The government has finally stopped requiring federal agencies to produce reports on the effects of the year 2000 on computers Thursday, 17 years after the computer scare proved to be a non-issue.
That policy, along with 58 other redundant and unnecessary polices, is the target of Director of Management and Budget Mick Mulvaney’s 12-page memo about wasteful policies that should be ended.
“Everybody knows we do crap like this,” Mulvaney told reporters, the Washington Examiner reports. “We do a lousy job of clearing out our closets.”
The Office of Management and Budget required agencies to produce a number of reports leading up to and through the year 2000, when some predicted that computers used by corporate and government systems would crash and be unable to process information at midnight Jan. 1, 2000. Those seven policies stayed in effect until Thursday, though it’s unclear whether agencies continued to report on the issues.
“It just clogs the operation of government,” Mulvaney said of the outdated reporting rules.
Other policies eliminated in the memo include reporting requirements that have been superseded by other OMB guidance, and many procurement policies that Mulvaney says were more focused “on rigid compliance with meeting a goal,” not incentivizing contractor performance.
Mulvaney also stopped requiring reports on the costs of British Petroleum’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill because one of the purposes of tracking the cost was for ongoing litigation. BP reached a settlement agreement regarding the litigation in 2016.
Mulvaney said that the list of eliminated, paused or modified policies should be an example for President Donald Trump’s “War on Waste,” and that the federal government could save as much as $140 billion over the next decade by ending redundant rules.
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