bottom up change

“The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works” -President Barack Obama, January 20, 2009

One of the Obama administration appointments that has not received enough attention by the traditional media is Vivek Kundra as the first Chief Information Officer of the federal government.  Out of all of the President’s appointments, this one may be the most significant.  Yes, perhaps even more significant than Secretary Geithner at Treasury, who has the dreary responsibility of pulling us out of the banking crisis which is at the core of the recession.  Why is Kundra’s position so important?

First, let me make a brief digression.  From my first post on this blog, I have often expressed my view about the need for fiscal responsibility in the Obama administration.  My view about government spending is that liberals need to be even more careful about how they spend money than conservatives.  That’s because it is much easier to stigmatize all of liberalism as a view that engenders wasteful spending and inefficient bureaucracy.  Liberalism’s greatest strength, in my opinion, is also its greatest weakness.  By having a more open view about the role of government than conservatism allows, liberals are more likely to have a guilt-free conscience about spending taxpayer money.  Whether this money goes to education, health care, or any number of areas where liberals believe government can play a constructive role, spending taxpayer money is seen as a necessary means to a noble end.  If some money is wasted along the way, the attitude sometimes seems to be that the ends justify the means.  While I have a lot of sympathy with a more open view of government, I also really, really hate spending taxpayers’ money on ineffective projects or inefficient beauraucracy, not to mention fraud and abuse.  I also believe that conservatives’ most potent weapon against liberals is when government wastes taxpayer money.  When this happens, the public comes to see liberals as not being trustworthy stewards of government.  It may well be true that the most powerful argument that economic conservatives have against liberalism is the DMV.

All of this is to say that the Democrats are very lucky to have Vivek Kundra in their ranks at this time.  Kundra previously served as the Chief Technology Officer for Mayor Adrian Fenty’s administration in the District of Columbia before he went on to serve as CIO for President Obama.  During his term in DC, Kundra was widely recognized as one of the most effective and innovative CTOs in the country.  This Washington Post profile of Kundra describes how he is bringing some of the “kinetic” energy and innovation of tech companies like Google into the public sector.

What is most impressive about Kundra are the accomplishments and promising innovations that his energy has produced during his brief tenure in the Fenty administration.  Kundra’s “Apps for Democracy” initiative allowed tech-savvy citizens to submit applications for computers and cell phones that would enable DC residents to easily access city data.    Data on anything from construction projects, dates for fixing potholes, crime rates by neighborhood, and more would be organized and easily searchable with these apps.  Those who invented the most popular apps would win a monetary prize.  Here is how Kundra described the result:

“I expected to get maybe 10 entries, but we got 47 apps in 30 days,” Kundra said. He said he spent $50,000 for the contest and prize money, and estimates he saved $2.6 million over what it would have cost to hire contract developers.

In addition to the money saved, I wonder how much time was saved with this project.  The entire contest was completed in October, 2008.  The People’s Choice Award winners from the contest included the “Carpool Mashable Matchmaker,” which allows people to easily find carpools and conserve energy, and the “DC Bikes” app, another program that promotes green transportation by giving DC residents bike paths in the city and warning them of high crime areas.  There were also Medal Winners.  Kundra’s Apps for Democracy project was so successful that Sunlight Foundation started a similar contest, “Apps for America,” through its Sunlight Labs project.  I’ll write about Apps for America in a future post.

A side benefit of Apps for Democracy is that it allowed citizens to feel engaged with their government in a new, futuristic way.  Kundra described his underlying Government 2.0 philosophy in a brief essay, “Building the Digital Public Square”:

In ancient Athens—the model for the democracy envisioned by the framers of our Constitution–citizens met, face to face, in the agora—the public square–to conduct business, debate civic issues, and drive the decisions of government. Gone are the days of daily meetings at the agora. Today, citizens know government as red tape, long lines, and cold, distant bureaucracies. The reins of government have slipped from “we the people” to inaccessible government officials.

