-line performance information.
"Moving from thousands of pages of printed documents to a central website with a consolidated program list will make it easier for Congress and the public to understand what our government does and how it is performing," he said.
The site is currently used internally by agencies and the Office of Management and Budget to coordinate cross-agency efforts to improve efficiency, supplemented by monthly face-to-meetings with managers, Zients said.
Panel chairman Tom Carper, D-Del., said the money required to fully fund the site, some $20 million, is a "modest amount" and that transparency in the long run can save government money.
The hearing was convened by convened by the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce and the District of Columbia.