To celebrate our 25th anniversary in 2025, we’re spotlighting 25 pivotal moments that reshaped the way the government operates. Visit our anniversary page each week as we look back on these defining moments.
In some ways the government barely ever changes. In other ways, the government today is unrecognizable from the one of 25 years ago.
Four presidents, seven administrations and 13 Congresses have each left their mark, from institution of the President’s Management Agenda to the advent of data-driven decision making.
Constantly evolving information technology has also left its mark, with developments including IP communications, the commoditization of hardware, cloud computing and the rise of digital services and the customer experience movement. Events no one could anticipate — those, too, have changed the government: 9/11, the great cyber hack of the Office of Personnel Management, a virus-induced pandemic.
In these years, the government hasn’t been merely a passive reactor to events. Innovations such as acquisition reform, more intentional approaches to human capital management and even creation of whole new agencies and bureaus to meet specific challenges — these too have marked the past 25 years.
Through the past quarter century, federal employees, together with their contracting partners, have striven to keep the government agile, responsive and accountable. And for 25 years, Federal News Network has been helping them do so. Our own mission: chronicling each development and highlighting the work of presidents and agency line managers alike.
In the coming months, we’ll be reviewing in detail, with weekly stories by FNN reporters, the most important developments in government management and technology. It’s our way of celebrating our own quarter century of service.
Born as an internet-only stream called Federal News Radio, today’s Federal News Network is a full spectrum media brand with nonstop web, radio broadcast, email and podcast information all aimed at helping the federal community understand what’s going on and make sounder decisions.
Exactly what occurrences rank as most significant in the past 25 years? Not surprisingly, opinions vary widely.
Therefore, to help our staff come up with a cogent list, our editors and reporters — with a combined total of more than 100 years covering the federal government — wracked our brains and our files. Then we sought input from some long-time observers. We asked:
- David Berteau, president and CEO of the Professional Services Council
- Dan Chenok, executive director of the IBM Center for the Business of Government and a long-serving manager in the Office of Management and Budget
- Traci DiMartini, the chief human capital officer, IRS
- Gene Dodaro, comptroller general and leader of the Government Accountability Office
- Karen Evans, the former federal CIO and now senior advisor for cybersecurity, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
- Veronica Hinton, associate director for Workforce Policy and Innovation, Office of Personnel Management
- David Lebryk, former Fiscal Assistant Secretary, Treasury Department
- David Shive, chief information officer, General Services Administration
- Tom Trezza, president, Trezza Media Group
- Roger Waldron president of the Coalition for Government Procurement
As readers can see from the detailed list we’ve posted, the 25 all concern in some way the management of government itself — its workforce, its activities such as procurement to support what its people do, and the way its agencies and components are organized. We did not include historic and significant events if they had no tangible impact on the operation of the government itself.
We invite you to revisit this spot each week for the detailed stories. First, though, join us on a flyover summary of events that shaped the government in the past quarter century.
Management overhaul
The 9/11 attacks in 2001, momentous internationally, also directly changed how the government manages its fundamental mission, namely the security of its citizens. It led Congress to reorganize scattered security components of the government into the massive Department of Homeland Security. The very word “homeland” had not been part of the American vernacular before, but the attacks showed how vulnerable U.S. soil had become in a highly networked age with ceaseless transnational movement.
That event also surfaced how poorly the often-competitive agencies of the intelligence community collaborated and shared information. Hence the establishment of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Creation of U.S. Northern Command similarly grew out of 9/11. NORTHCOM serves as a standby command to militarily protect U.S. soil.
The government is also a big spender. The acquisition of goods and services from warplanes to cubicle dividers to commercial cloud computing now amounts to more than $750 billion annually. Therefore, how the government buys has occupied Congress and the executive branch since the days when crooked Civil War contractors delivered “shoddy” blankets to keep troops warm.
The Services Acquisition Reform Act in 2003 came from recognition that services ranging from building custodial care to coding online citizen services took an ever-growing portion of the government’s acquisition spend, replacing products as the biggest area of spend.
In 2014, the Obama administration and its General Services Administration leadership realized that the sheer number of contract vehicles by which an agency could acquire something rendered procurement less efficient than it could be. That led to the best-in-class notion of winnowing down the acquisition vehicles and encouraging agencies to use those deemed to include the best prices and terms and conditions.
The backdrop to these management events, and others such as the 2015 White House memo on reducing the federal real estate “footprint,” was the continual rise in government spending. Government deficit spending, that is. Congress reacted with the 2011 Budget Control Act, with its sequestration feature. This limited spending only for the so-called discretionary elements of the federal budget, or about a third of total outlays. Still, it put agencies on notice that managers could not take as a given more money year after year for their mission and operations.
Credit the George W. Bush administration for the first President’s Management Agenda. This initiative — a blueprint for how the government would improve efficiency and better serve citizens — was taken up by each successive administration, each of which added its own priorities.
Workforce in a crucible
With some 2 million employees, and another million in uniform and another 500,000 delivering mail, the federal government has long been the nation’s largest employer. As such, and operating in such a highly visible manner, the government has been a testbed for many innovations in the field of what is now called human capital.
Here, too, you can find a long history. Congress codified the notion of a professional civil service in 1883 with passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act. Government being government, not until 1978, with passage of the Civil Service Reform Act, did Congress significantly change the government as employer. The CSRA gave us the familiar Title 5 structures of job protection, merit-based hiring, the Senior Executive Service, the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Office of Personnel Management.
