Senator Warner joined former Fed chair Paul Volcker today in highlighting a government reform blueprint prepared by Paul Light,  founder of NYU's Global Center on Public Service. The report, "Creating High Performance Government: A Once-in-a-Generation Opportunity," outlines a plan to save one trillion dollars over the next decade by focusing on performance and accountability in the federal bureaucracy.

Chairman Paul Volcker and Senator Warner at today's event.

“We are spending considerable time discussing long-term plans to bring government spending and revenues into balance, yet the third leg of the stool must be a serious discussion about cutting costs through improvements in the way our government works,” Senator Warner said. “This work is never easy and rarely generates news headlines. But removing unnecessary management layers and eliminating program overlap and agency duplication will improve service delivery for citizens and empower the federal workforce to focus on higher-quality outcomes.”

The Federal Times summarized the findings in the NYU report:

• Leadership has been "inconsistent at best, negligent at worst."

Only 44 percent of federal employees believe that leaders of their organizations generate high levels of motivation and commitment from their workforces, the report said. To cut management fat, Light proposed eliminating about half of the 3,000 posts set aside for presidential appointees in the Executive Service and the Schedule C classification category. To trim bloat in high-cost civil service layers, the government could generally hire only one manager or professional in the GS-13 to -15 ranks for every two who leave or retire. The reverse would be true for service delivery employees: For every one who leaves, two would be hired.

• Pay that doesn't reward performance.

Light stops short of pressing for an end to the General Schedule system, but urges creation of a "results-based pay-for-performance system" that includes training and monitoring systems to assure fairness. "We need to make grade and step increases more sensitive to individual, unit and agency performance and abandon automatic increases for any employee," he told Federal Times.

• Rampant inefficiencies, costing taxpayers billions of dollars, in the delivery of government services.

Those include a growing reliance on contractors; duplication in government programs, and a $300 billion backlog of delinquent tax collections. Light recommends reducing the contract workforce — now estimated about 7.5 million — by 500,000; improving tax collections and streamlining the federal acquisitions process.

Senator Warner chairs the Senate Budget Committee's Task Force on Government Performance and recently introduced the DATA Act. In addition, in January, the President signed the Senator's Government Performance and Results Modernization Act into law.