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Not only is Maryland Lt. Gov. Anthony G. Brown co-chairing the Obama transition team at the Veterans Affairs Department, he is a leading candidate to serve as VA secretary.

A source close to the Obama transition effort confirms that Brown is being given "serious consideration" for the VA slot, and is currently undergoing the vetting process.

A member of the Army Reserves since 1984, Brown, who holds the rank of colonel, commands the 153rd Legal Support Organization in Pennsylvania. He is the highest-ranking elected official in the country who has served a tour of duty in Iraq, having spent 10 months in the country in 2004.

According to his official biography, the handful of issues Brown has been asked by Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley to focus on in his current position includes the military base realignment and closure process, veterans affairs and health care.

There is no question that Barack Obama is going to change a lot of things, starting in January. There will be executive orders to assign, new agency heads to get in place, tweaks to programs, programs that get scrapped, programs to be built up out of nowhere. But one thing that I think no one writes about is what Obama will be stuck with. And also, what shouldn't he change? I know I'm throwing a lot of pieces at you guys today, but people really should read this piece from the November issue of the magazine. In it, Rob Brodsky observes that the Bush administration has made sure that some parts of its management agenda will stay in place unless they're specifically repealed:

The next president will have little choice in adopting the Bush administration's human capital plan for improving the federal workforce and boosting recruitment and retention. In April, the Office of Personnel Management quietly posted a notice in the Federal Register cementing the administration's entire human capital plan, including key metrics for knowledge management and workforce planning, in federal regulations.

"Regardless of the administration, we think that what is in regulation is just good business sense," says Kevin Mahoney, OPM's associate director of human capital leadership. "And it makes sense to follow the framework and use the framework to keep the progress that we have made over the past six or seven years going." The notice does not tie the next administration's hands, he says, and the metrics can be changed as needed.

And he also raises some good questions about whether there are elements of the management agenda that should--and will--stay in place. It's not really clear whether the agency policy review teams will release their reports publicly when or after they report to the transition team. But I would be very curious to see what conclusions they draw about management. Obama has already signaled that he'll reverse some decisions and policies related to the workforce. But what will the teams tell him to keep, if anything? What will he decide to keep in place?

I'm not going to comment on Ted Stevens' defeat or conviction, nor on the Senate sendoff to him yesterday. But I do have to say, the Senate will be poorer for not having a member who knows karate.

I don't know that many people thought Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano was a likely candidate for Homeland Security Secretary; more people seemed to be thinking Attorney General. But now that she's emerged as the DHS front-runner, and even John McCain has gotten on board for her nomination, it's well worthwhile for DHS employees--and everyone else--to read Dana Goldstein's profile of Napolitano, which ran in the American Prospect a while back. It's not really focused on Napolitano as an administrator, but the piece provides a good look at how Napolitano makes decisions, and how she sees herself:

But for every compromise, there are times when Napolitano put her foot down hard and fast. On the environment, she enrolled Arizona in a Western Climate Initiative that seeks to impose a regional cap-and-trade system on carbon emissions. She has also exercised her veto power more often than any governor in Arizona's history; state Republicans have bestowed upon her the moniker "Governor No." She nixed legislation that would have made it a crime for day laborers to look for work on public streets, and in May she pulled $1.6 million that Maricopa County police were using to conduct immigration raids in the Latino community. Being the savvy operator and former attorney general that she is, Napolitano immediately announced she was reinvesting the funds in a program to track down at-large fugitives. And although she signed one of the most restrictive anti-immigration bills in the country, an employer sanctions law that enforces stiff penalties for hiring undocumented workers, she did so in large part to prevent Republicans from placing an even more punishing measure on the state's November ballot.

and

When asked what she'd like to work on at the national level, Napolitano won't name a specific position, but she makes a hard sell for her law-enforcement experience. "I think at this stage, what I bring is that I've been an attorney general," she says. As U.S. attorney, Napolitano brags, her work on border-related crime forced her to make "big decisions that require judgment and attention." Like Hillary Clinton, Napolitano constantly emphasizes her experience, tenacity, and policy chops, often in a list-like deluge of information.

