Automate running a report?

Is there any way to kick off a velocity report or other export of data from the rest api?  or any other way of kicking it off through scripting?  There are a few actions that built in reports can do much faster and more efficiently, like getting all relationships for a project, and might be easier to script the built in call rather than trying to do it through rest api and causing a huge load on the server.

I tried searching the documentation and forum but have not found anything yet.    Thanks