Mulvaney ‘ cleaning out the closets’

OMB director says it sets an example for other agencies

WASHINGTON When President Trump put his budget director in charge of cutting out waste and inefficiency in federal government, Mick Mulvaney decided to start in his own office.

The Office of Management and Budget still has seven memos on the books requiring agencies to prepare for the Y2K computer bug, the technology obsession of 1999. Another four impose reporting requirements related to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. And dozens of White House requirements on technology — some dating back to 1997 — have become obsolete.

So Mulvaney signed a memo Thursday eliminating 59 redundant, obsolete or unnecessary reports and policies it imposes on other federal agencies.

The move is a down payment on President Trump’s executive order in March directing a governmentwide effort to make federal agencies more productive. Mulvaney said steps introduced Thursday will save tens of thousands of manpower hours, just in producing obsolete and redundant reports for the budget office.

“Government may do a decent job of looking forward. We do a lousy job of cleaning out the closets,” Mulvaney told reporters.

The Trump administration isn’t the first to come into office with ideas of streamlining bureaucracy, but Mulvaney said Trump has made it a priority.

“Everybody knows that we do crap like this. The difference here is that this administration is finally going to fix it,” he said.

Mulvaney, who is in charge of Trump’s effort to reorganize the executive branch, said one way to make it a priority is for his own agency to set the tone.

“It’s a lot easier for me to pick up the phone and talk to Rick Perry at the Department of Energy and say, ‘ Look, you need to be doing X, Y and Z’ if we’ve already done X, Y and Z,” he said.