The Biden administration is moving to reinstate a key accountability component of the federal budgeting process that the Trump administration discarded during last December, which was its last full month in power. In short, the Trump administration removed a provision that demanded documentation of progress towards set goals from federal agencies when making their budget requests, which left federal agencies further under the purview of whatever political ideology happened to be leading the way instead of set standards. Biden’s administration will apparently be demanding those progress reports again.
As a figure familiar with the Biden administration’s planned change put it:
‘This is about making sure we are making solid decisions that are not just based in political rhetoric alone — that there are numbers and data behind it. A commitment to good government should not be partisan.’
Trump-era Office of Management and Budget leader Russell Vought justified the original change by claiming that members of the public aren’t particularly interested in the progress reports from federal agencies, although a lack of immediate interest in the material doesn’t exactly automatically connect to not needing to have the information on hand at all. As Vought put it, the “thousands of pages of performance data generated by agencies and posted on performance.gov each year attract little interest” — but again, there’s an entire federal legal framework, the Freedom of Information Act, that reflects the fact that interest in certain materials could suddenly spike. (Under the act, members of the public can request certain government records.)
Pam Coleman, who serves as associate director for performance management at the Office of Management and Budget under Biden, said earlier this month that the Biden team members “continue to assess the full extent of the damage from the previous administration’s policies, actions and rhetoric, and are supporting and collaborating with [the Office of Personnel Management] to identify the best strategies to reverse these impacts and rebuild the federal workforce.” The change from the White House Office of Management and Budget is one of many such steps that the Biden administration has been taking to undo the Trump era’s chaos. The Biden team entirely paused the implementation of pending regulations from the Trump era that weren’t yet formally enacted.
