Dive Brief:
- President Joe Biden signed into law the Government Service Delivery Act Saturday. The law aims to improve people's interactions with government services.
- Under the law, the Office of Management and Budget director will designate or appoint a senior official as the Federal Government Service Delivery Lead. The position is charged with coordinating governmentwide service delivery efforts across agencies, with a focus on high-impact service providers, defined as “an agency program identified by the Director due to the scale and impact of the public-facing services of the program.”
- The law was introduced in October 2023 by a bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., Byron Donalds, R-Fla., Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., and William Timmons, R-S.C.
Dive Insight:
The Government Service Delivery Act garnered bipartisan support. Republicans and Democrats celebrated the law’s passage Tuesday.
“The federal government has an obligation to effectively deliver services that Americans rely on including Social Security, Medicare and veterans’ and retirement benefits,” Khanna said in a prepared statement Tuesday. “The Government Service Delivery Improvement Act is a bipartisan solution that will directly help constituents by making the delivery of these services more efficient and reliable.”
“The American people deserve government services that are efficient, reliable, and easy to navigate. Our aim is to collectively bring government services into the 21st century to improve the customer experience and more effectively connect the American people with the services they need,” Timmons said in a prepared statement.
The bipartisan support shows CX is good government, according to Amira Boland, chief of staff at New America’s New Practice Lab.
“This gives me such great hope, because it is something that is now a statutory responsibility of government, as signed on by bicameral, bipartisan members of Congress,” Boland said. “It just goes to show that there is [an] efficiency angle to this, accountability — they're serving all people.”
Boland, who was appointed first-ever lead for Federal Customer Experience at OMB, told CX Dive that the law solidifies that function and elevates it to a political appointment.
Establishing the role in law underscores “their statutory responsibility to be doing these functions and to be thinking about them as of equal weight to any of their other statutory responsibilities,” she said. “I'll say for myself and my counterparts at agencies, [we] often had to fight to be at the table, or to be taken seriously, or not to be seen as a nice-to-have or something soft and fluffy.”
Having the role in OMB allows the lead to have more impact, too.
“To quote Russ Vought, the incoming OMB director, OMB is really the nerve center of government,” Boland said. “I think that that applies in this case. OMB is at the center of the budget making, of really fundamental policy decisions, of trade-offs across agencies, of setting standards. This is just explicitly naming service delivery as a part of that.”
