Forty years ago, Congress passed a law to make government agencies more accountable and transparent in how they sought advice from industry and the public. It was called the Federal Advisory Committee Act.
Recent activity from the President and agencies has brought renewed attention to the issue – providing an opportunity that Federal leaders can use to help improve program operations.
The Administration’s Open Government Initiative has led to much progress over the past two years, yet more work remains to be done to further the cause of transparency.
The Bush Administration had its Results.Gov scorecard. The Obama Administration now has unveiled its Performance.Gov dashboard. Is a dashboard better than a scorecard?
The Bush website provided links to key management initiatives, such as the President’s Management Agenda Scorecard, a list and bios of top political appointees, and a set of agency examples of best practices.
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.
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, “. . .
On Monday, at an event with the Secretaries of State, Commerce, Homeland Security, the Attorney General, and the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Obama Administration released its international strategy for cyberspace. The strategy, described in a post from White House Cyber Coordinator Howard Schmidt, for the first time outlines a number of principles that the US will follow i