The year old program pays up to $6,000 for career advancement. The official in charge of the program apologizes for suspending the program with out notifying the spouses enrolled. The program was suspended because of a rise in enrollment that results in a bankrupting of the programs $174 million budget. The 136,000 spouses that signed up for the program before the shutdown will still be able to receive benefits.

“When we determined that an operational pause in the program was critically needed, we failed to notify our spouses in a timely and appropriate manner,” said Tommy T. Thomas, deputy undersecretary for defense.  ”As a result of our failure, we know we will have to work hard to restore their faith in us.”

The response to the program was overwhelming, with 136,000 enrolled for funding the program will cost an estimated $819 million, exceeding the program’s budget. Maj. April Cunningham, spokeswoman for the DOD, said officials were able to reprogram funds to meet MyCAA’s immediate needs. But new grant applications won’t be accepted until the department decides on a long-term plan for the program.

Many military families enrolled in the program are relieved to know that funding will resume. Although some spouses will not be able to register for classes as soon as they had originally hoped, they are still guaranteed classes.

The Department of Defense is currently working on developing options to maintain the long term integrity of the program.

For more information on individual programs and funds requests.

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Noveck created the Democracy Design Workshop, a collaborative “do tank,” where students and faculty at New York Law School work in teams to develop legal code and software code to promote transparent and collaborative ways of learning, working and governing.

With the support of grants from various foundations and corporations, Noveck launched the Peer to Patent: Community Patent Review project in collaboration with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Peer-to-Patent is the legal, policy and software framework to open patent examination for public participation for the first time.

Noveck is also the founder and organizer of the State of Play conferences, the annual event on virtual worlds research. With the support of the Maya Foundation, she launched the State of Play Academy, a virtual world space for democratizing legal education by teaching law to non-lawyers. The academy is also an experimental space for studying the impact of virtual worlds on learning and teaching.

Noveck is a member of the ABA’s Commission on Electronic Rulemaking and the OMB Watch Taskforce on Transparency and Public Participation in Government. She is a member of the Legal Expert Network of the Institute for the Study of the Information Society and Technology at the Carnegie Mellon Heinz School of Public Policy and Management, a member of the editorial board for First Monday, I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society, and of the advisory board of the International Journal for Communications Law and Policy. She is a member of the advisory board of the Nanyang Technical University Centre on Asia Pacific Technology Law and Policy in Singapore, where she visited as a Fulbright senior specialist.

Previously a telecommunications and Internet lawyer practicing in New York, Noveck is also the McClatchy associate visiting professor at the Department of Communication at Stanford University. She served as a volunteer adviser on innovation in government for Obama for America and as a member of the Technology, Innovation and Government Reform Policy group for the Obama-Biden transition.

Noveck graduated from Harvard University with bachelor’s degree in social studies and a master’s degree in comparative literature. She earned a law degree from Yale Law School. After studying as a Rotary Foundation graduate fellow at Oxford University, she earned a doctorate at the University of Innsbruck with the support of a Fulbright grant.

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“Well-conceived, effectively implemented environmental protection is good for economic growth,” said Jackson. “Let me repeat that: environmental protection is good for economic growth.”

Jackson makes the assertion that if America has a poor environment, the economy cannot prosper.

“Poison in the ground means poison in the economy,” she said.  “A weak environment means a weak consumer base. And unhealthy air means an unhealthy atmosphere for investments. But a clean, green healthy community is a better place to buy a home and raise a family, it’s more competitive in the race to attract new businesses, and it has the foundations it needs for prosperity.”

With an upswing in “Green IT” and other environmentally responsible business endeavors, communities will see fiscal and quality of life growth, according to Jackson.

“[Environmental protection] creates a need – in other words, a market for clean technology – and then drives innovation and invention – in other words, new products for that market. This is our convenient truth: smart environmental protection creates jobs.”

Jackson honed in on the importance of initiatives such as keeping dangerous chemicals like BPA away from water sources, and focused on the need to keep the state of the environment at the forefront of the public consciousness.

