B&G Report

There’s no question that it’s been a remarkably tough time for state and local governments for over eighteen months now. Confronting the pandemic has been an extraordinary challenge – one of the few in memory that has taxed the capacity of governments in all fifty states and Washington D.C. And times are certainly still difficult right now. Partisan politics is playing hob with our ability to govern effectively and civilly. Forecasts call for upticks in the rate of Covid. Cri

By Charles Sallee, Deputy Director, Legislative Finance Committee, New Mexico. New Mexico stands “at the forefront of states engaging in evidence-based policymaking,” according to a Pew Charitable Trusts brief published this year, This is something about which good government advocates in the state can be proud, but it’s not as though someone in the capital suddenly turned on a performance management switch. In fact, New Mexico’s Legislative Finance Committee (LFC), and the

“What party is running the legislature?” “What party is the governor?” Those were two questions that we were frequently asked by reporters back in the early days of the Government Performance Project, when we were evaluating management capacity in the states (and occasionally cities and counties). You may not believe this, given the way the world appears today, but frequently, we couldn’t answer one or both of those queries. One of the major areas of focus then – as it is in

by Chris Fabian, Co-founder and CEO, ResourceX I recently read a quote from Mike Mucha, Director of Research at the Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA), in Governing in which he stated, "The budget is, basically, the center of the government universe. It's where decisions about what's important get funded." This message completely rings true for me and why we have focused on the budget itself as if we wish to transform the lives of the people in our communities. ​