Assorted on Open Government

International Open Government Partnership to Include at Least 22 Countries at Launch Historic global 


 Open Government Partnership

Carlo Cottarelli on Bloomberg

Head of Fiscal Affairs Department of the IMF;“IMF’s Cottarelli Urges ‘Targeted’ Cuts of U.S. Budget”

Obama's Management Agenda checklist

A quick list of Obama's planned management reforms;

1. The promise to create a “chief performance officer” reporting to him
2. The promise to replace the Program Assessment Review Tool (PART) with a new Performance Improvement and Analysis Framework
3. The appointment of Jeff Zients as the chief performance officer, and as deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget
4. A commitment to a governmentwide performance portal
5. The creation of “high-priority performance goals”
6. A commitment to program evaluation
7. The outlining of six “performance strategies” for the Administration’s Accountable Government Initiative.

 

Government Results Act fails

The bill, known as the 2010 Government Performance and Results Modernization Act, would also have required agencies to post program performance scorecards on a single public website on a quarterly basis, the release said.

It set a first-year goal of a 10 percent reduction in the number of written reports required by previous Congresses and presidential administrations that are little used or obsolete. As Federal Times has previously reported, agency officials sometimes have to compile massive reports that are outdated as soon as they are printed.

"Taxpayers fund 44 separate programs in nine different federal departments that support workforce training, and we also pay for 17 separate initiatives across seven federal departments that deal with food safety," Warner said in the release. "We need a better system — a system that allows us to review the results of each program and evaluate its impact in addressing overall policy goals, whether it's the important work of retraining people who've lost their jobs or ensuring the safety of the food we eat."

The Obama administration has already created its own website, performance.gov, to track agency progress in meeting high-priority goals laid out in the administration's 2011 budget request. The site, available to federal managers since August, was supposed to open to the public this year. That move has now been delayed to "kick the tires a little more" and to get agency feedback, Office of Management and Budget spokeswoman Moira Mack said Friday

-House kills bill to improve agency performance

CATO Balances the Budget

Downsizing the Government

Why is Peter Orszag leaving?

Mr. Orszag, you may recall, was the administration’s main proponent of “bending the curve” on health care expenditures. Frustrated that House Democrats wouldn’t accept some painful cost-cutting measures in the new health care law, Mr. Orszag pushed for and won a controversial provision to create something called the Independent Payment Advisory Board. This is an outside commission of 15 appointees who will, beginning in 2014, identify cuts to Medicare if the plan exceeds a preset rate for growth. Congress then has to either approve the cuts or propose an alternative.

The significance of this new advisory board goes well beyond the immediate question of how to rein in Medicare costs. Mr. Orszag, who declined to be interviewed, has said that the board represented, for Congress, the “single-biggest yielding of power to an independent entity since the creation of the Federal Reserve.” In other words, the Medicare Board isn’t only a means of cutting government spending; it is a means, too, of wresting the constitutional responsibility for budgeting away from powerful committee chairmen.

The Medicare Board may be the most striking example of this strategy, but it is hardly the only one. Mr. Orszag also helped broker the creation of an 18-member debt commission that will offer specific alternatives for re-ordering the federal budget. The administration has also proposed a bill — known in the punchy language of Washington as “expedited rescission authority” — that would effectively give the president the power to strike out spending items after the budget has been approved.

-Budget Chief tried to tilt power to Executive Branch

Filling a $9 billion hole- an MTEF for New York?

One way to save New York's finances;

Years of decisions dictated by political expediency have led to a chronic budget imbalance that threatens our short-term solvency and long-term economic health.

Fortunately, Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch has put forward a plan to provide sorely needed oversight and discipline. He proposes to create a financial review board that would certify the budget only if it’s balanced. The board would employ a smart, multiyear strategy that would weigh significant cuts in spending against limited borrowing. And it would require Albany to adopt generally accepted accounting principles, the standard bookkeeping rules used in business.

According to the report, 'The State needs a multi-year financial planning process directly linked to the annual budget process.'

Another suggestion;

Finally, our short-term cash crunch would be eased if the state refinanced the interest rates on its tobacco-settlement bonds. Given current low long-term interest rates, this is preferable to Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch’s plan, under which the state would borrow $2 billion a year over three years for operations, leading us down a perilous road of annual borrowing.