On this date 40 years ago, Richard Nixon was basking in the glow of his election as president. Yale University had just announced it would admit women. "Hey Jude" by the Beatles and “Harper Valley P.T.A.” by Jeannie C. Riley were burning up the pop charts. And in Scranton, Pa., a group of intrepid executives were gathered at a printing plant as the "pilot issue" of a brand new magazine they had invented rolled off the presses.

That magazine was Government Executive.

The first official edition of the magazine wouldn't come out until March 1969. So we'll be commemorating our 40th anniversary throughout next year. In the meantime, here's a look back at that inaugural edition:

(Sorry for the stains and scribbles on the cover. It's the only copy I have in my office -- and by the way, no, I haven't been around for the full 40 years, just a few more than I care to admit to right now.)

I think Ezra Klein's point that the policy review teams Obama announced yesterday indicate that he’s picked a few priorities for policy review is well taken. But I take issue with the suggestion that the fact that there’s a “Technology, Innovation, and Government Reform” team indicates that management is a priority to the new administration. This team appears to be a technology policy review team, not a government reform team.

First, let's look at the team members' resumes. Unlike the agency review teams that deal with government, where the participants bring a real diversity of relevant experience, the resumes of Blair Levin, Sonal Shah and Julius Genachowski are heavily weighted toward technology. Both Levin and Genachowski worked at the Federal Communications Commission, and for both, that is their only experience working in a government agency. Shah worked at Treasury -- but on policy rather than administration issues -- and at the National Security Council.

There's no question that Levin, Shah and Genachowski have sterling technology reform resumes, and obviously that's an important policy issue to pursue. And it's clear that Obama sees a connection between technology and government reform. Whether it's his Google for Government proposals or having the first transition blog, technology is Obama's vehicle of choice for transparency.

But it's not enough. This would have been a great place to get a serious management person on board, someone with deep, deep experience with the civilian and political workforces. It didn't happen, and that's a lost opportunity. Maybe these folks have really innovative government reform ideas. Maybe they're ethics experts. Maybe they have some cutting-edge private sector models they think would work in government that we're all going to think is a game-changer. I hope so. But least in Obama’s choice of people to run this team, government reform is just a tacked-on phrase.

CongressDaily, as always, puts it concisely and on the money:

The vote weakens the seniority system and signals the rise of California liberals who backed Waxman. It also strengthens House Speaker Pelosi, who stayed neutral but whose allies supported Waxman's bid. The result gives Waxman, an environmentalist, a key role in shaping legislation on climate change, energy, healthcare and other priorities of President-elect Obama. Dingell will stay on as chairman emeritus.

It's official: Henry Waxman has just won a tight vote, 137-122, to oust John Dingell as chair of the House Energy and Commerce committee, likely a key post if President-elect Obama advances major climate change and health care legislation (not to mention the fading prospect of a bailout of Detroit automakers). As we wrote yesterday, this is yet another major shakeup to the leadership and tone at the Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Stay tuned for more...

My colleage Rob Brodsky sends in this classic story from Jim Williams, acting GSA administrator, told at the Government Contract Management Conference:

"As GSA administrator, Williams is tasked with officially naming the winner of the presidential election so that GSA can turn over the keys to the transition headquarters to the president elect and so that GSA can release funds for the transition. So, late in the evening on election night, Williams heads over to the transition headquarters in NW Washington. They set him up at a table with an official pen and get ready to take a photo of the historic moment. At first they bring him the official letter to sign naming Obama as the apparent winner but it did not have the proper letterhead. So, GSA aides rushed around to find a computer and printer to print out a new letter with the proper letterhead. By the time that the letter arrives, Obama is already giving his acceptance speech in Grant Park. So, when it finally arrives, Williams looks down to sign the historic form, officially naming the first African American president in history, and the letter says that the winner is …. Sen. John McCain.

