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Congress returns after its August recess needing to complete 12 spending bills, deal with a looming fiscal deadline, and focus on cybersecurity and DoD issues.
Former Defense Department Comptroller Bob Hale wants Congress to learn from the past five years of budgetary turmoil. Congress has about 10 work days when it gets back from recess Sept. 8. – with no immediate sign of a budget deal for fiscal 2016.
Burnout levels in federal agencies are on the rise as employees deal with the threat of sequestration and the expectation of doing more with less. Higher stress levels can negatively affect performance and your health. To beat stress you've got to understand it. Andrew Shatté is an executive education instructor and resilience expert at the Brookings Institution. He joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin to outline some of the factors for causing stress, and some tips for managing it.
We've all heard the complaints and lived with the consequences. The congressional budget process is broken and needs drastic overhaul. The Bipartisan Policy Center has some suggestions for doing just that. Dr. Alice Rivlin is a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brooking Institution, and a former director of both the Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget. She co-authored the report with former Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), and joined Tom Temin on the Federal Drive to discuss it.
The latest iteration of Better Buying Power from the Department of Defense and legislation coming out of the Senate Armed Services Committee are two of the most recent efforts to help DoD buy better. Michael O\'Hanlon is co-director of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence, and director of foreign policy research at the Brookings Institution. His latest work is titled, \"Pentagon Acquisition Policy: Three quarters right, one quarter broken\". He tells In Depth with Francis Rose about what he calls the JIEDDO model of acquisition.
The latest iteration of Better Buying Power from the Department of Defense, and legislation coming out of the Senate Armed Services Committee, are two of the most recent efforts to help DoD buy better. Michael O\'Hanlon is co-director of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence, and director of foreign policy research at the Brookings Institution. His latest work is titled \"Pentagon Acquisition Policy: Three quarters right -- one quarter broken\". He tells In Depth with Francis Rose whether three-quarters right is enough to get the job done for the military.
The Postal Service doesn't want to go into banking, but the idea just won't go away, according to experts on a Brookings Institution panel.
New research shows departments do not incorporate cybersecurity efforts into their goals and objectives, said Kevin Desouza, the associate dean for research at the college of public programs at Arizona State University and a non-resident senior fellow of Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution.
An Obama Administration initiative to fund social programs relies on one critical factor. Agencies had to use a data-driven and evidence-based approaches for planning and spending. Ron Haskins, senior fellow for economic studies at the Brookings Institution and author of "Show Me the Evidence," tells In Depth with Francis Rose how the evidence-based funding approach works.
Former government officials are diving into the debate over the future of the Senior Executive Service by drafting a blueprint for reform.
The Senior Executive Service is 35-years old, and yet it's never really worked the way it was intended. It didn't develop into the mobile cadre of managers who move from agency to agency. The Brookings Institution and Booz Allen Hamilton are holding a brainstorming session today with government leaders to discuss whether, and how, the SES should change. Federal News Radio's Emily Kopp spoke with two of the organizers, Ron Sanders and Bob Hale of Booz Allen on the Federal Drive with Tom Temin. Sanders says the SES has come under a lot of stress and scrutiny of late, making now the right time for change.
As of now, there are an estimated 7,000 politically appointed positions in the federal government. Again, it's an estimate, because there is no centralized list of political jobs, so no one knows the actual number. Nor is there a list of how many of those jobs are vacant on any given day. John Hudak argues that missing data created an embarrassing management and oversight problem for Congress and OMB. He has some ideas for how to close that information gap. Hudak is a fellow for Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He explained on In Depth with Jared Serbu how the government machine can still run with a large number of vacancies.
Federal News Radio asked a panel of experts how they would solve the flawed budget process as part of our special report: Now or Never: Ideas to Save the Failing Budget Process. See what they had to say and tell us which ideas you think would work best.
The challenge is not to fine tune the obviously dysfunctional budget process. The challenge is to rethink the budget process and the presentation of the budget so that it is more likely to produce a durable consensus among a significant number of Democrats and Republicans and promote better public understanding of the fiscal choices the nation faces, says David Wessel of the Brookings Institution. Mr. Wessel's column is part of Federal News Radio's special report, Now or Never: Ideas to Save the Failing Budget Process.