NAPA

A "twofer" is when you get two of something at once - sort of two for the price of one. That's what you would have gotten if you were at the National Press Club yesterday morning.

A series of presentations at the annual conference of the National Academy of Public Administration focused on the complicated management challenges all levels of government will be facing upon the passage of any health care reform legislation. As one participant noted: “There’s too much of a view that programs are self-executing and you just need more inspectors general and audits. . . that happened with the Recovery Act.” The consensus seemed to be that this assumption clearly won't work for health care reform!

Yesterday, I described how Eggers and O’Leary examined implementation of big government initiatives from a process perspective.

Government Executive’s Alyssa Rosenberg hits the nail on the head in her Fed Blog today, “How Health Care Would Be Run.” Her piece looks at the increased role of the Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Senate version of the bill. The House version has significant roles for other agencies as well, and creates a new independent agency, the Health Choices Administration.

There has been flood of memos and guidance on procurement reform coming out of the White House and OMB in recent months. But an open call for ideas was launched earlier this month via a collaborative project being undertaken by the General Service Administration, the National Academy of Public Administration, and a joint government/industry group called the American Council for Technology/Industry Advisory Council.