GovernmentExecutive.com

The Humane Society is not pleased that the Pentagon is conducting tests of a "pulsed energy projectiles"--which are "designed to inflict non-lethal but excruciating pain and suffering on the individuals they target from as far as 2 kilometers away"--on animals.

Never let it be said that the Agricultural Research Service isn't focusing on issues of importance to Americans. Olfactory importance, that is. "Unmistakable cattle manure odors have become a bigger issue during the last several years as more and more people move from cities and suburbs to rural areas," the agency noted on its Web site yesterday. So scientists at the agency's Roman L. Hruska U.S. Meat Animal Research Center in Clay Center, Neb., are "studying beef cattle diets to see if they can change them to reduce unpleasant odors while still raising productive animals."

The IRS announced yesterday that the "tax gap"--that is, the difference between what people owe in taxes and what they actually pay--topped $300 billion in 2001. Enforcement activities resulted in recovering only $55 billion of that amount. Anybody still think the IRS shouldn't get more money and staff for enforcement?

The Wall Street Journal's piece today on the planned air traffic controller hiring surge has the following interesting pair of statistics. Number of controllers the FAA wants to hire over the next decade: 12,500. Number hired last year: 13.

Good news for Toni Lausch of Cumru Township, Pa.: the Social Security Administration has confirmed that she is indeed alive. The agency had inadvertently attached a "death coding" to Lausch's SSA records, despite the fact that she's alive and well. This attracted the notice of the IRS when Lausch tried to file a 2004 tax return. Apparently, the tax agency doesn't like to send refunds to people who are, well, not among the living. But after Lausch's story appeared in the Reading (Pa.) Eagle, SSA updated its records. Of course, because the kinks are still being worked out on the whole e-government thing, it'll be another two weeks before the change filters through the IRS recordkeeping system.

The Post continues to drive the civil service overhaul story into the mainstream, with a piece today in the Style section, of all places, on just what goes on inside the heads of those little people who devote their careers to government service. I guess there are some Post readers who don't have friends, neighbors, or family members working for Uncle Sam who can benefit from this kind of anthropological exercise.

I loved the little shot IRS Commissioner Mark Everson got in during his news conference today trumpeting the $3.2 billion in unpaid taxes the agency has collected from its crackdown on the "Son of Boss" tax shelter. The folks who were forced to pay up went through "some real pain," Everson said, according to wire reports. "Some people have had to sell their villas and yachts."

Leaders of the Minuteman Project, take note: the president of the United States wishes you'd leave the border patrolling to the professionals.

If the folks at Snopes.com have confirmed it, it must be true: Last year a DEA agent had a bit of a mishap when he tried to demonstrate the importance of gun safety to a group of youngsters. Here's the video.

Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry offers an interesting defense of controversial video news releases issued by federal agencies in a USA Today piece today. Such releases are necessary, he says, because news organizations don't spend enough time reporting on how Americans' tax dollars are spent. Reporters, McCurry says, should "try covering the things that the government really does and report on things that really work instead of assuming that everything is waste, fraud and abuse." Hey, Mike: Some of us do.

Here's one of those stories that just won't die. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel got hold of a memo from a FEMA consultant written as Hurricane Frances bore down on the state last September, arguing that the agency should work with the White House and Bush reelection campaign officials to create a unified communications strategy about the response to the disaster. Not quite a smoking gun, in my book. The best quote in the piece is from FEMA Director Michael D. Brown: "The men and women at FEMA don't give a patooey about who the president is or who the governor is. Whenever people say stuff like that ... we're just offended by that because that's just not how we operate." But as GovExec columnist Charlie Mahtesian pointed out last fall, the mere fact that FEMA did its job well certainly didn't hurt the president.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed today, Fred Barnes tosses in an anecdote about John Bolton's efforts to finagle an offer from Colin Powell of a high-ranking position in the State Department early in the Bush administration. As Barnes tells it, Bolton got quite a lot of help from his friend, Sen. Jesse Helms: "As chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Helms invited Mr. Powell to his office and pointed on a State Department organizational chart to exactly the job he wanted for Mr. Bolton--undersecretary for arms control and national security affairs. Don't come back until Mr. Bolton gets that job, he told Mr. Powell. Mr. Bolton got it." It certainly wouldn't surprise me if something approaching this scenario actually unfolded, but I'm hard-pressed to believe that it did so in this straight-out-of-Hollywood fashion.

