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It's becoming clearer just how the Bush administration and Republicans on Capitol Hill intend to pay the hundreds of billions (maybe even trillions) of dollars it would cost to partially privatize the Social Security system. (Such a move entails short-term costs, because some of the money that currently goes into paying benefits for today's retirees would have to be diverted to personal investment accounts.) First, there's no way around a huge amount of new government borrowing. But watch out for the second part of the payment plan, too: "Some conservative analysts and Republicans in Congress say a portion of the temporary financial gap that would be created by personal accounts could be closed through measures like holding down the growth in overall government spending," the New York Times reports. This year's near-freeze on domestic spending is beginning to look like a walk in the park.

Your loyal FedLogger is headed West, to a workshop on Web publishing at Stanford next week. I'll impart some bits of wisdom from the West Coast if I can. If not, see you when I get back.

Fascinating piece in the Post today about a super-secret Navy project right in the heart of the National Mall, near the Jefferson Memorial. They call it a "utility assessment and upgrade," but it's pretty clear there's something more going on. Best part is the I-could-tell-you-but-then-I'd-have-to-kill-you comments from, of all people, Frederick Lindstrom, acting secretary of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. "Let's just say when they're finished, you'll be glad they've done what they've done," Lindstrom says.

National Treasury Employees Union President Colleen Kelley's got a point about all the hubbub over the embarassing provision in the omnibus spending bill that would have allowed appropriations committees to poke through individual tax returns. Is that really worse, Kelley wonders, than "handing over the tax returns of 2.6 million Americans to private sector debt collectors," as Congress also agreed to do in the omnibus?

If it's Thanksgiving, it must be time for John McCain's annual rant about pork-barrel spending. (He used to crank up his attack long before the holidays, but that was back in the days when Congress, quaintly, actually passed spending bills before the fiscal year started.) Am I the only who's having increasing trouble working up righteous indignation about this stuff? At a time when we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraq and adding multi-billions in new Medicare benefits to an already overstuffed entitlements budget, it's hard for me to get even mildly irritated that the House and Senate approved $50,000 to control wild hogs in Missouri.

So did anybody get up in the middle of the night Saturday to go spend some federal money and violate the Anti-Deficiency Act, just for the heck of it? Technically, there was a gap between when a continuing resolution providing temporary fiscal 2005 funding for agencies expired at midnight Saturday and President Bush signed a new stopgap measure (lasting until Dec. 3, by which time he will presumably have signed the omnibus appropriations bill Congress approved over the weekend) on Sunday. The new resolution was flown to the president in Santiago, Chile, by military plane for his signature. What's that old line about no way to run a railroad?

Guy Womack, lawyer for Cpl. Charles Graner, accused of abusing detainees at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, tells the Wall Street Journal that it was "no big deal" for Graner and other soldiers to force prisoners to wedge themselves together into a human pyramid. "Cheerleaders all across America form pyramids every day, and it doesn't hurt people." I'm sorry--did he actually say that out loud?

The "Bush-is-trying-to-rein-in-the-bureaucracy" story line continues to develop, with Reuters weighing in with its take. Aren't we getting a little ahead of ourselves here? Sure, there have been a few well-publicized anecdotes about hard-to-control bureaucrats at the CIA and the FDA over the past week. And certainly, the president seems to be rewarding loyalty in his first wave of Cabinet replacements. But those two things--especially the second--are hardly unusual in second terms. First-term Cabinet appointments have to be big and symbolic in some way. The second time around you get to promote the people you've worked with for awhile and probably would have put in the jobs in the first place, if political considerations hadn't prevented it. At least Reuters resists the temptation to play the Nixon card.

Looking at that video of President Bush going to the rescue of his Secret Service agent down in Chile, didn't you think for just a second there that he was about to go all Ron Artest on the Chilean security forces?

Sort of an odd story in the Washington Post today about President Bush's efforts to rein in the bureaucracy. It makes a tortured attempt to connect Cabinet shifts with the administration's on-again, off-again efforts at civil service reform (and with efforts to overhaul the regulatory process).

