President Obama created a new oversight board in June 2011 as part of his new Campaign to Cut Government Waste. He directed it to report to him in December on ways to improve accountability, based on lessons from the implementation of the Recovery Act. That report is now out. President Obama created the Government AccountabilityRead… Read more »
There may be widespread public dissatisfaction with Congress’s performance, but GAO has issued a new report that highlights Congress’s role in overseeing agency performance. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a set of briefing slides, “Managing for Results: Opportunities for Congress to Address Government Performance Issues,” which it is using to bring Members of CongressRead… Read more »
Back in April, President Obama issued an executive order directing agencies to step up their efforts to improve customer service. Whatever happened? The Executive Order gave agencies until the last week of October to provide their plans to the Office of Management and Budget, and last week the plans were delivered and posted on OMB’sRead… Read more »
President Obama put Vice President Biden in charge of the implementation of the $787 billion Recovery Act. Ed DeSeve had an eagle eye’s view of the interaction between agencies, states, localities, and non-profits. He shares his lessons learned from Recovery Act implementation, as well as advice for “the next big implementation challenge,” whatever that mightRead… Read more »
The New York City Police Department launched it vaunted CompSTAT more than a decade ago. This data-driven management approach inspired dozens of other cities and several states to adopt it to run their operations as well. Now it is being pioneered in federal agencies and will likely spread quickly with the encouragement of Congress andRead… Read more »
How can organizations reach beyond their traditional smokestacks and silos? Coordination mechanisms have existed for years, notes Naval Postgraduate School author Nancy Roberts, but they haven’t been used. But the availability of new web-based tools and the pressures from cost cuts, the war on terror, and emergency management may have created a new environment forRead… Read more »
States and localities were the front line for implementation of more than $275 billion in spending via more than 65 programs. They also faced pressures to spend, spend quickly, spend wisely – and report what they did in almost real-time. A new IBM Center report examines what happened in several cities in Virginia. In 2009,Read… Read more »
Obama signed the GPRA Modernization Act in January. While OMB has yet to issue any formal guidance to agencies on what they should do, there has been a flurry of conferences, forums, and seminars that have focused on the new law’s meaning and intent. In the past month, I’ve participated in more than a halfRead… Read more »
I believe that the best argument made by Eggers and O’Leary in If We Can Put a Man on the Moon was the need for lawmakers to consider how their proposals will be implemented when the programs are passed to the agencies. I was thinking about this when I was visiting the Woodrow Wilson Center’sRead… Read more »
So I’ve read (or am currently reading) two pretty interesting books: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon: Getting Big Things Done in Government by William Eggers and John O’Leary and The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel, Lang Davison and JohnRead… Read more »