The OMB Director is Blogging. That’s a Really Good Thing.
Thanks to a hat tip from my friend Tony Romm, I discovered this week that Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag is now blogging on the OMB’s Web site. Besides the obvious, seemingly generic arguments of transparency and candidness, the fact that the OMB director is blogging means a lot more for the use of social media in the government.
OMB Director Peter Orszag on Capitol Hill this week. (REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst)
Since the “M” in OMB stands for management, the OMB sets a lot of policy for federal agencies. As evidenced by this white paper I referenced in a previous post, the Federal Web Managers Council calls on the “National CTO or OMB” to fix and clarify a lot of these policies.
Since Orszag himself is adopting social media, we’ll be certain to see him break barriers of bureaucracy and clarify the rules governing the use of social media in government.
Orszag appears to be an honest man whose blog posts are very candid:
In this blog, I want to open up OMB even more to the public and share with you what we’re doing to address the many challenges that we face as a nation.
His blog does have one small problem: it does not have a homepage and new posts are only accessible via the OMB’s homepage. Also, and not surprisingly, the blog does not accept comments like it’s older cousin, the White House blog. However, the blog does have an RSS feed.
I know this is a busy time of the year for him, with the recent release of the FY 2010 budget and all. But still, I know an OMB memo on this topic is down the road. Hopefully, the appointment of the National CTO is as well.
