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THE PRESIDENT'S MANAGEMENT AGENDA THE PRESIDENT & HIS LEADERSHIP TEAM TOOLS FOR SUCCESS
President George W. Bush meets with Dan Bartlett, center, and Josh Bolten in the Oval Office Jan. 9, 2003. White House photo by Eric Draper.
The Deputy Director for Mgmt
PMA updates, best practices, and general information.
Scorecard
Grading Implementation of the PMA.
Human Capital
Initiative updates, best practices, and general information.
Commercial Services Management
Initiative updates, best practices, and general information.
Improving Financial Performance
Initiative updates, best practices, and general information.
E-Gov
Initiative updates, best practices, and general information.
Performance Improvement
Initiative updates, best practices, and general information.
Sharing Best Practices
Stories of achieving breaktrough results in government.
The President's Management Council

Letter from Clay Johnson - October 2004

Federal departments and agencies are working better now than they were three to five years ago. With the help of the President’s Management Agenda, there are habits and disciplines in place now that make it possible for agencies to more assuredly produce desired outcomes at acceptable costs.

The President’s Management Council, the chief operating officers of the departments, met with President Bush in early August to summarize the significant management improvements they have made in their agencies over the past three years. The President congratulated us for:

  • Holding ourselves and our people accountable for doing what we say we’re going to do, with the help of the PMA scorecard;
  • Focusing on results instead of process; and
  • Making sure the projected benefits of our efforts become real and tangible.
We are forever changing the way the Federal government works. We look forward to the day a year or two or three away when we can point to such milestones as:
  • The first $5 billion per year in real savings derived from the effort to eliminate improper payments.
  • The specific, verifiable performance and/or efficiency improvements that have resulted from agency efforts to improve program results relative to desired outcomes and costs.
  • The first $1 billion per year in real savings and taxpayer benefit derived from competitive sourcing; and the second and third billion dollars.
The key to all this success and improvement is our clearly defining what we want to accomplish, the definition of success, and then holding people accountable for developing and implementing aggressive, detailed action plans to get there. We’re newly applying this disciplined approach to the management of real property and to the elimination of all improper payments, where tens of billions of dollars can be made available for more productive purposes.

I encourage you to read about what specific agencies and the Federal government as a whole have accomplished the past several years, at http://www.results.gov/agenda/index.html. I also congratulate the Departments of Energy and Labor, who have achieved “green status,” along with the Department of Transportation, on four of the five PMA initiatives.

Yours truly,

Clay Johnson
Deputy Director for Management
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