Related: Citizen's Budget Commission

The Winston Wolf of Public Management

An interesting profile of US Defense Secretary;

In his memoir Speech-less, Matt Latimer, a speechwriter for both Rumsfeld and Bush, describes Gates as "our Winston Wolf," the Harvey Keitel character in Pulp Fiction who comes to dispose of the bodies and take care of the bloody mess after an accidental killing. "Wolf was a case study of robotic efficiency, overseeing an elaborate cleanup while calmly drinking a cup of coffee," writes Latimer. "That's what President Bush wanted — a cold-blooded competent cleaner."

The cleaner quickly went to work. He walked into the Pentagon alone. Inheriting many former Rumsfeld aides, Gates told them on his first day that he wouldn't be firing anyone. There was no time for confirmations, and he was leaving that day for Iraq. Gates brought a sense of relief, a feeling that an adult was back in charge...

One of the things his staffers love about him is his common sense, I-don't-get-it attitude toward the stupidity of bureaucracy. Now that he's past worrying about climbing within that bureaucracy, he has the confidence to break it. At the height of the Iraq surge in 2007, which Gates supported, more than 100 soldiers a month were dying. It's almost impossible as an outsider to understand why the Pentagon would not want to build the mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, known as MRAPs, that would have saved many of those soldiers' lives. Instead of budgeting for MRAPs, the Pentagon was still spending money on outdated weapon systems. So Gates bypassed the normal procurement process, created a special task force, went to Congress and got the money to build them. "Those vehicles saved hundreds of lives and limbs," says a senior Pentagon official...

The list of mindless bureaucratic obstacles that were hampering the war effort was dizzying. For example: military officers complained that there were not enough drones, Predators and unmanned reconnaissance in the air to help target insurgent cells. The holdup? Air Force pilots are taught to fly real planes, not drones. Each pilot costs about $1 million to train. And yet some staff sergeants in the Army had started operating the drones at a fraction of the price, with far fewer crashes. "If the Army is doing it safer and cheaper and able to produce more pilots faster, why aren't we doing it to that standard?" Gates asked. "This requires a cultural revolution in the Air Force," explained one of his staffers — which it got in 2008, after Gates fired the civilian and military leaders of the service for other reasons. Now the Air Force licenses junior officers to fly unmanned aircraft, and Gates has tripled the number of drones operating in the war zones...

Gates is a man of old-school habits: a Grey Goose at the end of the day and preferably steak or bacon cheeseburgers for lunch and dinner. He doesn't use a cell phone. He asked me during our interview if there was tape in my digital recorder. Gates keeps a box filled with index cards of quotes and anecdotes and one-liners he's collected over the years. His favorite comedians are both dead — George Carlin and W.C. Fields. Their sensibilities suit Gates' own — taking down institutions, puncturing pomp. He's even adopted some of their style. He loves to tell the same jokes about egos in Washington — "where people say, I'll double-cross that bridge when I get to it," and "the only place in the world you can see a prominent person walking down lovers' lane holding his own hand."...

At the height of the Iraq surge, Gates gave a speech to the Marine Corps Association. He began in Johnny Carson fashion with a long, meticulously timed story about Nixon's Secretary of Defense Mel Laird on a trip to see the Pope.

Laird was smoking a cigar, and Henry Kissinger told him to at least put it out before they went inside. "A couple of minutes into the Pope's remarks, Kissinger heard this little patting sound, and he looked over, and there was a wisp of smoke coming out of Laird's pocket. The Secretary of Defense was on fire. The American party heard this slapping and thought they were being cued to applaud. And so they did. And Henry later told us, 'God only knows what His Holiness thought, seeing the American Secretary of Defense immolating himself, and the entire American party applauding the fact.' "...

Like Obama, Gates can consume reams of information. His photographic memory is legendary. He is a voracious reader of history, spy novels and pulp fiction. He's subscribed to the Book-of-the-Month Club for 50 years. And he is careful, meticulously so. One decades-long colleague told me Gates will cancel a briefing if he hasn't done his homework. "Preparation for him is a cathartic experience," says his spokesman Morrell. He vents brutal answers to imaginary questions so he can be more diplomatic on the Hill. He's vigilant about the stagecraft of statecraft, even taking his own messy handwritten notes to meetings so his preparation can be seen...

