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Don Kettl cut to the chase in his op-ed in Sunday's Post on civil service reform: "The civil service system that drives the bureaucracy is broken. Every careful look at it over the last decade, including two commissions and a series of reports by the Government Accountability Office, has concluded that a century's worth of personnel problems have become encrusted like barnacles on the ship of state, making it ever harder to steer." That's why unions are the last organized constituency left putting up any resistance to junking the General Schedule at this stage. Even Tom Davis' declarations that we shouldn't rush into anything seem tepid now. With Defense, Homeland Security, the FAA, the IRS and others leaving the traditional civil service system in their dust, the rushing was over a long time ago.

The Biloxi, Miss., Sun-Herald reports today on NASA's A-76 competition to set up a shared services center to handle financial, human resources, procurement, information technology and customer relations operations. The twist: Not only do companies and the employee team have to submit their best bid for running such a center, they have to say at which NASA field office location they want to run it out of. That's gotten elected officials in Mississippi and Louisiana involved in lobbying for a CSC/Lockheed Martin proposal to use Stennis Space Center in southern Mississippi.

Fedlawyerguy says attorneys who work for Uncle Sam shouldn't kid themselves that they won't lose their jobs in A-76 competitions.

So there really is a Social Security trust fund? Yup, and it sits a couple of binders in a file cabinet in a Treasury Department office in West Virginia, of all places. In 1994, Congress required that Treasury create a "physical document in form of bond, note or certificate of indebtedness, rather than accounting entry," to document Social Security's obligations. So they did, and still do.

So it turns out that as many as 80 percent of those NIH scientists who allegedly cut shady deals with pharmaceutical companies didn't actually do anything wrong. So not only was this a case of overkill, it involved jumping the gun, too. Score another one for the federal ethics police.

This week's New Yorker features a story on the looming threat of a deadly avian-flu pandemic. (The article isn't available online, but a Q&A with its author, Micahel Specter, is.) If the subject sounds familiar to GovExec readers, that's because Katherine McIntire Peters already went down this gloomy path in our December 2004 issue.

On Web scams that trick folks into thinking they can get rich assembling them at home, that is.

This year's winner in the "Washington Monument syndrome" sweepstakes is the National Weather Service. (For those unfamiliar with the syndrome, its symptoms involve issuing dire warnings--such as, "We'll have to close the Washington Monument"--to ward off cuts or less-than-desired increases in an agency's budget.) Just as Congress prepares to take up the Weather Service's fiscal 2006 budget, an employee organization has conveniently leaked an internal memo saying that due to last year's cuts at the organization, "warning lead times will shorten and tornado detection rates will decrease (as will most other NWS performance standards) leading to the troubling and tragic conclusion that there will be unwarranted loss of life."

In response to Brian Friel's excellent Management Matters column on sloganeering in the workplace, an Army contractor, tells of quickly deleting a higher-up's e-mail detailing a new employee suggestion program, an action which landed him in the doghouse with a civilian manager. "The exchange," the contract employee writes, "ended surrealistically with him demanding that I recite the e-mail's content and me telling him to fuggedaboudit. It reminded me of that '70s Stealers Wheel one-shot pop hit: "Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right! Here I am, stuck in the middle with you!"

"Let's face it, 'First in war, first in peace, and seventh in the hearts of his countrymen,' doesn't sound very impressive."--Ted Widmer, a professor of history at Washington College in Chestertown, Md., on George Washington finishing seventh in a recent poll on the greatest presidents.

Like many others, I have my share of reservations about whether last year's intelligence reform will lead to an effective overhaul of the intelligence bureaucracy. Because of the ambiguous nature of the new structure set up by the law, a lot depends on who holds the top slots. And in that regard President Bush's appointments yesterday of veteran diplomat John Negroponte and National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden, are, to say the least, intriguing. Negroponte has a tremendous amount of experience in foreign affairs, giving him many opportunities to be on what former National Security Adviser John Poindexter described to GovExec's Shane Harris as the "demand side" of the intelligence equation. And Hayden has been justly lauded for his efforts to transform NSA into a modern, effective organization. (For more details on that, see George Cahlink's reports on Hayden in 2001 and last year.) The jury's still out on how much clout these guys will have, but they've certainly got the kind of federal management experience that people who get these kinds of jobs so often lack.

