Common Operating Picture (COP) systems are critical for supporting the situational awareness needs of the homeland security mission.
Through our portfolio review process at the Department of Homeland Security, we identified more than 20 different COP investments, most of which were largely uncoordinated, stand-alone investments. Keep reading →
Though historically a place where ink meets paper, the Government Printing Office now produces nearly all of the country’s most important documents in digital form and is currently pursuing technologies to broaden its reach across agencies and to the public.
Chief Technology Officer Richard Davis said efforts are under way to migrate troves of digital information in the Federal Digital System created in 2006 to Extensible Markup Language (XML). The first of which was the fiscal 2013 budget released Monday via a collection of documents published by GPO. The rest of GPO’s data will migrate during fiscal 2012. The move will essentially allow users to use and pass on the information more easily and could eventually allow GPO to generate revenue through new digital products. Keep reading →
Partnership for Public Service Presidnet and CEO Max Stier urged Congress on Wednesday to answer 25 key questions before moving ahead with proposals to reorganize federal agencies as part of efforts to save money and increase efficiency.
Wednesday’s hearing — “Why Reshuffling Government Agencies Won’t Solve the Federal Government’s Obesity Problem” — was scheduled to shed light on proposals to assess and reshuffle the size of our federal government. Keep reading →
Americans are more satisfied with services provided by the U.S. federal government than they were a year ago, according to a report released today by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).
ACSI results show that citizen satisfaction with federal government is up 2.3% to 66.9 (on a 0-100 scale) for 2011. The improvement, however, comes on the heels of a large decline for federal services, when citizen satisfaction tumbled nearly 5% to 65.4 between 2009 and 2010. Keep reading →
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s new director — armed with the bureau’s full powers — has set his top priorities for what to do first.
With President Obama’s recess appointment of former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray last week, the six-month-old bureau — created as part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law — inherited a couple of key new powers.
President Obama called on Congress to reinstate Presidential authority to reorganize and consolidate the federal government in order to drive proposals to streamline government services, focusing first on agencies that serve American businesses.
“We live in a 21stcentury economy, but we’ve still got a government organized for the 20thcentury. Our economy has fundamentally changed – as has the world – but the government has not. The needs of our citizens have fundamentally changed but their government has not,” President Obama said. Keep reading →
An obscure federal agency tasked with protecting the pensions of employees at bankrupt companies has managed to maintain high-quality services under difficult economic conditions.
The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) is the last step for nearly every private company in the U.S. that files for bankruptcy protection. PBGC takes over a company’s pension and guarantees it for retirees. Keep reading →
This article is the first of several commentaries appearing courtesy of Breaking Defense this week examining what America’s leaders should do next to secure our national security, 10 years after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
This is the second installment in a series of columns by Recovery Board Chairman Earl Devaney on the lessons he has learned from his work on the Recovery Board, which oversees the $787 billion Recovery program. The column originally appeared at Recovery.gov.
There’s nothing like a punch in the gut to get your attention. Keep reading →
The nation’s first Secretary of Homeland Security said Congress has “failed” America’s first responders by not acting on legislation that would dedicate wireless communications spectrum to a nationwide, interoperable, public safety network and said it is unlikely anything will pass before the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
“It’s wrong. It’s really wrong for them to have failed these first responders,” said Tom Ridge, appointed by President George W. Bush shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 to lead the homeland security effort, and who subsequently became America’s first Secretary of Homeland Security in 2003. Keep reading →