Woops."

Daniel Friedman, my colleage at CongressDaily, reports that Henry Waxman has narrowly defeated John Dingell in a House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee vote over who should chair Energy and Commerce. The full Caucus vote is tomorrow, but this has to give Waxman some momentum.

In any case, this is a step closer to the reshaping of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, too. If Darrell Issa is the new ranking member, the Republicans are virtually guaranteed to be much more aggressive than they were previously. But if Waxman's gone, Issa may not clash as much with a new Democratic chairman. Lots to watch, clearly.

I've written quite a bit about a push by State Department employees, diplomacy non-profits, and some legislators to increase the size of the Foreign Service, and especially to ramp up staffing of public diplomacy officers, the people who are tasked with getting out there in other countries and actually talking to folks there about who the U.S. is. And so I was pleased to see today via the always classy-looking State Department blog DipNote, that Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, Colleen Graffy, is Twittering a public diplomacy mission to Bucharest.

This is neat for a couple of reasons. First, it's transparency. We get a sense of who Graffy is meeting with, how long she spends with them, etc., as she tweets where she's going, when she's going. Second, it's a good way to communicate what a diplomatic trip overseas looks like. I think most Americans have very little sense of what happens when a diplomat goes abroad. It's true that Graffy isn't actually stationed overseas full time, so her schedule isn't exactly representative of a full-time public diplomacy officer. But it does open up the process a bit, and that's important in both directions.

So follow Colleen, and while you're at it, check us out on Twitter, too.

Almost as soon as the election results were in, Barack Obama's team moved in to a suite of transition offices in the Kluczynski Federal Building in downtown Chicago. So how was the General Services Administration, which has the responsibility of making office arrangements for transition teams, able to move so quickly to free up the space? I'm told that GSA employees themselves made the sacrifice. Renovations recently were completed on a part of the building slated to be occupied by a GSA unit. But when Obama won, employees of that unit were told they wouldn't be moving in to their new digs until after Inauguration Day.

I mentioned this yesterday and forgot to link it, but Rob's story on the agency review teams has good details on how the review teams are going to do their work, and when they'll report back to the new administration. Check it out.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commissioner Christine Griffin doesn't mince words. Ever. She's the kind of person who isn't afraid to tell a room full of disability hiring coordinators that "we're doing a terrible job," making the government a more open and accessible employer. So as I was picking through the agency review teams and decided to ask her about Kareem Dale and Marilyn Golden, who are reviewing the National Council on Disability/Access Board, I knew I'd get an honest answer.

"They are good choices," Griffin wrote in an email to me. "Kareem has been the Obama campaign liasion to the disability community since Obama became the [Democratic] nominee. I met him once but know lots of folks that he impressed. He is a person with a disability - he is blind. Marilyn is a long time advocate on all issues. A woman with a physical disability - uses a wheelchair for mobility - she is arguably a national expert on accessibility of transportation issues. Both good people."

John Kamensky of the IBM Center for the Business of Government has a great blog post up about Obama's "line by line" budget review pledge (which I've commented on before).

Kamensky knows whereof he speaks. He is a veteran of the last effort by a Democratic president to comb through the budget in search of savings. Here's his assessment:

President-elect Barack Obama will soon find out that most of the federal government’s biggest spending isn’t actually in the budget. Going through it line-by-line won’t help much. That’s what I and others found when we were tasked by President Bill Clinton to conduct his National Performance Review 15 years ago. He said “we’ll conduct an intensive national review of every single Government agency and service.” Well, we did that. And we conducted a huge savings review that went beyond agencies and services. We had identified $700 billion in potential savings (in the days when $700 billion was a big number) but only acted upon a fraction of that. What we found was politically too scary to do anything with.