The is-he-or-isn't-he case of would-be whistleblower and former Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Andy Eller (See March 8 item below)
gets a little clearer today, with the news that FWS admits it messed up its reports on on the habitat needs of the Florida panther.

What does it cost to bring the work at Los Alamos National Laboratory to a standstill for a month, and order all employees to spend their working hours trying to hunt down a few missing computer disks? Between $120 million and $367 million, depending on whether you believe the high-end or low-end estimate.

Because it was the House Government Reform Committee that decided to anoint itself the investigator of steroids in baseball, I'm exercising my option to deconstruct the testimony of Mark McGwire yesterday. First, imagine the scene: He's sitting just a few chairs down from Jose Canseco, the guy who has fingered McGwire and other players as steroid users in a book that is clearly the direct cause of these hearings. After some obligatory preliminaries about his "love and respect" for "our national pastime," McGwire gets down to the business of drawing a direct comparison between himself and his arch-nemesis, Canseco. "I have never been a person who has spread rumors and said things about my teammates that could hurt them," he says. Two clear implications: Canseco did, and I could, if I felt like it. Well, exactly what kind of "rumors" and "things" are you talking about, Mark? "I do not sit in judgment of other players, whether it deals with their sexual preference..." Excuse me? "Sexual preference"? You tell me exactly what McGwire's saying--and who he's saying it about--in this non-rumor-spreading statement of his.

If you were starting a military program to develop a spacecraft to grab enemy satellites and bounce them out of orbit, you'd want to find a way to to call it "Sumo," wouldn't you? Apparently, so would the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Defense Tech notes. It is seeking $35 million for its Spacecraft for the Unmanned Modification of Orbits program. You do the acronym.

I'm not taking a position on the possible ICE-CBP merger. I've seen the fights in the Mailbag between the ICE and CBP folks, and I want no part of them. But I will say this: Members of Congress, if you decide to take action, please address the truly important issue here: that neither of these organizations have the term "bureau," "agency," "administration," or "service" in their names. "Customs and Border Protection" and "Immigration and Customs Enforcement" are concepts, not entities. ICE and CBP are federal agencies, and I've never understood why they want to obscure this fact. (While I'm at it, don't get me started on agencies that arbitrarily give themselves acronyms that don't match the initial letters in their names. Yes, I'm talking about you, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.)

Yesterday, Tom Davis was on his high horse about reorganizing GSA's Federal Supply Service and Federal Technology Service. Today, it's steroids in baseball. Funny government, isn't it?

After I wrote about good ol' Matt Lesko (you know, Mr. Free Money From The Government) on Feb. 6, he sent me an e-mail saying how much he loved bureaucrats. Now he's showing his devotion by running a contest on his own blog seeking "amazing stories of people in government going out of their way to literally change people's lives." Only, as Wonkette points out, Lesko's not exactly getting the responses he's looking for. They include one from a former postal worker whose supervisor "made the job so miserable and hopeless that it became very clear that for my own survival I had to get the heck out of there."

The Interior Department has one solution for that pesky problem of coming up with enough money in the budget to meet payroll costs: more volunteers.

Thanks for keeping those job-appropriate names rolling in. Some of the latest:

• Lt. Cmdr. Peter Seaman, Coast Guard.


• Norm Covert, former public affairs officer, Ft. Detrick, Md.


• Edgar Swindell, HHS's designated agency ethics official.


• Sgt. Scott Fear, public information officer, U.S. Park Police.


• James Kennedy, director of NASA's Kennedy Space Center.


• Brent Jett, astronaut.

Here are three dopey things you can't say to try to get out of paying your taxes, according to the IRS:

• "The income tax is unconstitutional."


• "I'm withholding my taxes to protest government programs I don't like."


• "I want my Social Security taxes back, and I promise not to take any benefits when I retire."

From the transcript of the Washington Times editorial board interview with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Friday:

QUESTION: Would you consider running for President in 2008?

SECRETARY RICE: Oh, jeez.

(Laughter.)

QUESTION: You know people are talking about it.

