By Suzanne Kubota
Senior Internet Editor
FederalNewsRadio.com

Anyone who thinks working for the government isn’t a manufacturing job has never seen number of reports your agency generates, right?

Senator Mark Warner (D-VA.) thinks there’s got to be a better way to do business and has proposed legislation to prove it.

Warner told Federal News Radio there’s got to be a way to “more effectively use the data that often times government is collecting in a more user-friendly way.”

As part of his Government Performance Modernization Act, instead of reinventing the wheel by reporting performance data every year, Warner’s legislation would require federal agencies to post performance data on a single public website, on a quarterly basis.

And then because too often, particularly to our federal workforce, we simply add more requirements and never take any away, we’re actually asking for a 10 percent reduction in governmentwide reporting so that we really…ask our federal workforce to focus more on what is truly needed. Necessary for Congress, necessary for management goals, necessary for the public and not the kind of redundant amount of reporting that too much of our legislation already requires.

So instead of annual reports, the data would be submitted quarterly, to a single website.

Bottom line: how can we make the government perform more effectively, how can we give our stakeholders a single source of information, and how can we also say to our federal employees rather than simply just piling on more reporting requirements how can we actually go back out and eliminate some of the less useful ones so that those reports that they do file are actually used and are valuable.

Warner said he’s hopeful the bill will “get worked on in the lame duck session.”

For more about reforms to measuring agency performance from In Depth with Francis Rose, click here.

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