Senate confirms Johnson for GSA

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The Senate confirmed former Dickinson resident Martha (Nace) Johnson as General Services Administration administrator Thursday afternoon in a 94 to 2 vote.

During the spring, Johnson was notified that she was nominated to be administrator. She then faced an hour-long Senate hearing in early June where she was unanimously voted in.

Johnson attended high school in Dickinson from 1966 to 1968 before moving east. She is the daughter of Ted Nace and the late Lovina Nace.

Her approval was held up by Sen. Christopher “Kit” Bond, R-Mo., who placed a hold on her confirmation over funding for a federal building in Kansas City. Bond, in a statement dated Thursday on his Web site, said “the GSA is not being responsive to the people of Kansas City.”

In her position, Johnson said she would be a part of a large agency in Washington, D.C., which would handle federal buildings and manage all goods and services needed by federal employees.

“The big thing is there has not been an administrator confirmed since April 2008,” Johnson said. “Just going in and being the president’s confirmed nominee for the job is a pretty important sort of statement that the agency will be focusing on the president’s agenda.”

Three big arenas will be worked on within the agency, she added.

“One of them is sustainability,” Johnson said. “We have a huge amount of money in the recovery act coming to GSA to, what they say, ‘green the federal inventory building,’ meaning going through the building and do what we can to make them much more energy efficient.”

Allowing citizens to get to government information is also part of the tasks.

“We hold a lot of those policies and we hold a lot of that technology to help show agencies how to do that, how to have more, and how to use all the social networking and so on and so forth, so that citizens can see their government in action,” Johnson said.

Johnson, who is currently the vice president of culture at Computer Sciences Corp., was part of the Clinton administration for eight years, serving as chief of staff at the GSA. She said she plans to resign from her current job Friday, and is slated to begin work at the GSA Monday.

“They will swear me in formally on Tuesday,” Johnson said.

Dann Greenwood of Dickinson said he and his wife, Deb, are proud of Johnson and happy to be able to call her a friend.

“I was very happy to hear that the Senate finally took the matter up. The 94 to 2 vote clearly indicates that the delay had nothing to do with her and everything to do with politics,” Greenwood said. “Martha is an exceptional person who is a highly qualified professional, who will do a great job, and who is a genuinely nice person.”

Johnson and her husband reside in Maryland. Her new office will be in Washington, D.C.

Tags: news, local, johnson, gsa