SECRETARY RICE: I know. I have never wanted to run for anything. I don't think I even ran for class anything when I was in school. I'm going to try to --

QUESTION: But you could save us from Hillary.

(Laughter.)

I supppose I'm asking for trouble by raising questions related to an effort to increase access to government records. After all, as a card-carrying member of the mainstream media, I'm all in favor of as much openness in government as possible. But USA Today's story today about a nationwide poll conducted for media organizations promoting "Sunshine Week" is one of those pieces that may say less than meets the eye. The story highlights the eye-popping statistic that 70 percent of respondents to the poll were either "somewhat concerned" or "very concerned" about government secrecy. It then notes that a bill is pending in the Senate to revise the federal Freedom of Information Act "to address many of the open-government complaints." But only several paragraphs later does it become clear that most of the complaints are either from people who don't know much about government records access at all, or whose experience is limited to state and local agencies. Less than a third of respondents said they had sought government records about themselves, and of those, only one in 10 had sought information from a federal agency.

So the "name that fits the job" responses are rolling in, and they're great. Some of the best:

• Lester Cash, Office of the Budget, Health and Human Services. (Just don't call him "Les").


• James Banks, chief of special actions in military pay, Defense Finance and Accounting Service, Indianapolis.


• Crystal Ball, who's responsible for developing and communicating the strategic vision of the Bonneville Power Administration.


• John Riffee, personnel management specialist, Agriculture.


• Jim Toothaker, former area dental consultant, Indian Health Service.


• Lance Lord, commander, Air Force Space Command.


• Ernie Sell, specialist in the sale of property seized for unpaid and delinquent taxes at an IRS office in Phoenix.

OK, it's time to crank up a project first suggested to me more than a decade ago by the former managing editor of GovExec: Put together a list of federal officials (or at least people related in some way to the operations of the federal government) whose names fit their jobs perfectly. The classic example, I always thought, was former Air Force procurement official Arthur Money. I just came across another today while reading the Wall Street Journal: Thomas R. Saving, a member of the board of directors of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. Get the idea? Good. Start sending me some more examples, and I'll publish 'em. Update 2:48 p.m.: GovExec West Coast correspondent Jason Peckenpaugh weighs in with a good one: former National Credit Union Administration Chairman Dennis Dollar. And how could I have missed this obvious one: Education Secretary Margaret Spellings.

The House Government Reform Committee may be focusing its attention on the unfunded mandates that the federal government passes on to the states. But there's a flip side to the story. Just ask folks out in Montana, where 46 cents of every dollar the state spends over the next two years will come from the federal government. A decade ago the figure was only 38 percent, and state lawmakers are worried about their increasing dependence on Uncle Sam in fiscally tight times.

This was inevitable: The Homeland Security Department, like the Pentagon and other agencies, has hired a liaison to work with Hollywood moviemakers and scriptwriters, according to USA Today. Even before adding the new position, the department helped out with last year's Tom Hanks movie The Terminal. That didn't exactly portray bureaucrats in a flattering light (I mean, please, how hard is it to figure out how to get rid of a foreigner stuck in an airport?), so maybe they could use the help.

Interesting (but I guess not exactly surprising) quote from the Defense Department report that made the news today about the Army's difficulty in recruiting African-Americans. It turns out that the attitude of all groups of young Americans toward the Army has grown more negative in recent years--not because they'd rather do other kinds of jobs, but because they don't like getting shot at. "In the past, barriers were about inconvenience or preference for another life choice," the study said. "Now they have switched to something quite different: fear of death or injury."

The whistleblower of the day is Andy Eller, former Fish and Wildlife Service biologist, featured in a Post profile. That means the question of the day is whether he's a) a courageous employee who sacrificed his job in the name of truth, justice and the Florida panther; or b) a slacker malcontent who's operating out of his area of expertise. That's the maddening thing about almost every one of these whistleblower stories (and about the numerous people who approach us at GovExec saying they're whistleblowers): it's usually really difficult to tell--sometimes even if you work with a self-described whistleblower--exactly where the truth lies.

Treasury Secretary John Snow knows how to make a short list that rocks! I'd love to be on the selection committee that has to choose between Bono (an Irish singer who fronts the multi-platinum-selling band U2, for those of you who stopped paying attention to popular music before the early 1980s), and recently ousted Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina for the next head of the World Bank.

