Public Policy in Local Government in a Essay

Public Policy in Local Government

In a general setting, the public policy is understood as a set of regulations implemented by the state in order to manage a specific issue within the parameters imposed by the current legislations. In a different formulation,

"Public policy can be generally defined as a system of laws, regulatory measures, courses of action, and funding priorities concerning a given topic promulgated by a governmental entity or its representatives" (Kilpatrick).

The public policies implemented by the United States government are numerous and complex, to target virtually every field of life, such as education, infrastructure, business regulation and so on. While all public policies are equally important within a democratic society, there are some policies which raise more interest from the public and this is due to their applicability in a specific context, or the impact they generate within the community.

Within the modern day society, some fields of recurrent interest for policy makers and their observers include environmental regulations, business regulations (with emphasis on prudence), health care regulation, employment policies or efforts to regulate the IT community. In the specific case of technology policies, the government has been rather intrigued, given the novel nature of the sector. In essence, the policies are still being developed and implemented, as the IT field evolves by itself.

In the context of a rapidly changing society and more and more demanding public, the governmental institutions have come to make more use of technology in order to improve the quality of their services, as well as create operational and cost efficiencies. But the integration of the latest technologies and their usage within federal institutions is pegged to a series of challenges, such as increased expenditures or the need for specialized staffs.In order to address these challenges of IT integration in federal agencies, the United States government is becoming more open to outsourcing the IT services. In other words, it tends to deliver fewer IT operations in house but prefers to have them completed by tertiary parties in different institutions, or even different regions. In other words, the public policies within federal institutions are becoming more and more prone towards outsourcing.

This change in public policy nevertheless generates a series of impacts within the community. Some examples of impacts include the following

Improved quality of the public services offered, as the federal institution comes to outsource IT operations and focus on the provision of its core services (health care, education, public administration and so on)

The creation of a context which supports the development of the private IT sector by creating opportunities for further development, demand for services and competition for federal contracts. In other words, this supports market equilibrium and further development of the IT community (Auriol, 2009).

A tradeoff at the level of employment opportunities, as these decrease in the public sector but increase in the private sector. As the public agency renounces in house completion of IT operations, it downsizes the staffs responsible for these tasks, decreasing as such public employment. Nevertheless, if these operations are transferred to a tertiary party in the same community, more jobs are created in the private sector; problems nevertheless arise when the operations are outsourced to foreign regions and this costs the jobs of Americans in favor of more cost effective foreign labor.

At the level of the federal institution, the change in public policy regarding IT outsourcing is….....