President Donald J. Trump’s campaign pledge to “drain” Washington, D.C.’s swamp took a major step forward this week after the president’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director, Mick Mulvaney, released a White House plan to dramatically cut bureaucracy and make government leaner, meaner and much more efficient.

Calling it “one of the biggest story nobody’s talking about,” Mulvaney discussed details of the plan Wednesday, following the release of a memorandum providing guidance to federal departments that will be required to comply with the president’s March 13 executive order titled, “Comprehensive Plan for Reorganizing the Executive Branch.” Under provisions of that order, the OMB director was instructed to develop a plan and distribute it to the federal bureaucracy.

The plan lifts Trump’s Jan. 23 order implementing a federal hiring ban, but agencies and departments will still not be permitted to “hire willy-nilly,” Mulvaney said, as reported by Breitbart News.

Rather, federal agencies are ordered to take “immediate actions to achieve near-term workforce reductions and cost savings, including planning for funding levels in the President’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2018 Budget Blueprint,” while developing “a plan to maximize employee performance” by the end of June. (RELATED: Team Trump Already Dismantling Obama’s “Legacy” Of Job-Killing Rules And Regulations)

Also, agencies are required to “submit an Agency Reform Plan to OMB in September 2017 as part of the agency’s FY 2019 Budget submission to OMB that includes long-term workforce reductions,” the memorandum states, adding that an “initial, high-level draft of the Agency Reform Plan” must be submitted to OMB by June 30.

Further, the OMB memorandum provides guidance on steps the office “will take to formulate a comprehensive Government-wide Reform Plan” that will be part of Trump’s FY 2019 budget. The efforts seek to, among other objectives, “create a lean, accountable, more efficient government that works for the American people.”

The issuance of the memorandum ends Trump’s hiring freeze, Mulvaney said Tuesday, replacing the president’s “across-the-board” freeze with “a more surgical plan.”

Mulvaney said the president is looking to do something that has never been done before in terms of how the federal government is structured.

“The executive branch of government has never been rebuilt,” the OMB director said. “It has grown organically over the course of the last 240 years and the President of the United States has asked all of us in the Executive Branch to start from scratch, a literal blank piece of paper, and say if you were going to rebuild the Executive Branch, what would it look like?”

Recommendations for refurbishing the government came from within and from without, Mulvaney said, noting that CEOs from top corporations have also offered input.

And while the White House is taking the lead on this restructuring, Mulvaney also acknowledged that Congress will have to play a role as well.

“Net, we think we could run the government more efficiently than the previous administration can and we think we can run the government with fewer people than the previous administration,” he said. (RELATED: Trump touts infrastructure plan, ‘American first’ agenda and rollback of red tape)

The director noted that the objective is all about getting the government to a point where it works the most efficiently for the American people.

“This is about good government, okay? It’s not about big government, it’s not about small government, it’s about good government,” he said. “And that is what I think the president talks about when he talks about draining the swamp.

“If you’re on the Left, the Right, the middle, they don’t know where they are philosophically, they know Washington doesn’t function well,” he added.

He said what will kick in Wednesday “is what we call the smart hiring plan.” As soon as his new guidance plan is distributed, the White House expects agencies will review what they believe to be the president’s priorities, examine the budget blueprint, and “fashion” their hiring or elimination of their respective workforces.

J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for NaturalNews.com and NewsTarget.com, as well as editor of The National Sentinel.

Sources:

Breitbart.com

Newstarget.com

Whitehouse.gov