Mindy Connolly joined the General Services Administration in February 2011 after serving as the senior policy analyst at the Office of Federal Procurement Policy where she led the agency’s natural resources division. In her role there, she was instrumental in President Barack Obama’s 2009 federal executive order aiming to cut back on agency greenhouse gas [...]

The federal government has a customer service problem, President Barack Obama wrote in a newly released executive order. “The public deserves competent, efficient, and responsive service from the federal government,” the president wrote. But too often the government and its agencies are hampered by inadequate citizen-facing services, such as agency websites. The order directs agencies [...]

A new report on the government’s efforts to shut down its costly and ungainly federal data centers reveals the government could cash in on the consolidation to the tune of $18 billion. The new report, “Federal Data Center Consolidation: Measure to Manage Report,” a joint project of government IT network group MeriTalk and cloud-computing firm [...]

Federal spending on IT is expected to climb over the next few years, reaching as much as $111 billion, according to a five-year forecast from research firm INPUT. According to the research, spending on federal IT will increase from $85.8 billion last year to $111.6 billion by 2015, at a rate of 5.4 percent. To [...]

He has a wealth of experience on the battlefield. But for Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, his next act will likely involve the secretive and bureaucratic intrigue of being the nation’s top spy. While the job switch — which will likely occur in early September — means both change and [...]

A new proposal on thorny conflict-of-interest regulations issued by the Obama administration conflicts with a draft proposal the Defense Department issued last year, according to a report in Federal Computer Week. The administration’s new proposal is actually less stringent than DoD’s version, per the report, giving individual program managers more latitude to accept risk, when [...]

Federal contract spending could be in a for a slight decline, market research firm FedSources revealed at its annual federal outlook conference. The government spent about $773 billion for contracted work in the last fiscal year, Federal Times reports. But President Barack Obama’s 2012 budget of $752 billion for contracted goods and services amounts to [...]

In his new role as head honcho of the Defense Department, observers say Leon Panetta — maybe even more than predecessor Robert Gates — is expected to continue and perhaps even expand departmental budget cuts and cost-savings. His managerial elan, which earned him rave reviews at the CIA where he is credited with boosting morale, [...]

Julius Genachowski knows he can’t please everyone. In a candid interview with the senior editor of Fortune magazine posted this week, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission said that sage piece of wisdom has helped to guide everything from FCC’s National Broadband plan to its controversial decision on Net neutrality rules. “One of the [...]

At least 36 federal data centers in Washington, D.C., area will be shuttered under a plan by federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, which includes a total of 137 such closures nationwide, The Wall Street Journal reports. The D.C.-area closings affect 16 federal agencies — including the Justice, Commerce and Transportation departments. As federal government [...]