Put any of that stuff in your budget request today and you can expect a tough interrogation by OMB and a trip to the woodshed with your congressional appropriators. Those capital assets, especially the ones closely tied to agency missions or involving lots of risk, now are getting scrubbed within an inch of their lives in the budget process. The new scrutiny means new headaches for managers, buyers and users of capital assets, because it falls to them to justify buying and owning them. Since 1994, OMB has made special efforts to improve the way agencies buy, manage, maintain and dispose of large assets. The hope is that cleaning up huge cost and schedule overruns like those of the IRS tax modernization system, the Federal Aviation Administration's air traffic control system and the FBI's fingerprint identification system will convince Americans their government truly can manage its way out of a paper bag.
Good management equals good government.
The guide is intended to move managers away from battling for dollars after asset purchases have overrun cost and schedule goals toward cautious, measured consideration of every possible alternative before buying assets at all. That's a big change from the haphazard adhocracy of ever-changing characters whose fingerprints obscured the goals and hid the overruns of many major programs in the past. If a review of current programs finds gaps between planned and actual performance, managers should kick off a search for ways to close the gaps, the guide advises. Acquiring capital assets should be just one of many alternatives managers consider. If, after all is said and done, buying an asset turns out to be the most cost-effective and practical way to close a performance gap, the integrated product team takes over.