What did Gates ask the President-elect? "I asked him if he could trust me."

The Budget Director's Love Life

There is something that a lot of people in Washington find shocking about this story, which is why we keep talking about it,” Ms. Ein said. “This is a person who seems so controlled in his professional life.” Indeed, someone who carries neat to-do lists in his breast pocket and a copy on his desk of Epictetus, the Greek philosopher who preached self-discipline. “And yet he’s so messy in his private life. This is an a-ha moment.”

This goes to another obvious — and recurring — question: whether someone whose personal life has become so complicated is really fit to tackle one of the most demanding, important and stressful jobs in the universe. “Frankly I don’t see how Orszag can balance three families and the national budget,” wrote Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post.

-If Peter Orszag Is So Smart, What Will He Do Now?

Goolsbee defends Obama fiscal policies

GOOLSBEE: I think there's some conventional wisdom forming among opponents of the administration that the deficit is getting bigger primarily because Obama is spending like crazy, and it's totally wrong.

If you look at the 10-year budget, the reason that 10-year deficit is getting bigger, it's first and foremost because the economy has gotten substantially worse, and as the current economy gets worse, it makes the 10-year deficit numbers significantly worse also. And that's by far the biggest thing driving it.

The second is the President consciously came in and said, "We're going to stop engaging in a series of budget gimmicks that are used to artificially make the 10-year deficit look smaller," so things like, they put in zero dollars for natural disaster cost each year, even though there's a hurricane season. So you would think that this is a somewhat regular expense.

Each year, they say, "Oh, my goodness. How could we have predicted there would be a hurricane hitting South Carolina this year?" And so the president said, "Look, let's take the average cost for natural disasters. Let's put it in the budget every year. Let's stop saying the R&D tax credit is only temporary. Let's make it permanent because they renew it every year. Let's stop saying we're going to go cut all doctors' salary by 20 percent at the end of the year and then, at the end of the year, saying actually we're not going to do it this year, but we promised to do it all future years," thereby keeping the long-run deficit smaller.

None of those are spending. The president is not spending anything that people were not spending before for all of those budget gimmicks. He is instead saying, "Let's be honest about what the situation we're in," and so I would just encourage that people who are agitated about the spending to do two things.

The first is go look at the 10-year budget and ask how much of the increase in the 10-year deficit is actually due to new programs versus just being honest and just the state of the economy, and the second is, for this year and next year, while we're in stimulus and Recovery Act land, in the face of the stiffest recession since 1929, that is not when you try to tighten the belt. It is extremely dangerous to do that. That is exactly what Herbert Hoover did that got us into the Depression.

ROMANO: Well, why not? Now, see, that's counterintuitive for a lot of people listening to you. They're saying, "Well, we should be tightening our belt."

GOOLSBEE: We should tighten our belts in the sense of getting the savings rate up. Getting long-run fiscal responsibility is going to be quite important, but if you go at everybody and the savings rate went to 25 percent in a day and we went and massively cut government spending right now, it would drive the GDP downward. And this may be a paradox, but in a period of crisis, you can't do that. That's what Herbert Hoover did. They faced stiff recession, big financial crisis, and they said, "You know what we should do, we should try to balance the budget, and let's start raising taxes and cutting spending." And by doing that and by letting the financial systems collapse, they started the Great Depression, which was a spiral that they would not fix itself and really stuck with us for more than 10 years until World War II ends up getting us out as you know, as a big stimulus.

We faced a financial crisis bigger than the one in 1929. We faced a recession, the stiffest since 1929. The stage was set that if we engaged in a series of policy missteps, we're in the Great Depression, and the Fed deserves great credit and this administration deserves great credit as taking actions to prevent that. And one of the actions that was absolutely needed to prevent it was loosening the belt, not tightening the belt, in the face of those things.

