What if low trust was not a given? Or, said another way: what if we had the power to improve trust in government – what would that world look like?
Datasets and variables that do not align with Administration priorities, or might reflect poorly on Administration policy impacts, seem to be especially in the cross-hairs.
At a period where the federal government is undergoing significant changes in how it hires, buys, collects and organizes data, and delivers, deeper exploration of trust in these facets as worthwhile.
Using visioning, world-building, scenario planning, and other foresight tools, participants set aside today’s constraints to design blue-sky models of a future American government.
“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.”
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
As the former U.S. Chief Data Scientist, I know first-hand how valuable and vulnerable our nation’s federal data assets are. Like many things in life, we’ve been taking our data for granted and will miss it terribly when it’s gone.
Direct File redefined what IRS service could look like, with real-time help and data-driven improvements. Let’s apply that bar elsewhere.
There is a lot to like in OPM’s new memos on federal hiring and senior executives, much of which reformers have been after for years, but there’s also a troubling focus on politicizing the federal workforce.
The public rarely sees the quiet, often messy work that goes into creating, passing, and implementing a major piece of legislation like the CHIPS and Science Act.
If this proposed rule were enacted it would have deleterious effects on government workers in general and federal researchers and scientists, specifically.
When we introduce “at-will” employment to government employees, we also introduce the potential for environments where people are more concerned about self-preservation than service to others.