TSP's G Fund Helps Delay Debt Ceiling
Sequester Hits Disaster Relief
Feds Respond to Oklahoma Tornadoes
Making Government 'Simpler'
OK Senator Wants Aid Offset by Budget Cuts
Boldly Go Where No Fed's Gone Before
AUTHOR ARCHIVES
Joseph Marks
Staff Correspondent
Joseph Marks covers government technology issues, social media, Gov 2.0 and global Internet freedom for Nextgov. He previously reported on federal litigation and legal policy for Law360 and on local, state and regional issues for two Midwestern newspapers. He also interned for Congressional Quarterly’s Homeland Security section and the Associated Press’s Jerusalem Bureau. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Wisconsin and a master’s in international affairs from Georgetown.
VanRoekel to Temporarily Lead OMB Management Team
May 21, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel will temporarily lead the White House Office of Management and Budget’s management team, an OMB spokeswoman said Tuesday. OMB Director Sylvia Burwell asked VanRoekel to lead the management team on an interim basis until a new deputy director for management is confirmed, spokeswoman Ari ...
How Feds Fail
May 20, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
During a panel discussion on innovation’s role in government on Monday, an audience member asked participants how they react when innovations fail. The panel took place at the American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council’s annual Management of Change conference in Cambridge, Md. Here’s what the panelists said. It’s ...
Shared Services Can Be a Money Maker for Some Agencies
May 20, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
Sharing services isn’t just a good way for federal departments to lower information technology costs, it’s also a way for underfunded agencies to scratch back some of their dwindling budgets by providing services to their peers, a Customs and Border Protection official said Monday. CBP’s technology division has lost more ...
From Russia with Opacity
May 20, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
Russia has officially withdrawn a letter of intent it filed in April 2012 saying it would join the Open Government Partnership, becoming the international transparency body’s first casualty. Open government and technology blogger Alex Howard broke the news of Russia’s withdrawal from the OGP on Friday. Nathaniel Heller, whose organization ...
White House Defends Obamacare on We the People
May 17, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
The White House turned to its petition site We the People late Thursday to combat Republican criticisms of President Obama’s two-year-old healthcare overhaul. Around the same time that the House of Representatives voted for the 37th time to repeal the 2010 Affordable Care Act, the White House posted responses to ...
How Data Can Aid Farmers' Markets and Education Innovations
May 16, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
Two things that came across my desk this week show the potential of President Obama’s new open data policy but also its potential pitfalls. That policy requires agencies to make all future data they collect open and machine readable by default. The hope is that entrepreneurs outside government will use ...
Cloud Computing Could Transform Foreign Aid
May 15, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
The next agency to invest heavily in the cloud may be the U.S. Agency for International Development. The agency is in the market for a flexible, cloud-based platform that will allow officials at USAID's mission offices overseas and Washington headquarters to rapidly build new technology, according to solicitation documents posted ...
Data Center Consolidation Savings ‘Minimal’ So Far
May 14, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
An initiative to consolidate federal data centers has yielded minimal savings so far and the government is unlikely to meet its goal of $3 billion in savings by 2015, the Government Accountability Office said in a report Tuesday. Agencies have also failed to adequately report on their data center cost ...
Dot-govs Dip Below 1,000
May 14, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
Remember that plan to drastically consolidate federal websites? Progress on the initiative has been slow since mid-2011 when President Obama first highlighted dot-gov proliferation as part of his campaign to cut government waste. As we approach the three-year anniversary of that initiative, though, the government has passed a milestone. For ...
The Story of an Open Document
May 14, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
When a cross-government team prepared to write the government’s new open data policy they wanted to do it in the most open way possible, Ben Balter, a Presidential Innovation Fellow who worked on the project, said. So for its primer on best open data practices, the team eschewed the common ...
