Putting government to work for us

One of Obama's major campaign promises was to make government more transparent and efficient.  He pledged to cut out wasteful programs and build upon those that work.  His overarching goal is to renew American faith in government.

The stimulus is one of the earliest and biggest opportunities for Obama to deliver on this promise.  (Ignore the photo of New Orleans Mayor Rag Nagin, which has to be WaPo snark for an article about effective government.  Good one!)  One question to ask is: will stimulus spending reduce economic inequality, currently at levels not seen since the 1920s?

The stimulus package is not only a political crucible for Obama and the congressional Democrats who pushed it through; it is also the ultimate test of government's ability to deliver, from a vast array of federal agencies and departments down to state and local offices across the country.

It will be up to thousands of Cabinet undersecretaries, regional agency directors and local contracting officers to get the stimulus money out fast enough to boost the economy and to meet Obama's broader policy goals. Obama has cast his election as a repudiation of an anti-government philosophy that has been in vogue for the past three decades. The stimulus spending offers the prospect of renewing confidence in the public sector just as many are losing faith in corporate America. If done poorly, though, it could undermine Obama's longer-term vision of reaffirming the positive role of government in the lives of Americans.

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Complicating matters further is the leadership vacuum at many agencies, where many top political appointees have yet to be confirmed. Agencies must rely on career officials who are experienced but may not have gotten much training or support over the years.

"It's not easy to go to work and be told that at best you're a kind of sticky cog in the machinery," Kettl said. "You can only expect so much from a system when you do your best to undermine it constantly. And for a long time, that's what we've been facing. The problem is how to rebuild confidence and competence in the federal workforce . . . as one of the biggest challenges in history is being tossed in its lap."

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[Since Virginia's weatherization agency has] only one full-time and one part-time staffer for the program, the agency is reassigning others to help, encouraging local nonprofit groups it contracts with to broaden the pool of recipients and working with community colleges to train workers for weatherizing jobs.

My professional experience working in Lower Manhattan after September 11 bears out that public-private partnerships like that in VA, where government funds go to local non-profits to deliver services, can be highly effective, as the latter have the experience and contacts on the ground to more effectively reach those in need.  As such, private sector professionals are lining up ready to demonstrate their potential as stimulus partners for local governments.

The new Chair of our department, Dr. Amy Glasmeier, a specialist on Appalachian poverty, climate change and energy, confirmed that the government has calcified under Bush and to a certain extent Clinton.  As someone who has won and managed large federal research contracts for years, she found that experimentation and innovation moved to the states under Clinton, as federal agencies were no longer "robust" during his tenure, only to be starved by Bush & Co.  Her concern is that the states are well-equipped to spend the stimulus money efficiently, but that current inequalities could worsen, because states have balanced budget requirements and are more revenue-dependent than the feds, indicating that they will spend money on their healthiest, most stable citizens first in order to shore up their tax revenues, leaving scraps for the neediest.  The federal government, enormous and cumbersome as it feels to us, is in a distinctly different position than the states to pursue fair and equitable programs.

Chances are in your neighborhood there is a flurry of activity in your governments and non-profit and related business sectors, with officials drawing up all kinds of partnership agreements to invest in your communities and homes.  Unless you live in the Deep South; here's hoping your legislatures override your stonewalling governors.

(Photo of the Massachusetts State House by Rob Young)