The shutdown led states to ‘fundamentally rethink’ their relationships with the federal government

The extended government shutdown has begun to strain state and local governments usually dependent on reimbursement checks for major projects and support from officials who haven’t been in their offices, according to Justin Marlowe, a research professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy. Marlowe tells the Priorities Podcast that the shutdown is causing project delays, and has been especially damaging for IT operations. “If you see a delay in the approval of any of that project planning process, it ripples through the entire project, throws off the entire timeline and ultimately costs a lot more,” he says. Being forced to rely less on the federal government, he says, accelerates a national trend that’s been underway since the 1950s. “[It’s] forcing a lot of states and localities to fundamentally rethink their partnership with the federal government,” Marlowe says.

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Alex Pettit, who has served as the chief information officer of Oregon and Oklahoma, announced last week that he’s returning to Oregon to serve as its digital transformation officer. Pettit, who most recently served as Colorado’s chief technology officer, wrote online that he’s excited to “bring hard-won experience from the field and apply it to familiar soil.”

A new guide published by the nonprofit Open Contracting Partnership aims to provide government officials with a resource containing the best practices for procuring AI technologies. “AI adoption and AI procurement are diverging,” said one of the group’s program managers. The guide is hoped to bring those back into alignment.

Following a recent decision by a federal judge in Wisconsin to send a whistleblower case from 2008 to trial, an AT&T subsidiary could be forced to repay millions it received in federal broadband subsidies. Central to the case is a debate over whether money dispersed through the FCC’s E-Rate program counts as federal funds under the False Claims Act.

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