The District of Columbia, however, is at the forefront of a new era of governance, one in which technological advances now allow people from around the world unfettered access to their government. Through these advances, constituents can hold their government accountable from the privacy of their own homes. The District of Columbia is bringing people closer to government through collaborative technologies like wikis, data feeds, videos and dashboards. We’re throwing open DC’s warehouse of public data so that everyone—constituents, policymakers, and businesses—can meet in a new digital public square.

It remains to be seen whether Kundra can bring the kind of groundbreaking innovation to the vast federal government in which agencies are known for bitter turf wars.  But now, perhaps more than ever, an effective CIO is needed.  At a time when the government is preparing to spend trillions of taxpayer dollars for economic stimulus and President Obama’s budget priorities, waste of taxpayer money is a real danger.  One big scandal of fraud, waste, or abuse of stimulus dollars, for instance, could do serious damage to President Obama’s ambitious agenda.  The technology is now being developed to make government more transparent than ever, giving citizens the tools to be more vigilant watch dogs of their government.  Hopefully apps will be created that will allow us to monitor spending more carefully so that a major scandal does not occur.  So, I expect to see big things from Kundra over the next few years.  One good place to start may be to work with the Treasury department and the Congressional Oversight Panel to allow citizens to track exactly how the banks are using TARP money.

My take-away from the first 24 days of the Obama administration is that President Obama is serious about bipartisanship, but perhaps to a fault. Clearly, he has tried to work with Republicans and bring a change of tone to our politics. During the stimulus debate, he met with Congressional Republicans, invited them to the White House, and even nominated a conservative Republican to head the Commerce Department. No one can deny that President Obama has largely succeeded in bringing some civility back in the relations between a President and the opposition party.

All of this is good in my view. One reason I supported Barack Obama over other Democratic nominees in the primaries was his commitment to changing the tone in Washington. I believed, and still do, that building goodwill among your political opponents can achieve breakthroughs in legislation that a bitter, highly partisan atmosphere would not allow.

But while the President’s conciliatory gestures have earned him praise from Republicans and may be a reason for his popularity in the country, it is just as clear that bipartisanship isn’t working out. No Republicans in the House voted for the original stimulus bill and only three Republicans in the Senate did so. It is yet to be seen whether any more Republicans vote for the final bill, but I’m not too optimistic.  And then most recently, Sen. Judd Gregg has withdrawn himself from consideration as the nominee for Commerce Secretary, citing unbridgeable ideological differences with the President.

Meanwhile, partisan commentators on the left are getting impatient with President Obama’s desire to achieve bipartisan consensus. Most visible is Paul Krugman, whose op-ed in today’s NYT is an example of a tough indictment from the left of Obama’s willingness to compromise with Republicans on the stimulus:

Officially, the administration insists that the plan is adequate to the economy’s need. But few economists agree. And it’s widely believed that political considerations led to a plan that was weaker and contains more tax cuts than it should have — that Mr. Obama compromised in advance in the hope of gaining broad bipartisan support. We’ve just seen how well that worked.

Here’s where I agree with Krugman’s criticisms of the President and other similar analysis:

1) President Obama was wrong to begin the debate by conceding so many tax cuts in his original bill. Apparently, the administration originally thought that 80 votes in the Senate was a realistic goal, and we now know that was a ridiculous assessment of what was possible. However, this fact should have been apparent to Rahm Emmanuel and other senior advisors in the administration. The President should have kept his tax cuts for 95 percent of Americans but told Republicans that any further tax cuts would only happen if they came on board. If they didn’t, he would go to the moderates and try to win their support and just ram the bill through. As, in fact, happened anyway.

2) Obama should have offered a bill that was over $1 trillion. By starting well under that number, it was easy for the Republicans to become emboldened and think that they could take control of the debate. They succeeded in doing so until President Obama finally decided to break out of the Washington echo chamber and go directly to the people, which likely contributed to the stimulus plan’s increased popularity in the country. But if you give your opponents a concession right away in a negotiation, it is just common sense that they will then ask for more and you will end up giving away more than you’d originally planned.

