Two recent examinations of management practices in three federal departments provide contemporary evidence of the need to incorporate procedures like those of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act in the public sector. Although each department established what appeared to be well‐designed internal controls, all lacked sufficient monitoring and assessment of the efficacy of those controls. By requiring senior management to attest to the strength of their control mechanisms, as required by the newly revised OMB Circular A‐123, the quality of this monitoring should improve. Findings from a recent study of private‐sector implementation of these reforms are described, along with suggestions for public administration research and practice at all levels of government.
Business management reform efforts have been part of the U.S. Defense Department agenda for decades. Current reform efforts have explicitly established the goal of generating, harvesting, and reinvesting savings from business management reform to buy more capital items; that is, they have focused on a measurable reallocation from operating and support costs to investment within a given budget top line. Recent increases in the defense top line, largely related to the war on terrorism, are not likely to persist; in addition, an examination of the factors affecting the top line suggests that a decline in the near term is likely. An examination of current and past defense management reforms suggests that efficiency‐seeking business management reforms are not likely to generate sufficient resources to cover a budget decline. Instead, management reform should be sustained for reasons of stewardship and accountability.
The advantages of increased delegation of resource management authority by Congress have long been argued by defense leadership. It is an important issue because of its relevance to congressional assessment of defense management, budget priorities, and how to enforce policy preferences. This paper investigates the series of supplemental appropriations for the war on terrorism to determine (a) under what conditions, and how and why Congress delegates budget authority to defense, (b) what happened with respect to the degree of delegation after appropriation during budget execution, and (c) what this case teaches us about the evolving budgetary relationship between Congress and the Defense Department.
This study addresses managerial strategies to adapt public spending in anticipation of fiscal stress. It simulates a cutback to a federal agency, providing a decision tool that applies normative recommendations from the cutback management literature. Using agency data, we develop a menu of options that illustrate how different distributions of budget reductions affect organizational goals. We show five alternatives that consider the political, legal, and fiscal implications of the agency's responses to anticipated budgetary pressure. This simulation demonstrates that public agencies can apply existing data to generate rational and viable strategic plans for weathering fiscal stress.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.