According to a press release this morning (PDF), GPO management will soon be reducing their personnel by 15% (a reduction of 330 positions out of 2,200) including a reduction of 25% in management and supervisory levels. This is one more grim announcement on top of drastic budget cuts to govt information services and govt transparency efforts across the federal government. Stay tuned for more as we learn more about these reductions.

In response to overall Government cutbacks and projected reductions in appropriated funding, the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) informed employees today of its plan to send a request to Congress and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) for authority to offer buyouts and early outs to the agency’s 2,200 employees. GPO’s goal is to achieve a personnel reduction of 15% (or 330 positions), including a reduction in management and supervisory levels of 25%. Once GPO is given authority, employees can be offered lump-sum payments up to $25,000 as an incentive to voluntarily separate from the agency. The actual amount of the payout is based on a formula. GPO will use current funds to conduct this program, which needs to be concluded by the end of the first quarter of FY 2012 to achieve the needed savings for the coming year. In combination with a careful workforce restructuring plan, GPO management believes these reductions in personnel can be achieved without compromising the agency’s ability to carry out mission critical operations.

“GPO has restructured and reinvented itself numerous times throughout the last 150 years to carry out the critical mission of meeting the dissemination and information needs of the U.S. Congress and Federal agencies,” said Public Printer Bill Boarman. “These challenging economic times have no boundaries and are forcing many Federal agencies to seek ways to survive. GPO is open for business. We are an agency with a dedicated workforce that will continue to reengineer itself in the 21st century to serve as the digital information platform for the Federal Government.”

Sunlight reports on the House bill that will slash funding for major government data sharing and transparency projects. Noting that the funding for these programs is only a few million dollars, Daniel Shuman says, "The returns from these e-government initiatives in terms of transparency are priceless."

• Budget Technopocalypse: Proposed Congressional Budgets Slash Funding for Data Transparency, by Daniel Schuman, Sunlight Foundation Blog (March 23, 2011).

  Data.gov, USASpending.gov, and other Obama tech innovations face virtual extinction if the FY 2011 budget bill passed by the House of Representatives in February or considered by the Senate in March becomes law.

It is not just the Statistical Abstract and related compilations that we are in danger of losing due to budget cuts (see The demise of the Statistical Abstract and other critical Census titles). Budget cuts are aimed at some of the most basic government information programs.

In such a climate, how can we rely on GPO, FDsys, NARA, and government agencies as our sole source of the government information that is released? We need this information in our digital depository libraries so that our communities can decide what is essential for long term preservation and access!

One of our favorite rss feeds, docuticker, identifies an interesting gov doc in a recent update - Budget of the United States Government — Fiscal Year 2010: The Budget Documents, A New Era of Responsibility: Renewing America's Promise (OMB).

A New Era of Responsibility "... [p]rovides a description of the Obama Administration’s fiscal policies and major budgetary initiatives. This document is an overview of the full Fiscal Year 2010 Budget expected to be released this spring."

It is comprehensible in the way a well written commercial outline can distill an impenetrable appellate decision. In it, the President's Message begins:

"Throughout America’s history, there have been some years that appeared to roll into the next without much notice or fanfare. Budgets are proposed that offer some new programs or eliminate an initiative, but by and large continuity reigns. Then there are the years that come along once in a generation, when we look at where the country has been and recognize that we need a break from a troubled past, that the problems we face demand that we begin charting a new path. This is one of those years..."

That's clear. Think of it as lyric prologue to prose recovery (I'm an optimist) -- The 2010 Budget joins its predecessors at GPO Access ... (and, some day, FDSys as well).

Go ahead and try with this online game called Budget Hero. Fun for the whole family :-)

And speaking of usaspending.gov (thanks Jim for the original post!),  Radar Magazine has analyzed federal spending on paper shredding contracts since 2000 (see chart at left) and shown that there has been a 600% increase on these contracts since George W. Bush took office. In 2000, the federal government spent $452,807 on shredding services (no doubt some appropriate and some not); by 2006, the "Cheney Effect" had bumped that number up to $2.9 million. And by halfway through 2007, the feds almost matched that number, with $2.7 million and counting. Here's the full breakdown and data from usaspending.gov.

