Management and Administration
These articles are about the nuts and bolts of government administration, from IT governance, including security and privacy policies, to management best practices affecting procurement, workforce development and retention.
Cuts in funding don’t change counties’ obligations to their residents. They will have to figure out how to raise new revenue, cut services or both. But success in navigating this new landscape won’t come from austerity alone.
We could save billions by transforming these shuttered monuments to mass incarceration into something far more useful, humane and fiscally responsible. What the military did decades ago offers a proven blueprint.
Washington wants to prune federal regulations. The feds should pay attention to what the Old Dominion is doing. And AI can help.
The new tax and spending law’s requirements for food assistance and Medicaid impose costly administrative burdens on states and localities. Widely misunderstood rules for taxing overtime will intensify the administrative pain. Public employers should start preparing their workers for the confusion to come.
Cities that depend heavily on federal research dollars will necessarily take a hit. But a look at two different cities suggests two possible futures.
It’s threatened with extinction in many places and the relationship can be fraught, but it has a lot of value both to communities and their governments. Social media alone isn’t a substitute.
They raise issues of fairness, and critics claim they’re only about revenue. More speed and red-light cameras, however, would prevent a lot of deaths and injuries.
From politics to economics, closing old or bad prisons is not always straightforward. Even some incarcerated people have mixed emotions.
By prioritizing caregiver access and opening classrooms to families, Dr. Brittany Daley made real headway on some of her school’s major post-pandemic problems.
It’s not a panacea, but skillfully assembled systems have a huge amount of value.
New York City’s Democratic mayoral nominee has idealism and charisma. If he wins, he’ll need someone with a deep understanding of how a city works to translate passion into governance. There’s an obvious candidate.
The state’s first drone-as-first-responder program gives police near-instant visual access to emergency scenes.
Kristi McKenney was named director of the Port of Oakland in February, the first woman to hold the post at the nearly century-old port. She’s also overseeing a name change for Oakland's airport and a shift to zero-emissions operations.
Syracuse, N.Y., is having renewed success. Mayor Ben Walsh helped make it happen.
Employee-created AI tools process purchase receipts, identify patterns in 311 requests, examine parking challenges and more.
A housing assistance program “proved to be extremely vulnerable to fraud,” according to an FBI affidavit.
There’s a reason so many local governments rely on the council-manager system: It balances democratic accountability with operational expertise.
A transit agency’s social media strategy shows how to communicate a winning message.
It’s a common complaint by executive branch managers: Lawmakers don’t always grasp the importance of providing resources for more efficient use of tax dollars down the road.
Federal forecasters issued their first flood warning at 1:14 a.m. on July 4. Local officials haven’t shed light on when they saw the warnings or whether they saw them in time to take action.
Law enforcement officials say it’s not the boys in blue on patrol but rather city-run youth programs that are shifting the trend for kids.
News about cyberattacks — including those unrelated to voting — leaves even election winners with diminished confidence in the process. Education is key: It’s vital that voters understand how elections are run, how they're protected and how failures are caught and corrected.
Children with a parent in prison face a higher risk of social, economic, educational and behavioral challenges. There’s much that could be done to reduce collateral damage to families.
In January, Gov. Mike Braun issued an executive order calling for state workers to return to the office. The state is no longer allowing hybrid work arrangements, with everyone either at home or at the office full time.
The public sector is more obsessed than ever with using data to make decisions. But some think the quality of it may be getting worse.
It won’t be easy, but former mayors Michael Tubbs and Aja Brown hope to prevent displaced lower income Altadena residents from being displaced for good.
One promising approach is a dedicated specialist to prevent ordinary pain management from turning into the kind of addiction that tears at the fabric of communities.
A new law extends the lottery for several years. Its fate had been in doubt due to some questionable practices.
Drones had been limited to dangerous situations but now will be used for routine calls.
One federal agency targeted by DOGE lost substantial staff but took up AI and implemented ideas that should have been put in place years ago.
Getting ticketed by AI cameras using license plate data was never popular. Now there are concerns about financial mismanagement and a lawsuit between vendors that ran the program in Mississippi.