If you need an example of why public trust in government continues to erode, look no further than this weekend's (lack of) action on the intelligence overhaul bill. Now there's lots of room for debate about the merits of the bill, as I've noted before. But at the end of the day, the measure had plenty of votes to pass. It just would've been embarassing for the House Republican leadership to have most of those votes come from the Democratic side of the aisle. It's very hard to convince people you're serious about making one of the most critical operations of the federal government run more effectively when important efforts that draw widespread support fall short for no other reason than political gamesmanship. It's sort of like the House and Senate repeatedly voting to trim the Bush administration's competitive sourcing initiative, then weaseling out when the measures get wrapped into larger pieces of legislation.

Guess we have our answer on the relative level of lavishness of the inauguration. President Bush has named three of his top fundraisers to drum up big bucks for the festivities. Taxpayers will kick in $2.8 million, too.

Here's the FDA reservation. And there's agency scientist David J. Graham way, way off it in the distance. Graham headed to the Hill yesterday to lob a grenade into the whole Vioxx mess, calling it a "profound regulatory failure" and saying the agency is "virtually defenseless" against preventing a similar situation from arising again. In fact, he went as far as naming five drugs he thought were similarly dangerous: Crestor, Meridia, Bextra, Accutane and Serevent. This unexpectedly harsh assessment forced Dr. Steven Galston, acting director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, to take the extraordinary step of going on NBC's Today show this morning to "categorically reject" Graham's claims. Let's face it: It just hasn't been a good week for muzzling civil servants.

A "long-time government employee" who signs herself "BJB" offers the following suggestion: "Since we have people sacrificing their lives during this time of war and the country is desperately short of money, it would be fitting that the inauguration events be low-key and less security-intense. This means no parades, limited parties, and a solemn inauguration ceremony." Think it'll happen? Me neither.

WSJ.com's James Taranto on President Bush's nomination of Maragaret Spellings to be Education Secretary: "Were we ever relieved to learn she was married. The Education Department is the last place you want to find Miss Spellings." Har har.

USA Today thinks there's altogether too much kissing going on in the Oval Office these days. But hey, at least... Nope. Not going there. No way. Update: 1:41 p.m. Hilary Clinton just described her husband as someone "who loves his fellow man" at the opening of the Bill Clinton Presidential Library. Now I can go there, right? I can't? Damn.

The front-page battle at the CIA continues, as the New York Times reports on a leaked memo from Porter Goss telling agency employees that they need to get behind the the administration and its policies. The Washington Times adds that the Pentagon is cheering Goss on. Need to get up to speed on the sniping? Slate's Jack Shafer handicaps the fight.

In its December issue, our (big) sister publication, The Atlantic, presents the results of a sobering "war game" the magazine organized on the subject of how to respond to Iraq's onward march to develop nuclear weapons. One of the key conclusions: the process by which people at the highest levels of the federal government make life-or-death decisions about national security issues is abysmal. "Companies deciding which kind of toothpaste to market have much more rigorous, established decision-making processes to refer to than the most senior officials of the U.S. government deciding whether or not to go to war," said Michael Mazarr, a professor of national security strategy at the National War College. (Click here for a preview--and then do all of us over here at Atlantic Media a favor and sign up for a subscription.)

The federal government can't seem to make up its mind about the Boy Scouts. National Journal recently reported that the Education Department had published rules under the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act that prevent schools from excluding the Boy Scouts of America from using school facilities for meetings. (Some school districts had objected to the Scouts' policy of banning gays and denied them access to school buildings.) But Monday, the Defense Department reached an agreement with the American Civil Liberties Union under which it will order military bases not to directly sponsor Scout troops. The ACLU and other organizations had sued the Pentagon, charging that direct sponsorship of troops was unconstitutional because Scouts have to swear an oath to God. Update: The Washington Times reports that the Boy Scout Jamboree, which draws tens of thousands of Scouts to Virginia's Fort A.P. Hill Army base every four years, will be allowed to go on--for now.

Even before the White House made it official today that Condoleeza Rice would succeed Colin Powell, the long knives were coming out in Foggy Bottom. The Washington Post reports that Rice faces a double whammy: The State Department bureaucracy loves Powell, because he fought for their interests like no secretary of state in recent memory, and distrusts Rice, because they think she undercut him while at the NSC. Bottom line? We could be looking at the next Porter Goss. "I look forward to working with the great people in the Foreign Service and the civil service," Rice said today. That's a start.

Slate's Fred Kaplan thinks Rice's arrival could actually bring "a morale boost among foreign service officers--a note of compensation for the departure of their cherished Powell that the State Department is now run by someone who has the president's ear and trust." We'll see. I doubt it.