“This is about rising to meet our most urgent environmental and economic challenges – not shrinking from them with the excuse that it’s just too hard,” she said.  “That’s never been a good enough answer for the American people. At no point in our history has any problem been solved by ‘waiting another year to act’ or burying our heads in the sand. Progress is made by seeing – in our greatest challenges – all the possibilities for building a healthier, more prosperous future, and bringing the best we have to offer to the table. It’s what we’ve done before. It’s what we have to do again today. It’s not something we can leave for tomorrow.”

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Instead of building its new billion-dollar enterprise data center, NASA has decided to make major changes to its data center strategy, according to an agency announcement.

NASA said it was postponing the release of a long-awaited request for proposal for the new data center in light of new Office of Management and Budget  requirements regarding cloud computing, green IT, virtualization and federal data center consolidation guidance.

NASA intends to create a data center consolidation plan to include data center architecture and full enterprise assessment, which will allow the agency to design an infrastructure strategy to address all business requirements while taking advantage of opportunities to reduce energy costs and use innovations like cloud computing. The new plan is expected to be ready by fall 2010.

The announcement came on the same day Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra sent out a data center consolidation memo to agency CIOs. The memo instructed agencies to develop data center consolidation plans and incorporate them into 2012 fiscal budget plans by the end of August after first carrying out an assessment of their current data center infrastructures.

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Since being appointed to his new position last June, Floyd has been promoting the use of various social media to spread the DoD’s message.

“This means all [DoD] components have been told … that the default switch on access is to be open,” Floyd said March 10 at a “DoDLive” bloggers roundtable. “It’s balanced with the need to be security-conscious and tells the combatant commands to continue to deny access to sites when people try to access them inappropriately.”

The new policy supports longstanding regulations denying access to Web sites with inappropriate content, such as gambling, hate crimes or pornography, he said. The policy also considers the importance of operational security, which he said becomes more important because of social media’s reach.

“Don’t say or do anything on these sites you wouldn’t say or do in any other form of communication,” he said. “The people here in public affairs have started an education campaign to push out both the fact that we have this new policy, and the need to use it appropriately.”

The policy comes largely as a result of a culture shift outside the DoD, Floyd said. That shift needs to be carried over into the department’s culture, he added, as young people, many of whom have grown up using sites such as MySpace and Facebook, join the military.

“I think we have work here to do at the Defense Department,” Floyd said. “People who are coming into the military take all of this for granted. They can’t imagine a world where one didn’t have access to these sorts of sites. For those of us who are a little longer in the tooth, it’s only been in the past few years that we’ve seen these developments and discovered how useful they can be. So we have some education and cultural shifting to do.”

The early months of the new policy will be a learning period for everyone, Floyd said. In six months, he added, a review will lead to further guidance. However, for now, he encouraged exploration of social media.

“We shouldn’t be so dogmatic about this stuff,” he said. “Try new things, see what works. What works for me here in Washington might not work on a base somewhere else. I would encourage people to open a Twitter account, create a Facebook page, and see what works for them and their audience.”

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New approvals of eligible loans with the higher guarantee and reduced fees made possible by the Recovery Act are expected to resume March 10. Loan applications from borrowers in SBA’s Recovery Loan Queue will be funded first, followed by new loan applications.

SBA Administrator Karen Mills said the key loan programs successfully helped jump-start the economic recovery for small businesses in the United States.

“The increased guarantee and reduced fees on SBA loans helped put almost $22 billion into the hands of small-business owners and brought more than 1,100 lenders back to SBA loan programs,” Mills said. “As a result, average weekly loan approvals by SBA have climbed by 87 percent compared to the weekly average before passage of the Recovery Act.”

As part of the Recovery Act, SBA received $730 million, which included $375 million to increase the SBA guarantee on 7(a) loans to 90 percent and to waive borrower fees on most 7(a) and 504 loans. The funds for these programs were exhausted Nov. 23, and an additional $125 million was provided in December. Those funds were exhausted in late February.

SBA has implemented the Recovery Loan Queue twice before as part of its temporary transitions back to pre-Recovery Act lending. Eligible small businesses, in consultation with their lender, could choose to be placed in the queue for possible approval of a Recovery Act loan if funding became available from loans canceled for a variety of reasons.

