GovernmentExecutive.com

The Federal Trade Commission plays a leading role in the fight against identity theft. Now the head of the agency knows what it's like to be a victim. Newsweek reports that last week, Deborah Platt Majoras got a letter from DSW Shoe Warehouse saying that hackers had broken into the retailer's database and stolen her credit-card data, along with that of 1.4 million other customers.

It's tempting to sit slack-jawed in amazement at the Post's report this morning on out-of-control spending at TSA during the mad rush to staff up the agency. But really, nobody should be that surprised. This is what you get, when as a nation, you demand the instant creation of a huge federal bureaucracy. Even in the best of times, most agencies lack the capacity for truly effective contract management. Couple that with the absurdly short time frame to hire a fully federalized airport screening force, and you have a prescription for runaway spending. Best quote in the story is from Frank Berger, who ran hiring centers for TSA contractor NCS Pearson in Des Moines and Davenport, Iowa: "I never saw any government people. There was zero government people involved."

If you haven't read Jim Barnes' introduction to the new National Journal Decision Makers special issue (reprinted on GovExec.com today as our Management Matters column), do yourself a favor and check it out. It's a great analysis of President Bush's second-term approach to running the executive branch. The first few paragraphs alone are priceless, for their discussion of H.R. Haldeman's 1978 book on Watergate, The Ends of Power. Watergate, Haldeman revealed in the book, went hand in hand with Nixon's effort to reorganize the federal bureaucracy--and, we now know, led to a career federal official, Mark Felt, taking on the role of Deep Throat. "Let's remember the VA," Nixon raged at one point. "Clean those bastards out.... [and] take the Park Service, they've been screwing us for four years."

Least surprising news of the day: The Consumer Products Safety Commission reports that almost 70 percent of fireworks-related injuries occur around the Fourth of July. Best factoid in the report: Sparklers burn at temperatures of about 2,000 degrees--hot enough to melt some metals.

Who was responsible for the anthrax attacks in 2001? What happened to Saddam's weapons of mass destruction? These unsolved mysteries have officially been joined by another: Why did Siegfried and Roy's white tiger, Montecore, attack Roy on stage in October 2003? AP has uncovered an Agriculture Department report showing that agency investigators conducted an extensive inquiry, but never did figure out what caused the tiger to sink its teeth into Roy's neck and drag him offstage.

Looks like Michael Griffin's Great NASA Purge is going over about as well as you'd expect in the agency's ranks. Washington Times reports today on how the folks at NASA Watch are saying that the old "climate of fear" is returning as a result of Griffin's moves. "It sends a wrong signal when you put people's bosses in rockets and launch them out the window," NASA Watch editor Keith Cowling told the paper.

As promised, I have indeed returned, from 10 days in lovely Ireland. I believe I'm the first tourist to have sucessfully managed to get a sunburn while visiting the country. In a lame effort to remain on-topic, I'll offer up a couple of observations: The U.S. government takes a beating overseas, especially in Europe, but from what I saw, puts on a very good public face. The customs and immigration officials we encountered were particularly efficient and helpful. TSA's workers make the best of a very difficult situation brought on by the policies they're required to enforce. (Thank you, Richard Reid, for making every single airline passenger remove his or her shoes before going through the metal detector). Think about this next time you travel: Who do you have more difficulty with: The federal officials manning the various checkpoints, or the private-sector employees of the airlines?

Fedblog is going on vacation. I'll be back on June 27, rested and ready to go.

Another landmark in the desperate quest to keep Americans interested in supporting NASA's human space flight efforts: A House committee actually heard testimony from Astronaut John Phillips yesterday--live from the International Space Station.

Another irresistible Deep Throat twist: Mark Felt "was, at heated moments during the scandal, in charge of finding the source of Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate scoops," David Corn and Jeff Goldberg write in The Nation. "In a twist worthy of le Carré, Deep Throat was assigned the mission of unearthing--and stopping--Deep Throat."

Boys rule! For the 63rd year in a row, more boys than girls were born in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports.

Attention federal employees: Uncle Sam wants you to get married--and stay that way. A new report from the Administration for Children and Families on the Bush administration's Healthy Marriage initiative contains the following tidbit: "Federal Occupational Health (FOH), a contractor with the Department of Health and Human Services, is working with ACF to develop a Healthy Marriage pilot program for federal employees. This pilot program adds marriage education services to the existing array of services offered to federal employees through the Employee Assistance Program. The program may eventually be implemented throughout DHHS and possibly the federal government."

