IBM Center for The Business of Government

(This article first appeared on the Brookings Blog "TechTank.")

A review of the federal budget process

ta is there. , but the interpretation can be more complex. The December attack in San Bernardino prompted people to ask whether or not the government should be more active in using social media data to prevent such things from happening again. Certainly, social data can be highly valuable, but it has its limitations, and agencies must be aware of how best to use it. Determining sentiment – It is very useful to understand how citizens feel about certain issues such as a new a policy. Many programs will try to determine sentiment by categorizing certain words as positive or negative.

President Obama’s fiscal year 2017 budget proposal, released in early February, builds on bipartisan momentum at all levels of government to increase the use of data and evidence in making decisions so “government can do more of what works and less of what does not.”  The budget “proposes to take additional evidence-based approaches to scale,” strengthen the base of available evidence available to future policymakers, and increase the analytical capacity of agencies to use evidence and data.

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, “. . .