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I'm happy that the Washington Times gave a little ink to this year's Service to America Medals ceremony, which was hosted by CNN's Wolf Blitzer, since GovExec is a co-sponsor of the awards. But check out Stephanie Mansfield's lead on the story: "Has grizzly, bearded Wolf Blitzer become the Paris Hilton of Washington?"

That's raising a series of highly disturbing mental images that I fear will be seared on my brain for quite some time.

Nearly a year after Congress required the Defense Department to reimburse soldiers who purchased their own body armor to protect themselves during Iraq deployments, the Pentagon still hasn't figured out how to do so, the AP reports. I suppose this news shouldn't be that shocking, since Defense officials criticized the measure last year as “an unmanageable precedent that will saddle the DoD with an open-ended financial burden.” (Thanks to A.L. for the tip.)

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., is indignant. The "federal government lacks any means of tracking what it buys and what price it pays for goods and services," he said yesterday after holding a hearing on Federal Procurement Data System-Next Generation. That's rather hyperbolic. The FPDS-NG system is far from perfect, but it does collect data on hundreds of billions of dollars in purchases. And Dr. Coburn himself seems to have a far from perfect understanding of the system. His statement about it contained a couple of key errors:

• Coburn said FPDS-NG "is not universally used by government agencies. The Department of Defense, which is responsible for 60 percent of federal procurement, is not using the system." Not so. Defense is reporting data to the system, it's just not yet feeding it electronically in real time.




• Coburn said "it took the federal government until 2003 to begin collecting even this minimal amount of data." In fact, the General Services Administration collected the procurement data itself for many years before outsourcing the function with the creation of FPDS-NG.

The Army put out a press release yesterday with the following headline: "Corps of Engineers to restore pre-Katrina protection in New Orleans." I'm not so sure I would be bragging about that. The pre-Katrina flood protection system didn't work out all that well, did it?

With the rescues of people completed, Air Force reservists operating in the New Orleans area have turned to a new mission: ridding flooded areas of mosquitoes and filth flies. Tests have shown an 800 percent increase in the mosquito population since Katrina hit, says Lt. Col. Steve Olsen, chief of aerial spray for Air Force Reserve Command's 910th Airlift Wing from Youngstown Air Reserve Station, Ohio.

Treasury Secretary John Snow yesterday, on the occasion of the unveiling of the new $10 bill, which continues to be graced by a portrait of Alexander Hamilton:

More than any other founding father, Alexander Hamilton was a true visionary who saw the vast potential that lay ahead for the young and fragile republic.

Is the key to boosting the government's homeland security efforts more people or more dogs? Apparently, the latter, because it seems like every day there's another announcement of a new program to put man's best friend to work safeguarding man. The latest: the Transportation Security Administration is expanding the National Explosive Detection Canine Team Program to 10 mass transit and commuter rail systems in big cities across the country.

Least convincing quote of the day:

The secretary is not the type to dictate how things will happen.

--Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Speaking of USA Today, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin dropped this bomb on the paper's editorial board: It's "commonly accepted," he said, that the entire post-Apollo space program has been a giant mistake. As the story makes clear, Griffin's said this kind of thing before he took over the helm of the agency, but that doesn't cushion the shock much for me. To blithely write off 30 years of efforts costing billions of dollars and 14 astronauts lives, with an "Oops, shouldn't have gone down that road," is pretty amazing.

More bad news about TSA screeners: USA Today reports that the agency has hired contractors to review the medical records of injured screeners to seek out evidence of fraud. This just doesn't sound good:

TSA employees had an injury rate last year four times as high as construction workers and seven times as high as miners. They missed nearly a quarter-million work days, which aggravated staffing shortages, caused them to miss training and violated a law requiring that luggage be screened with bomb-detection machines.

How did I miss this? From Variety, posted on Sunday:

Producer Joseph M. Medawar was arrested Friday by FBI and IRS agents on charges he bilked investors out of more than $5.5 million for a TV series about the Dept. of Homeland Security that never existed.

Here's the cheesy Web site for the alleged show, called "D.H.S." Medawar and his associate, Alison Heruth-Waterbury, never came close to actually getting it off the ground, but did succeed in suckering various media outlets, including the Boston Globe, E! Online and National Public Radio's "On the Media," into believing that they had actually won Bush administration support for the show.

