Gay Gilbert

Gay joined the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (ETA) in November 2000 and currently serves as the Administrator of the Office of Unemployment Insurance overseeing the nation's federal-state Unemployment Insurance program.

Hannah Sistare

Hannah S. Sistare served as Staff Director and Counsel to Senator Fred Thompson on the United States Senate Governmental Affairs Committee from 1995 to 2002. She has held positions within the Departments of Health and Human Services and Labor and has taught at both George Washington University and American University. She also served as Chief of Staff to Senator Charles H. Percy and as Chief Legislative Assistant to former Senate Republican Leader Hugh Scott. She is currently a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.

 

Reflections on government excellence on the anniversary of 9/11

First, a reflection of events from Sep 11, 2001: I was the career deputy advisor for OMB on IT and E-Government issues. On that day, our office was working closely with the Council for Excellence in Government (CEG) to host a meeting of international IT leaders – one of the early meetings of CIOs and equivalent executives from multiple countries, done in partnership with CEG (which for many years led government, industry, academia, non-profits, and civil society groups generally on technology and management excellence initiatives).

The Open Government Dialogue

With little fanfare, the While House announced that 29 agencies launched their Open Government weblinks on schedule (per an OMB directive), on Saturday, February 6th. Virtually all of them also invited citizens to participate in a dialogue on how they could improve their approaches to transparency, participation, collaboration, and innovation.

Health Care Reform Implementation (Part 2)

A series of presentations at the annual conference of the National Academy of Public Administration focused on the complicated management challenges all levels of government will be facing upon the passage of any health care reform legislation. As one participant noted: “There’s too much of a view that programs are self-executing and you just need more inspectors general and audits. . . that happened with the Recovery Act.” The consensus seemed to be that this assumption clearly won't work for health care reform!

Risk Management and Reducing Improper Payments: A Case Study of the U.S. Department of Labor

This report continues the IBM Center’s long interest in risk management with a specific focus on employing risk management strategies to reduce improper payments in the U S Department of Labor’s (DOL) Unemployment Insurance (UI) program. There is a long tradition of public management scholarship that has provided empirical support for the hypothesis that management matters for government performance. One specific management activity that has been growing in prominence in federal agencies over the last several years is risk management.