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On the Dusty Trail
By Tom Shoop | Tuesday, February 28, 2006  |  04:07 PM

Newsweek reports that CIA Executive Director Kyle "Dusty" Foggo---who GovExec's Jason Vest wrote about in December (and who Jason introduced to the world in a 2004 Boston Phoenix piece) has caught the eye of federal investigators probing the relationship between now-convicted ex-Rep Randy "Duke" Cunningham and Foggo's friend, defense contractor Brent Wilkes. Not only that, Foggo is the subject of a CIA inspector general's inquiry on account of his ties to Wilkes. All of this comes as Wilkes' fellow defense contractor Mitchell Wade has pleaded guilty not just to bribing Cunningham, but also to "corrupting" unnamed Defense Department officials, in his efforts to secure federal contracts. Stay tuned for more...

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Attention Podcast Proponents
By Tom Shoop | Tuesday, February 28, 2006  |  03:09 PM

We're exploring what GovExec could do in the world of podcasting, and we're interested in hearing from you. What do you like? Hate? What (if anything) should we do? Send me your ideas at tshoop@govexec.com.

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Archives Opens Video Vaults
By Tom Shoop | Tuesday, February 28, 2006  |  02:19 PM

The National Archives has uploaded a collection of 101 historical movies onto the Google Video Web site. Now, instead of trekking down to the Archives to see World War II newsreels, NASA video of the Apollo 11 moon landing, or a 28-minute 1975 documentary on a "new view of extraterrestrial life," all you need is a high-speed Internet connection.

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Moving 'Diary'
By Tom Shoop | Tuesday, February 28, 2006  |  09:39 AM

The Washington Post's Federal Diary is on the move, from the paper's Metro section to its Business section. Makes sense, I guess, since the federal government is hardly just a metro Washington entity. I'll admit that my competitive instincts cause me to wonder whether some readers might not follow the column to its new location. Unfortunately, from personal experience of getting scooped by the column's author, Steve Barr, I know that's unlikely. Steve's an incisive observer of the federal scene, and I have no doubt that his loyal readers will go with him wherever the column goes.

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We're on TV!
By Tom Shoop | Monday, February 27, 2006  |  11:56 AM

GovExecTV, that is. Today brings the launch of our new Web-based video service. We're kicking off with the debut of our news-talk show, FedCast, and video from our Leadership Breakfast Series. But we're just getting started, and we understand we've got a lot to learn (especially that guy who hosts FedCast). Expect to see a lot more from us in the future in the video realm, and please give us your feedback on what we've done so far at tshoop@govexec.com.

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SSA's Hurricane Help: The Big Picture
By Tom Shoop | Friday, February 24, 2006  |  02:22 PM

Mark Lassiter of the Social Security Administration's press office has let me know that my previous item on assistance for employees who were hurricane victims offered a far less than complete picture of the kinds of aid the agency has offered. "Millions of dollars in assistance have already been provided to Social Security employees based on their individual needs since the day Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast," he notes. That includes:

• Employees in the affected areas were provided with paid administrative leave, at their request, until October 31, 2005.


• Displaced employees were detailed to offices in the areas where they had temporarily relocated, at their request. These employees are being provided lodging, per diem and/or mileage reimbursement until February 24, 2006.


• Displaced employees who have permanently relocated to another area can request a permanent reassignment to an SSA office in that area. To date, 39 employees have been permanently reassigned at their request.

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Katrina: The Real Blame Game
By Tom Shoop | Friday, February 24, 2006  |  09:58 AM

When all else fails, throw the bureaucracy under the bus. That, unfortunately, was one of the messages sent by White House homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend yesterday during a press briefing on the administration’s Katrina lessons learned report.

President Bush, Townsend said, “accepted responsibility for the shortcomings in the federal response.” But it was a curious sort of acceptance that mostly found fault with people far lower on the chain of command.

While other investigations have criticized administration officials for being disengaged from the response process, Townsend recommended putting even more distance between the president and federal officials on the scene of disasters. At the same time that she repeatedly bemoaned “red tape” in the Katrina response, Townsend argued that FEMA Director Michael Brown’s problem was that he was more interested in getting information directly to the White House than in following the chain of command set out in the Homeland Security organizational chart:

We know from Director Brown's testimony that [Homeland Security] Secretary [Michael] Chertoff reached out for him a number of times. It wasn't that there was bureaucracy between them, it was that he didn't -- he's testified that he didn't want to deal with the Secretary. The answer is, what we need is a system that gets the information and the needs of the people in the disaster area up to the decision-maker, who is Secretary Chertoff, who is responsible for the department. Those operations aren't run out of the White House; they never are.

Townsend acknowledged the need for “a better structure at the White House,” but only to “cut through the red tape and to referee any needless disputes that arise in the heat of an emergency”—in other words, to deal with the agencies that will inevitably let the president down in a crisis.