Time magazine weighs in this week with a lengthy discourse on political cronyism in the Bush administration. I'd like nothing better than to join the appointee-bashing party in defense of career managers, who do a better job running agencies when they're put in charge. But I can't resist pointing out a few questionable statements in this piece:

• As far back as the Florida recount, soon-to-be Vice President Dick Cheney was poring over organizational charts of the government with an eye toward stocking it with people sympathetic to the incoming Administration. Clay Johnson III, Bush's former Yale roommate and the Administration's chief architect of personnel, recalls preparing for the inner circle's first trip from Austin, Texas, to Washington: "We were standing there getting ready to get on a plane, looking at each other like: Can you believe what we're getting ready to do?"

  
  

  
  

  
  Two problems: 1) Transitions always involve filling top political jobs with people friendly to the president. Nothing sinister about that. 2) Johnson's quote is placed to make it sound like he and Cheney were gleefully plotting to stock agencies with hacks, but it sounds a lot more like the typical "Gee, can you believe we're actually in charge?" stuff that incoming White House staffers routinely spout.










• Across the government, some experienced civil servants say they are being shut out of the decision making at their agencies.

  
  This statement would be true at any point in any administration in the last 150 years.










• As administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, [David] Safavian, 38, was placed in charge of the $300 billion the government spends each year on everything from paper clips to nuclear submarines, as well as the $62 billion already earmarked for Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts.

  
  This makes it sound like Safavian signs off on everything the government buys. It's the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, not the central purchasing office. Johnson's statement to Time that Safavian was "by far the most qualified person" for his job is absurd on its face, but not because the job involved deciding which brands of paper clips and nuclear submarines to buy.

The New York Times is acknowledging that Geraldo Rivera didn't really "nudge" an Air Force rescue worker out of the way so that he could be filmed lifting a wheelchair-bound hurricane victim to safety. The Times' accusation that Geraldo did so was merely "figurative," the paper's editors assert. But "numerous readers" apparently "read the comment as a factual assertion." I'm sure they won't make that mistake again.

Who cares about the moon? We're going to Pluto!

After weeks of playing up the notion that state and local governments should take the lead on designing a plan to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, President Bush seems to be warming to the idea of a federal reconstruction czar. Here he is today, on whether he's "reconsidered" the idea:

Yes, "reconsidered" means we've ruled it out. I never have; I'm considering. "Reconsidered" means at some point in time I decided not to have that. But I think the idea of having a federal interface with local folks might be -- might be a good idea.

While federal employees often complain that their managers discourage telework, apparently the big boss doesn't mind if his underlings telecommute from time to time. Vice President Dick Cheney will be working from home today as he recuperates from surgery to repair aneurysms on the back of both knees.

Initial figures on Katrina contracting, courtesy of the New York Times:

• More than 15 contracts exceed $100 million.


• More than 80 percent of $1.5 billion worth of FEMA contracts were awarded with limited or no competition.


• Largest contract so far: $568 million to AshBritt, a Pompano Beach, Fla., company that was a client of the former lobbying firm of Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi.

Apparently prehistoric beasts spent a lot of time dodging space debris. First came the theory that a giant meteor killed off the dinosaurs. Now a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory theorizes that a supernova finished off the wooly mammoths of North America.

Finally. Slate's Daniel Gross pokes some well-deserved holes in the now-popular notion that private companies could handle all aspects of disaster response much better than government agencies at any level. I'm no apologist for the Katrina response effort, but we're all badly in need of some perspective on this issue.

The National Transportation Safety Board is urging states to prohibit novice teenage drivers from using mobile phones behind the wheel, MTV News reports. Actually, the NTSB has been on this kick for a few years now. As the father of a teenager who has both a cell phone and a fervent desire to get her learner's permit, I'm behind this idea 100 percent.

Rep. (and ex-presidential hopeful) Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, has found a partner in the Senate for his efforts to create a new Peace Department. Sen. Mark Dayton, D-Minn., has introduced a measure that would "elevate [the] Reagan-established Institute of Peace to [a] Cabinet-level department" known as the Department of Peace and Nonviolence. That "Reagan-established" part is a nice touch.

This is not going to look good. At all. The Houston Chronicle reports that scores of Transportation Security Administration screeners at two Houston airports failed to show up for work today, causing "endless lines" at baggage checkpoints. The agency had to send in replacement workers from as far away as Cleveland.