Attention sailors: How satisfied are you with the fitness centers, golf, bingo, bowling, swimming, outdoor recreation, internet access and movies provided to you by the Navy? The service's Morale, Welfare and Recreation program wants to know.

Attention cockfighters in (where else?) Cocke County, Tenn.: You're busted. Last weekend, the FBI, USDA, Tennessee Law Enforcement Officials and the Humane Society raided the Del Rio cockfighting pit in the county, arresting 144 people and seizing 305 gamecocks and $40,000 in cash. The bust breaks up what was believed to be one of the largest cockfighting operations in the United States.

We've established that Mark Felt was disgruntled about getting passed over for the top job at the FBI when J. Edgar Hoover died, and that his disgust at the Nixon White House stemmed less from a distaste about "black bag" break-ins without search warrants than with Nixon's desire to run such operations out of the White House. Now the guy who prosecuted Felt for approving such break-ins against friends and relatives of people associated with the militant leftist group the Weathermen in 1972 and 1973 says Felt did so even though Hoover himself had put a halt to the practice in 1966. "No government official higher than Felt knew about the bag jobs," John W. Nields wrote in the Post yesterday.

So those new consolidated monthly recruiting numbers from the Pentagon are out. Unfortunately, they don't make things look any better for the Army. The service fell 17 percent short of its goal for regular forces--and 24 percent and 20 percent in the National Guard and Army Reserve, respectively.

It's beginning to look like National Intelligence Director John Negroponte is exactly the kind of guy who can fill the vacuum created by the legislation mandating his ill-defined post. Last week he scored a couple of key victories: First, Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, withdrew an effort to limit Negroponte's ability to transfer up to 100 employees within the intelligence community. Then the White House forced the FBI to accept an independent commission's recommendation to give Negroponte a role in appointing an intelligence chief at the agency. In a new position like Negroponte's, with only vague authority over turf-conscious agencies, every little battle is important. He's won a few key ones already.

For those eagle-eyed readers who have actually noticed, Fedlog is now Fedblog. Shoulda been all along. Especially since Fedlog is, technically, already taken.

I've been waiting for months for an opening to write about the notorious Jeff Gannon/James Guckert, that "reporter" whose fluffball questions at White House press briefings betrayed the fact that he wasn't exactly what you call a real journalist. After all these months, the moment has finally arrived. GAO has ruled that Gannon/Guckert's "verbatim reprinting of White House press releases as his own work" does not violate a federal prohibition on the use of appropriated funds for publicity or propaganda purposes. Unseemly, icky, and lazy, yes. Illegal, no. (Thanks for the tip, A.L.)

Some days, reading the Post with my breakfast cereal is a real sobering experience. Take this morning, for example, when I learned:

• That the Transportation Department's inspector general doesn't think the agency's safety inspectors can keep up with changes in the airline industry. The FAA "disagreed with many of the inspector general's findings. But it agreed that it has been constrained by budget cuts that will result in 300 fewer inspectors this year. The agency has asked for money to add about 100 inspectors next year to its 3,400-inspector workforce."










• That over at the FDA, the IG found "inconsistencies" in the accounts of acting administrator Lester Crawford and a woman who worked at the agency over allegations that he inappropriately helped her gain a slot in the career Senior Executive Service at the agency.










• That the American Foreign Service Association has decided to withdraw an award for "constructive dissent" that it had planned to give to John M. Evans, the U.S. ambassador to Armenia. Higher-ups at the State Department had protested the award, noting that Evans' reference to "Armenian genocide" in 1915 was made in a speech, and not voiced through official channels, as award criteria specify. Now the award won't be given at all, because there were no nominees who had voiced such dissent.










• That the FBI says it has really, really learned its lesson from the Virtual Case File system fiasco, and will now embark on a new project that will cost even more money.

Today, Donald Rumsfeld said "I know of no one in the U.S. government, in the executive branch, that is considering closing Guantanamo." Well, here's one guy: the president.

I'm in the process of trying to fill a reporter position here at GovExec. And I'm here to tell all of you federal managers who have pawned this task off on HR people in the past that you have much to look forward to under impending civil service reforms. You may think it'll be nice to have fewer restrictions on who you can hire, but it also means that you have to go through the time-consuming process of trying to evaluate candidates. And some of them serve up some real head-scratchers in their resumes and cover letters. Here are just a few examples from the dozens of applications I've sifted through:

• It would be an honor for me to interview for The New York Times.










• For the past several years I have been taking care of some family business that began with a tree root attempting to strangle a septic tank and ended up in court.










• Skills:
  
  Telephone Etiquette
  
  Operation of Copiers and Fax Machines










• Posses a knowledge of a variety of sports.