For an administration that has been so adamant about not playing the “blame game,” this looks an awful lot like an effort to make sure that the finger can be pointed at the bureaucracy when things go wrong.

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Disaster Defense
By Tom Shoop | Friday, February 24, 2006  |  08:54 AM

The military's response to the White House's Katrina response report: Just leave these things to us, please.

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Postal Privacy and Personal Injury
By Tom Shoop | Thursday, February 23, 2006  |  10:14 AM

It's one of those good news/bad news days for the U.S. Postal Service: Americans say they trust the agency more than any other to protect their personal information. But the Supreme Court says that if a mail carrier leaves a stack of packages where someone can trip over them, then the Postal Service can be sued.

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A Ugandan Rose By Any Other Name...
By Tom Shoop | Thursday, February 23, 2006  |  09:01 AM

Just in time for Valentine's Day, the U.S. Agency for International Development provided targeted technical assistance to Ugandan flower exporters, enabling one of them to deliver its first shipment of 500,000 roses to the United States earlier this month.

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Army's Twenty-Ton Robots
By Tom Shoop | Thursday, February 23, 2006  |  08:55 AM

Here's one way to ensure the safety of the Army's next-generation Stryker Infantry Carrier vehicles: Leave the infantry out of them, and turn them into giant robots.

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For SSA Workers, Hurricane Help Arrives
By Tom Shoop | Wednesday, February 22, 2006  |  02:42 PM

Almost six months after Hurricane Katrina hit, the Social Security Administration has made a decision: It will provide some financial assistance to its employees who were affected by the storm. No sense in rushing into these things.

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Bush to Energy Researchers: You're Not Fired!
By Tom Shoop | Wednesday, February 22, 2006  |  09:48 AM

President Bush's effort to push for the development of alternative energy resources has hit an awkward bump. You'll remember that the president pushed for energy research in his State of the Union address. But a week later, the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory announced it would lay off 32 people due to a $28 million budget shortfall (which Energy officials blamed on congressional earmarking). Then DOE shifted some money around and the employees were hastily reinstated last weekend, the New York Times reports--just in time for the president's visit to the Golden, Colo., facility. "I recognize that there has been some interesting, let me say, mixed signals when it comes to funding," Bush acknowledged at a panel discussion at the lab.

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FBI Tech Upgrade: Big Budget, Behind Schedule
By Tom Shoop | Wednesday, February 22, 2006  |  09:33 AM

The FBI is once again falling behind on its effort to upgrade its computer systems, AP reports. The first contract for the Sentinel program, designed to replace the failed Virtual Case File system, was to have been awarded by the end of last year. But the date has been pushed back because "we can't not do it right this time," an FBI official told AP. The agency is slated to spend $97 million on Sentinel this year, and is requesting $100 million for next year. That would push the total cost of the project above the $170 million that was spent on Virtual Case File.

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Reclassification Brigade
By Tom Shoop | Tuesday, February 21, 2006  |  09:53 AM

U.S. intelligence agencies are busily reclassifying thousands of documents at the National Archives New York Times reports today. Agency officials contend lots of documents were improperly released to the public after President Clinton issued an executive order in 1995 mandating declassification of historically valuable information that is at least 25 years old. In fact, they argue, they're not technically reclassifying the documents, just simply recalling those that were improperly declassified in the first place. Members of Congress have been
concerned for years about the pace of declassification efforts in the wake of Clinton's order.

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They're Raiding the TSP!
By Tom Shoop | Tuesday, February 21, 2006  |  09:04 AM

Once again, the Treasury Department is tapping the Thrift Savings Plan's G Fund to maneuver around statutory limits on the national debt, the Post's Steve Barr reported yesterday. Here's a dirty little secret: Those of us who report on the civil service have enjoyed playing up this story when it's happened in the past (as it has several times), because of the whiff of malfeasance it gives off: Government robs its own employees' retirement funds! But as always, there's really no danger to employees' TSP accounts.

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Not President's Day
By Tom Shoop | Tuesday, February 21, 2006  |  08:36 AM

Hope you had a nice Washington's Birthday.

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Agency Line-Item Veto?
By Tom Shoop | Friday, February 17, 2006  |  02:47 PM

President Bush is seeking a form of line-item veto power that will pass constitutional muster. In the meantime, Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., has another idea. He wants agencies to use a "virtual" veto by simply refusing to spend money that Congress earmarks for pet projects. During a Senate Commerce Science and Transportation Committee hearing yesterday, DeMint noted that agencies are routinely instructed by Congress to fund specific projects through designations in report language. However, he argued, federal agencies are under no legal obligation to follow such language.

