Federal Drive Interviews — April 8, 2013

Federal Drive

Federal Drive Interviews — April 8, 2013

We kick off our weeklong series, Rise of the Money People, by interviewing former HUD CFO Doug Criscitello. Economist and financial planner Arthur Stein talks a...

Federal News Network Staff

April 8, 2013 10:50 am

4 min read

This is the Federal Drive show blog. Here you can listen to the interviews, find more information about the guests on the show each day and links to additional resources.

Today’s guests:

Doug Criscitello
managing director
Grant Thornton

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Federal finance may conjure up images of dull reports and boring people toiling away on spreadsheets. If that’s what comes to mind, it may be time to revise your thinking. Accounting and finance people can vastly enhance an agency’s ability to meet its mission goals. As we kick off our weeklong series, Rise of the Money People, we take a look at how finance is changing, and the skills people need to keep up with this dynamic profession. Joining us now is a man who spent a third of a century in federal finance, retiring recently as chief financial officer of Housing and Urban Development.

Arthur Stein
economist and financial planner
Arthur Stein Financial, LLC. Inc.

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Might be good to look around you before mentioning the words “chained CPI.” Word broke last week that President Barack Obama would propose this method of calculating cost-of-living adjustments in his 2014 budget proposal. Democrats called him a traitor. The change could help the federal government cut its deficit. But it would make life harder on retirees. Economist and financial planner Arthur Stein joins us to explain.

Related Story: The Chained CPI – How Big a Difference Will It Make? (Arthur Stein Financial, LLC)

John Johnson
quality assurance branch chief
Army’s Military Surface Deployment and Distribution Command

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If your military family has gotten moving orders, we suggest you buy your boxes and duct tape soon. Spring and early summer are prime moving seasons for everyone, not just military families. But you may be eligible for some help from the Army.

Catherine Woteki
chief scientist
USDA

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The government has the facts and figures. But it may lack the ingenuity to apply them. That’s the theory behind big-data paloozas happening across the government. Now the Agriculture Department and its global counterparts are hoping the theory will work for them. Later this month, they are holding a summit to mine the depths of agriculture data. The goal is to increase food security.

MORE FROM THE FEDERAL DRIVE

Monday morning federal headlines – April 8, 2013
The Morning Federal Newscast is a daily compilation of the stories you hear Federal Drive hosts Tom Temin and Emily Kopp discuss throughout the show each day. The Newscast is designed to give FederalNewsRadio.com users more information about the stories you hear on the air. In today’s news, the Office of Personnel Management has published guidance to help agencies create the new role of post-combat care coordinator and is proposing two dozen changes to the largest workplace fundraiser.

From Our Reporters

A new analysis finds that with the combined effects of sequestration and internal cost growth inside the Pentagon, within the next 10 years, the vast majority of DoD’s budget will be swallowed up by just two budget categories: military personnel, and operations and maintenance. As we take a look at federal financial management in our weeklong series, Rise of the Money People, we have more from Federal News Radio’s DoD reporter, Jared Serbu.

Federal chief financial officers were responsible for $1.2 trillion in federal spending in 1990. Now it’s $3.8 trillion. CFOs not only face a larger budget, but one that is more complex. Does that mean the law that created the federal CFO 23 years ago, known as the CFO Act, needs to be updated? Has it fallen behind the times? Federal News Radio’s executive editor Jason Miller went into the federal community looking for answers as part of our weeklong special report, the Rise of the Money People.

DoD Report