Good news for TV viewers: The FDA has ordered Viagra-maker Pfizer to stop running those creepy commercials where the middle-aged dude grows blue devil horns imagining how he's going to return to his "Wild Thing" days of youthful stud-hood after popping the little blue pill. "FDA is not aware of substantial evidence or substantial clinical experience demonstrating this benefit for patients who take Viagra," the agency deadpanned in a statement. "If you have data substantiating this claim, please submit them to FDA for review."

The Indianapolis Star reports that several top Bush administration officials can't wait to give Indiana governor-elect Mitch Daniels--famous for his budget-slashing zeal as the head of OMB in Bush's first term--some of his own medicine. "Colin Powell told me that they were really yucking it up," Daniels told the paper. "All of the Cabinet members were looking forward to the first time I call one of them and ask for something. They all said, 'Oh, I hope he calls me first.' "

Those election wounds aren't healing too quickly, if the Mailbag reaction to our Kimberly Palmer's Thursday story on federal unions' reaction to President Bush's reelection is any indication.

In case you've managed to miss the endless promos, trailers and commercials for the new movie National Treasure, one of its central plot lines involves a treasure map on the back of the Declaration of Independence. Preposterous, no? Well, now comes word from the National Archives that there really is something written on the back of the Declaration. (You have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the linked article to uncover this tidbit.) Sure, they say it's got nothing to do with hidden treasure, but I'm not buying.

Would the last one out the door at the CIA please turn out the lights? First, Mike Scheuer, the former chief of the unit tracking Osama bin Laden, quits so he can criticize the agency even more vociferously. Then, AP reporter (and former GovExec intern) Katherine Pfleger Shrader reports this morning that John McLaughlin, a 32-year CIA veteran and deputy director of the agency, has opted to move on. And the Washington Post adds that new CIA chief Porter Goss and White House officials had to beg Deputy Director of Operations Stephen R. Kappes to spend the weekend reconsidering his decision to hit the road in disgust over the way that Goss and his handpicked team of advisers are running the agency. I realize Scheuer's resignation isn't really connected to the other departures, and McLaughlin's is being portrayed as just a natural move after a long career (and after he was passed over for the top job), but it's getting pretty clear that Goss is well on his way to setting some kind of political appointee record for alienating his agency's career staff.

Update: NY Times' David Brooks offers a dissenting view: CIA bureaucrats are out of control and must be put in their place by the Bush team. Updated update: Place-putting well underway: Kappes and his deputy, Michael Sulick, are also out the door.

"Nobody can tell me they wasn't scared. The worst part is when you're waiting to go into combat. After the fighting started, it was just a little different. But the initial waiting, waiting. That gets you. I was scared, and I'm not ashamed to admit it."--Walter Bieder, 83, who won two Silver Stars and two Bronze Stars for gallantry in combat during World War II, on the D-Day invasion of Normandy.

Let the metaphors fly: Arnold Schwarzenegger is bulking up California's effort to muscle its way through the Pentagon's process of getting lean and mean through base closures, Judy Sarasohn reports in the Washington Post's "Special Interests" column.

I'm starting to feel bad that I ever suggested Starbucks was a less-than-enthusiastic supporter of military forces overseas. Today, the company announced it has teamed up with the Red Cross to provide 50,000 pounds of free coffee to troops serving in Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Headline on yet another AP campaign post-mortem: "Women Say Kerry Should Have Wooed Them."

Who said the nanny state is dead? The ongoing federal obsession with Americans' weight continues apace, as the Federal Trade Commission sues six companies over weight-loss claims. Gotta love the name of the initiative, though: Operation Big Fat Lie.

"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved."--Attorney General John Ashcroft in his resignation letter.

As the House and Senate continue to go back and forth on the issue of creating a national intelligence director, one gets a creeping feeling: from a management perspective, this is almost destined to end badly. We're now at the stage where a legitimate question--who should control the massive, widely dispersed intelligence budget--has become a political football. Both sides are floating cut-the-baby-in-half solutions: the House says the NID could "determine" the intelligence budget, while leaving the Pentagon in control of its day-to-day spy spending; the Senate wants the NID to have "exclusive control" over spending, but would limit transfers of funds or personnel to 10 percent of an individual agency's total in any single fiscal year. When and if they reach a compromise on these issues, the new NID will almost certainly enter office hamstrung by a Rube Goldberg spending machinery designed not to increase the efficiency of intelligence operations, but to satisfy various political interests.

