21. Department of Commerce · Notable
Hand the Baldridge Program to the Baldridge Award Foundation
Printed page 686 21. Department of Commerce
“Transfer the Baldridge Performance Excellence Program. … Maintenance and operation of the program should be entirely handed over to the Baldridge Award Foundation to be run by non-government staff via fees.”
What has happened
- Not started
Nothing found, and the program is plainly still NIST's. The Baldrige Performance Excellence Program was not transferred to the Baldrige Foundation: NIST convened the Board of Overseers of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award on 2026-04-02 and again in 2025, ran the Judges Panel (2025-06-10, 2025-06-17), renewed the Award and Examiner application information collection twice (2025-06-20, 2025-09-22) and cleared the Baldrige Executive Fellows Program collection on 2025-03-07. No fee-funded handover to non-government staff is proposed anywhere.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
Negative search: Federal Register full text since 2025-01-20 for Baldrige (11 documents, all
listed in the chapter log — nine of them NIST’s own operation of the program); a jq pass over the
52 in-window NIST Federal Register records; the DOC/NIST slice of reginfo.gov’s Unified Agenda (two
RINs, both removals of obsolete regulations — the Advanced Technology Program and Technology
Innovation Program, and toy firearm markings); and grep -i baldrige over the text-extracted FY2026
and FY2027 Budget documents (0 hits — the Budget names MEP for elimination and leaves Baldrige
alone).
The Foundation the Quote names is a private body and is not on the allowlist; the Federal Register record of NIST continuing to run the award is the better evidence anyway.
- Action
- transfer
- Object
- Baldridge Performance Excellence Program
- ID
- 1909