White House Promotes Prizes for Open Government
Executive branch agencies should “increase the use of prizes and challenges as tools for promoting open government,” the White House Office of Management and Budget said in a memorandum to agency heads (pdf) this week.
“It is Administration policy to strongly encourage agencies to utilize prizes and challenges as tools for advancing open government, innovation, and the agency’s mission,” OMB said.
The memorandum, as promised in the December 2009 White House Open Government Directive (pdf), is intended to provide “a framework for how agencies can use challenges, prizes, and other incentive-backed strategies to find innovative or cost-effective solutions to improving open government.”
The substance of the desired improvements was not spelled out in the latest memo, but the earlier Directive said that “The three principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration form the cornerstone of an open government.” None of these principles is instinctive or can be taken for granted, and the prize program is an evidently sincere effort to help overcome bureaucratic resistance to greater openness.
“A prize should not be an end in itself, but one means within a broader strategy for spurring private innovation and change,” the new OMB memo said.
A lack of sustained federal funding, deteriorating research infrastructure and networks, restrictive immigration policies, and waning international collaboration are driving this erosion into a full-scale “American Brain Drain.”
With 2000 nuclear weapons on alert, far more powerful than the first bomb tested in the Jornada Del Muerto during the Trinity Test 80 years ago, our world has been fundamentally altered.
As the United States continues nuclear modernization on all legs of its nuclear triad through the creation of new variants of warheads, missiles, and delivery platforms, examining the effects of nuclear weapons production on the public is ever more pressing.
“The first rule of government transformation is: there are a lot of rules. And there should be-ish. But we don’t need to wait for permission to rewrite them. Let’s go fix and build some things and show how it’s done.”