During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised to create a "focused team within the White House" to improve government performance and efficiency.

"This unit, a SWAT team, will be composed of top-performing and highly-trained government professionals and be headed by a new Chief Performance Officer who will report directly to the president," Obama promised. "The CPO will work with federal agencies to set tough performance targets and hold managers responsible for progress. The president will meet regularly with cabinet officers to review the progress their agencies are making toward meeting performance improvement targets."

As we noted the last time we looked at this promise, Obama appointed businessman Jeffrey D. Zients, to be his chief performance officer. He was confirmed on June 19, 2009. (He"s now acting director of the Office of Management and Budget.)

Here are a few things Zients and his staff have been working on since then:

• The Accountable Government Initiative, which the White House says has already cut at least $16 billion in contract spending, recommended termination of redundant programs in the president's 2012 budget, and avoided $4 billion in improper payments for government services. Another target: federally owned buildings and real estate, which cost $20 billion a year to maintain.

• Adoping a "cloud first" policy for information technology. "We are reducing our data-center footprint by 40 percent by 2015 and shifting the agency default approach to IT to a cloud-first policy as part of the 2012 budget process," Zients said in a blog post. "Consolidating more than 2,000 government data centers will save money, increase security and improve performance." The Department of Homeland Security and the Education Department have taken steps in this direction, the White House said, and the General Services Administration has announced that it will be the first federal agency to adopt an agency-wide cloud-based e-mail system, under a $6.7 million contract to shift 17,000 GSA employee e-mail accounts to Google Apps for Government.

• A commitment by the federal government to enter into "energy savings performance contracts" for federal buidlings over the next 24 months.

• New guidelines for implementing a customer service mandate from the White House. According to a memo by Zients released in June 2011, "within 180 days, each agency will post a customer service plan" that identifies ways in which technology can be used "to improve the customer experience will be designed and executed."

• A new appraisal system for the Senior Executive Service, a class of high-ranking federal managers. Among other things, the new system is designed to increase uniformity in job evaluations.

• Implement the Securing Americans Value and Efficiency (or SAVE) award, in which federal employees submit ideas for improving government received tens of thousands of ideas on how to make government more efficient and effective. The contest, which began in 2009, has led to 56,000 submissions, with the White House saying it has included "dozens of the most promising ideas" included in the Terminations, Reductions, and Savings volume of the president"s budget.

John M. Palguta, vice president for policy at the Partnership for Public Service, said he was impressed with how closely Zients has worked with each agency"s appointed "performance improvement officers. "We know that Jeff Zients and OMB paid attention and were interested in finding ways to provide additional support to the PIO"s," said Palguta, whose group issued a survey in April 2011 about the PIOs" ideas for improving the federal government.

We can"t say for sure whether all of these innovations will lead to lower costs and improved government efficiency over the long term. But Obama"s promise was about creating the office, setting performance targets and coordinating between agencies. Everything we"ve seen indicates that the administration has done each of those things. We rate this a Promise Kept.