John Kamensky

John Kamensky

Partnering Across Branches. NextGov reports: “The General Services Administration announced Tuesday it will partner with the Government Accountability Office to assist Congress’ investigatory arm in launching its nascent technology innovation lab.”

Legendary Police Commissioner William Bratton presided at one end of the U-shaped table with a podium in the center and two screens behind. A precinct commander for one of the city’s 77 police precincts was at the podium.

April 23, 1998. A bipartisan summit, of sorts, on the implementation of the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) was being broadcast by C-SPAN and I had been tasked with drafting Vice President Al Gore’s remarks. The summit was hosted by the National Academy of Public Administration and the Council for Excellence in Government and included the House majority leader, Richard Armey, as well as one of GPRA’s lead Senate sponsors, Sen. John Glenn.

This team of registered nurses is part of a national network created by the Nurse-Family Partnership -- a 40-year old non-profit that visits the homes of low-income, first-time mothers to help “transform the lives of vulnerable, low-income mothers pregnant with their first child.”

Background.  Several days earlier, the three of us had been invited to share our ideas on how the vice president might proceed with his new mandate from the president to “reinvent the government,” where the vice president had to deliver a plan of action to the president in six months.  Gore’s newly-appointed advisor, Elaine Kamarck, received the task of getting this off the ground and she had invited the three of us to talk with her, based on the advice of David Osborne, a co-author of the best-selling book

John Kamensky

Since 1991, the federal government has imposed 110 new requirements on university research grant recipients.  But it capped reimbursement for administrative costs in 1991 to be no more than 26 percent of a grant.  Partly because of the cap and increased mandates, universities have increased spending on research by $7 billion between 2010 and 2017 from their own resources.

What are some examples of these new requirements?

John Kamensky

Inventorying Federal Research. Federal Times reports: “The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy . . .  wants to decrease burden on researchers by setting data repository standards for federal agencies to provide “optimization and improved consistency” across the federal government’s repositories.”

John Kamensky

John Kamensky