Cabinet Department Blogs

Let's see what the White House and Cabinet Departments are doing with blogs.

In addition to the White House blog, there are eight other Executive Office of the President blogs off whitehouse.gov. More than half the Cabinet departments now have department-wide blogs. During the Bush Administration, in August 2007, HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt became the first Cabinet blogger; according to news reports he actually did his own blogging.

The quality of these blogs varies widely. The most regularly updated and interesting are State's "DipNote" (also the most established, run since Sept. 2007), Defense's "DodLive," Transportation's "Welcome to the Fast Lane," and Homeland Security's "The Blog @ Homeland Security." The ED.gov blog and The Justice Blog are solid but a bit texty. HUD's is also a bit texty and has no archives; USDA's is regularly updated but hampered by a lack of design. Among Cabinet-level agencies, the EPA's "Greenversation" stood out.

No department-wide blogs were found at Treasury, Interior, Commerce, Labor, HHS and Energy. However, note that within departments there may be specialized blogs such as Health IT blogs at HHS or Energy Efficiency blogs at Energy. The focus of this survey is department-wide blogs.

* = first posting in brackets.

White House: The White House Blog. [Jan. 20, 2009]

State (Hillary Clinton): DipNote (U.S. Department of State Official Blog) [Sept. 27, 2007]

Treasury (Timothy Geithner): no blog; closest is Secretary's Corner

Defense (Bill Gates): DoDLive [May 2009]

Justice (Eric Holder): The Justice Blog [Aug. 16, 2009]

Interior (Ken Salazar): no blog; closest is Interior News

Agriculture (Tom Vilsack): USDA Blog [March/June 2009]

Commerce (Gary Locke): no blog; Main Site

Labor (Hilda Solis): no blog; Main Site

HHS (Kathleen Sebelius): no Dep't-wide blog.
There are a couple of Health IT blogs and close to a blog is HHS HealthBeat [July 2005)

HUD (Shaun Donovan): Blog [Sept. 10, 2009]

Transportation (Ray LaHood): Welcome to the Fast Lane (The Official Blog of the U.S. Secretary of Transportation)

Energy (Steven Chu): no Dep't-wide blog.
There are several Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy blogs, the most frequently updated of which is Energy Savers Blog

Education (Arne Duncan): ED.gov Blog [March 2009]

Veterans' Affairs (Eric Shinseki): no blog; Main Site

Homeland Security (Janet Napolitano): http://www.dhs.gov/journal/theblog/ [June 14, 2009]

Cabinet Level
OMB, USTR, EPA ("Greenversation"), U.S. Mission to the UN (none), CEA (none).


Also of interest: "Web Communication and New Media" and particularly "Blogging Standards"

Finally, note that many federal government agencies also have blogs. One noteworthy example is Gov Gab: Your U.S. government blog launched in 2007 by the U.S. General Services Administration's Office of Citizen Services and Communications.