-Voices of Power Transcript: Austan Goolsbee, Economic Adviser to President Obama

Idiots Guide to the US Budget System

The Budget System and Concepts

Budget Reform Proposals

And more by Peter R. Orszag

The art of cutting budgets

Governor Corzine Discusses New Jersey State Budget Proposals (podcast)

Related;
The FY 2010 Budget Address;

The global recession took a further toll on our revenues, so we have cut almost $4 billion in baseline spending from this year's budget. But before we cut, we made a value-based judgment to take some things off the table...

Now, let's lay out the numbers in basic terms. This fiscal year, which runs through June, the state will take in about $30 billion - about $3 billion less than we originally planned. In the coming FY 2010, we're projecting base revenues of only $28.5 billion.

Even with important help from the federal government -- the declining revenue meant we had to make deep cuts in spending to balance the 2010 budget. With respect to budget cuts, there are two ways to compare the numbers: in absolute terms - as I just outlined - or in terms that reflect baseline growth. In absolute terms, we need to cut $3 billion to bring this budget into balance. In baseline growth, we need to find a "staggering" $7 billion in spending and revenue solutions. As you all can appreciate, baseline growth is a more practical measure of the state's budget gap.

Baseline numbers include increases that are mandated by statute, contract, and the courts - contractual wage increases, for instance. A baseline comparison also includes increases in health care and energy costs, supplemental school funding, debt service and court-mandated actions that increase child-welfare expenses.

A family sitting around the kitchen table understands the real pressures in baseline growth. Their health care costs are going up every year their energy costs soared in 2009 and the cost of nearly everything else - from food, to child care, to college tuition - continues to rise. The state budget is no different....

That still leaves a $5 billion gap in the budget, which we have attacked with $4 billion in cuts to programs, rebates, pension payments, and state worker salaries, In all, over 850 line items in the budget have been cut. The largest cuts will come from reductions in a scaling back of homestead rebates by $500 million, and reducing by another $500 million payments to the pension fund....

With the talent, the work ethic, and the strong character of our people, New Jersey will lead the way. I believe in our common desire to do what is right. I hope and expect to see that spirit reflected in the final budget, a budget that values children, seniors, and the most vulnerable, and asks a little more from the rest of us.

For Discussion: What do you think of the budget speech? What does he mean by baseline growth?

Effective Habits from the Budget Man

A profile of Peter Orszag in NYT;

“He’s made nerdy sexy,” said Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff.

Mr. Orszag, who grew up in Lexington, Mass., has always worked himself punishingly hard — a legacy, he says, from a math-professor father who glanced at test scores of 98 and asked about the 2 other points. “It was always, ‘When I was your age, I was a tenured professor,’ ” he said.

When he won a Marshall scholarship, his father congratulated him by admitting that the award was “not trivial.” Later he discovered that his father had once been turned down for the prize, which finances graduate study in Britain. (Mr. Orszag earned master’s and doctoral degrees at the London School of Economics.)

In classic political fashion, Mr. Orszag trained for Washington rivalry through family rivalry, not just with his father but also with his economist brothers. Peter, Michael and Jonathan Orszag have worked and written papers together and still compare electronic gadgets and their Princeton grade-point averages...

Friends say his dinner parties are notable for the meticulously chosen wines and the senators who attend. (Mr. Orszag, a divorced father of two, is so cozy with the Capitol Hill crowd that Senator Ron Wyden and his wife, Nancy Bass Wyden, found him a girlfriend.)...

So far, his main project has been the budget, drafted in meetings that began before the inauguration. For weeks after Mr. Obama took office, Mr. Orszag sat directly across the table from him in the Roosevelt Room. He began each session with a series of PowerPoint slides, defined the president’s options and constantly jotted down requests on notecards.

For someone with two BlackBerrys — work and personal — clipped to the small of his back, Mr. Orszag seems governed by little cards: the ones in his breast pocket for notes, another that lists his meetings, a tiny hand-lettered one that materializes to summon him to the Oval Office....

His own health care conversion occurred when a doctor told him several years ago that he was at risk for cardiovascular problems. Mr. Orszag changed his diet. Each day he eats the same egg whites for breakfast and salad topped with chicken for dinner, all from the White House mess.

He also began training for marathons, sometimes startling colleagues by appearing in their offices at day’s end in head-to-toe spandex.

Now he keeps two books on his desk: the teachings of Epictetus, a Greek Stoic philosopher who espoused dispassion and self-discipline, and “The Strenuous Life,” by Theodore Roosevelt, an ode to pushing oneself as hard as possible.

