Latest Commentary

Totemic positions on taxes

November 13, 2012 | By
Taxes aren't just taxes any more in American politics – they're totems of ideological purity, which makes reasoned discussion difficult. Witness, for example, wave of relief that...

Post-truth times and the CRS

November 6, 2012 | By
We live in disturbingly post-truth times, when ideology increasingly is a license to assert what you believe is true by sheer dint of belief. Assertions of belief that ignore facts become assertions...

The self-licking ice cream cone of outrage at federal inefficiency

October 23, 2012 | By
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...

Tangherlini's two words for GSA: Zeit. Geist.

October 16, 2012 | By
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...

FierceGovernment grows

October 8, 2012 | By
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...

Address workforce issues in detail for better project management

September 25, 2012 | By
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...

Privacy emerges to forefront of technology regulatory concern

September 18, 2012 | By

Though it's been fought mainly in skirmishes rather than an all-out push along the lines of cybersecurity, privacy protection has emerged as the technology regulation issue of the year. Right now those who are concerned that the technological advances of the recent past not permanently gel into a world where expectations of privacy once considered routine melt away have a mixed record of victory to draw on. 

Proposed past performance rule doesn't address real problems

September 11, 2012 | By
A move by the FAR Council to standardize past performance evaluations is laudable, but I suspect problems with past performance as an evaluation factor will persist. Partly that's because it can...

Onboard your new employees well

September 4, 2012 | By
Auditors sometimes exist to point out the obvious, and so it is with a recent Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report about new employee onboarding processes at the Internal Revenue...

The Internet is forever: Federal conference edition

August 28, 2012 | By
Whether you've heard it from human resources or you've said it as a parent, we're all familiar with this nugget of advice: Be careful what you post on the Internet because it will be...
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