Very interesting piece on Slate today about NIH's spanking-new ethics rules. In the article, Richard A. Epstein, a University of Chicago law professor (and, it should be noted in this context, consultant for Pfizer and PhRMA, the drug industry trade association), makes the case that the new rules, which were implemented largely in response to two high-profile ethics breaches, are overkill. "These two incidents and others like them flatly violated the pre-existing version of the NIH rules, which requires full disclosure of potential conflicts," he writes. "The private sector often follows a similar model. The NIH's main response to the miscreants should have been to boost enforcement of the sensible rules it already had in place rather than piling on new ones."

But that's never really an option in the federal ethics arena, is it? Stepped-up enforcement of existing rules is never treated as a serious option when a scandal hits. (Prediction: It won't be in the post-Darleen Druyun Pentagon, either). This wouldn't be that big a deal if not for the fact, as Epstein notes, "the NIH's policy is likely to drive qualified physicians and scientists out of the national labs where they're most needed - and slow the pace at which treatments and cures come to market."

Suppose you're a Colombian drug dealer, and you get the brilliant idea of running drugs through Guatemala to the United States, smuggling them across the border in car batteries. Great idea, right up to the point where you get busted in a multi-jurisdictional, multi-national takedown led by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The NY Times weighs in today on the moral implications of the Pentagon's long-range plans to develop a robot army. But it also notes the cash implications. "The Pentagon today owes its soldiers $653 billion in future retirement benefits that it cannot presently pay. Robots, unlike old soldiers, do not fade away. The median lifetime cost of a soldier is about $4 million today and growing, according to a Pentagon study. Robot soldiers could cost a tenth of that or less."

Whole buncha replies to my item below about the widespread availability of government salary information. For starters, plenty of folks reminded me that federal employees' salaries are a matter of public record, so finding out your coworkers' grade level and bonuses is as simple as filing a Freedom of Information Act request. (Or even simpler: Let's just say that more than one person noted that the Washington Post helpfully makes this information available in a database on its Web site.) And agencies often make a big public deal of the incentive awards granted to employees.

This situation obviously emboldens a lot of workers to quiz their fellow employees about their pay. "Believe me, federal employees know exactly what people in their section or branch or division are making," says one Defense employee. "Bad form to ask? Maybe, but a lot of people ask." Some employees try to brush off the snoops. A first-line supervisor with 36 years of government service says, "Each year, I advise my employees to resist the temptation to respond to co-workers questions about their awards. I have even suggested they have three choices: to say 'no comment,' to change the subject or to lie."

While of course it's true that the current system encourages employees to track how their compensation compares to those around them, there are indications that things operate differently under pay-banding systems. A Navy employee who has been in a pay-for-performance demonstration project for 20 years says, "You're absolutely correct about co-workers openly discussing individual salaries--it just isn't normally brought up. Whereas, we may know which pay band a coworker is in, we are typically not aware of where within the pay band they lie. Sometimes, the gap between a junior employee in the pay band and a 'topped out' individual is more than $30,000. And we certainly don't divulge our annual performance ratings." An FAA employee adds, "I can speak from my experience with pay banding, that no one really discloses their pay any more, since not all get the additional annual Superior Contribution Increase. When I worked at DoD, it was commonplace to discuss grade and step."

This will clearly be an area to watch as the transition to performance pay unfolds. Thanks for all the e-mails.

According to the EPA, the federal government buys 7 percent of the world's computers, and discards 10,000 of them every week. The good news is that at least some of them end up in the recycling bin.

In the dark of night, under cover of the impending weekend, OMB has finally done it: released the list of 154 programs that it proposes to eliminate in the fiscal 2006 budget. For this White House (like all other White Houses) Friday night's the night to bury the news you don't want widely reported.

An Air Force employee e-mailed me the following this morning about the Defense personnel reform announcement: "As a government employee for 22+ years, I find myself more than a little frustrated. I take a great deal of pride in the work I do. The new personnel system seems to have more cons than pros for employees. A level playing field is always the preferred way to work with others. Those who are high performers are given awards with their appraisals. Changing the program will only cause anyone not getting raises to resent those who do."

My question (and maybe it's a dumb one) is, how will they know? Over here in the private sector, most people just don't know exactly what their coworkers make, much less how big a raise they receive in any given year. The only way to know is to ask, and that's considered bad form. Of course, many companies have salary schedules that match positions, so you can get a general idea of what people make. But I've never worked in a place where people openly talk about what their raise was. I realize the government culture is very different, and people often openly identify their grade and step levels. But I wonder if that will change in the move to a pay-banding system. Maybe people who have already worked in such systems can enlighten me on this point.

