Showing posts with label implementation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label implementation. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Laws Need Enforcers

Congress can pass laws and the President can sign them, and the supporters applaud and then....

If there's no bureaucrat taking action, nothing happens.

The latest case of that: a revision in FOIA law:
"Among the new law’s requirements are giving those seeking information at least 90 days to file appeals of denied requests, not charging inappropriate duplication fees and informing requesters of their rights to advice from agency or governmentwide FOIA ombudsman offices"
 The GovExec article says a number of departments haven't implemented the law 9 months after signature, including USDA.   The lead office is in Justice.  I'm going to guess that there won't be 100 percent compliance by this time next year.

Sunday, June 05, 2016

A Small Defense of Trump

I pride myself on being able to focus on nuts and bolts of implementation.  With that in mind, I'll offer a small defense of Donald Trump. The story briefly: he holds a fundraiser for vets early in the year, claims to have raised $6 million, of which $1 million came from him.  The media, notably the Post, pressed him on who and when, and yesterday he announced the details.  It turns out he didn't write his check until last week.  The mean-minded, which often includes me, take that as a sign he wouldn't have given without the media attention.

That's surely one story which fits the known facts.  But there's an alternative version of  what might have happened. Trump does the fundraiser without really planning the details of implementation. He does intend to make the donation.  What I haven't seen yet is the details of the handling of the money, whether donors wrote checks to the recipients or whether the money was routed through a checking account.  It's also not clear who determined the recipients--Trump, his aides, or the donors.  Once the media got on his case, Trump's people slapped together what was revealed at the news conference.
Bottomline: While I won't convict Trump of lying about the donations, I will say there's a strong case he and his people were inefficient bureaucrats, proving they fail at implementation.

For the bad case see TPM

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

HHS--Can They Make Their Deadline?

The dirty secret of government is that many legislated deadlines are not met.  Congress tends usually to ignore implementation once the bill is passed, so agencies really face few repercussions if they fail to meet the date.  This Politico article on HHS suggests the circumstances under which failure may not be an option: you're working on a highly visible,very controversial keystone of the program for a political party.  (If memory serves, Mark McClellan did a good job implementing the addition of Medicare Part D (drug coverage) back in the Bush days.)  We'll see how HHS does this time around.