Michael Iskoff at Newsweek is reporting that Obama has asked Washington lawyer and Clinton-era Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder to be his AG, and the real debate is over who will be his deputy:

One top candidate, favored by Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and other former Clinton White House officials, is Elena Kagan, dean of the Harvard Law School and a former lawyer in the White House counsel’s office under Clinton. Another top candidate, favored by other Obama advisors, is David Ogden, a former chief of staff to Attorney General Janet Reno, who is currently heading Obama’s Justice Department transition team. Kagan brings legal policy credentials; Ogden has more experience in the Justice Department trenches.

And always-saavy Alexis Simendinger is reporting at Lost In Translation that Peter Orszag will head up the Office of Management and Budget. Thoughts? Send 'em or post in comments.

The Agency Review Working Groups that Obama announced last week are important for a couple of reasons. 1) Especially for more under-the-radar agencies, the appointments provide a good preview of potential appointees to key positions. 2) The appointments provide some sense of how Obama sees the agencies, and what he knows, or doesn't know, about them. 3) They provide some sense of who Obama thinks he owes, and who he values.

Take the Department of Transportation Review Leads, Mort Downey, Jane Garvey, and Michael Huerta. The National Air Traffic Controllers Association, which for a small union is relatively tight with Obama (one of his first acts as a Senator was to introduce the "FAA Fair Labor Management Dispute Resolution Act of 2006," which would have restored the controllers' right to binding arbitration in contract disputes), is super-happy about that list. When Garvey was FAA administrator, she negotiated a contract the controllers consider the gold standard. And they're happy about Downey, too:

"There’s all sorts of people who are in there who we know and who know us. Mort Downey, beyond being a high-ranking official, was a former judge for our top controller of the year award," NATCA spokesman Doug Church told me yesterday. "He knows a thing or two about what we do for a living."

Continue reading "Some Thoughts On the Agency Review Teams" »

Marc Ambinder has a post up on the interaction between the Obama team's "No Drama" mantra and the message control that will become less and less possible as the team expands dramatically. I think he's on the money that stuff will leak, but it probably won't leak in damaging, discontented ways: people won't grumble, but stuff will get out.

I also think that the agency policy review teams were a brilliant political move. Whether they turn up major ideas for agency-level innovation remains to be seen, of course. But throwing out the long list of names of folks who are overseeing the teams threw a lot of chum into the water. Those names are great fodder for reporters who want to speculate endlessly on who will end up with presidential appointments. They allow for all sorts of conjectures about who Obama is trying to reward, and what policy changes he is trying to signal. In other words, they provide the press corps with something to focus on while Obama and Biden hold private meetings with a whole range of other potential nominees and discuss other policies. The policy review teams may prove substantive and substantial; I'm certainly not ruling that out. But right now, they're mostly a very effective smoke screen.

Barack Obama has the good fortune to have not one, but two, official presidential transition offices: One in Washington, and the other on the 38th floor of the Kluczynski Federal Building in downtown Chicago. The fact that he's taken up temporary residence at the latter location makes me wonder: Who's filling his staplers?

When Obama and McCain announced they were going to meet today, and said that "t's well known that they share an important belief that Americans want and deserve a more effective and efficient government, and will discuss ways to work together to make that a reality," some of us joked around the office about what kind of position in the new administration that statement might be signaling for McCain. We concluded that it seems possible that Obama will ask McCain to lead up government reform efforts of some kind. But I suggested that the efficiency bit didn't really seem like McCain's bag; he seems a lot more interested in issues of waste (earmarks!) and corruption than in converting federal agencies to the Church of Six Sigma.

And true to form, the joint statement from Obama's meeting with McCain doesn't really give details:

At this defining moment in history, we believe that Americans of all parties want and need their leaders to come together and change the bad habits of Washington so that we can solve the common and urgent challenges of our time. It is in this spirit that we had a productive conversation today about the need to launch a new era of reform where we take on government waste and bitter partisanship in Washington in order to restore trust in government, and bring back prosperity and opportunity for every hardworking American family. We hope to work together in the days and months ahead on critical challenges like solving our financial crisis, creating a new energy economy, and protecting our nation’s security.