Here's who's really on the hot seat for the Rita response: Coast Guard Rear Adm. Larry Hereth, who Mike Chertoff has designated as the "principal federal official" for the federal effort in Texas under provisions of the National Response Plan.

The National Disaster Search Dog Rescue Foundation has an exquisite sense of timing. The Hill reports that before Hurricane Katrina hit, the group hired a lobbying firm to try to win federal funding for a national dog training center. The name of the company? James Lee Witt Associates, which is run by the guy who used to run FEMA back when it won kudos for effective disaster response.

"Let me guess. This isn't about the alcohol or the tobacco."
--Nicolas Cage as an international arms dealer in Lord of War, after a being stopped by a federal agent who identifies himself as representing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

The story surrounding the endless legal saga of the Interior Department's management of Indian trust funds just keeps getting stranger and stranger. The latest twist: The National Archives discovered two sets of Bureau of Indian Affairs records dating to the 1950s dumped in a trash bin and a wastebasket. Now an Archives official says the document dumps "may be intentional acts aimed at unlawfully removing or disposing of permanent records from the Interior Department," and the Archives inspector general has launched an investigation. Interior officials insist they had nothing to do with it.

With Mike Brown out of the picture, and Hurricane Rita bearing down on Texas, the nation needs a designated scapegoat to take the fall if anything goes wrong this time around. It's always best to have one well in advance, so that you don't have that messy problem of trying to sort out afterward who's really responsible. USA Today has helpfully prepositioned the blame for Rita. So remember, whatever happens, it's all Mike Chertoff's fault.

Rep. Tom Tancredo has an interesting solution for that little problem of how to pay for Hurricane Katrina relief: Sell some national park land.

FEMA has announced that it and other federal agencies "are preparing for [Hurricane] Rita by pre-positioning supplies and commodities in the surrounding affected areas and potential landfall areas of the storm," including truckloads of water, ice and food. They've also dispatched urban search-and-rescue teams and disaster medical assistance teams to regions likely to be hit by the huge storm. That would be comforting if FEMA hadn't announced almost exactly the same thing before Katrina hit.

The Pentagon's Northern Command says it's getting ready for the now-Category 4 Hurricane Rita. Or more specifically, it's "prepared to meet Requests for Assistance that the Federal Emergency Management Agency may issue prior to and in the wake of Hurricane Rita." In other words: We're there, but if anything goes wrong, it's FEMA's fault.

Update, 3:01 p.m.: AP has this from FEMA's acting director, David Paulison:

Paulison said the federal response to Rita would depend "much more heavily" on the Pentagon and the National Guard than it did initially for Katrina. But he said the biggest difference in comparing the government's response between the two storms would be stepped-up communications among state, local and federal authorities — which was riddled with problems when Katrina hit.

Apparently Barry Bonds doesn't want to play the "blame game" any more than President Bush does. Helping Katrina victims is much more important, he says, than other issues that members of Congress have concerned themselves with--such as, oh, let's say, maybe, just to take one example, steroid use in baseball. "This is our country," Bonds said yesterday during the San Francisco Giants' visit to Washington to play the Washington Nationals. "We're the United States. We have a crisis here that everybody needs to start contributing to. Not pointing fingers, but contributing to." David Marin, a spokesman for House Government Reform Committee chairman Tom Davis, R-Va., shot back: "Members of Congress, particularly Tom Davis, can walk and chew gum at the same time." Well, I don't know if I'd go that far...

From a New York Times story today on NBC's unusual efforts to promote its new fall show, Three Wishes:

NBC has been stuffing cash registers at stores here like Goody's and others in or around Nashville, Salt Lake City, Des Moines and Milwaukee with tens of thousands of $1 bills used for groceries and other basics. The dollars are affixed with yellow stickers (removable, consistent with Treasury Department guidelines) that ask, "What's your wish?," and implore people to watch the show. All told, the network expects to give away 150,000 of those dollar bills in 15 cities and towns.

EPA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have teamed up to advise local and state officials of the potential health and environmental risks associated with returning people to New Orleans. Maybe this will succeed in getting local officials to actually listen to federal warnings.

Hey California: Get used to intense heat waves and rolling blackouts, says Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. But only for the next 100 years.

$330 million. That’s the South Florida Sun-Sentinel’s estimate of how much FEMA has spent in disaster assistance to communities that didn’t actually need it in the past five years. Money quote:

In impoverished neighborhoods from California to the Carolinas, from Florida to Michigan, the newspaper found the same patterns. Residents call FEMA assistance "free money," "easy money" and "mobility money." Scamming FEMA is widely known and openly discussed.

