Below are recommended plugins for many government-specific challenges.

Finding a ‘good’ plugin

How do you know if a plugin is “good?” Take a look at the right side of the plugin’s page and check to see that it has:

• Recent and frequent updates (within the past several months)
• High download count (tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands)
• Strong user rating (four stars or higher)
• Active support forums (with developer participation)

Recommended plugins

Kitchen sink

• Jetpack: Supercharges your self-hosted WordPress site with the awesome cloud power of WordPress.com.

Administration

• Members: User role and permission management
• Maintenance Mode: Temporarily disables public-facing site
• BackWPUp: Automated on- or offsite database backups
• See Also WordPress MultiSite

Performance and caching

• WP Super Cache: Simple page cache for smaller sites
• W3 Total Cache: Full-featured page, object, and browser cache, CDN integration, etc.

Workflow and publishing

• EditFlow: Comprehensive workflow management for teams
• WP Document Revisions: Workflow-based document management

Business intelligence and analytics

• Google Analytics for WordPress: Turnkey Google Analytics integration

Search engine optimization (SEO)

• WordPress SEO by Yoast: Full featured SEO solution, including generation of sitemaps
• Google XML Sitemaps: Generates sitemap.org compliant XML sitemaps

Content organization and display

• JSON API: Automatically generate JSON (machine-readable) APIs of all front-facing content
• MediaElement.js: HTML5 video and audio embedding via shortcode
• WP-PageNavi
• WP Sitemap Page

Social

• Gravatar: (via the official JetPack plugin) Generates user images based off of e-mail addresss
• Social Media Widget: Display social media accounts

Other content

• The Events Calendar
• WP Job Manager

Security

Generally speaking, WordPress is secure, out of the box, especially when you follow the best practices described in the  Hardening WordPress Codex page. Looking for more security? These plugins may prove useful:

• Limit Login Attempts: Limit rate of login attempts, including by way of cookies, for each IP. Fully customizable.
• Wordfence Security: Firewall and malware scan.