B&G Report

We’ve seen lots of changes in public sector human resources over the years, but none as startling and transformative as those that occurred during the pandemic. So, we were glad to see the new report from Deloitte that cited the management of people, at all levels of government, as the biggest underreported story of these weird and deadly two years. The report, titled “The Rising Influence of Human Resources in Government During the Pandemic”, includes a strong focus on the r

Back in 2015, we wrote a major feature for Governing magazine titled “The Causes, Cost and Consequence of Bad Government Data.” As far as we know, aside from the pieces we did for the Government Performance Project, it was the most popular single feature we wrote over the twenty years we were contributors to that magazine prior to becoming columnists and senior advisors for Route Fifty. In the years that followed, our interest in the topic has continued to be fed by state and

By Terry McKee, director of procurement at Knoxville’s Community Development Corporation I believe that one of the reasons people disparage government at all levels is because of an absence of a proclaimed political philosophy that aligns with their true wishes about the way government spends its money. ​ I have served as the procurement officer for three different governmental entities and have observed inconsistent patterns between the scope of government people think they

A few weeks ago, we were honored to join Harry Hatry, a pioneer of performance management and a distinguished fellow at the Urban Institute and Batia Katz also of the Urban Institute in co-authoring a paper called “Do’s and Don’ts: Tips for Strengthening Your Performance Management Systems.” The paper also included contributions from a formidable group of performance experts including Maria Aristigueta, dean of the Biden School of Public Policy and Administration at the Unive

We were disheartened, but not surprised by a February 2022 performance audit in Kansas about that state’s use of performance-based budgeting. While the Kansas auditors noted that the state’s executive budget division met most of the basic requirements of the Kansas 2016 performance-based budgeting law, it didn’t mince words on the actual impact of all the law: “This doesn’t seem to have meaningfully changed how the state budgets,” auditors wrote in big bold letters on page 2

We’ve written repeatedly over the years about the many challenges that confront workforce development programs. Back in the early 1990s, one of the big issues was the penchant to cherry-pick clients who could probably have gotten jobs on their own, in order to show that the programs were successful – at least on paper. Since then, we’ve written about problems with incentives; tense intergovernmental relations between state or federal programs and local needs; ongoing issues w

By William Leighty, partner in DecideSmart, LLC, senior strategic advisor to the dean of the L. Douglas Wilder School of Government Public Affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University, and formerly chief of staff to Governors Mark Warner and Tim Kaine of Virginia Early in my career when I served as a staff person in the Commonwealth of Virginia, I never hired, fired, or did an employee evaluation. Then I woke up one morning as the Deputy Commissioner of the Virginia Department

A couple of weeks ago, New York City’s new mayor Eric Adams signed an executive order consolidating all the city’s technology agencies under a single authority to streamline their operations and foster interagency cooperation. The new operation is called the Office of Technology and Innovation. We don’t know enough about the details of the consolidation to weigh in on whether it’s a brilliant idea or not. But we do know that we don’t like its name. For one thing, dubbing any

The other day, we came across some news from Washington state about a brewing tug of war between the executive and legislative branches over gubernatorial power. This isn’t unusual. But it provided a great example of the idea that all conflicts between branches of government are not colored in shades of red versus blue. Partisanship is not, in short, at the root of all intragovernmental debate. This isn’t a new idea. Over the years, we’ve taken note of the simple fact that le