The Government's Efficiency Summit Had a $2.4 Billion Entrance Fee. The Savings Were $2 Billion. Officials Call This Progress.
WASHINGTON — The federal government held its most ambitious efficiency reform event in recent memory last week, and if you were hoping to attend, you had ample time to prepare: registration opened fourteen months ago, required completion of an 847-step pre-approval portal, and demanded, at various stages, a notarized PDF of your professional biography, a fax confirmation of your notarized PDF, a secondary fax confirming receipt of the first fax, and a brief personal statement explaining why government efficiency matters to you personally, which officials requested be submitted in triplicate.
Approximately 340 people made it through. The White House had hoped for 2,000.
"We consider that a strong showing," said Deputy Chief of Staff for Operational Excellence Miriam Holt at the summit's opening session. "The registration process was itself a proof of concept. If you completed it, you are precisely the kind of resilient, process-oriented professional this conversation needs."
She did not address what the process said about the other 1,660 people who gave up somewhere between Step 34 and the fax machine.
The Portal: A Brief History of Obstacles
The Government Efficiency and Modernization Summit pre-registration portal, formally titled the Federal Event Access and Stakeholder Verification System (FEASVS, pronounced, according to a help document, "however feels natural"), was developed by a contractor at a cost of $4.3 million and launched in January of last year.
By February, the contractor had been paid an additional $800,000 to fix the portal's login function, which did not work. By March, a second contractor had been engaged to audit the first contractor's fix, at a cost of $650,000. The audit concluded that the fix had introduced three new problems while resolving the original one, and recommended a patch, which was developed by a third contractor for $420,000 and deployed in May.
The portal worked correctly from May through September, at which point a routine security update broke the notarized PDF upload function. This was resolved in November, eleven weeks before the summit, by a fourth contractor whose invoice has not yet been made public but which sources describe as "not small."
Of the 340 attendees who successfully registered, a post-summit survey found that 67 percent had required assistance from their agency's IT department at some point during the process. Fourteen percent had called the portal's help line, which was staffed by a contractor and operated Monday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Eastern, excluding federal holidays.
"I faxed three times," said one attendee, a budget analyst from the Department of Transportation who asked to remain anonymous because she was not authorized to speak to the press. "The third fax was a fax confirming that I had sent the second fax. I'm still not certain what the second fax was confirming. There was a form. I filled out the form."
She paused.
"I do not know what the form was for."
The Summit Itself: Two Days of Identifying the Problem
The Government Efficiency and Modernization Summit, held over two days at a downtown Washington hotel whose conference rate was $485 per night per attendee, featured twenty-two panels, four keynote addresses, a working lunch (billed at $94 per head), and what the program described as an "immersive efficiency simulation," which turned out to be a room with a lot of whiteboards and a facilitator who kept saying "let's park that."
The summit's central achievement — the one cited in every press release, briefing document, and congratulatory email circulated by the Office of Management and Budget in the days following — was the identification of $2 billion in potential federal savings across seven program areas.
The identification process, comprising the portal development, contractor fees, summit logistics, staff time, travel costs, hotel accommodations, keynote speaker honoraria (the lowest of which, sources confirm, was $45,000 for a forty-minute address on "doing more with less"), and the working lunch, cost approximately $2.4 billion.
When this figure was raised at the summit's closing press conference, Principal Deputy Director for Federal Modernization Craig Ostrowski acknowledged it without apparent distress.
"What you're describing is an investment," Ostrowski said. "The $2.4 billion isn't a cost. It's the infrastructure of savings identification. You can't find $2 billion without spending money on the finding."
A reporter asked whether the net result was therefore a $400 million loss.
"The net result," Ostrowski said, "is a foundation for future progress."
Expert Analysis: The Savings Are the Friends We Made Along the Way
The summit's closing panel, titled "Translating Findings Into Action: A Path Forward," featured five consultants from firms that had, collectively, billed the federal government approximately $18 million over the past two years for work related to efficiency reform.
Their findings, presented across four PowerPoint decks and one hand-drawn diagram that a panelist described as "deliberately analog to signal openness," converged on a single central recommendation: the portal itself should be studied for potential efficiency improvements.
"The portal is, in many ways, a microcosm of the broader challenge," said senior consultant Andrea Voss of Voss Meridian Government Solutions, whose firm had been engaged to evaluate the portal's user experience at a cost of $1.2 million and whose report, delivered six weeks earlier, had recommended the portal be studied for potential efficiency improvements. "We see real opportunity there. What we need is a structured assessment."
When asked what such an assessment might cost, Voss said it was too early to speculate but that her firm would be happy to submit a proposal.
The panel's moderator, himself a consultant billing at $475 per hour, noted that the real value of the summit lay not in any single recommendation but in "the relational capital accumulated across two days of high-level dialogue."
"The savings," he said, with what several attendees later described as a straight face, "are the connections we made along the way."
What Happens Next
The Office of Management and Budget has announced that the summit's findings will be compiled into a comprehensive action report, expected to run approximately 300 pages, which will be distributed to relevant agency heads for review and comment. The comment period will be ninety days. Comments will be compiled and analyzed by a contractor. The analysis will be presented at a follow-up summit, currently scheduled for next spring.
Registration for the follow-up summit will open in approximately six weeks.
The portal is already being rebuilt.
"We've incorporated significant lessons from the first portal," said Holt. "This one will be streamlined. Intuitive. We're targeting a twelve-step registration process."
She was asked whether that included the fax confirmation.
"We're keeping the fax confirmation," she said. "That's a security requirement. That one isn't going anywhere."
The 340 attendees who made it through the original registration process received a certificate of completion suitable for framing. It was notarized. It arrived by fax.
