The Pursuit of Efficiency: An Interview with Dan Tangherlini

Dan M. Tangherlini was appointed acting Administrator of the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) on April 3, 2012, and serves a vital role in President Barack Obama’s agenda to build a more sustainable, responsible and effective government for the American people. Before joining GSA, Tangherlini served as the Treasury’s Assistant Secretary for Management, Chief Financial Officer, and Chief Performance Officer. From 2006 to 2009, Tangherlini also served as Washington, DC’s City Administrator and Deputy Mayor. Tangherlini received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Public Policy Studies from the University of Chicago and his Master’s degree in Business Administration from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

What is your the vision for the GSA, and how do you plan to reform and modernize the agency?

GSA has this important mission that it was given after World War II, and the mission was to figure out ways to leverage the scale of the vastly expanded government and see if there were ways that we could deliver those services more efficiently. It was really based on a model of looking at the changes that had been undertaken in corporate America—which had grown into one of the most efficient productivity machines that the world has seen—and saying “Wait, let’s take a look at how we can deliver these services better in government.” The idea was to create a place where you leverage scale and scope to deliver the systems and services necessary for the people who deliver government services.

Back in the 1950s, that really was securing space and pencils and figuring out ways that we could have common purchasing. We have evolved a lot over time, but the basic principal is that the federal government is a big organization. We deliver services on certain common platforms and it makes sense to leverage our scale and our scope to get those services delivered in the most efficient and cost effective way. For GSA, it is asking ourselves if there are ways we can focus our service delivery so that we can buy like the biggest buyer and treat our real estate as one of our most valuable assets.

The Obama Administration is taking actions to maximize efficiency and pursue cost-savings across the federal government, in part by auctioning off underutilized federal property. Can you talk about GSA progress in this initiative and describe any future plans to reduce the federal footprint?

It is a little more subtle than that. The idea is to try to focus our real estate investment on those things that have the most productivity, and not just maintain assets for the sake of having assets. We should ask ourselves: what is the productivity that we are getting out of them, what is the level of investment that we are putting into them, what is the level of investment that they need, and how much is it costing us to carry these things?

We are also working on freezing the footprint, or at least not growing the real estate square footage of the federal government. GSA is working very hard with agency partners to say that every penny you spend on real estate is one less penny you could spend on programming or one more penny contributed to the deficit. We are trying to change our organizational focus to partner with agencies and deliver their services in a more efficient environment, both physically and on the contract side.

We are also interested in whether there are better and smarter ways that we can create more common platforms around technology to make it faster and more effective for government to serve its customers, as well as for government to manage its data. We are leading the effort around pushing data into the cloud so that it can be accessed anywhere, anytime, so that we can move towards an “always on” government where people can get the services they need when they need it and where they need it, rather than when we are available.

The GSA recently had a role in securing supplies to regions devastated by Hurricane Sandy. Has the GSA Disaster Relief Program grown over the years? Does GSA have other roles in emergency response planning?

Our work in disaster response is a very intense manifestation of what we do every day, and that is to provide people space and vehicles to deliver the work that they are doing. We are helping agencies that were dislocated or agencies serving people who were dislocated so they can find space and get their operations going again. We are getting agencies what they need to help these communities recover. We helped procure 300 buses for FEMA to give to New Jersey Transit so that they could get people back to work and get the transit system working again. I think we have, like the rest of the federal government, gotten much better and much smarter at how we perform. We have a great partnership and relationship with FEMA. We have a great group in our federal acquisition service that is devoted to this work, and they are some of the best there are.

You were tasked with leading the GSA at a difficult time.  What steps have you taken to restore the agency’s reputation and boost employee morale?

The difficult thing in a situation like this is that it is easy to tear your reputation down, but it is much harder to build it back. We have been working on a collaborative process across the organization to refocus ourselves on our core mission, and to show over and over and over again that GSA is not the agency that wastes money. We are not saying we didn’t waste money back in 2010 in the Western Regions Conference. We are not saying that. At the same time, we get over 12,000 people every day who are committed to saving government money and deliver services more efficiently and more effectively.

Our job is to show people the actual value of this organization by being smart, by buying well, and by leveraging our scale and our scope to drive down the cost of government and return money to tax payers or push money into programs. Either of those outcomes I think everyone would support. So we need a good, smart, strong GSA. That is what we are working on continuing to build.

Feature Photo: cc/(futureatlas.com)