The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee held a confirmation hearing yesterday to consider the nomination of Jeffrey Zients, President Obama's pick to be Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget and sit in the newly created position of Chief Performance Officer. The hearing was uneventful and short, lasting less than an hour, and Zients received mostly praise and kinds words from Senators.

Last week, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced its intention to scrap a two-year-long, $19.5 million project to create a new tax-filing website. The agency's Chief Information Officer cancelled the new website due to "the lack of a comprehensive enterprise strategy that considered industry best practices or advancements in portal technology, and budget challenges due to the significant expenditure requirements necessary to replace existing equipment." That's government speak for, "We let this project get out of hand by not employing proper oversight, and so, now the stuff we were going to buy to utilize our newfangled website won't work with it." You can read the rest of the agency's explanation in their report. Guess those new heights of customer service IRS was striving towards will have to wait a few years.

President Obama released more details of his FY 2010 budget request last week and I've been spending some time flipping through it today. I didn't have to flip far to find some encouraging news about how the new administration will tackle performance assessment over the next four years and what they plan to do with the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART). Front and center on page 9 in the most important volume in the budget release - the Analytical Perspectives - is a section called "Building a High-Performing Government." This gives the first details about administration plans to replace PART with a new performance system the administration refers to as a "performance improvement and analysis framework."