Managing the Business of Government

Overview

Priority Area Leaders

Don Graves

TitleDeputy Secretary

AgencyU.S. Department of Commerce

Andrea Palm

TitleDeputy Secretary

AgencyU.S. Department of Health and Human Services

John Tien

TitleDeputy Secretary

AgencyU.S. Department of Homeland Security

Summary of Progress

  • May 2023

    Strategy leads continued to implement action plans to advance Federal priorities for sustainability and equity through Federal acquisition and Federal financial assistance. In Federal acquisition, this release includes important updates related to priority supply chains and investing in the acquisition workforce. Federal financial assistance leads announce the release of a new training for the financial assistance workforce.

  • March 2023

    Cross-agency teams continued to develop and refine their action plans to advance sustainability and equity priorities for the Nation through the Federal acquisition and financial assistance systems. Each strategy has defined initial success metrics and milestones.

  • November 2022

    Cross-agency teams have been working to develop and refine action plans to achieve the President’s vision to leverage Federal acquisition and financial assistance systems to advance priorities for the Nation. Each strategy is defining strategy-wide success metrics to measure progress toward achieving their ambitious goals.

Challenge

The Federal Government awards over $1.5 trillion in Federal contracts and financial assistance each year—and sometimes much more in times of crisis. This creates an enterprise-level opportunity to lean on Federal systems for managing the business of Government—the goods and services we buy and the financial assistance and resources we provide and oversee—to create and sustain good quality union jobs, address persistent racial and gender wealth and wage gaps, and address other challenges our Nation faces. The Administration has already taken bold action to leverage Federal acquisition and financial assistance to take on our most pressing challenges as a country. Accomplishing these ambitious goals and activities collectively will also require continuous improvements in our procurement, financial assistance, and financial management ecosystems. This shift will require new measures and processes, new training for the Federal workforce, and new tradeoffs that agencies together will need to address going forward.

Opportunity

We can harness this collective power and make connections across the Federal acquisition and financial assistance systems to strengthen the U.S. manufacturing base and support American workers, catalyze new solutions that address the climate crisis and enhance sustainability, and advance equity. The public will benefit from a Government that buys together and manages financial assistance together, devoting attention to how these systems deliver results—prosperity, security, and opportunity—for all people in this country. Federal agencies will look across existing Administration initiatives to ensure that system-wide, continuous improvement in Federal acquisition, financial management, and financial assistance systems occurs. This system-wide focus can include, for example: opportunity and issue spotting, including resolution of conflicts across discrete lines of effort; training and guidance for practitioners within agencies; data-management and evidence-building strategies; and other capacity-building strategies.

Strategies

Highlights

A curated view of progress happening across this priority area