Even before Katrina, FEMA essentially had two choices: Shovel money out the door or be accused of being inefficient and uncaring when it came to assisting disaster victims. They made the obvious choice. And under current circumstances, FEMA will be under more pressure than ever to distribute funds indiscriminately. The last thing FEMA wants to do is deny anyone benefits on the grounds they weren’t really a victim. Get just one of those decisions wrong and imagine how you’d get walloped by the full wrath of the media and members of Congress.

The American Spectator has a fatalistic assessment of the Bush administration's prospects to get anything accomplished in the rest of this term. It's the kind of piece that always turns up in the wake of a highly publicized fiasco, so it should be taken with several grains of salt. But it includes a very telling blind quote which would go a long way toward explaining the Katrina management failure:

"What happened was that some of the best people who were working in the Administration during the first term, but who weren't necessarily Bush campaign members or weren't particularly close to the White House, jumped when they saw opportunities being filled by under-qualified but more politically connected people," says a current Administration senior staffer in a Cabinet department. "In this department we lost three quarters of the people who should have been encouraged to stay, and most of them left simply because they had received no indication they would be considered for better or different opportunities. And many of these folks would have stayed."

The Justice Department sent an interesting e-mail to U.S. attorneys last week, AP reports, including the following:

Has your district defended any cases on behalf of the Army Corps of Engineers against claims brought by environmental groups seeking to block or otherwise impede the Corps work on the levees protecting New Orleans? If so, please describe the case and the outcome of the litigation.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin: Too slow to get his city's residents to leave, too quick to have them return. Nice. Update, 5:08 p.m.: Get out again!

Buried in today's Washington Post story on President Bush's declaration that the federal budget ought to be able to absorb the cost of reconstructing the entire Gulf Coast region with just a few cuts here and there is this bit of news about the money that's already been budgeted for the effort:

But some congressional appropriations aides said the money is not being spent as quickly as they had expected. So far, about $9.8 billion has been allocated to Federal Emergency Management Agency relief contracts and federal projects. An additional $4 billion is tied up in contracts that have not been formalized.

That leaves more than $46 billion in unobligated funds, the documents indicate.

They actually expected FEMA would write $56 billion worth of fraud-free checks in about two weeks? I don't think even the contractors FEMA has hired to do the contracting could pull that off.

Very interesting tidbit from the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll:

Despite FEMA's woes, Katrina hasn't shifted confidence in federal government generally. Some 31% say Washington can be trusted to do the right thing at least most of the time, matching a June Gallup survey. After 9/11, confidence in Washington surged.

The poll also showed DHS chief Michael Chertoff's 17 percent negative rating exceeds his 13 percent approval, but the bigger ego blow for him is that half of respondents didn't even know who he was.

Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., is helping President Bush construct a new story line for the hurricane-response effort: The bureaucrats let me down. "While the government fumbled in its emergency response during the immediate aftermath of the hurricane’s destruction," Coleman said after Bush's speech last night, "the president has picked up the ball to construct a vision for the region and its residents that is positive and promising."

Now might be time time for the federal disaster-response community to start thinking bigger about what they might have to handle in the years to come. The number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes worldwide has nearly doubled over the past 35 years, according to a study by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Apparently, President Bush isn't quite ready to sign on to the notion of a federal hurricane reconstruction czar. The New York Times reports that Bush is not going to use his speech to the nation tonight to take the opportunity to name somebody to head the recovery effort. From the story:

Officials said the 9 p.m. address, the president's first major speech on the hurricane, would not be a State of the Union "laundry list" of proposals. Instead, they said, it would focus more generally on Mr. Bush's vision for the reconstruction of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, with the federal government playing a supportive role to what White House officials are calling a "home-grown" plan that must be created by city and state authorities.

Actual quotes ripped out of context and truncated from the interview Fox News' Bill O'Reilly conducted with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday:

O'Reilly: You know who Damon Wayans is?

Rice: I do.

O'Reilly: The press is the most anti-Bush press I've ever seen in any administration, perhaps with the exception of Nixon. [Good point; there was much less criticism of George W. Bush when Nixon was president.]

Rice: I've been black all my life. Nobody needs to tell me how to be black.