• I enjoy the challenge of multi-tasking and am dedicated to the collaborative edge.










• Alhtough I have never worked as a journalist…










• Experience:
  
  Pain Intern










• I am interested in your reporter, correspondant, account executive, and marketing associate positions.

A war on street drugs is one thing, but a federal crackdown on prescription painkillers like OxyContin is quite another, the libertarian Cato Institute argues in a new report. The study says the media has blown the OxyContin story out of proportion, and the resulting crackdown by the Drug Enforcement Administration has "scared many doctors out of pain management altogether, and likely persuaded others not to enter it, thus worsening the already widespread problem of underrated untreated chronic pain."

The National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare says President Bush is wrong to compare his Social Security reform proposal to the federal Thrift Savings Plan. The TSP, the group notes, was designed to complement Social Security, not replace it. But you know that, because you read it in Government Executive first, right?

Washington Monthly, which, unlike most other Washington-based magazines, has a history of actually paying attention to what happens in the bureaucracy, rakes the Patent and Trademark Office over the coals in its latest issue. The piece, by Zachary Roth, highlights another example of the perils of fee-based government. "The 1991 decision to make the PTO pay for itself," Roth reports, "has created a series of perverse incentives that encourage the office to approve undeserving applications, and has made it easier for applicants to game the system. Because each new application now brings in a $380 fee, the agency has an incentive to approve those patents, sending a signal to the market to apply for more. Additionally, patent-holders pay annual maintenance fees for the first 12 years of a patent's life, meaning that each approved patent brings in a total of over $3,000 to the office." (Thanks to Kausfiles for the link.)

For those who aren't Deep-Throated out yet (and I, for one, am nowhere close to being tired of this story), Slate's Jack Schafer does a terrific job of laying out Mark Felt's real motivations for turning into the world's most famous whistleblower. It ain't pretty, and it's nobody's fairy tale of good triumphing over evil, but then again, these things rarely are.

Looks like the Defense Department is trying to buy some time to put the best face possible on declining recruitment numbers. Check out this report from American Forces Press Service, the Pentagon's in-house news organ. It notes that monthly recruiting data, which had been made available to the public on the first day of each month, will now be delayed until the 10th. Why the change? Partly to allow a "more consistent release" of information, but also because the delay "provides DoD leaders more time to review recruiting data before it is released." Recruiting numbers "must be reasonably scrutinized" by the Pentagon before the public finds out about them, said Air Force Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke, a DoD spokeswoman.

I think I speak for all of us when I say I'd like to see the federal government protect the Earth from a very large asteroid strike. Luckily, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., is on the case. In fact, he wants an entire new federal asteroid-response agency, according to a Wired News report. You might think NASA would be threatened by having another agency in the space-watching business, but apparently they're eager to have some help dealing with the asteroid nightmare scenario. "Right now, NASA has a charter to find and track these objects," Donald Yeomans, manager of the agency's Near Earth Object program, told Wired News. "But if we do find something, who do we call?"

Now that I think about it, I'm all for an Asteroid Response Agency too, as long as it's run by Bruce Willis and uses a really bad Aerosmith tune as its official theme song. (Thanks for the tip on this one, Daniel P.)

I can't resist saying more about Deep Throat's surfacing. First off, here's a link to a fantastic 1992 piece by James Mann, a former colleague of Bob Woodward's at the Post, in Government Executive's sister publication, The Atlantic. Thirteen years ahead of Vanity Fair, Mann all but outs Deep Throat in the story, writing, "he could well have been Mark Felt."

Mann delves deeply into the reasons why Felt would have been motivated to become the ultimate leaker. For starters, he and others were legitimately concerned that the Nixon White House was actively seeking to undermine the independence of the FBI in the aftermath of Hoover's death--and worse, obstructing the Watergate investigation.

But Felt also was deeply disgruntled about being passed over for the top job at the FBI when J. Edgar Hoover died in 1972. Mann quotes from Felt's 1979 memoir, The FBI Pyramid:

It did not cross my mind that the President would appoint an outsider to replace Hoover. Had I known this, I would not have been hopeful about the future. There were many trained executives in the FBI who could have effectively handled the job of Director. My own record was good and I allowed myself to think I had an excellent chance.

So Felt's motives weren't entirely pure. As my colleague Anne Laurent points out, that puts him in the company of a very large percentage of other federal whistleblowers. And it makes his revelations no less true or important. As an IRS employee wrote to me today, Felt "was the ultimate whistleblower in the name of preserving the intent of the Constitution and he was a blabbermouth. They can be one and the same."