Within the wide pasture of the post-CRSA world, much innovation has occurred in our 25-year period. Perhaps most significant: Passage of the Chief Human Capital Officers Act in 2002. This took place during the Bush administration in 2002, at the time noteworthy for being the first MBA-holding president. Indeed, industry was also busy establishing chief officers for this and that — information, marketing, revenue and personnel.
More than reaction to a fad, the act not only established CHCOs at agencies, it acknowledged the fact that its employees really are crucial to successful delivery of services for which the government is obligated. Eventually that would give rise to the notion that a happy and enthusiastic workforce is more likely to offer top-notch constituent experience than a grumpy one. It also acknowledged that while devotion to the mission motivates federal employees, the government is obligated to operate as a model employer, if not in salary than in management of its most important asset.
Sometimes technology advancement impinges on workforce issues, as evidenced by the Telework Enhancement Act of 2010. The advent of fully useful portable computers and ubiquitous broadband led federal managers and line employees alike to realize how much they could get done without schlepping to an office. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, with its widely scattered examiners, led the telework drive. And Congress eventually followed up.
The core of established virtual private networking capability enabled every agency to switch overnight to mass teleworking when the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020.
Wherever its employees do their work, in the past 25 years the merit hiring system, while fundamentally sound, has led to practices that hinder the government’s agility in obtaining the people it needs. The Pathways Program, established in 2010 and updated from time-to-time since, has helped many agencies take in interns and early career professionals.
Throughout its 25 years, Federal News Network has maintained steady coverage of workforce issues, from starting your Thrift Savings Plan as a new employee, to how to optimize retirement planning. Among the first FNN hires, the legendary Mike Causey drew countless listeners and online readers to his continuous coverage of workforce topics. After his death in 2022, other FNN staff members have filled in the gap, maintaining the popular Federal Report as a daily must-read for federal employees.
Technology progress
By 2001, much of America had adopted the online phenomenon in some way. Broadband had become available throughout the nation and the internet browser had gone in six years from novelty to competitive commodity.
The government had gone from driver of information technology to simply large consumer. If the Navy’s ENIAC project in World War II preceded commercial data processing, in the early 2000s the government sought to learn from industry the intricacies of digital, retail-style, high-volume transactions.
As such, government was a bit behind industry in offering online services to the public. After all, consumers were becoming addicted to online commerce, whether for dog collars or for airline tickets. And new developments came regularly.
The Clinton administration had overseen establishment of government web sites. (I saw my first browser session on a Saturday morning in the West Wing of the White House. On a cook’s tour, a Clinton communication specialist, Jock Gill, took me to his Sun workstation. He typed out a www address and up came a scene. “That’s Japan,” he informed me.) But moving from online display to online transacting with the government? That formed the next challenge.
The technology components of e-commerce grafted to the service-to-the-citizen movement. Efforts of the Bush administration plus passage of the E-government Act in 2002 really got things going. It catalyzed government agencies to adopt more uniform approaches to website design. At the same time they devised ways to engineer away paperwork, telephone calls and visits to field offices.
That effort continues in full force to this day. Each administration advanced the idea in its own way. The 2018 law called the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act built on efforts of the previous decade.
An early case in point: The IRS, where the first electronic filing took place by modem in 1986. Fully paperless transactions didn’t occur, though, until 2002. In 2025, the IRS continues to expand online transactional capabilities for more taxpayers and more tax-related functions. Now more than 97% of personal returns come in electronically.
The online age also sparked peripheral changes for the government. For example, the Bush White House memorandum on e-authentication recognized the need for people to have secure yet usable ways to verify their identities for accessing online federal services. The viral 1993 New Yorker cartoon panel about no one on the internet knowing you’re a dog? That had morphed into a real security challenge when people switched from in-person-with-paper to digital.
The whole matter of cybersecurity acquired more urgent importance. Agencies kept getting hit with cyber attacks. Still noteworthy is the breach of Office of Personnel Management. Hackers purloined data on millions of current and former federal employees. The 2020 Veterans Affairs data breach proved the need for continuous vigilance.
A 2010 memo from the Obama administration also ranks high among significant federal technology developments. It set off the commercial cloud computing movement for federal agencies. The Cloud First policy, which morphed into Cloud Smart during the first Trump administration, postulated that agencies could move to a services development orientation, and away from the costs of operating their own data centers. OpEx to DevOps became the mantra.
Cloud computing has become a routine way agencies develop and deploy applications. The Defense Department retains some data centers for specific purposes. But it has numerous cloud contracts throughout its components, in addition to the big Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) DoDwide procurement vehicle.
Equally important in the last 25 years: Government realized the growing power of data to both manage the government and make it more transparent. The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 sought to improve how the government tracks and reports it spending information.
Still later laws pushed agencies to use data-based evidence in decision making and chip away at the perennial challenge of customer service.
When ChatGPT came on the scene in 2022, it brought along a whole new vocabulary, to say nothing of a new way of thinking about reality itself. The Trump administration developed its own roadmap for how the government ought to pursue the use of generative, large (and small) language model technology. The Biden administration had its own ideas for generative AI, and now the second Trump administration has re-established its own, less regulated approach.
Thus the cycle of technology infusion into government continues.
In short, world events, technology and new thinking about public administration itself have kept the government in a continuous state of renewal. For 25 years, Federal News Network has chronicled large and small developments. We’ve aimed to ensure our readers and listeners always know what’s going on and what it means to them.
Once again, we invite you to visit this site starting now and until the fall as we recount 25 years of vital coverage. We’re proud of what we’ve done, and we’re honored to have you along with us until now and into the future.
Join Federal News Network in celebrating our 25th anniversary as we recount 25 years of major federal moments that forever changed the government, and helped shape today’s federal workforce.
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