I have no idea how I missed this last week, but I can't let it pass unnoticed. USA Today reported that the Air Force paid $25,000 to one Eric W. Davis of Warp Drive Metrics in Las Vegas for a study of various forms of teleportation. And it got its money's worth, too. If you don't believe me, check out the full report--Star Trek references and all--on the Federation of American Scientists Web site. The report recommends the Air Force spend another $7.5 million to conduct psychic teleportation experiments, but the service says that for now, it's done throwing money at this little concept. Meanwhile, the folks at NASA throw cold water all over the whole idea. Naysayers.

Apparently there's no substitute for a human air traffic controller--yet. The Dallas Morning News reports (registration required) that the Federal Aviation Administration has quietly halted a test of an automated system to control some flights departing from Dallas-Ft. Worth International Airport. Four incidents--including one in which two jets flew closer to each other than the mandated three-mile limit--raised red flags. The FAA plans to resume the tests, saying that introducing some level of automation is necessary to increase the capacity of the air-traffic system.

This tiresome who's-leaving-the-Cabinet-and-when story is finally starting to get interesting. Last week, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters to stop asking when Colin Powell was going to make his long-rumored exit. Of course, they didn't. Yesterday, some dogged journalist brought up a moldy report from last May about how Powell was supposedly "tired." That, said Boucher, in the kind of terms that diplomats generally try to avoid, is "a pile of crap."

The White House announced this morning that Andy Card's staying as White House chief of staff. Press secretary Scott McClellan said Card was "honored" to accept Bush's offer to hang around for a second term, adding "he serves at the pleasure of the president just like the rest of us." I really only bring this up to note the following: Has anyone else, like me, always been mildly creeped out by the phrase "pleasure of the president"? Can't we come up with a better phrase for what political appointees do?

Seeing this in the Washington Post more than three years after Sept. 11 doesn't exactly inspire confidence: "Overlapping jurisdiction among federal agencies working on biodefenses--including the departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services--leads to confusion inside and outside government about who is in charge of preparations for, and response to, bioattacks."

Now that Burt Rutan has picked up his $10 million check for sending the first privately manned rocket into space, he'll have that much more time to spend on his other hobby: ripping NASA for excessive bureaucracy. Maybe the space agency will figure out how to fight back after NASA scientists crack the code of Rain Man's brain.

In the race to be a commissioner of the Hennepin County, Minn., Soil and Water District, that is. The St. Paul Pioneer Press reports that no one actually filed to run for the vacant commissioner's post, leaving county officials to tally write-in votes to try to determine a winner. And Kerry got more than Bush, although each had fewer than 10. Other write-ins included former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura and several local pro athletes: Twins pitcher Johan Santana, Vikings receiver Randy Moss and Timberwolves forward Latrell Sprewell.

Vindication for NASA scientist Robert M. Nelson! (See Oct. 29 item). The Secret Service tells The Hill newspaper that the bulge on George W. Bush's back during the first presidential debate was the strap for a bulletproof vest. Nelson, after doing some photo analysis on his own time, had said he was "willing to stake my scientific reputation to the statement that Bush was wearing something under his jacket."

Looks like Charlie Mahtesian's story about FEMA and the Florida election has hit a nerve among Mailbag contributors. With all due respect to those who are up in arms, I don't think the piece suggests that FEMA was engaged in a nefarious political scheme to aid the Bush reelection effort. Rather, the agency simply did what it was supposed to do--and did it very well. The fact that this certainly didn't hurt the president shouldn't be taken as an insinuation that FEMA would have given anything less than its full effort regardless of the political circumstances. So why the hubbub? Maybe this is one of those times when an editor (umm, that would be yours truly) slapped a headline ("How FEMA delivered Florida for Bush") on a piece that was just a wee bit more sensationalistic than the nuanced story the writer delivered.

Honestly, I'm not trying to gum this up with politics. And I certainly don't want to endorse the political views of a former Clinton adminstration Cabinet secretary. But I think Robert Reich is very close to the mark in his analysis of the election in Slate today:

"I don't think most Americans rejected John Kerry's policies. They just didn't pay much attention to them. It was Bush's moral vision they found more compelling. Kerry kept saying he had a 'plan' for the economy and a 'plan' for health care and a 'plan' for fighting terrorists. The problem is, when politicians talk about having a plan for this or a policy for that, people just don't believe it. One of the legacies of the last 40 years of mounting distrust in government is that politicians with 'plans' and 'policies' are immediately discounted."