AP asks the question of the day: Is the National Security Agency e-mailing with Engelbert Humperdinck?

Is it just me, or has the response to the administration's annual effort to push bigger pay raises for the military than the civil service been more muted than usual? It occurs to me that there are three factors at play here:

• The gap (3.1 percent military, 2.3 percent civilian) is actually smaller than a lot of people expected. In the fiscal 2004 and 2005 budgets, the gulf was at least 2 percentage points.


• Whatever the size of the gap, by now there's simply an assumption that Congress will close it. Even Republican leaders like Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., don't pretend to take the administration's proposal seriously.


• For federal employees and their union representatives, there are simply bigger fish to fry--such as the pay-for-performance systems at the Defense and Homeland Security departments that the administration wants to extend governmentwide.

So Karl Rove is now in charge of domestic policy, economic policy, national security and homeland security at the White House. Quick question: Is there anything left for anyone else to be in charge of?

Have you seen the list of 150 programs the Bush administration wants to eliminate in its fiscal 2006 budget? Me neither, and there's a good reason: OMB's not releasing it. For now, the administration's position is that such information is "interlineated throughout the budget," as OMB Director Joshua Bolten so wonderfully put it yesterday. You need to scour the document yourself to uncover the nuggets. GovExec's Amelia Gruber did just that yesterday, and came up with this list, for a start. It shows the 48 programs graded using the Bush team's Program Assesment Rating Tool that are zeroed out in the budget. But don't assume that's because the programs got bad grades. Lots did, but some didn't, and are being put on the chopping block because they don't square with the administration's priorities. HUD's National Community Development Initiative, for example, was rated "moderately effective," but still gets the ax. Education's GEAR UP program, aimed at getting low-income students ready for college, is performing adequately, OMB says, but still goes from $306 million to nothing in the budget. With a deficit as big as ours, you can't just take aim at the poor performers.

Here's evidence that civil service reform at the Homeland Security Department (and across the government, if President Bush has his way) has actually seeped into the popular culture.

I've always loved Matthew Lesko--you know, the nutball in the question mark suits who runs all over D.C. in cable-TV commercials hawking his books--like Free Money to Pay Your Bills!--that purport to show how to uncover piles of federal dough. (I remember seeing Lesko strolling downtown a couple of years ago sipping a cup of coffee--but still wearing that goofy suit. Seriously.) Apparently the New York Consumer Protection Board isn't as enamored of his work as I am. As Lesko points out in his new blog, the board recently issued a press release lumping him in with grant-scamming telemarketers. Lesko is, not surprisingly, apoplectic. But let's face it, his logic on the whole government giveaway thing is a little strained. Just check out the statement his co-author, Mary Ann Martello, gave to the folks in New York, in which she argues that the free bill-paying money comes in the form of--are you ready for this?--food stamps: "Matthew would say that money the government gives you to pay other bills frees up money to pay your credit bills. There is no money the government will give you to directly pay down your credit bills, but the $800 in food stamps frees up that money for other bills." Sure.

After reading the Post's "explanation" yesterday of President Bush's Social Security proposal, I swear I thought that one reason I couldn't really understand it was that they'd simply gotten it wrong. Turns out that was right.

I'm not a fan of Bravo's fashion design reality show, Project Runway, but luckily Tanya B., the Queen of all Managing Editors, is. So she alerted me to this week's episode, in which the plucky contestants had to try their hand at redesigning Postal Service uniforms. The results were a little scary, featuring several outfits that I really wouldn't want to see on my local mail carrier. But the winning design wasn't all that bad, I guess.

Sorry about the lack of posts this week. Sometimes the regular job they pay me to do happens to take up all of my time. Anyway, here's a link to a provocative op-ed by former Des Moines Register editor Jim Gannon in USA Today, making the case for moving substantial portions of the federal bureaucracy out of Washington to the hinterlands. I disagree with Jim's underlying premise--that all of this should be a precursor to simply getting rid of much of the government--but I'm not about to rip him, because, ummm... well... he's my father-in-law. Besides, I'm all for moving agencies around. Think of the expense accounts we Washington-based journalists would be able to demand with agencies' headquarters spread out all over the country.