A few of you have written to me asking for a copy of the Booz Allen Hamilton report on changing government that I discussed in a story last month. You can find the report on their Web site here.
Browsing: Agencies
The House Homeland Security Committee plans to mark up a bill on Thursday that would kill the Transportation Security Administration’s Performance Accountability and Standards System. In its place, HR 1881 would move roughly 45,000 screeners to the General Schedule system most federal employees are currently under. Unions criticize the PASS pay-for-performance system as unfair, and say it is driving many screeners to leave TSA. The bill would also grant collective bargaining rights to screeners, also known as transportation security officers. This would likely set off a battle between the American Federation of Government Employees and the National Treasury Employees Union…
Accenture, OMB Watch and the Georgetown Public Policy Institute have a new report out (.pdf) on improving the government’s performance management system. If you’ve been following the Obama/performance management discussion for a while, you’ve probably heard many of the recommendations before: modify PART to focus on outcomes rather than numerical outputs; encourage federal managers to use the results; give Congress more input into the process. But it’s nice to see those ideas compiled into one report — particularly now that OMB has a chief performance officer who might act on them.
Robert McNamara, the controversial former Defense Secretary who spent his twilight years apologizing for escalating the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War, died early this morning in Washington. He was 93 years old. McNamara was a top manager at the Ford Motor Co. and had just taken over the company in 1960Â when President John F. Kennedy tapped him to run the Pentagon. According to the Washington Post, McNamara used his considerable management skills to tame the military’s massive bureaucracy: At the Pentagon, McNamara quickly put his own stamp on the sprawling military bureaucracy in what amounted to a management…
That’s the conclusion from a new Gallup survey, which found two-thirds of Americans support allowing the Postal Service to switch to 5-day mail delivery to help fix its financial problems. 14 percent said they strongly favor the idea; 52 percent favor it. There’s less support for other cost-cutting measures: Only 11 percent of Americans would favor closing their local post office, for example. (2 percent are “strongly in favor” of it; I’d love to know who those people are…) But here’s the one that really interested me: 48 percent of Americans — a surprisingly high number — are okay with…
The General Services Administration turns 60 years old today. And from this birthday news release, it sounds like the agency has no plans to retire. “After six decades we’re just hitting our prime,” Acting Administrator Paul Prouty said in the statement. With billions in Recovery Act dollars flowing out of agencies today, GSA stands ready to “help green the government, move America toward energy independence, increased transparency and accountability and much, much more,” he said. To celebrate the agency established by President Harry Truman in 1949 to centralize the procurement of goods, services and office space for the federal government,…
The incoming General Services Administration chief should no longer require vendors to give the government their best prices, according to an advisory panel. Instead, GSA should insist that agency customers buying products and services worth at least $100,000 from GSA’s federal supply schedules program obtain at least three bids from vendors before making a purchase. These and other recommendations are outlined in a report finalized by the Multiple Award Schedule Advisory Panel today. The 15-member panel was formed last year by former GSA Administrator Lurita Doan to suggest ways to improve the federal supply schedules program, also known as the…
The House passed the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act in a 389-22 vote today. The House version of the bill would suspend the use of public-private competitions for federal jobs for three years, end the department’s pay-for-performance system and direct new contracting reforms.
The $106 billion war supplemental bill President Barack Obama signed yesterday will start closing the pay gap between Foreign Service officers in Washington and overseas beginning this fiscal year. The bill for the first time authorizes diplomats abroad to receive the same 23.1 percent locality payment they would receive if they were stationed in the Washington area. The bill does not spell out how much the State Department and other foreign affairs agencies such as the Agency for International Development should pay Foreign Service officers this year. The American Foreign Service Association suggested closing the gap by one-third — or…
H.R. 22 was approved this morning by the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee on the federal workforce, Postal Service, and the District of Columbia (say that five times fast…). Now it goes to the full committee. More details to come over on the Web site.