What's gotten into President Bush? First John Negroponte, with his four decades of government service, gets to be top dog in the intelligence world. Now Stephen L. Johnson, a 24-year career veteran of the Environmental Protection Agency, gets the nod
to become its next director. It's almost as though experience suddenly counts in the search for political appointees. Update 3/7, 3:41 p.m.: Linda Robinett of the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division at China Lake, Calif., notes another example of the trend: NASA's recently named acting chief, Frederick Gregory, is a former astronaut. Granted, lots of career people (including Johnson) get appointed to acting jobs for awhile, but still.

What did President Bush teach former HUD Secretary (now Florida senator) Mel Martinez? To use hand sanitizer "religiously." (Thanks, Scripps-Howard and the Hotline.)

Stewart, that is. In prison. According to Slate's "Explainer," between 3.90 to 6.31 pounds of food per day, including 0.10 to 0.25 pounds of fat, 0.75 to 1.50 pounds of vegetables, and 1.08 to 1.56 pounds of starches. That's based on Bureau of Prisons dietary guidelines. Kind of amazing that she managed to lose 20 pounds in the joint.

Every day, I get a list of new GAO reports in my e-mail inbox. After reading the titles of these reports (and sometimes, heaven forbid, the reports themselves) for several years, I think I can say with confidence that GAO has scientifically determined that the state of almost every federal program is as follows: "Management Improving, But Challenges Remain." Don't believe me? Go to GAO's Web site and do a search for reports with the terms "management," "improving," "challenges," and "remain." Makes you wonder: Does GAO actually think that federal management will one day reach a state of nirvana in which no further challenges remain? I hope I'm around for that.

The Washington Times goes all-bureaucracy-all-the-time on its front page today, with two workforce related stories. One features Democrats ripping the administration for only asking for funds to hire 210 Border Patrol agents, instead of the 2,000 mandated in last year's intelligence reform law. The other accuses the Federal Air Marshals Service of padding statistics about the number of flights its agents have flown on.

This just in from CIA chief Porter Goss: My job's hard! It's really, really hard!

AP reports that Donald Rumsfeld is desperately seeking a few top executives.

Pay-for-performance: It's not just for the federal workforce. It's for Medicare providers, too.

A federal lawyer offers the following comments on the item below on "appearances" of conflicts of interest: "The most important reason why we keep the 'appearance of conflict' language in the discussion is to keep the discussions shorter. If the only thing we were allowed to worry about is actual conflicts, then there would be interminable discussions about whether this or that is really a conflict or whether, if you hold it up to the light just this way and ignore that dangling participle, it really isn't a real conflict, not really, sorta. If we had to have these discussions, we'd have so many angels dancing on the heads of pins you couldn't sleep for all the racket." I take that as at least partial vindication.

As GovExec's Shawn Zeller reports, the number of federal employees who lost their jobs due to reductions in force last year (1,276) was less than half the number (2,826) who died while members of the civil service.

Here's one for the you-get-the-government-you-pay-for files, from today's NY Times story on the arrest of a man accused of evading $450 million in taxes: "The government has stepped up investigations but managed to recommend only 1,400 tax prosecutions out of the 130 million tax returns filed annually. For budgetary reasons, the IRS relies almost entirely on data reported to it on computer files, not on traditional detective work, to help identify tax evaders."

You know what phrase bugs me? "The appearance of a conflict of interest." Discussions of ethics rules invariably get around to someone saying, "we want to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest." Or using phrases like "rules or practices designed to prevent conflicts of interest and the appearance of conflicts of interest." But in reality, you either have a conflict of interest in a particular set of circumstances or you don't. Calling it only an "appearance" of a conflict is just a lame way of saying, "some people might have a problem under these circumstances, but a principled person like me could never be conflicted about the right thing to do." Appearing to have a conflict of interest and actually having one are exactly the same thing. And when you have one, either you are tempted to act inappropriately as a result of the conflict or you aren't.

Update: Here's an attempt by the Seattle city government to explain the distinction. I'm still not persuaded. Both of their examples look to me like situations where somebody has a conflict of interest. The second one is just a little more benign.