WASHINGTON — President Obama yesterday boasted he’s made the federal government “smarter.”
Obama said he’s taken the high-tech know-how that made his first presidential campaign “one of the most inclusive and one of the most successful campaigns in American history” and applied it to the federal government.
“As anyone knows, dealing with the federal government is not always high-technology and it’s not always user-friendly,” Obama said at the White House. “So over the past 4 1/2 years, we’ve worked diligently to change that.”
The president’s focus on improving government services provided him a welcome diversion from his struggles at home and abroad, including recently announced delays for implementing ObamaCare and the failure to catch US spy-secrets leaker Edward Snowden.
As an example of technological innovations in government, Obama pointed to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s use of Web and mobile phone apps to more quickly sign up Hurricane Sandy victims for assistance — and claimed that tech-savvy government had produced $2.5 billion in annual savings.