O'Reilly: Nothing's easy.

Rice: Nothing is easy.

O'Reilly: Anything you can do to OPEC to have them start -- stop price gouging? It costs them $4 a barrel to get the oil up and marketed and they're charging $65 a barrel. I mean, is there anything you can do as Secretary of State? Can you charm them? Can you take them out to dinner?

Rice: We -- we talked to OPEC and they have every reason not to want to sink the world's economy.

When it comes to allegations of procurement fraud, you hear a lot about the Boeings, Haliburtons and other big-name firms. Most of the real fraud, though is much more mundane, and involves stuff like paying an INS official a $20,000 bribe to funnel information about supply contracts to a company set up for the purpose of scamming federal dollars. That's what Hugo and Melissa Flores of San Benito, Texas, did, and now they're going to prison.

Ever since Ronald Reagan took office, there's been one thing you could count on from Republicans: A commitment to reducing the size and scope of the federal government. That philosophy took a pretty big hit with the election of compassionate conservative George W. Bush. 9/11 took another chuck out of its hide. Now Katrina may have finally finished it off. Latest sign of this particular apocalypse? Tom DeLay's declaration yesterday that when it comes to the size of the federal bureaucracy, "we've pared it down pretty good," and there's simply no fat left to cut.

We're all big government lovers now, folks. Oh yeah--and haters, too. That's our privilege as Americans, right?

So much for Uncle Sam deferring to the states and localities. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., has jumped on the bandwagon of the creation of a federal czar to oversee the rehabilitation and reconstruction of hurricane-ravaged areas. He's seeking someone who would "work with local leadership to create a plan addressing the best ways to rehabilitate and rebuild the Gulf Coast with our taxpayers’ dollars; someone who will coordinate the federal, state, and local roles in implementing that plan; someone who will answer for how that plan is carried out." And Domenici's got eight more Republicans with him: Larry Craig of Idaho, Charles Grassley of Iowa, Judd Gregg and John Sununu of New Hampshire, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, and George Voinovich of Ohio.

One of the inevitable aftereffects of a national crisis like Hurricane Katrina is the effort by interest groups to tie their pet causes to the disaster. Today's award for creativity in such an endeavor goes to the American Federation of Government Employees, which suggests that in the wake of the crisis, the Bush administration should abandon its efforts to study whether to subject certain jobs at Department of Veterans Affairs facilities nationwide to public-private competition. If you're having trouble figuring out the connection between hurricane relief and the administration's competitive sourcing agenda, here's AFGE president John Gage to help you out: "Even as retired veterans and VA employees are being displaced from their homes and as loyal VA workers are rolling up their sleeves to help people devastated by the hurricane, the administration is ready to add to the devastation by using hard won health care dollars on programs that will destabilize the VA health care workplace and put veterans working in VA facilities out of work."

Calling all Minutemen: Rep. Thelma Drake, R-Va., wants to institutionalize your efforts to aid in stemming illegal immigration by creating a civilian Border Patrol Auxiliary. The bad news is that it looks like the members of the auxiliary would only be deputized to get coffee and sharpen pencils for the real border agents.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash. wants Americans to get more involved in the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court chief justice nominee John Roberts. One way to facilitate this process might be to avoid subjecting them to an entire day of senators bloviating about Roberts before he's even allowed to speak.

Here's one good thing about the inevitable cry for Mike Brown's scalp: It opened up a political appointee slot that could, for all practical purposes, only be filled by a highly qualified career civil servant--at least on an interim basis.

You had to know this was coming: Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., says that in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, President Bush should reject the recommendation of the Base Closure and Realignment Commission to close two naval bases in the Gulf Coast region. The people, ships and helicopters on the bases "were some of the very first responders on the scene to support victims of this disaster," Lott and Rep. Solomon Ortiz, D-Texas, wrote to Bush.

If you think the removal of FEMA's Mike Brown showed the kind of decisive leadership needed to get a handle on the hurricane relief situation, don't give the credit to President Bush. He says it wasn't his idea. Asked about Brown's departure this morning, Bush said: "I sent Mike Chertoff down here to make an assessment of how best to do the job. He made a decision; I accepted his decision."

The cat's out of the bag on the cable news networks' freakout about the hurricane response. (See Sept. 8 post below.) It looks like at least some some of the attacks on federal officials about the recovery effort were scripted. In his column Sunday, Michael Kinsley notes that "a Los Angeles Times colleague of mine, appearing on CNN last week to talk about Katrina, was told by a producer to 'get angry.' " (Thanks to Kausfiles for the link.)

