Office of Management and Budget Blog

In honor of Immigration Heritage Month, Shaun Donovan shares his father's story, a fifty-two year journey to citizenship.

U.S. Federal Departments and Agencies together with Canadian Ministries have been working to develop new frameworks for cooperation since the release of the U.S.-Canada Regulatory Cooperation Council (RCC) Joint Forward Plan last August. Collectively, these documents outline major objectives for bilateral cooperation over the next three to five years in specific areas of regulatory activity.

Federal service is public service. That’s easy to forget sometimes because so much of what Federal employees do goes on behind the scenes. But America’s workforce affects every American every day. Each day, all across this country, many Americans are fortunate to wake up in a society where they have clean water to drink, safe food to eat, beautiful parks, affordable and quality health care, and a growing economy.

Today, House Republicans marked-up their first two funding bills for fiscal year (FY) 2016 in full committee. They also released planned funding levels, known as 302(b) allocations, for the 10 remaining appropriations bills that fund the rest of the government. In doing so, House Republicans have started to show how they plan to budget at discretionary funding levels that are the lowest in a decade, adjusted for inflation. The bills released so far, along with the targets for the remaining bills, show that the Republican budget funding levels will force cuts compared to the President’s Budget in areas important to the economy and the middle-class, ranging from research to education to environmental protection, as well as in national security priorities, ranging from peacekeeping and foreign assistance to the base defense budget.

Last night, the Senate passed H.R.2, the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015, with overwhelming bipartisan support, following House passage of the bill with overwhelming support three weeks ago. Not only will the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 reform Medicare’s physician payment system to incentivize quality and value and extend the Children’s Health Insurance Program, it also includes a two-year extension of the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program (“Home Visiting”). The Home Visiting program, administered by the Department of Health and Human Services, funds States, territories, and tribal entities to develop and implement voluntary, evidence-based home visitation programs in which families that choose to participate receive advice, guidance, and other help from nurses, social workers, or other trained professionals during pregnancy and the first years of a child’s life.

Since the beginning of the Administration, the President has made it a priority to identify and eliminate inefficient or unnecessary spending, and advance efforts that help sustain a high-performing, cost-effective Government for the American people.

A little over a year ago, the Administration committed to several ambitious improvements in Government services and better outcomes for the American public. Building on successful data-driven efforts that have helped reduce veterans’ homelessness, increased renewable energy, and the speed up the approval of disaster loans for families in need, we established 15 new Cross-Agency Priority (CAP) Goals and every Federal Agency published a limited number of Agency Priority Goals (APGs).

In 2013, the Administration issued the Freeze the Footprint (FTF) policy to freeze the Federal Government’s real estate footprint and restrict the growth of excess or underutilized properties. Freeze the Footprint was the first government-wide policy that established and required federal agencies to identify offsets (i.e., disposals) of existing property to support new property acquisitions, and that set a timeline for agencies to freeze their real property footprint. The policy was a success.

Successful acquisitions depend on a clear understanding of the market’s capabilities and dynamics, and this requires early and meaningful engagement with industry and the application of strong management practices within the agency. Today, in an effort to further that goal, I issued guidance to agencies directing them to seek feedback from vendors and internal stakeholders – such as contracting officers and program managers – on how well certain high-dollar IT acquisitions perform.

OMB Director Shaun Donovan explains the medium and long term fiscal progress we’ve made.

On Sunday, March 8, 2015, OMB Director Shaun Donovan delivered remarks at the historic Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church in Selma, Alabama, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery March and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The President and First Lady announced Let Girls Learn, a new whole-of-government initiative that will support adolescent girls around the world. Building on USAID education programs that reach more than a million adolescent girls every year, the initiative will both improve access to quality education and target the barriers that can keep adolescent girls out of school, including gender-based violence and child marriage.