FastGov: Where Government is Going

If you missed the live version of former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker "Fiscal Wake Up Tour," a new documentary that was the darling of the Sundance Festival captures the central message Walker would talk about to anyone who would listen: the US government is broke and broken.

The numbers tell at least some of the story: The federal government has dug itself a $53 trillion financial hole and keeps digging $2 trillion to $3 trillion deeper every year.  If those numbers have too many zeroes to feel relevant, it works out to $175,000 of debt for every American.

But the story is more than the numbers.  And that is where documentary director Patrick Creadon comes in.  Creadon, who you may remember from his charming 2006 film about puzzles and those who make and play them (Word Play), begins to unpack the puzzle of how we got here and what to do about it now.

In early reviews, it has been praised for doing for public finance what an Inconvenient Truth did for the environment.  But the live Fiscal Wake Up Tour from which the film draws was much less polemical than the Al Gore keynote presentations about climate change.  And it is worth noting that Creadon's work to date is more about compelling storytelling than the ideological screeds for which Michael Moore or D.A. Pennebaker are known.

That said, there is ideology and world view at work here, but in a more non-partisan way than you might expect. Groups as different as the Concord Coalition, Brookings Institution, Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute were all on the tour and agreed that America's fiscal policies and practices were and are unsustainable.  Expect a largely unchallenged contention that entitlement programs are the problem.  Their death, not just reform, is central to ever climbing out of the super-sized fiscal hole.

And lest I bury my lede, I.O.U.S.A debuts on the big screen in a live event (tape delayed on the west coast) that includes an after-movie discussion with Warren Buffett, Alan Greenspan, Paul O'Neill, Robert Rubin and Paul Volcker.  It is scheduled for this Thursday in theatres across the country -- which can be found through the film's official website.

A gathering of executives from leading system integrators and related technology companies gathered on August 11 for a day long examination of state and local government in Colorado Springs, CO. It was the second annual Industry Summit, convened by the Center for Digital Government.

The hundred or so industry delegates allowed an anonymous peak under the covers of their respective companies' prime targets in SLG. It is not at all surprising the public safety and human services topped the list but, interestingly, there was consensus on only two items -- on enterprise IT infrastructure near the top of the list and parks and recreation at the very bottom.



Slicing the market by the technologies in which government is likely to invest, infrastructure again topped the list -- second only to virtualization (which may be an aspirational ranking, given the composition of the audience).  Interestingly, the industry reps see a continuing government focus on information security, consolidation and connectivity.  They see only middling opportunities for legacy modernization, shared services and software-as-a-service.  Representing sales organizations as they do, the results also indicate three items that just don't seem ready to move -- sadly, they are business process models and identity/ access management.

The people of Jib Jab are back with their satirical send up of the race for the White House with the animated Time for Some Campaignin' (to the tune of Bob Dylan's Times They Are A-Changin').  It is clever and well executed but, to borrow a phrase from the pundit's handbook, may lose in the expectations game because you and I cannot help comparing it to the original My Land parody from the 2004 Presidential Campaign.


Apparently, I inadvertently added to the funhouse-mirror view of this year's presidential race in a column that posted on June 25, 2008 in Government Technology's Public CIO.  It included the results of a survey of IT professionals that seemed a little odd.  They were mistakenly attributed to the Computer Technology Industry Association.  The error was mine.

In fact, the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) had commissioned separate opinion research this spring on the presidential preferences of IT professionals.  The findings, coming before the end of primary season, showed Senators Obama and McCain "in a dead heat, with 29% each."

CompTIA's Michael Wendy tells me the organization has commissioned a follow-on poll to gauge the IT community's view of the presidential horse race one more time before the general election.  Its results will be available in September on the industry group's website at www.comptia.org.

Legislators are unique among elected officials because they can be who they are and speak for themselves in their own voice, without the encumbrances of operational responsibilities that come with the territory for the executive branch and most independently elected officials. That makes them natural candidates to blog, and a growing number are. Such was the nature of my conversation with staff writer Pauline Vu for a Stateline.org update on the state of the new legislator's art. Part stump speech, part coffee shop chatter and more than a little stream of consciousness narrative, legislative blogs reflect the personality and world view of these (mostly) free agents - for good or for ill.

