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Responding to an earlier post, Alyssa Rosenberg notes that judging from the biographies of the folks staffing Obama's "Technology, Innovation, and Government Reform" team, we're really just looking at a technology policy team. And nothing wrong with that: Technology is important, and using it to radically enhance government transparency is an incredibly worthy goal. But it's also a potentially missed opportunity:
This would have been a great place to get a serious management person on board, someone with deep, deep experience with the civilian and political workforces. It didn't happen, and that's a lost opportunity. Maybe these folks have really innovative government reform ideas. Maybe they're ethics experts. Maybe they have some cutting-edge private sector models they think would work in government that we're all going to think is a game-changer. I hope so. But least in Obama’s choice of people to run this team, government reform is just a tacked-on phrase.Alyssa knows a lot more about this than I do, but the state of the federal workforce is a pretty serious problem, and there's much that could be done to improve it. When people talk about this, my sense is they're generally talking on the agency level, but from a political perspective, it's also crucial to improve the basic experience people have with government: The DMV and the IRS and the postal service. If folks are too trust government to do big things, they need to be impressed when they find government doing little things. That said, I'm really going on stereotype here. The DMV might be a hellhole, but I've always found the postal service almost comically impressive.
