Page 15 - FCW, July/August 2018
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                                 $1.03B
White House’s proposed OPM/GSA merger includes IT consolidation
is the size of Group D of the CDM DEFEND task order awarded to Accenture on July 24
 At a Senate hearing on a key piece of the Trump administration’s government reorganization plan, officials testified that systems consolidation and digitization of paper records are a big part of it.
The administration’s goal is to merge some of the core functions currently performed at the Office of Personnel Management — retirement services, federal employees’ health care and other insurance, and human resources — into the General Services Administration, which would be renamed the Government Services Administration. What’s left of OPM would be shifted to the Executive Office of the President.
GSA Administrator Emily Murphy said merging OPM’s functions into GSA would lead to IT modernization and improved service delivery “on both sides of the equation.” She added that she hopes to reduce the number of time-
and-attendance systems from 100 to “a manageable number.”
OPM Director Jeff Pon said the restructuring plan would let the
and retirement systems, officials plan to digitize the current paper-based records, which Pon said will take at least a year or two.
At a July 26 hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s Regulatory Affairs and Federal Management Subcommittee, lawmakers said they needed more detail.
“Just rearranging the chairs or who sits where, in my opinion, doesn’t solve some of the problems that I see that need to be solved within OPM,” Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) said.
Although much of the plan will need congressional approval before moving forward, Pon said the administration is taking a phased approach to the restructuring rather than waiting until the entire proposal is approved.
— Chase Gunter
  Proponents push to restore MGT funding
The lead sponsor of the Modernizing Government Technology Act expressed confidence that congressional appropriators will replenish a revolving fund for agencies’ IT modernization initiatives. But issues regarding transparency still must be addressed.
The House Financial Services and General Government appropriations bill for fiscal 2019 would pay into the Technology Modernization Fund to the tune of $150 million — the same funding level passed for 2018. However, Senate appropriators zeroed out that line item in the latest omnibus spending package.
Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas), author of the MGT Act, told FCW that he is talking to his Senate counterparts, and “in conference, we can probably resolve this issue.”
However, he acknowledged that the
Office of Management and Budget has not done enough to keep lawmakers and the public informed about how the money is being distributed. “OMB was not transparent in how decisions [were made] with the awards,” he said after a hearing on July 25. “That frustrated our appropriators and rightfully so.”
In a July 12 email message to FCW, Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), chairman of the appropriations subcommittee that oversees TMF funding, wrote: “I am concerned about the lack of transparency with the allocation of the awards and who is submitting proposals and why certain projects and agencies were or were not selected. In the coming weeks, I hope to explore possible solutions to this lack of transparency.”
In a July 9 letter to appropriators,
OMB Director Mick Mulvaney warned that the funding lapse would “halt the Technology Modernization Board’s ongoing work to tackle impactful, governmentwide IT modernization efforts. The administration believes that any additional funding would be well utilized and will continue working with the Congress to demonstrate the taxpayer value generated by the TMF.”
OMB awarded a combined $45 million to the departments of Energy, Agriculture and Housing and Urban Development in June. However, only seven agencies submitted proposals.
Another $55 million has yet to be awarded this year, and OMB has issued a call for another round of agency proposals.
— Adam Mazmanian and Derek B. Johnson
Emily Murphy
Jeff Pon
agency “concentrate on centralized policy development in areas such as employee compensation, workforce supply and demand, identification of future workforce skill needs, [and] leadership and talent management.”
Before OPM hands off health benefits
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