President Barak Obama has invited dozens of the nation’s top executives to the White House seeking tips on how the federal bureaucracy can become leaner and meaner. Why? Try these examples:
The U.S. Census Bureau spent $600 million on a project to make its 2010 count electronic, but the effort failed and the census will be conducted by paper this year. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services uses text messages to inform applicants for citizenship when their paperwork moves through the seven steps of the application process. The Patent and Trademark Office receives 80 percent of patent applications electronically, but it must print all of the applications to input them in an outdated database that doesn’t work with modern systems.
This is how the furnace of bureaucracy turns the taxpayers’ money into ashes. They always do it everywhere. But Mr. Obama wants to call it a day and he wants to learn from the private sector. His guests will include Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Sprint Nextel chief executive Dan Hesse, PepsiCo chief executive Indra K. Nooyi, and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. Read more.
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