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It turns out the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 and the Bush administration's now-abandoned Program Assessment Rating Tool were good for something. Those attempts at creating...

If there's to be a resolution to the looming threat of sequestration, it'll stem from party caucus meetings among members of Congress centered on a discussion of "who's going to be blamed more," said Paul Carliner, a former Democratic Senate Appropriators Committee staffer.

Pity the administrators of the General Services Administration. Politically appointed and at the apex of their career, they seem almost uniformly…disappointed. Having crept up from the swampy...

A lack of central planning and a focus on immediate threats is what permitted the United States to overwhelmingly arm itself during World War II, said Arthur Herman, a historian and author of Freedom's Forge,  new account of how the private sector built what President Franklin Roosevelt termed the "Arsenal of Democracy."

Federal agencies fall far short of the private sector in buying commodity products and services through consolidated contracts that gain lower pricing in exchange for high-volume ordering – a technique known as strategic sourcing – find the Government Accountability Office.

What the federal government does is a function of how it does it; a change in policy merely announced is policy still unimplemented. Yet, most media coverage of the federal government centers around...

"VA's processes and the oversight were too weak, ineffective, and in some instances, nonexistent," the OIG says in a report (.pdf) released Oct. 1, just a day after VA Assistant Secretary for Human Resources and Administration John Sepúlveda resigned over matters discussed in it.Sepúlveda had a "hands-off approach" toward conference oversight that resulted in "a confusion of roles and a dysfunctional execution of responsibilities."

Seventy federal agencies owe approximately $14 million in unpaid taxes as of Dec. 31, 2011, according to a Tax Inspector General for Tax Administration report (.pdf) dated Sept. 5, but not released publicly until later that month, perhaps from trepidation of ensuing snark.

There's been ample opportunity to recently contemplate why the federal government is so bad at project management. During a recent Senate hearing, federal officials discussed another root...

A continuing resolution to keep the government funded through March 26 cleared Congress with a Sept. 22 Senate vote of 62-30 to approve the measure, which already gained House approval Sept. 13 on a 329-91 vote. The continuing resolution's expected passage into law does nothing to alleviate the specter of sequestration, which will occur in January unless Congress moves to undo it.