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Government Executive Editor in Chief Tom Shoop, along with other editors and staff correspondents, look at the federal bureaucracy from the outside in.
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Obama on Management Reform: It's a Private Matter

Some excerpts from President Obama's remarks at the White House today on what the administration is calling its "new management agenda":

We started by recruiting some of the smartest people from the private sector to work side-by-side with some of the smartest people in the public sector to help get it done. ...

Entrepreneurs and business owners are now using that data -- the people’s data --to create jobs and solve problems that government can’t solve by itself or can’t do as efficiently. ...

We’ve also welcomed a new class of Presidential Innovation Fellows -- and I’d love for the press to meet some of these folks, because they’re extraordinary.  These are Americans with vast private sector technology expertise who have volunteered to come serve their country in the [public] sector. ...

Now, the good news is America is full of talented, dedicated public servants who are working really hard every day to uphold the public trust. ...

And I’m going to be asking more people around the country -- more inventors and entrepreneurs and visionaries -- to sign up to serve.  We’ve got to have the brightest minds to help solve our biggest challenges. ... 

We've got the ...

Moneyball Government, Again

The Moneyball movement in government is gaining steam again. It started with the release of the film version of the Michael Lewis book in 2011, bringing to dramatic life the story of the Oakland A’s’ Billy Beane, and his efforts to substitute (or at least substantially augment) baseball scouts’ intuition about players with data-driven decision-making.

Soon, the Office of Management and Budget was endorsing the Moneyball approach, arguing that government needed to be relentlessly focused on goals, not processes, and rigorous in efforts to gather evidence about program performance. And that evidence, ultimately, should be used to drive budget decisions, the Obama administration declared.

Fast forward almost two years, and two high-ranking officials in the Obama and George W. Bush administrations put the question starkly in the July/August  “Ideas Issue” of The Atlantic: “Can Government Play Moneyball?” John Bridgeland, a Bush policy adviser, and Peter Orszag, Obama’s first OMB chief, argue that less than $1 of every $100 in government spending is spent analyzing whether the money is being spent wisely.

While the Moneyball approach seems trendy, the idea of measuring the performance of government programs isn’t new. Even in its modern incarnation, it’s more ...

Taxpayer Advocate’s Solution to Scandal

  • By Charles S. Clark
  • June 26, 2013
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National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson issued her required mid-year report to Congress on Wednesday and fleshed out one policy prescription that might head off any future scandal involving the Internal Revenue Service’s efforts to determine which quasi-political groups deserve tax-exempt status.

In addition to her perennial pleas for greater funding is a separate "special report." Here Olson reiterated her call for enactment of a Taxpayer Bill of Rights, noting that if her version were in force, eight of its 10 tenets were violated by the delayed and improper screening of applications.

She then repeated what policy wonks have heard from lawmakers looking into how the IRS Exempt Organizations division came to single out mostly conservative nonprofit groups for extra scrutiny in their applications. In a nutshell, the IRS lacks a clear criteria for making the calls, both in the law and in regulations going back to the 1950s.

Section 501(c)(4) of the tax code provides that an organization may qualify for tax-exempt status if it is “operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare,” Olson notes. Treasury regulations provide that an “organization is operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare if it is primarily engaged in ...

A Better-Prepped FBI Director?

  • By Charles S. Clark
  • June 20, 2013
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Conservative lawmakers and media outlets took notice on June 13 when departing FBI Director Robert Mueller appeared to muff an answer to a question on progress the bureau might be making in investigating the Internal Revenue Service for mishandling applications from largely conservative nonprofits seeking tax-exempt status.

In a repartee with Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, Mueller said he was not aware of how many agents or who within the FBI was at work on the probe promised back in May by Attorney General Eric Holder.

"This is the most important case in the country for the past six weeks and you don't know who the most important person is, leading the case?" pressed Jordan, a member of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee who is involved the panel’s own investigation.

"Not off the top of my head," Mueller said.

"You've had a month to investigate, and you can't even tell me who the lead investigator is? This is what happened. You can't even tell me what happened?" Jordan said. 

Flash forward to Wednesday, June 19, when Mueller appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee. This time the IRS issue was raised by Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala ...

Obama Breaks Ranks With Senior Executives

In April, I had the privilege of attending the Senior Executives Association’s annual Presidential Distinguished Rank Award banquet, honoring the recipients of the highest awards to civil servants for on-the-job performance.

I’ve attended the annual event several times, and as usual it was a classy, dignified affair, held at the State Department’s Diplomatic Reception Rooms, featuring an address by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. And lest you think it was an example of questionable federal spending, the event was, in fact, funded by SEA’s Professional Development League, with corporate support.

But it may be the last time SEA has any executives to celebrate.

That’s because the Obama administration has decided that in the era of sequestration, awarding bonuses of 20 percent to 35 percent of salary to the highest performing 1 percent of the government’s senior executive corps is unseemly. (Another 1 percent of senior level scientific and technical executives can receive the rank of Distinguished Senior Professional.) This week, the administration announced it was canceling the Presidential Rank Awards (which also honor a group of officials designated as Meritorious Executives) for 2013. The idea, the White House said, was to preserve all ...