The extension signed by Obama authorizes the higher guarantee levels through March 28, 2010, for 7(a) loans. The fee relief is available until the additional funding is exhausted or the end of the fiscal year Sept. 30, whichever comes first. As was the case in November and again in February, SBA is prepared to transition into a queue system as the funds start to wind down to ensure the maximum simulative effect of the programs and disbursement of funds.

For non-Recovery Act 7(a) or 504 loans already funded during the transition period, this extension does not provide a retroactive guarantee or waived fees. Loans that were funded under non-Recovery Act terms cannot be canceled and resubmitted to take advantage of the Recovery Act extension provisions. This extension does not affect other SBA Recovery Act programs, including the America’s Recovery Capital loan program or the agency’s microloans. Recovery Act funding still remains available for both programs.

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Currently, there are no regulations in place that differentiate between online advertisements and hard copy advertisements.  The FDA hopes to put guidelines in place that will “not become quickly outdated as the tools and technology evolve,” according to FDA spokeswoman Shelly L. Burgess in a NextGov report.

One issue the FDA faces with the regulation of online advertisements is that on these social media sites there is not enough space to include the full list of directions, side effects or drug interactions. The FDA hopes to put guidelines into place that will require promotional messages to be accurate and not deceptive.

A possible way to get around this shortfall of the Internet is to require a graphic that would indicate that the information is accurate. In a way, it would be a “seal of approval.” However, the FDA has not yet confirmed that this concept will be carried out.

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The agency did not mention how the services would be paid for, but they did suggest a public funding for “Digital Literacy Corps.” This would be a program designed to teach computer-illiterate individuals how to use the Internet and PCs in general.

This is not an entirely new idea for the FCC. Back in 2008, the former FCC Chairman, Kevin Martin, made a similar proposition. Martin suggested the winner of an airwaves auction to offer free wireless service to all Americans.

Obviously, Martin’s plans fell through. Will Genachowski follow through with the idea in the National Broadband Plan? We will find out in less than a week.

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Janet Napolitano

Janet Napolitano is the third secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. She leads the nation’s collective efforts to secure it from various threats, including terrorism and natural disasters.

To counter the threat of terrorism, Napolitano has forged new partnerships with international allies and expanded information sharing with federal, state and local law enforcement. She has initiated a course to strengthen security along the southwest border, deploying additional personnel and advanced technology, while working with Mexico to combat violent international drug cartels.

Napolitano also has implemented an effective approach to enforcing immigration laws and prioritizing public safety while targeting criminal aliens and pursuing employers that take advantage of illegal labor. She has strengthened the nation’s ability to prepare for, respond to and recover from disasters by cutting through red tape and expediting decision-making along the Gulf Coast, providing new resources to build resilient communities and bolster their response capabilities, and urging Americans to take part of the shared responsibility of making the nation secure.

Prior to becoming secretary, Napolitano was in her second term as governor of Arizona and was recognized as a national leader on homeland security, border security and immigration. She was the first woman to chair the National Governors Association and was named one of the top five governors in the country by Time magazine. Napolitano was also the first female attorney general of Arizona and served as U.S. attorney for the District of Arizona.

Napolitano graduated from Santa Clara University, where she won a Truman Scholarship and was the university’s first female valedictorian, and received her law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law. Before entering public office, Napolitano served as a clerk for Judge Mary M. Schroeder on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and practiced law in Phoenix at the firm of Lewis and Roca.

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“I feel like I have been incredibly blessed and fortunate to have been able to serve our great nation for over thirty years and do so with so many people around the world that I like and respect. I also believe our country’s future is bright because of the dedicated and fantastic people that I have had the opportunity to serve with and to have been part of teams of people, many still serving government, that work hard to deliver positive results for the American people, our military and law enforcement personnel, and all other parts of government,” Williams said.

Williams had served as FAS commissioner since 2006 and filled in as acting administrator of the GSA at the end of the George W. Bush administration.

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