Excuse a self-referential reference, but I thought this was pretty good. Vu wrote:

Despite the risks, Taylor of the Center for Digital Government said the best legislative blogs are those written by lawmakers who don't turn to their advisors for approval on every posting. But therein also lies the danger. "It is a legislator who may speak the truth in unvarnished terms...and I suppose depending on your view of how public processes are supposed to work, that brings both promises and pitfalls," he said.

That brought a response from Barrett Marson who runs a blog for "the majority members of the Arizona House of Representatives. Its mostly unvarnished." And it mostly is ... as you can see here.

Overstock.com is suing and Amazon's Jeff Bezos calls the move unconstitutional. On Sunday, June 1, the state of New York ended the experiment that has kept the Internet a sales tax free zone for those online retailers that do not have a physical presence in the state.

As of yesterday, New Yorkers began paying a charge for state and local sales taxes for their online purchases, which amounts to about 8 percent in most parts of the state. It is a high stakes gambit for political subdivisions in the midst of a public sector revenue recession. The change is expected to be worth $50 million to state coffers and another $50 million for counties and some cities that levy local sales taxes. According to published reports, the total take could be as much as $146 million next year.

The change refreshes an old debate about a level competitive environment among online retailers and their brick and mortar counterparts on one hand, and the potential to thwart Internet innovation and development on the other. Clearly, policy makers in one state have decided the Internet is all grown up. Revenue hungry legislators and governors in the other 49 states will be hard pressed to resist the temptation for new money even if, as is the case in New York, officials argue the online sales tax collection scheme is only a more effective means of enforcing use tax payments for out of state purchases. A permanent change at the virtual check out is contingent on yet another trip to the physical courts.

A Marc Amblinder essay (HisSpace) in The Atlantic examines the promise and pitfalls of trying to parlay online campaigning into online governing. Amblinger's thesis: Barack Obama is likely to do it because he can but leaves open the question of whether he should.

Obama clearly intends to use the Web, if he is elected president, to transform governance just as he has transformed campaigning. Notably, he has spoken of conducting "online fireside chats" as president. And when one imagines how Obama's political army, presumably intact, might be mobilized to lobby for major legislation with just a few keystrokes, it becomes possible, for a moment at least, to imagine that he might change the political culture of Washington simply by overwhelming it.

This promise of transformation hinges on meaningful transparency.

What Obama seems to promise is, at its outer limits, a participatory democracy in which the opportunities for participation have been radically expanded. He proposes creating a public, Google-like database of every federal dollar spent. He aims to post every piece of non-emergency legislation online for five days before he signs it so that Americans can comment. A White House blog--also with comments--would be a near certainty. Overseeing this new apparatus would be a chief technology officer.

As an aside, that would radically redefine the role of CTO (not that the world of three-letter acronyms needed anymore confusion). The challenge here is a not just to appear to be a participatory democracy but to actually be one.

If Obama wins, and if he can harness the Web as a unifying force once the voting is done, he could be a powerful president indeed--the kind that might even deliver on some of the audacious promises that Obama the candidate has made. But the Web, like the politics it seeks to transform, is unruly and fickle. The online networks that have turbocharged Obama's candidacy could end up hemming him in, and even stalling his agenda, as president.

Obama and the Internet have both been described by their proponents as transformational with the ability to make good on the forty year promise of open government. It is at moments like these that half measures will disappoint at a devastating scale because words such as transformation and transparency should never be seen in the same sentence as the vaguely French sounding modifier faux.

Take a good look at a slacker video produced and posted by the California tax man. Indeed, the California Franchise Tax Board is among a growing number of public agenies that have been experimenting in public with engaging the public on the its terms. Exhibit A: YouTube videos. They are not your father's public service announcements because they are not intended to run on your father's medium of choice - television. Instead, they have a young, hip and urban sensibility more typical of viral videos that are now common on the Internet. And yes, the critics have had their say on why agencies should stay away from YouTube. This from the Christian Science Monitor:

"The state's YouTube videos vary in usefulness," says Jack Pitney a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College. "The public service announcements are slick but unhelpful. Who goes on YouTube to seek propaganda from a state agency? Just because you can go on YouTube, doesn't mean that you should."

Propaganda? A harsh assessment for what remains well within the tradition of PSAs - public health, public safety and, in the present case, filing taxes. It is surely hyperbolic to lump propaganda and PSAs together in same virtual bucket. The audience can figure it out even if certain college professors cannot. And that may be what ultimately matters. This YouTube experimentation by public agencies should not be judged by its production values (although a sophisticated audience is discerning on this front) or even the use of a video platform that comes without cost to the taxpayer rather than building their own (although that should be applauded).

