TIME: The Stimulus Turns Two: How Obama Quietly Changed Washington

[impik]

A must read, if you're into facts.

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,2049816,00.html

[PatSeg]

1. K&R

[young but wise]

2. Thanks.

[LiberalAndProud]

3. Bureaucrats who aren't just paperpushers ... seems like a good idea to me.

The Department of Transportation was inundated with nearly 1,400 applications for its first 51 grants. And DOT officials say the program galvanized their bureaucracy; it turns out that civil servants work a lot harder when they're assigned to help evaluate whether projects would be good for America, rather than whether projects have submitted all their paperwork. "Republicans ought to love this stuff," said one senior administration official who requested anonymity. "It's evidence-based, it's merit-based, it's results-based. It's not government telling you what to do; it's setting the goals and letting the applicants figure out how to get there."



Read more: http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,2049816,00.html#ixzz1EEs0pPK6

[zipplewrath]

4. Not all that new

It's probably "new" to government spending a bit. I think the author may have been over sold on the degree to which it is new. What bothered me about the piece was it didn't speak to the short comings of the approach. It's not that it is without value, it is that it can easily be over used. Furthermore, it isn't clear it can work well in an organization as large as the Executive branch, and even more so in one that also has to deal with a congress.

When you build a house, you can't let each contractor optimize around their own tasks. Cost, performance, or schedule improvements on their level, may have the larger effect of reducing the overall results of the larger task. It is one of the hardest things to work out at the macro level and one can ultimately "chase local minima" and miss larger opportunities.

There is probably no area which is more likely to experience this than education.