The Office of Management and Budget is launching USASpending.gov a relaunch of www.FederalSpending.gov to providecitizens with easy access to government contract, grant, and other award data.

News stories:

• OMB Offers an Easy Way to Follow the Money, by Elizabeth Williamson, Washington Post, (December 13, 2007; Page A33)
• OMB beats deadline to unveil federal spending database, by Jason Miller, FCW (December 12, 2007)

"The database’s initial functionality will include the ability to search contracts and grants but not other types of spending data such as loans, said Robert Shea, OMB’s associate director of administration and government performance." (FCW)

The database will have an API (application programmming interface) so that programmers will be able to users to write software to access the data directly, and a wiki where users will be able to suggest changes and add information.

CBO's report on the costs of US operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and other related activities (CBO Testimony) states that overall expenditures exceed 600 billion dollars. Their analysis also includes expenditures which aren't explicitly budgeted for this purpose such as Veteran's Administration expenditures.

One of the documents included in the president’s FY 2004 budget declared “…we are no closer to measurable accountability than in President Johnson’s day”(48). In the budget for that year, the OMB (Office of Management and Budget) showed how they were addressing this problem with something called the Program Assessment Rating Tool, or PART.

PART was initially developed in 2002 (from what I’ve been able to determine). By 2004, its performance rating assessments were growing in numbers of programs assessed and in influencing budgeting decisions.It is a questionnaire executed by the OMB and the agency whose program is being assessed. The questions are in weighted into four categories: Program Purpose & Design (20%), Planning (10%), Management (20%), Results (50%).

PART questions are designed for short answers and are to be accompanied with supporting evidence (or other details when applicable). Lack of supporting detail for an answer may result in a disfavorable score for a particular question. PART answers determine a program’s overall rating. An important objective of the PART assessment process is to help an agency develop an improvement plan for a program –which is then used to evaluate performance in subsequent evaluations. A PART assessment should help clarify a program’s purpose, design, planning, management, results, and accountability and help decision makers (and citizens) determine its overall effectiveness.

There are seven types of programs eligible for PART, including Direct Federal, Competitive Grant, Block/Formula Grant, and Capital Assets and Service Acquisition (like big-budget defense acquisitions). Programs were initially to be assessed every five years. The FAQ on the OMB page has more detail.

Citizens can get PART assessments from Expectmore.gov. The site was launched formally by the OMB in April of this year(the site was initially launched in February). By making assessments of Federal programs based on PART results available to the public, it is believed such public accountability for performance increases transparency and help us judge whether a program is using resources effectively.

Programs have two categories of ratings, “Performing” (broken down into three sub-categories of “Effective”, “Moderately Effective”, or “Adequate”) and “Not Performing” (as either “Ineffective” or “Results Not Demonstrated”). Currently, according to PART assessment results of about 800 programs,

• 72% of Federal programs are “Performing”:
  • 15% of Federal programs are Effective (meaning these programs set “ambitious goals, achieve results, are well-managed and improve efficiency”).
  • 29% of Federal programs are Moderately Effective.
  • 28% of Federal programs are Adequate.

• 28% of Federal programs are “Not Performing”:
  • 4% of Federal programs are Ineffective (meaning these programs have been judged to be “unable to achieve results due to a lack of clarity regarding the program's purpose or goals, poor management, or some other significant weakness”). Some examples of “Ineffective” programs are the “EPA Ecological Research” and Amtrak .

  • 24% of Federal programs are Results Not Demonstrated. Includes those programs which were not able to collect adequate data.

The answers to PART questionnaires for an individual program are available on expectmore.gov. From the main page click on either “Show me the programs that are Performing” or “Not Performing”. These results you have to scroll thru as these query results are not downloadable to Excel for quicker sorting (however, you can get a dump of all programs, ratings, and recent funding information based on FY 2007 requests on the “Funding information for each program” link). Next, select a program and bring up its assessment page; at the bottom of the page is a “Learn More” link on the left and a “Assessment Details, Funding, and Improvement Plan” link to the right of that. Each assessment has a link to a “Program Performance Measures” and “Program Improvement Plans” (every program has an improvement plan regardless of its rating being “Effective” or “Not Effective”).