Robert Maguire's Library tagged Government →  View Popular

Afghanistan was “heading towards a catastrophe” due to several factors, including:



• “Afghanistan’s worst drought in history.”
• Twenty years of civil war in Afghanistan—which was at that time intensifying.
• The “administrative incompetence of the Taliban.”

“With the aging of the boomers and those who responded to Kennedy's call to service, we need to replenish the government work force,” says Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service.

Stier, a one-man evangelizing squad on behalf of government service, notes that the government must fill 273,000 “mission-critical” positions in the next three years. This will require vast improvements in the way government recruits and a new willingness to invest in its work force.

The military, he says, gets roughly 40 percent of its officer corps through ROTC. It makes sense to undertake a comparable investment in the civil service.

In the small and underappreciated world of those who care passionately about improving government's performance and prestige, there are competing visions of how to achieve this. One group of activists and legislators has been pushing to create a Public Service Academy, modeled after the military academies, to prepare a new generation of leaders in government.

It's a good idea and would send another powerful signal that government work is and should be valued. But with the extraordinary constraints on the federal budget, the prospects of the large investment that would be required to build a new institution are not exactly rosy. A civilian ROTC would be a good first step. The Roosevelt program has the benefit of drawing on the entire higher education system's capacity to produce specialists.

The Roosevelt program could also be an antidote to two debilitating trends in our politics. It would push back against the tendency of politicians to deride government (an odd habit, since politicians are themselves engaged in government service). And it might open the way for a bipartisan achievement at a time when such endeavors are in very short supply.

The Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) will provide the short-, medium-, and long-term blueprint for our diplomatic and development efforts. Our goal is to use this process to guide us to agile, responsive, and effective institutions of diplomacy and development, including how to transition from approaches no longer commensurate with current challenges. It will offer guidance on how we develop policies; how we allocate our resources; how we deploy our staff; and how we exercise our authorities. Specifically, the final report of the QDDR will lay out:

• The baseline: An assessment of (1) the range of global threats, challenges and opportunities both today and over the next two decades that should inform our diplomatic and development strategies; and (2) the current status of our approaches to diplomacy and development, with emphasis on the relationship between diplomacy and development in our existing policies and structures.
• The ends: A clear statement of our overarching foreign policy and development objectives, our specific policy priorities, and our expected results, with an emphasis on the achievable and not merely the desirable.
• The ways: A set of recommendations on the strategies needed to achieve these results, including the timing and sequencing of decisions and implementation.
• The means: A set of recommendations on (1) the tools and resources needed to implement the strategy; and (2) management and organizational reforms that will improve outcomes and efficiency.
• The metrics: A set of recommendations on performance measures to assess outcomes, and--where feasible--impacts.
• The links: An assessment of how the results and recommendations of this review fit into broader interagency, whole-of-government approaches, and into the Administration’s larger foreign policy framework.
• The QDDR will be managed by a senior leadership team under the direction of the Secretary of State and led by the Deputy Secretary for Management and Resources, with the Administrator of USAID and the Director of the Policy Planning serving as co-chairs. The QDDR leadership team will include senior representation from State, USAID and MCC, and will engage with Congress, Cabinet agencies, and seek input from non-government experts. Findings and recommendations of the QDDR will contribute to an interagency process aimed at developing a whole-of-government approach. The final report will be presented to the President and Congress and be made available to the public.

Here he is explaining why Europe isn’t a zero growth dystopia:

In America, people tend to think of their federal taxes as money down a rat hole and react accordingly. But in Europe, the people are more apt to feel they are simply paying for services with their taxes that Americans have to pay out of pocket.

This fact is best illustrated by health care. Most Americans get health insurance through their employers. The cost reduced their cash wages by 7.9 percent on average in 2008 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If we had national health insurance and insurers were entirely relieved of this expense, they could afford to pay their workers 7.9 percent more and be no worse off. If the payroll tax went up by 7.9 percent to pay for health insurance, it would all be a wash, but both taxes and government spending would be higher. [...] The second reason why taxes have less of an impact on incentives in Europe than one might expect is because European countries raise much more of their revenue from consumption taxes than the United States does.