The Right (And Wrong) Way to Spend $1 Trillion

The title is a bit misleading- from New America Foundation.

The Committee to Save the World

Inside Obama’s Economic Brain Trust

Bernie Madoff- an American Hero?

Bernie Madoff- an American Hero?

Dear Mister Madoff:

Before it's too late, I wanted to thank you for all that you've done for America. It's been reported that you have pleaded guilty to 11 criminal charges, meaning you will spend the rest of your life in jail. A legacy like yours should not go unmarked as you fade into history.

And so I'm writing you this letter to honour your contributions to American society. I'm not speaking about the thousands of people you've defrauded. Nor am I referring to the (less than) $50bn you made evaporate overnight. And those two people you caused to commit suicide? Disgraceful, of course, but not all that you should be remembered for.

I, unlike the rest of our compatriots, will choose to exalt your gifts, not just your sins. Like the way you single-handedly forced Congress to acknowledge just how crappy the SEC is at doing its job. Like when your downfall helped unearth a dozen other Ponzi schemes, proactively saving millions of dollars. And I, for one, do not think you're only the basest kind of American – a man driven by greed, power and an unchecked case of OCD. No, you, sir, are an American patriot. Your selfless sacrifice is overlooked by the hate-first-think-second mass media. You gave the American people somebody to despise when they needed it most. In our economic era, you may not have been the villain we wanted, but you were the one we needed.

Bernie – may I call you Bernie? – you arrived at just the right time. In December, when you admitted your fraud, we Americans were spewing anger, but it wasn't directed at anyone in particular. President Bush? He was on his way out of office, and we had already vented our frustrations at the polls. The CEOs of sub-prime lenders? Countrywide was absorbed by Bank of America; Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac belonged to us, the very people they helped ruin. Wall Street? Too many CEOs, all of whom you could call greedy only if you understood what in God's name a credit-default swap was....

Obama's 'revolutionary Chinese budget'?

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Clusterf#@k to the Poor House - Obama's Revolutionary Budget

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

Photo of the Day

Mr. Obama rolled up his sleeves on Monday and helped out at a homeless center, devoting much of his last full day as president-elect to paying tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. and to the spirit of volunteerism and public service he said Mr. King represented.

Presidential Council of Psychological Advisors ?

Barry Schwartz writes;

On the Economy—Understand the "Irrational" Where did our financial institutions go wrong? Many accounts focus on greed, fear, and lack of trust. And why did things get so out of hand? Why was there a housing "bubble"? Somehow, "irrational exuberance" (Robert Schiller) or "animal spirits" (John Maynard Keynes) overwhelmed rational calculations of risk and reward. And it isn't just that irrational optimism, or even blindness to market fundamentals, gets the better of our rational faculties. Rather, as George Soros has pointed out, these psychological phenomena can become part of a feedback loop that actually changes market fundamentals. "Reflexivity," he calls it. The housing bubble was not the first such phenomenon, nor will it be the last.

Economists offer little that helps us understand why such bubbles occur or how they might be prevented. They also have little to tell us about how to prevent a "downward spiral of negative expectations" that makes fear of an economic downturn self-fulfilling. Economists largely make assumptions about the rationality of human decision-making and proceed from there. Witness Alan Greenspan's recent admission that he was mistaken in assuming that markets operate rationally and efficiently. The current crisis makes it clear that ignoring the real psychology of greed, fear, trust, and irrational enthusiasm (0r pessimism) can be perilous. Economists offer little that helps us understand why such bubbles occur or how they might be prevented. A Council of Psychological Advisors could help.

Clifornia's Fiscal mess

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a fiscal emergency on Friday to call lawmakers into another special session to tackle the state’s weakening finances, and separately ordered state officials to prepare to furlough and lay off employees to cut costs.

His two actions mark a dramatic escalation in the budget battle waged in recent weeks in Sacramento, the capital of the most populous US state and world’s eighth-largest economy, as its revenues fall harder and faster than expected.

California’s state government now faces a $40 billion budget shortfall over its current and next fiscal years and is on track to run out of cash in February.

-California declares fiscal emergency