Earlier in his op-ed, Krugman correctly points out the Congressional Republicans’ unwillingness to budge one nanometer from their ideology:

One might have expected Republicans to act at least slightly chastened in these early days of the Obama administration, given both their drubbing in the last two elections and the economic debacle of the past eight years.

But it’s now clear that the party’s commitment to deep voodoo — enforced, in part, by pressure groups that stand ready to run primary challengers against heretics — is as strong as ever. In both the House and the Senate, the vast majority of Republicans rallied behind the idea that the appropriate response to the abject failure of the Bush administration’s tax cuts is more Bush-style tax cuts.

What is the lesson we should take away from this first major partisan battle of the Obama Presidency? I think it is this: the Republican party’s ideological purity at this moment is a clear and present danger to the economic security of our country. If they are not willing to bend at all in return for a Democratic President who is willing to compromise, then perhaps bipartisanship is not possible at this moment. While I would encourage President Obama to continue reaching out to Republicans, maintaining a respectful tone, and trying to work with them, I do not want to see any more watering down of the solutions that we need to solve very serious problems. If most economists believed that a larger stimulus was necessary to really fix the economy, that is what we should have done even if it may have caused some problems.

Of course, even as I write all this, I cannot say for certain that the moderate Republicans senators who are supporting the bill would have supported a larger stimulus package. Should the President and the Democrats have fought for a larger bill even if that resulted in a delay of the bill’s passage, or no passage at all? I follow Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri on Twitter, and she made the point a few days ago that the stimulus package we have is not perfect, but it’s better than no package at all. It’s a cliche that politics is the art of the possible, and this may have been the best our politicians could do.

But I guess I still believe that 1) and 2) above should have been tried first, more skepticism is needed in dealing with the Republicans, and finally, supporters of President Obama need to do a better job of communicating to him our concerns and criticisms when we think he is giving in too much to his opponents.

Any thoughts about this? I’d like to hear more from people about how the President should proceed in terms of bipartisanship. Also, how can supporters become more vocal in our criticisms when he compromises with a party that is not willing to meet him half-way?

Finally: one problem in even writing about the stimulus lately is that we don’t know exactly what is going to be in the final bill. I’m going to post later about how to find good online summaries of what’s in the bill. It looks like the House just released the full bill here, but who really reads this stuff?

I think it’s safe to say that today was Barack Obama’s first bad day as President. Tom Daschle withdrawing from his cabinet nomination for not paying all of his taxes was bad enough. On top of that, Nancy Killefer has also withdrawn her nomination as Chief Performance Officer for not paying all of her taxes. I wrote here yesterday that I didn’t think that Daschle should have to resign for his tax mistakes. He has a reputation for integrity on Capitol Hill from his days in Congress. Further, I can’t imagine that he’d be stupid enough to try tax evasion during 2008, knowing full well that if Obama won the election, he’d likely have a top job and would be vetted thoroughly. Finally, unless there’s evidence that a nominee was engaged in tax evasion, I don’t think it’s right to bar someone from serving in high office because of a tax mistake. I don’t do the most complicated tax returns by any means in my job, and yet the taxes that I do can be challenging. It’s perfectly reasonable to assume that Daschle and his accountant simply made an honest mistake.

At the same time, this is politics. In this game, it often doesn’t matter if you’re really in the wrong or not since the media tells the narrative. The narrative that was developing was that in Obama’s troubled cabinet appointments, he was reneging on his campaign promise to change Washington and muddying his message of “a new era of responsibility” from the inaugural address. If Daschle were the only nominee who had tax problems, I don’t think he would have resigned. It’s the pattern that made this a political problem for the administration. The same goes for Killefer.

What is still unclear to me is why President Obama would say that he would “absolutely” support Daschle yesterday, but then today in his interview with Brian Williams he takes responsibility for the withdrawal. It seems that Daschle was asked to leave, so I suppose that Killefer’s withdrawal may have pushed the administration into a corner on this one. It’s too bad. Daschle would have probably been just about the perfect person to help get health care reform done.

Then again, Andrew Sullivan has a plausible take on why Daschle went down: those horrible glasses.

