Recovery Act

How does NYC DEP protect the environmental health, welfare and natural resources of the City and its residents?

What does it take to deliver over one billion gallons of quality drinking water daily to over 8 million residents?

How is NYC greening its operations and making them more sustainable?

What steps are being taken to maintain NYC's water system for the next hundred years?

This week the General Services Administration (GSA) is hosting its 49th annual Interagency Resources Management Conference. An estimated 300 Chief Acquisition Officers, Chief Financial Officers, Chief Information Officers, Chief Human Capital Officers, Inspectors General, program managers and other senior executive leaders are attending. It is the most well known government-wide, government-only conference where leaders delve into emerging management issues and how they are being confronted.

The Recovery Act is quietly influencing federal-state-local relations. Not only is the money being used to save jobs as states and localities cut back their budgets, but the ways states and localities are choosing to use and report on the funds are creating different ways for getting “the business of government” done.

Congress passed the $787 billion Recovery Act in early 2009. The Act – sometimes referred to as the stimulus bill – focused on job creation, but it does so through hundreds of existing and new federal programs. Implementing these programs falls on the shoulders of thousands of state, local, non-profit, and private organizations. The Act also spawned new governance models. What are the implications of these models for national policy leadership, accountability, and our federal system?

The IBM Center for The Business of Government hosted a forum in November 2009 to examine the Obama Administration’s themes for a high-performing government and to frame a public management research agenda.

Participants included nearly 50 of the nation’s top public management researchers, scholars, and distinguished practitioners.  The forum was an effort to help bridge the gap between research and practice, and to collectively develop a research agenda that would help government executives move things forward.

The Recovery Transparency and Accountability Board posted its second set of updates onto its Recovery.Gov website last week. The new data covered Recovery Act spending in the last quarter of 2009 (October – December).

“Where is Obama’s big-bang reform of government?” laments an insightful article by University of Maryland public administration dean, Donald Kettl, in a forum on President Obama’s management initiatives in the current issue of The Public Manager. He says that President Obama is quietly reshaping the way government works and dubs it a "stealth revolution."

What does it mean to be a citizen in a Gov 2.0 world? President Obama’s FY 2011 budget is being dissected for its shift in the size and scope of government. But several initiatives in the budget, and things happening at the state and local levels, point to subtle -- but significant --shifts in the role of citizens in their government.