The residents of a hurricane-ravaged region cry out for help from a storm that left billions of dollars in damage. Aid quickly comes to the rescue in the form of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, whose bureaucratically nimble director, Michael Brown swiftly implements a plan to deliver pre-positioned supplies and equipment. In the first two days, drivers deliver truckloads of ice, water, cots, blankets, baby food and building supplies to affected residents. A day later, a one-stop disaster relief center is up and running.

Unfortunately that was last year, as Charlie Mahtesian noted in a Nov. 2004 GovExec column. (Thanks for the reminder, Daniel P.)

Most Cabinet undersecretaries don't get much in the way of hoopla when they're sworn in to office. But most of them aren't Karen Hughes, a trusted adviser to President Bush and the new undersecretary of State for public diplomacy. Here's a partial list of the luminaries who were able to take time out from the ongoing response to Hurricane Katrina and other pressing national priorities to attend her swearing-in ceremony Friday: President Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Interior Secretary Gale Norton, HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, National Intelligence Director John Negroponte and Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"I appreciate you taking time out of your day to come and honor our friend," Bush told the assembled dignitaries. "Don't hesitate to get back to work."

Michael Brown is on his way back to Washington, and presumably eventually out of his job. Before he exits the scene, though, here's a little factoid, from the background materials he submitted for the record of his June 19, 2002 confirmation hearing to be FEMA's deputy director:

Q. To your knowledge, have you ever been investigated, arrested, charged or convicted (including pleas of guilty or nolo contendre) by any federal, state or other law enforcement authority for violation of any federal, state, county or municipal law, other than a minor traffic offense? If so, provide details.

A. Yes, in August 2000, a neighbor filed a complaint with the local sheriff's office because on of our St. Bernard dogs escaped our "invisible fence" system. The municipal judge dismissed the charge upon payment of court costs.

By the way, the whole hearing was pretty much a bipartisan lovefest, with nary a senator raising any questions about Brown's previous tenure at the International Arabian Horse Association.

Say what you want about Brown's performance, but the uproar about his alleged lack of credentials is a little silly in the sense that he was more qualified than many appointees to be director of his agency, because of his years of experience at FEMA. (Indeed, at his deputy director hearing, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, then the chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee, said, "I am glad the president has nominated someone already familiar with FEMA’s mission to become deputy director.") The only time it would have made sense for the horse thing to come up was when then-FEMA director Joe Allbaugh hired Brown as general counsel in 2001. But it wasn't as if Brown didn't have a legal background, so who would've cared?

The Veterans Affairs Department has started a nice little blog where employees are sharing their stories of aiding in hurricane relief efforts.

Getting hurricane relief funds "all starts with that first call or online visit," FEMA said yesterday in a press release. But if you want to do it the online way, you'd better be prepared to bow down to the Great God Microsoft. Because, as the fine print of the agency's application page notes, "currently to complete your application online you must be using Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6.0 or above."

Thanks, Jack Shafer. You had to go and pat TV news anchors and reporters on the back last week for dropping the pretense of objectivity and ripping every federal official in sight for the inadequacy of the hurricane response. Soon enough, other media critics (such as the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz) were on the bandwagon, praising reporters for finally letting their feelings show. Where exactly you guys got the idea that journalists--especially TV reporters--have heretofore been insufficiently opinionated and hostile, I don't know. I must be watching different cable networks than you. Like today, when--after a week of watching CNN reporters viciously attack any Bush administration official they could get their hands on--I had to endure CNN's Kyra Phillips viciously attacking House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi for having the temerity to criticize the administration.

The Katrina relief effort is taking on a truly massive scope. Some federal actions you may not have heard about:

• The Department of Housing and Urban Development is working with mayors across the country to find vacant public housing units for evacuees.


• The State Department is coordinating offers of assistance totaling nearly $1 billion from 95 countries.


• The Agriculture Department is making more than
  $170 million in emergency assistance available to
  agricultural producers affected by the hurricane.


• The Federal Communications Commission is trying to make sure that wireless service providers follow the industry practice of maintaining service to people displaced by the hurricane even if they can't pay their bills.


• The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is working with the Federal Reserve to facilitate cash deliveries to banks.