So what happened to the extraordinarily probing questionnaire that candidates for high office in the Obama administration had to fill out? Did some people who applied for jobs with President Obama just get to skip it?

The Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, not paying his full share of federal taxes is much more embarassing than Tom Daschle, the nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, not doing so. Geithner was confirmed last week in a pretty divided vote of 60-34. Still, the problem is that Daschle’s stumble comes after Geithner’s, and now, fair or unfair, it looks like a pattern is developing of nominees not telling the Obama team the full story. Before the Geithner embarrassment, Bill Richardson had to withdraw his nomination as Commerce Secretary because of an investigation into his ties to a contributor who was awarded a state contract. That makes three high-level cabinet appointments that have, within the span of a month, caused problems for President Obama.

I don’t think that Daschle should withdraw merely based on this issue and I seriously doubt that he will have trouble getting confirmed. But since it seems that Daschle withheld information about his tax situation from the transition team, that raises some questions about him as well as the vetting process for cabinet officials. While I don’t think that these confirmation hiccups have hurt Obama with the public yet, the administration is probably reaching its threshold with problems like this.

The official portrait of President-elect Obama was released yesterday:

And then some great photographs of the cabinet and Democratic leaders at the NYT.

President-elect Barack Obama is a cool-headed politician with style and grace. He may be the hippest person to be elected President ever. With all those trips to the gym, he’s also in great shape. He is a huge sports fan.

But as his obsession with his Blackberry and his penchant for effortlessly discussing the minute details of policy demonstrates, he may also be a geek. I mean that in the best way: I’m using “geek” in the sense of a person who is proficient in technical/intellectual subjects to a much greater degree than most people. Under my definition, you don’t need to be socially inept and unpopular to be a geek. Maybe that used to be the case, but the Obama administration may make being a geek cool (again?).

It really began to sink in how different having an intellectual President was going to be after watching Obama’s first post-election press conference.  Then the appointments began: Summers, Clinton, Geithner, Romer, Volker, Chu, Kagan, and today, Genachowski, just to name a few. Then change.gov kept innovating with new and geeky features: from two rounds of Open for Questions, to the weekly YouTube address by Obama, to Your Seat at the Table, to the latest Citizen’s Briefing Book, to highly produced YouTube mini-documentaries of Tom Daschle and the policy team discussing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan. Woah! Two months into the transition, I think I am now officially suffering from symptoms of Cerebral Policy.

So get ready America. The geeks are coming to Washington next week. I can hardly wait.

I would like to see Colin Powell’s image restored. It was tough to see him become the character witness for George Bush’s dishonest march to war with Iraq. Powell’s Meet the Press appearance during the campaign did a lot to help me respect the guy again.  Then there’s his intriguing appearance today at the unveiling of the Renew America Together Initiative.  How awesome would it be for Obama to tap Powell as the public face of his new service agenda? I would like to see that, though I know not everyone would.

Other than that, I didn’t see the press conference so I still don’t have many details about this new initiative. Anyone else know what it’s all about?

I’m a fan of the Government Accountability Office. As much of a geek as this makes me, I admit that it’s true.  In fact, I link to the GAO on this blog so you can have easy access to their awesome reports.  But word to the wise: don’t forget the caffeine.  If you’re at all inclined to be a liberal, the GAO should be one of your favorite federal agencies.  One thing that can sink liberals and may be a huge temptation for our new liberal government is lack of oversight on government programs, and thereby, wasteful spending.  Sure, conservatives have proven that they are wasteful spenders because of Bush, but the stereotype is more entrenched in the public for liberals and thus we have to be even more vigilant.

So you can imagine my happiness to see that the President-elect is taking the importance of government oversight seriously with the appointment yesterday of his Chief Performance Officer (don’t ya love that title?).  From what I can gather about her, Nancy Killefer is a smart, tough cookie with a good combination of government service and experience in the more nimble world of business and management consulting (McKinsey). Good move, Mr. President-elect. Now can we change the GAO’s name to the Government Performance Office, please?