GovernmentExecutive.com

Over the years, many readers of Government Executive and users of GovernmentExecutive.com have told us that they'd really like to get handy direct access to news articles that feature the agency where they work. We're happy to address that need with our new feature, News By Agency. It provides an agency-by-agency breakdown of recent news coverage on our site. Just click on the link to your agency and bookmark it for future reference.

We weren't able to feature every single agency, due to limits on our capacity to report and upload news articles, but we've got as many as we could cover.

This is just the begining for this feature: In the coming months, look for us to build out each agency's page with links to news articles from other sources and additional content.

A report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project on broadband adoption has some sobering news for the next president – if he wants to expand electronic government. The first statistic that jumps out of the report, "Home Broadband Adoption 2008," is that the percentage of low-income Americans who have a broadband Internet connection dropped from 28 percent in March 2007 to 25 percent in April 2008. For African Americans, the percentage that had broadband grew only slightly 43 percent from 40 percent during the same period.

And it won’t change anytime soon. Of those that use the slower dial-up connections, almost two-thirds said they had no desire to change to broadband, and almost one out of five said nothing would make them change.

Another statistic that should worry e-government advocates is that 27 percent of Americans have no Internet access, with most of those being either elderly or low-income. And PEW found that only 10 percent of the non-Internet users have any desire to become wired.

These are the hard-core resisters – and there are millions of them. That means if government wants to move ahead with providing more electronic services – including services that may require faster and more robust connections that broadband provides – a large portion of Americans may just not care. And these resisters are exactly the demographics that government tends to serve.

Cracking that resistance, or finding a way to deal with it, will be a tough one.