• The National Endowment for the Humanities is providing at least $1 million in emergency grants to libraries, museums, colleges, universities, and other cultural and historical institutions.


• The Peace Corps has signed an agreement with FEMA to send "Crisis Corps" volunteers to affected regions.

The Partnership for Public Service has announced that next week they'll release their annual "Best Places to Work in the Federal Government" ratings, based on the responses of 150,000 employees across 250 federal organizations. Guess who came in last among 28 Cabinet departments and major agencies in the most recent set of rankings? That's right: the Federal Emergency Management Agency. What a shocker. (Thanks to an anonymous tipster for pointing this out.)

Latest figures on the DoD response are here. Bottom line: 60,000 troops in the affected regions, including about 43,000 National Guard members and about 18,000 active-duty troops. DoD search and rescue teams have flown 5,200 sorties to date, evacuated 75,000 people, rescued more than 14,000, and evacuated or treated more than 15,000 patients.

We interrupt this Katrina commentary for a word from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and the Council for Excellence in Government: the two organizations are accepting nominations until Sept. 15 for this year's Innovations in American Government awards. Each of the winners--which can come from federal, state, local, tribal or territorial governments--receives a $100,000 grant to tell the world about the great work they're doing.

Columnist Robert Samuelson in today's Washington Post, on our collective tendency not to face and prepare for potential catastrophes: "The result is a sort of Catch-22 of national disasters: We cannot address serious national problems until they are conclusively shown to be serious, but the required proof is usually the very crisis that we are trying to avoid."

The New York Times reports today on two Navy helicopter pilots who ferried supplies from Pensacola Naval Air Station to military installations on the Gulf Coast last Tuesday. On their way home, the pilots picked up a radio transmission saying helicopters were needed to rescue victims near the University of New Orleans. They quickly turned around and rescued more than 100 people. But if you think that bit of quick thinking qualified them for a hero's welcome upon their return to Florida, you're wrong. The pilots actually were reprimanded by their superiors for deviating from their resupply mission.

Are you a federal employee who is either participating in hurricane relief efforts, or was affected by them personally? If you have access to a computer and the Internet, and you want to share your story, we want to tell it. Contact me at tshoop@govexec.com and we'll post your experiences on GovExec.com.

I'm still trying to get my mind around the disconnect between federal officials and those on the ground in hurricane-ravaged areas. The gap is roughly is as follows. Feds: We are rapidly implementing the hugest disaster response effort in the history of the country, if not the world. Locals (and reporters in the area): That response is completely inadequate to address the magnitude of the tragedy.

What if both sides turn out to be right? It's certainly not out of the question.

The epidemic of not getting it at the federal level continues apace. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard Myers just held a press conference in which they insisted that not only was there no delay in getting troops and other military assets to New Orleans, but the department actually anticipated what FEMA would want before the agency even asked for it. The gulf between federal officials' statements about the situation and the reality of what occurred and what is still occurring remains alarmingly wide.

Incredibly chilling reading of the day: Brendan Loy's blog in the days leading up to Katrina's landfall. Here's just one post, from Saturday, Aug. 27:

For some reason that I can't even begin to comprehend, the evacuation order for New Orleans is only "voluntary" at this time. The mayor says he might issue mandatory evacuations tomorrow morning, depending on what the forecast says. What is he waiting for??? The forecast calls for a DIRECT HIT! This is the story we've been fearing for decades! And if he waits until 24 hours before landfall to order people to leave, it may very well be too late! People getting stuck on the highways while a Category Five hurricane makes landfall is one of the most horrifying scenarios imaginable!!!

Some incredibly depressing statistics, courtesy of the Census Bureau:

• An estimated 9.7 million people live in the areas of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi that were hit by Hurricane Katrina.


• More than 16 percent of Alabamians (706,070 people) live in poverty.


• More than 21 percent of Mississippi residents (603,954 people) are impoverished.


• One in five Louisiana residents live in poverty. That includes nearly 200,000 people in the New Orleans metro area, and one in four residents of the city of New Orleans itself.

Here's one of those things you just have to pray turns out not to be true. If offers to FEMA of Amtrak trains and FedEx jets to aid in the evacuation effort really were "ignored by the agency," as Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., has charged, then FEMA has even bigger problems then it's already saddled with.