The ol' e-mail inbox at GovExec world headquarters included the following this morning:

Dear letters@govexec.com,

We had a long night -- and we had a great night. The voters turned out in record numbers and delivered an historic victory. I want to thank our supporters across this country. At every stop I asked you to make the calls, put up the signs, talk to your neighbors, and get out the vote. And because you did your part, we are celebrating today. Thanks to you, we received more votes than any presidential ticket in history....

George Bush

Well, thanks, Mr. President--and congratulations. But honesty compels us to admit that the Letters section was strictly neutral in this race.

Regardless of who you supported in the election, you've got to admit there's one tragedy about John Kerry's loss: no Department of Wellness.

If you thought the idea of the Postal Service sponsoring Lance Armstrong was a little out there, get a load of this: The mailing behemoth has now licensed its name to a fledgling West Coast rock band, AdAge.com reports (registration required). Seriously. When USPS folks found out that Seattle's Ben Gibbard of the band Death Cab for Cutie and Los-Angeles based electronica artist Jimmy Tamborello had joined together to form a new group, calling themselves Postal Service, they reacted the way you might expect: with a letter ordering the pair to cut it out. But the musicians' record label, noting that Gibbard and Tamborello had come up with the name because they mailed tracks and lyrics back and forth while working on their album, convinced the postal folks to join in on the deal. So USPS licensed the Postal Service name to the duo and signed a deal to engage in cross-promotional activities with them. Postal Service (the band) will perform for senior postal executives at their annual conference in a few weeks.

Hey, did you catch the big election news yesterday? No, not the apparently impending Bush victory, but the fact that a federal employee, NASA astronaut Leroy Chiao, became the first person to vote for president from space. Chiao was cagey about who he cast his ballot for, saying only that it was "very positive" that both candidates had said nice things about the space program. Spoken like a true civil servant.

Here's what you get to wake up to tomorrow: The Treasury Department announced Monday that it would have to borrow $147 billion in the first three months of 2005, breaking the borrowing record set in the same time period this year.

The Denver Post reports that the Homeland Security spending spigot is finally opening, with $12 billion in grants trickling down to local communities, allowing them to purchase high-tech gear like vacuum shovels that suck up debris after explosions. The problem: Many first response organizations lack the personnel to use the new equipment--and anyway, what they really need is more basic stuff like fire trucks. Denver has 898 firefighters, down from 921 before 9/11.

"Now that a new California law allows civilian and military voters overseas to fax their ballots after marking them," the Wall Street Journal reports today, "officials in Yolo County have received two--one from a high-ranking military officer...with complaints about the 'difficulty in punching out holes in the faxed ballot image,' relates Tom Stanionis, director of technology for the county clerk."

Just when the agency got past the story about investigating the NAACP's tax-exempt status, the IRS gets slapped again, this time in an AP story on a report concluding that the rate of corporate audits in the first six months of this year was off last year's pace. The agency insists the story's bunk. Figures for the first half of the year don't make a good comparison, officials say, because the pace of audits picks up in the latter half. Both the House and Senate have refused to meet the Bush administration's funding request for fiscal 2004 IRS enforcement efforts.

Just when you thought stories about security problems at Los Alamos National Laboratory couldn't get any worse--or weirder--comes news that authorities just discovered that a guy's been living in a cave on the top-secret lab's property for years. And it's not like he was hunkered down in Saddam's rabbit hole, either. The cave features such amenities as a glass door, a wood-burning stove, and solar panels connected to car batteries for electricity--oh, and "numerous" marijuana plants, too.

You know it's getting bad when the AP puts a story on the wires with this headline: "Dead Voters May Sway Election."

Starbucks' defenders have weighed in about my Oct. 27 item on coffee donations for the troops. Actually, they point out, there are at least a few potential legal hurdles to providing coffee or anything else of value directly to the troops. The better approach, they say, would be for Starbucks to give coffee to the USO, which could then pass it on to those in uniform. And this happens to be exactly what the company is doing for soldiers returning or departing via the Dallas airport, according to an Army reader.