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The U.S. Department of Education has reestablished the Office of Enforcement to oversee and take action on post-secondary programs that use Federal Student Aid. The office was previously deprioritized under [...] more...

The article presents a new framework that can be used for estimating the overnight temporary de facto population for the services and infrastructure planning applications. The framework is shown to be extremely efficient, as it combines several different direct and indirect methods for estimation. more...

While scholars study the transitions into office of new presidents and their teams, there has been less interest in how sitting presidents and their administrations prepare to leave office. The 2008-2009 transition is particularly important to study because the preparations made by the incumbent president began earlier than previously was the case and involved all agencies in the administration. Clay Johnson, former deputy director for management in the Office of Management and Budget, was charged in April 2008 with preparing federal agencies for the transition. In this essay, he explains how the administration did so. First, Johnson discussed responsibilities and timetables for the transition preparations with the 22 agency members of the President's Management Council Then, in July, based on information generated in the council sessions, Johnson sent a letter to agencies with goals for the transition and guidelines for achieving them. He and Gail Lovelace, the transition official in the General Services Administration working with career employees, subsequently made certain that their goals were met., By most accounts, the George W. Bush administration did more to help prepare its successor to govern than any previous administration, and for the first time in recent memory, the [...] more...

The United Kingdom Healthcare Commission, Commission for Social Care Inspection and the Mental Health Act Commission will merge under the Care Quality Commission (CQC). Heads of the bodies have expressed reservation over the merger plan. Barbara Young will head the CQC. more...

One of the most enduring debates in the public administration literature concerns the relative merits of rational planning and incrementalism as alternative styles of policy making (Lindblom 1959, 1979; Simon [...] more...

A study on of government employee's resistance against plans of privatization is presented. Key points of government negotiations with employees is also presented.

The measures taken by the government like retaining the old officials, to enhance the completion of proposed reforms of the public services and to tackle the issues of pensions and private provisions are described. more...

The effect of information and communications technologies (ICT) on government departments /agencies and the contributions of external agents to change and development programs are examined. Scenario planning is used as a tool for establishing the limits of possibility and plausibility for the future. more...

This paper examines the Beacon Council Scheme as a distinct policy element within the UK government's wide-ranging local government modernization agenda. The aim of the Beacon scheme is two-fold. First, reward for high performing councils and second, the achievement of substantial change by sharing `best practice' from identified centres of excellence. The scheme presupposes an implicit theory of organizational change through learning. The Beacon Council Scheme is based on the assumption that the organizational preconditions exist which will facilitate learning, and through its application to practice, improve service delivery. The paper analyses the presumed and possible conditions which facilitate or impede interorganizational learning and service improvement through the scheme. The paper then examines empirical data from 59 local authority elected members and officers about their attitudes towards and motivation to take part in the Beacon scheme during the first year of its existence. The data indicate that there are differing motivations for participation in the scheme and that these reflect different learning needs. The experiences of local authority participants suggest that the formulators of the dissemination strategy at the heart of the scheme have not yet given sufficient consideration to the processes of interorganizational learning, the conditions that support such learning between authorities and the embedding of new understandings, practices and organizational cultures in the receiving authority. This suggests that the underlying theories of organizational learning and cultural change may be insufficiently developed to create and sustain the kind of transformational change that is intended by central government. more...

SOI Projects and Contacts General Statistical Information: (202) 874-0410 Fax: (202) 874-0964 e-mail: sis@irs.gov Frequency and Program Planned Projects, Year * Primary Analysts Content Americans Living Abroad: This periodic study [...] more...

The author supports the use of impossibility theorems of social choice to explore the reasons behind an agency's adoption of a particular planning style, such as incremental or synoptic. Implications for resolving decision-making dilemmas via a link between agency characteristics and planning styles are also discussed. more...

Four separate agency planning profiles are examined, which include advocacy, communicative, incremental and synoptic planning. These configurations of planning structure and style can be used for theoretical reference when examining constellations of procedure and practice, and for developing hypotheses regarding these constellations. more...

Budgeting is an important element in a public sector organisation's accounting control system. There are a number of budgetary methods that could be used, each with an explicitly different focus. This article investigates possible reasons for Victorian local government selecting line item budgeting, planning programming budgeting (PPB) or a combination of the two. While program budgeting arguably failed in the USA, research shows it was adopted by local government. Australian researchers report similar findings, yet the introduction of program budgeting into local government has not been explored. Four reasons are postulated: (1) PPB will be adopted because of the complexity of the organisation; (2) PPB will be adopted because it is perceived as an aid to planning; (3) line item budgeting will continue to be used because users are familiar with this type of budgeting; and (4) management'' support for the adoption of PPB will be a significant factor in its introduction. A questionnaire was distributed to all the local governments in Victoria and 60 percent were returned. The findings reported in this article confirm the reasons postulated. more...