Federal officials clearly failed to get the situation in New Orleans under control in a timely fashion. Now that they finally want to, it turns out they can't. On Friday, President Bush proposed an arrangement under which the federal government would at least share control over National Guard and Army forces, with Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honoré reporting to both the president and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco. Incredibly, Blanco refused. "She would lose control when she had been in control from the very beginning," Blanco's press secretary, Denise Bottcher, told the New York Times. Well, if Blanco she wants to take responsibility for having controlled the initial response, then she has an awful lot to answer for.

When the country goes to war overseas, we're told as citizens that however we feel about the policies and plans for battle, we're supposed to support our troops involved in the effort. It’s clear now that the same simply is not true of domestic operations. Turn on the TV, and you won't see the kind of veiled bias that journalists are often accused of--you'll see open disdain for the government workers on the ground and their leaders in Washington. Check out this exchange yesterday between CNN reporter Jamie McIntyre and anchor Aaron Brown. McIntyre mocks Pentagon officials who suggest that members of the media who have focused their attention (understandably) on the victims may not fully understand the complexity of a response effort like this, or sympathize with the challenges confronting the federal officials involved in it.

"It doesn't really seem all that unusual that you would tend to understand the plight of the victims a little more than the bureaucrats in Washington," McIntyre says. "We'll worry about the bureaucrats later," Brown chimes in.

There's plenty of room for criticism about government's preparations and actions in response to the disaster (see posts below)--and there will be even more in the future. But how does turning this into an opportunity to take potshots at "bureaucrats" help anybody?

President Bush has just amended his earlier statement about unacceptable results in the hurricane relief effort. One agency is doing OK, he said. "The results in New Orleans are
acceptable when it comes to the work of the Coast Guard," Bush told reporters in Biloxi, Miss.

Has there been a worse day for the image of the federal government in recent memory? Here's just a sampling of the headlines:

• Planning, Response Are Faulted (Washington Post)








• Amid lawlessness, New Orleans mayor blasts efforts (USA Today)








• Federal aid efforts criticized sharply (Washington Times)








• A Can't-Do Government (Paul Krugman column, New York Times)








• The disaster response: 'Magnificent' or 'embarrassment'? (CNN)

I think E.J. Dionne has it right today: "This is a moment in which individual acts of charity and courage, though laudable and absolutely necessary, cannot be enough. It is a time when government is morally obligated to be competent, prepared, innovative, flexible, well-financed -- in short, smart enough and, yes, big enough to undertake an enormous task."

The fingerpointing is in full swing. I want very badly to defend the efforts of the federal government, especially those people on the ground who are working very long hours in incredibly dangerous conditions. And the armchair quarterbacking by people who have very limited information about the situation on the ground is irritating--and sad, really.

That said, it's clear at this point that when this situation finally gets under control, federal officials will have much to answer for. Among the key questions:

• Why has it taken so long for the National Guard to take control of the situation in New Orleans? I take Pentagon officials at their word when they say that it's not that too many Guard units are deployed to Iraq. There seem to be plenty of troops available in the region. So why will it take almost a week after the storm hit to get 30,000 of them on the ground?








• Why did the situation at the Civic Center deteriorate so badly before anyone seemed to even know about it? (FEMA Director Michael Brown says he only learned about it yesterday.) The situation at the Superdome was brought under control before it got completely out of hand.










• Why did emergency plans seem not to contemplate a disaster of this magnitude? It already seems clear that plenty of people were warning that a major hurricane strike on New Orleans could be a disaster of unprecedented proportions.

Looking for a place to find all of our Katrina-related coverage at a glance? Here's our special report.

The rapid deterioration of the situation in New Orleans has taken on tragic proportions. The AP quotes Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Cheri Ben-Iesan, spokesman at the city's emergency operations center: "Hospitals are trying to evacuate. At every one of them, there are reports that as the helicopters come in people are shooting at them. There are people just taking potshots at police and at helicopters, telling them, `You better come get my family.' " In what universe does it make any sense to shoot at people as a means of trying to get them to come and help you? Now FEMA has had to suspend operations in areas where gunfire has broken out.

Even from as far away as Washington, you can feel the frustration building on the ground in New Orleans and the other hurricane-ravaged areas. Despite the massive mobilization of federal resources, you can be sure that Uncle Sam is about to become the major target of that frustration. Some members of Congress have already tried to score some political points off the crisis. "We are watching this devastation unfold on our televisions for days," Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., told the Washington Post, "and you have to ask, where is the federal government?"