John Kamensky

In 2012, President Obama’s digital government plan ordered federal agencies to create at least two mobile apps.  A lot has happened since then, and at all levels of government.

The fiscal year 2016 consolidated appropriations bill was signed in mid-December, averting a potential government shutdown, but the bill was over two thousand pages long, with even more details in the accompanying committee reports.  The amount of detail is amazing, including a provision authorizing breastfeeding of babies in federal buildings (p. 582), but there are also five provisions that have potential long-term effects on government performance and management.

The recent history on government reorganization efforts hasn’t been too good.  President Obama in his 2012 State of the Union offered a fairly mild proposal to reorganize the federal government’s trade functions.  This was a Republican proposal from the 1990s, but the only bipartisan response it generated was opposition to any large-scale reorganization.

Improving Grants Management. Shelley Metzenbaum, in an article in Government Executive, writes: “. . . the way federal grants are managed gets woefully little attention. To achieve higher returns on the taxpayer’s dollar, that needs to change.

FY2017 Budget – Open Data Format. The FY2017 budget was released in two formats this year. The traditional PDF download and for the first time, a separate site, which offers downloadable data and some high-level interactive ability to view the budget graphically by program area or agency. . . . .In addition, Government Executive highlights eleven “major reforms” in the budget, most of which it judges to be achievable. . . . Well, maybe not granting the president the authority to reorganize federal agencies on his own. DHS Proposes New Appropriations Structure.

President Obama’s fiscal year 2017 budget proposal, released in early February, builds on bipartisan momentum at all levels of government to increase the use of data and evidence in making decisions so “government can do more of what works and less of what does not.”  The budget “proposes to take additional evidence-based approaches to scale,” strengthen the base of available evidence available to future policymakers, and increase the analytical capacity of agencies to use evidence and data.

New SES Onboarding Guidance.  Federal Times reports that the Office of Personnel Management has issued a new guide to agencies.

he saw. Similarly, Beth Simone Noveck, in her new book, Smart Citizens, Smarter State also shares a vision of the future of government – a vision she and her colleagues build upon a the Governance Lab at New York University in a series of practical case studies. In a recent presentation, she observed that governing well in the next President’s administration is going to depend upon treating the public and the civil service as skilled partners in problem solving. De Tocqueville wrote that in the United States of the 1830s, “. . .

Articles from across the Web that we at the IBM Center for The Business of Government found interesting, February 22-26, 2016

John Kamensky