This slacker video matters because it reflects an appreciation of irony, the defining characteristic of the demographic cohort that is coming of age at a time when YouTube is outdrawing the old tube. Public institutions continue to fight the fight for relevancy in these times -- and some are helping themselves by taking a calculated risk to act more like the people they serve.

Public Information Officers have a tough job. Consider how hard one or more federal PIOs had to work to squueze lemonade from a bucket full of lemons. The White House uses the stop light metaphor common to scorecard programs everywhere - green is go or good, yellow is slow or mediocre, and red is stop or just plain bad, bad, bad. Here's the brave face put on the most recent report:

In the President's Management Agenda Scorecard for the second quarter of FY 2008, nearly 50% of agency "status" scores were green, and more than 75% of "progress" scores were green. The Department of Labor, the Social Security Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, continue to be the only three agencies to receive green scores for both "status" and "progress" in all five of the governmentwide initiatives: human capital, competitive sourcing, financial performance, e-gov and performance improvement.

Put slightly less charitably, (a) more than half of all federal agencies have a worrisome status of yellow or red; and , (b) only 3 of 26 -- 12% -- of federal agencies had their act together and were still moving forward on this handful of priorities. Singling out a vertical or two, 20 agencies were making green-level progress on e-government but 17 are digging out of a hole (14 yellow, 3 red) on the status measure. Ironically, the reddest of the red status belonged to the Department of Commerce -- an interesting spot to end up for a department the name of which shares a root word with "e-commerce." Apparently, not much to show for the last 13 years of playing in the Internet sandbox. On the competitive procurement watch, more than two-thirds (69%) of agencies were mired in red and yellow lights. Some 58% were making progress on this front, which may be akin to being lost but making good time.

It is just not easy building new data centers in Washington state, whether you are the world's dominant and hometown software company or the state government itself. Ground breaking on a new state data center was scheduled for this spring in Olympia, WA -- the first domino in a capitol campus renovation that includes an accompanying office complex to headquater the Department of Information Services (DIS), the Washington State Patrol and other state agencies, which would make room for a new Heritage Center near the Legislative building and Temple of Justice.

The Olympian (May 23, 2008) reports in a front page story above the fold that the first first domino won't budge just yet. The price tag on data center complex spiked $110 million from $260 Million to $370 Million, thanks to the rising costs of construction material plus the unforeseen need to mitigate the effects of increased traffic on the neighborhood. (The original $186 Million estimate for the Heritage Center has also bulged to $221 Million.)

What's more, State Treasurer Michael Murphy is concerned about the use of lease-purchase financing for the DIS complex, telling the Olympian, "This project will be the most expansive project on the capitol campus ... yet it is being financed in a way that makes it excempt form public works laws." The project marks DIS' debut as a general contractor, a role it sought in order to create a showcase for technologically advanced and sustainable workspaces.

In an unrelated development, DIS can commiserate with Microsoft and Yahoo, both of which have also suspended plans to build huge data centers in the state. The companies' multi-facility campuses signaled their commitment to enterprise-level utility computing. The viability of the SaaS-ready data centers required economical access to electricity, broadband access and a tax break. The town of Quincy, WA is prepared to make long term commitments to supplying cheap power thanks to the nearby Columbia River.

But the blog Data Center Knowledge reported that, earlier this year, "the state ruled that data centers were no longer covered by a state sales tax break for manufacturing enterprises.... Gov. Chris Gregoire requested an exemption in Senate Bill 6666, which would restore the exemption for data centers." The legislative session ended without action on the bill. Without the exemption, a 7.9 percent tax would be due on data center construction and equipment. Some things simply do not pencil out.

The June 2, 2008 edition of Newsweek updates the deepening public sector revenue recession and provides a useful point of comparison. Citing revised data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the magazine tallies $42 Billion deficit across 29 states for fiscal years 2008 and 2009 (projected). Compare that with the actual numbers from the bone crushing revenue recession that began in FY 2001 and crested in FY 2004. The big number, attributed to the National Association of State Budget Officers, totaled $84 Billion. NASBO's Scott Pattison worries "We haven't seen the worst yet," suggesting the current circumstance could come to rival the fiscal hardships at the beginning of the decade.  During the earlier troubles, there was a compelling argument about the use of digital technologies to permanently change the cost structure of service delivery because the fiscal problems are structural and merit a structural response.  It appears we have a second chance to get it right.