The "government waste" line looks like a nod to McCain's anti-pork inclinations. But otherwise, not a hint. And certainly no mention of the implementation issues that divided the former candidates on the things they jointly identified as national priorities today.

Slate's John Dickerson has a nice piece today that connects two trends that have shaped coverage of the transition: Obama's committment to bring a lot more, and a lot more sophisticated, technology to government, and questions about how open to the press his legendarily discipled operation will be. Some of the points are pretty simplistic: releasing a YouTube video of his weekly address may get that address out to more people, but it doesn't give more people the opportunity to ask questions or reveal any more than Obama and his team want to. But the overall point is an important one:

Obama will show he is transparent not by delivering his message in some new way but by conveying actual information. He's got to tell the truth, yes, but he's also got to have something to say. His most powerful statements during the campaign were not conveyed through an Ethernet cable but from a stage, alone, with a microphone, the way it has been done for 100 years. If the promise of transparency and candor never arrives but the hype continues, his campaign will have produced the political equivalent of vaporware.

Language guru (and former speechwriter) William Safire did his New York Times Magazine column on transition language this weekend, and gave some love to the Plum Book and the Council for Execellence in Government's Prune Book, noting that:

Plums are the delicious fruit of the political tree. In 1885, the Pennsylvania boss Matthew Quay is said to have coined the phrase “shaking the plum tree,” updating the previous “persimmon tree.” When a generation later William Allen White, editor of The Emporia Gazette, asked the presidential candidate William Howard Taft how he got started in politics, Taft replied, “I always had my plate the right side up when offices were falling.” It was natural to call the book of political plums “the plum book” informally, and in 2000 a creative designer introduced a plum-colored cover.

It's a good column, but it's a reminder that every so often, commentators beyond our own good-government circles get startled awake and remember that the government is operating along out there, beyond the Sturm und Drang of the political season. And when they do, they feel compelled to translate the workings of government for their readers as if they're describing something very exotic, rather than the services our tax dollars pay for. Clark Hoyt, the Times' public editor, has written that many readers are sick of coverage of political races, and would prefer coverage of the actual issues at stake in the elections. Perhaps now that the election is over and the new administration is beginning, the Times will give their readers some good stories to go with their etymologies.

The Obama transition team has released the full list of people who are soon to be dispatched to agencies to review their operations. Here's the complete list for one key group: "Government Operations Team Leads":

Sally Katzen
Martha Johnson
Jane Woodfin
Bruce McConnell
Gloria Parker
Amy Comstock Rick
Elaine Kaplan
Linh Nguyen
Sylvia Bolivar
Stephen Crawford

Sorry for the light blogging today, folks. Your loyal correspondent had a bunch of deadlines, but I'm back, I promise. And I had almost as much fun reading a press release from Customs and Border Protection as the person who wrote it must have had thinking it up. Apparently, a Korean Air flight passenger had tucked 59 hypodermic needles and 10 oz of collagen, a popular facial filler like Botox, in her suitcase. As CBP's release put it:

Some Washington, D.C., area residents will have to find another source to remove those unwanted wrinkles and to gain a fuller smile after Customs and Border Protection officers seized a shipment of collagen from an international traveler at Dulles International Airport on Thursday.

...

“CBP officers and agriculture specialists at Dulles have seized some rather interesting items over the years, but I think this collagen is a first for many of us,” said Christopher Hess, CBP Port Director for the Port of Washington. “The importance of this seizure is that it reinforces CBP’s commitment to protect American’s against products that may be unsafe, and that are not approved for use in the U.S.”

Of course the seizure is relevant, and important. But most importantly, it's pretty entertaining.