B&G Report

Aristotle had it right when he wrote, “The more you know, the more you know you don't know.” We’ve come across this idea repeatedly over the years in covering state and local governments. Those that are doing the best jobs – whether in HR, budgeting, procurement, infrastructure or any other field of public sector endeavor -- tend to be the ones who are most eager to do better. That’s because, in large part, they know how much can be accomplished in the future. Places that fal

Often performance audits geared to one agency in one state carry provide lessons for many other governments around the U.S. That’s true of an unusual audit of workplace culture at the Department of Fish and Wildlife in the State of Washington. We’re calling it unusual because, unlike other performance audits that just touch on issues of workplace culture, in this instance that important topic was the sole reason for the report. The audit by the Office of the Washington State

In the days before the pandemic shut down most social gatherings that we might have attended, one of the first obligatory questions in polite chit-chat would be: “And what do you do for a living?” Our first answer, typically, has always been “we’re journalists,” even though our work extends in all sorts of directions other than traditional journalism. But when someone probed a bit, we’d say, “We do research, analysis and writing about governments, in an effort to help them to