SLA Government Information Division

New OMB Blog and RSS Feeds

Peter Orszag, Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), has begun blogging anew. (Orszag had blogged in his previous post as Director of the Congressional Budget Office.) His OMB blog, which appears to be called The Blog, is on the OMB home page. The feed address is www.whitehouse.gov/omb/feed/blog/. Orszag's most recent post at this moment is Clearing up a misconception: “tax hikes during a recession?”.

OMB RSS feeds are also available for news releases, OMB Memoranda, and Statements of Administration Policy.

President's Budget Online - UPDATE

The President's Fiscal Year 2010 budget proposal is now available via the U.S. Government Printing Office at www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy10/ .  "This document is an overview of the full Fiscal Year 2010 Budget expected to be released this spring," GPO says. The budget overview, A New Era of Responsibility: Renewing America’s Promise, is a 146-page PDF document.

UPDATE:

The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has posted the FY2010 budget at www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/, conveniently downloadable chapter-by-chapter as well as all at once. OMB has also posted brief fact sheets for the major executive branch departments and independent agencies.

Government 2.0 Club

A new Government 2.0 Club is getting off the ground, led by a group of individual organizers with cooperating institutions.

From the Club's blog post announcing its launch:

Government 2.0 Club is a national organization that brings together leading thinkers from government, academia and industry to share ideas and solutions for leveraging social media tools and Web 2.0 technologies to create a more collaborate, efficient and effective government — Government 2.0. ...
As Government 2.0 Club takes root and grows we’ll put in place additional support structures to allow a chapter based network of local clubs to develop. In the meantime, the organizers of Government 2.0 Club will focus on the first chapter’s solidification and programming - the Washington DC Chapter.

The Club's initial event, a Government 2.0 Camp, is already booked. If anyone from DGI is going, please report back!

CRS Info Policy Expert Retires

Harold Relyea, long-time analyst for the Library of Congress Congressional Research Service, has retired. Congress Daily, via GovExec.com, reports on Relyea's career and retirement in Congressional Research Service veteran steps down, 23 February 2009. The article quotes Relyea as saying that he "plans to continue editing and writing, including a book on emergency powers."

One of Relyea's most recent CRS reports was Presidential Libraries: The Federal System and Related Legislation [PDF], available via fas.org.

Steven Aftergood of the FAS Project on Government Secrecy has blogged a tribute to Relyea, CRS Scholar Harold Relyea Retires.

SLA on PA State and Other Library Cuts

From the SLA Public Policy Connections Blog, 23 February 2009 ---

Pennsylvania 2009/2010 Proposed Budget Cuts Library Funds

News that Pennsylvania Governor Rendell’s 2009/2010 budget cut would cut library funds did not come as a huge surprise; budget cuts are sweeping the globe. The current recession is affecting businesses and individuals on every level, from mega conglomerates down to the self-employed business owners working at a desk that doubles as a breakfast table.

What may come as a surprise to many, however, is the proposed 50% budget cut to the Bureau of the State Library. Information about library services, under the Department of Education, begins at E14.20 of the proposed Pennsylvania 2009/2010 Budget. What is currently unknown is who and what will be affected by the proposed budget cut from 4.8 million to 2.4 million.

SLA is following this issue, and would like to hear from you as well. Please contact Doug Newcomb, Chief Policy Officer, with any news that you might have regarding this or other major budget cuts affecting libraries.

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Digital Government Info and the Library's Role

Two articles to be published in the esteemed Against the Grain collections development journal propose roles for libraries and librarians in managing digital government information collections. Article preprints are available online thanks to Against the Grain, the authors, and the authors' Free Government Information website.

• FDLP: Services and Collections [preprint] by James A. Jacobs, Against the Grain, 21(2) April/May 2009. Argues against the claim "that the best future we can imagine for libraries in the digital age is 'libraries without collections.' "
• Distributed Globally, Collected Locally: LOCKSS for Digital Government Information. Daniel Cornwall and James R. Jacobs. Against the Grain, 21(1) February, 2009. p.42-44 (flip ahead to page 5 of the PDF). Makes a call to action: "The preservation of federal documents is too important to be left to the federal government alone; we have the makings of a viable system to preserve digital government publications. There are several ways you can help."

What do you think?

New Foreclosure Crisis Info from the US Governors

The National Governors Association (NGA) issued a 22 February 2009 press release announcing two new resources for state-level information on the foreclosure crisis and response:

• Emerging Trends: State Actions to Tackle the Foreclosure Crisis [PDF], a report from NGA's Center for Best Practices, describes current and best practices in three categories: mitigation, stabilization, and prevention. The report includes directories of state foreclosure assistance websites and state foreclosure task forces.
• A companion website makes an inventory of state practices retrievable by state or topic (mitigation, stabilization, prevention). Information for each state includes phone numbers and website links for foreclosure assistance. The site links to additional web resources from NGA, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and other sources.

OMB Raises the Bar for Agencies' Online Stimulus Spending Reports

Anyone interested in tracking stimulus bill spending in detail, learning about new agency web requirements, or gaining insight to the new administration's approach to the federal web will want to review the 18 February 2009 Office of Management and Budget memorandum Initial Implementing Guidance for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 [PDF].

The body of the memorandum details agencies' procedural reporting requirements for stimulus, or Recovery Act, funds. For example, pages 33-34 of the memorandum detail requirements for Recovery Act grants, including reporting for the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) and Grants.gov. (Currently, the CFDA website carries the notice: "We are upgrading our site to provide increased transparency, greater access to assistance information and to better support the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan.")

Appendix 2 of the memorandum (pages 58-60) spells out the requirements and best practices for agency "recovery" web pages, themselves a new requirement. For an example of a nascent agency recovery web page, see the EPA's page at http://www.epa.gov/recovery/. Section 2.12 (page 17) of the memorandum states:

Agencies are not required to develop new websites dedicated to recovery efforts. The initiative is designed to create one portal where the public can find and analyze information and report potential fraud, waste and abuse pertaining to the Recovery Act. As such, www.recovery.gov is intended as the single, consolidated portal to that information. Multiple websites will confuse the public.
Each agency should, however, dedicate a section of its primary website to Recovery Act activities within one week of issuance of this guidance. Those pages must be consistently identified with a url that identifies the key entry page to that information with a “/recovery” extension, i.e. www.agency.gov/recovery.

For related commentary from the ReadWriteWeb.com blog, see their post Stimulus Spend Data Coming via Feeds.

The President's Quasi-SOTU

Newly elected U.S. President Barack Obama will deliver his first address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, 24 February 2009. First-year addresses not referred to as State of the Union (SOTU) addresses are a modern phenomenon. For the full story, consult:

The President's State of the Union Address: Tradition, Function, and Policy Implications, CRS Report, 12 January 2009. First-year addresses are discussed briefly on page 8.

House History: State of the Union Address, from the Clerk of the House website. First-year addresses are discussed briefly in the Presidential Delivery section.

State of the Union Messages at The American Presidency Project website addresses the topic in the third paragraph.

SLA on NIH Public Access Policy Threat

The SLA Public Policy Blog has posted a notice about a bill introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives that would reverse the existing National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy. The bill in question is H.R. 801. Check the full 17 February 2009 Public Policy blog post for details.