Ron Sanders, vice president and fellow at Booz Allen Hamilton, and Jackson Nickerson, non resident senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, discuss their new book with Francis Rose. Sanders and Nickerson co-authored “Tackling Wicked Government Problems: A Practical Guide for Developing Enterprise Leaders”. This program originally aired on July 16 on In Depth.

Requests-for-proposals are out for the multi-award contract OASIS. NASA’s SEWP 5 is close to completion and the Homeland Security Department has a multi-billion dollar cybersecurity contract on hand. Those and others are adding up to a busy time in the federal contracting world. Guy Timberlake, chief visionary officer of the American Small Business Coalition, spoke with Francis Rose on Industry Chatter. Timberlake says there might not be as much money floating around the federal market as it seems.

Two formerly-powerful organized crime families in New York have been seriously crippled, thanks to some good old fashioned sleuthing at the FBI. Some snitching from one of the crime bosses helped, too. For his work on taking down the operations, Seamus McElearney, FBI supervisory special agent, is a finalist for the Homeland Security and Law Enforcement Medal in this year’s Service to America awards.

Related Story: FBI team honored for efforts to break up two N.Y. crime families

PHOTOS: Meet the 2013 Service to America Medal Finalists

Scott Gould didn’t wait long to find a new home after leaving his post as the deputy secretary of Veterans Affairs in May. Gould didn’t head to one of the beltway bandits. In the latest edition of his bi-weekly feature, Inside the Reporter’s Notebook, Federal News Radio’s Executive Editor Jason Miller tells us where Scott Gould landed.

Planning and justifying the costs for one of the nation’s largest health care delivery systems is no easy chore. In fact, it’s so complex, that the Department of Veterans Affairs starts its annual budget exercise almost a year and a half before the President’s budget hits Capitol Hill. Now, based on some prior recommendations from the Government Accountability Office, VA is implementing some new measures to make its budget justifications more digestible and transparent to lawmakers. GAO just finished its annual review of VA’s health care budget. Randy Williamson, director of health care issues at the Government Accountability Office, discusses some of its findings.

The hunt for enterprise leadership is what some experts call the new normal for federal agencies. As budgets shrink and new technologies emerge, the need for interagency collaboration grows. Adm. Thad Allen, senior vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton and former commandant of the Coast Guard, joined the Brookings Institution Aug. 14 to set enterprise leadership goals with his colleague Ron Sanders, vice president and fellow of Booz Allen Hamilton. Allen says enterprise leaders will need a new set of skills to manage interagency operations.

The William Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies says it was able to avert some of the huge productivity losses other parts of the Pentagon felt during the six week furloughs. This is because of a flexibile work plan it already had in place. The Perry Center is one of three hundred organizations who just won the Alfred P. Sloan Award for workplace flexibility from the Society for Human Resources Management. Jeff Murphy, the Center’s management services chief, told Federal News Radio’s Jared Serbu about the workplace flexibility programs they’ve implemented.