The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) published the Trump administration’s President’s Management Agenda (PMA) on Monday, laying out plans to shrink the federal government and leverage technology to deliver faster services.
The practice of new administrations issuing PMAs dates to 2001. The documents describe strategies to make the federal government more effective and efficient and set overarching management goals.
“President Trump’s historic victory was a mandate to reform the Government root and branch,” Eric Ueland, the deputy director for management at OMB, said in a statement posted to Performance.gov – the website that hosts the administration’s PMA.
“The PMA helps ensure we carry out the President’s vision to deliver an effective and efficient Government directly accountable to all Americans,” Ueland said.
The latest President’s Management Agenda – which is just two pages in length – lays out three priorities: shrink the government and eliminate waste; ensure accountability for Americans; and deliver results, buy American.
The PMA’s first priority, shrink the government and eliminate waste, has three goals. These include “eliminate woke, weaponization, and waste;” downsize the federal workforce; and optimize federal real estate.
These goals have objectives, including eradicating “woke and weaponized programs across government,” eliminating jobs in “non-essential, non-statutory functions,” removing poor performers, strategically hiring only for essential jobs, and offloading “unnecessary leases and buildings.”
The second priority, ensure accountability for Americans, also has three underlying goals. These include fostering a merit-based federal workforce, ending censorship and over-classification, and demanding partners who deliver.
These goals have objectives such as hiring the best based on skills and merit, finding and eliminating government censorship of speech, and contracting with the best businesses.
Finally, there are two underlying goals for achieving the third priority: deliver results, buy American. These goals include efficiently deploying the buying power of the federal government and buying American, as well as leveraging technology “to deliver faster, more secure services.”
The technology goal comes with several objectives, such as consolidating and standardizing systems, reducing the number of “confusing government websites,” and ensuring secure, digital-first services “that are built for real people, not bureaucracy.”
It also outlines objectives to defend against and combat cyber enemies, “eliminate data silos and duplicative data collection,” and reduce wasteful processes through artificial intelligence.
The Trump administration has already been working towards many of these goals since taking office in January, whether through large-scale layoffs to downsize the federal workforce, or through the OneGov initiative, which aims to streamline federal IT acquisitions.
The Performance.gov website does not yet list details such as which federal leaders will be tasked with delivering on the PMA goals, or public reporting on PMA progress so far.