NOAA Administrator Vice Admiral Conrad C. Lautenbacher said he'd love to have more budgetary flexibility, but was a little leery of DeMint's idea. “I agree that it’s not legally required," he said, "but it is in fact a practice that has been in place for many, many years.”

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Lincoln Group's Personal Propaganda
By Tom Shoop | Friday, February 17, 2006  |  02:43 PM

Jason Vest contributes the following item: Back in November, GovExec
was the first to start parsing the oblique and dubious history of the Lincoln Group. Wednesday's New York Times added to the canon, filling in some nice details about how Lincoln Group honchos Christian Bailey (nee Jozefowicz, as the Times of London revealed last year---check it out via War and Piece) and Paige Craig have used sleights-of-hand to secure millions in federal contracts. But there was no exploration of how Bailey's Republican fundraising connections may have helped Lincoln Group. Nor did the paper name either of the two lobbying firms Lincoln has working for it. (On retainer for Lincoln since last summer: the well-connected Republican lobbyist/public relations specialist Charlie Black of BKSH Associates, and quiet heavy-hitters Van Scoyoc Associates).

Still, the piece is a great read, especially when one recalls what the Lincoln Group said about itself at various times in various places under various names (in the past few years the company has gone from Lincoln Alliance Corporation to Iraqex to Lincoln Group). A few
examples:

• 2004 Iraqex ad on InternshipPrograms.com: "We have four mansions across Baghdad"
  
  NYT: "The firm rented a one-story house inside the Green Zone, the heavily fortified government compound in central Baghdad. Furnished with two sofas and a sheet of plywood that served as a desk, the house had a single telephone and an overloaded electrical outlet."










• 2004 Iraqex ad on InternshipPrograms.com: "Iraqex takes precautions to safeguard the security of its personnel."
  
  NYT: "Lincoln lacked the armored vehicles or security guards employed by more established contractors. When venturing outside the Green Zone, employees would grab weapons and climb into one of two beat-up Proton sedans, which employees were told were chosen to blend in with dilapidated Iraqi vehicles on the streets."










• Lincoln Alliance Corporation website, 2003: "Values and
  Principles: Honesty and Integrity."
  
  NYT: "The company's rise, though, has been built in part by exaggerated claims about its abilities and connections...The briefing also touted the firm's "strategic advisers," including Mr. [Jason] Santamaria...Mr. Santamaria said he reviewed several investment proposals for Lincoln during a two-week association in late 2004. But after becoming "concerned about their methods," he said, "I severed ties with them as quickly as I could." ... Lincoln listed Mr. [Jerry] Della Femina as a "creative director" in materials presented last spring at a meeting with Special Operations officers in Tampa. But Mr.
  Della Femina said his firm pulled out before executing any of the ideas. Three months after ending the collaboration, Mr. Della Femina said, he discovered that Lincoln's Web site listed him as one of its partners. ...A proposal signed by Mr. Bailey in October said Lincoln "has exploited the extensive experience and expertise of the Omnicom Group." But Pat Sloan, an Omnicom spokeswoman, said she could find no evidence it has ever worked with Lincoln Group. "We're not aware of any relationship with Lincoln Group," she said.










• Lincoln Alliance Corporation website, 2003: "Values and
  Principles: Innovation and Creativity"
  
  NYT: A Lincoln spokesman, William Dixon, said "it was a mistake" to include Mr. Santamaria's name in the December briefing because he was no longer affiliated with the company. Lincoln may simply have been following another principle taught by Mr. [Daniel S.] Peña. "How do you create an instant track record?" Mr. Peña says he told Mr.
  Bailey. "You joint-venture with someone who has a track record."
  

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Cheney's Secrets
By Tom Shoop | Thursday, February 16, 2006  |  10:31 AM

Did anybody else catch this at the end of Dick Cheney's interview with Fox News' Brit Hume? After Cheney vigorously defended his decision not to say anything himself about the shooting of Harry Whittington for days, and to approve a plan to have somebody else initially release the information to a handpicked reporter at a local paper, Hume switched gears and asked him about another subject: leaks of classified information. The vice president's response? "One of the problems we have as a government is our inability to keep secrets."

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Rumsfeld, Chertoff: No E-mails, Please
By Tom Shoop | Thursday, February 16, 2006  |  09:09 AM

Newsweek reports that congressional investigators asked for the e-mail records of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff in connection with a special committee's probe of the Hurricane Katrina response. But their quest proved fruitless. Executive privilege? Stonewalling? Nope. It turns out that Rumsfeld and Chertoff don't use e-mail. Of course, with his "Can I quit now?" and "fashion god" messages, I bet that right about now ex-FEMA chief Michael Brown wishes he never used it either, either.

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Mineta Blasts Britney
By Tom Shoop | Wednesday, February 15, 2006  |  09:25 AM

Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta has joined the Britney Spears hater brigade. Is it her sexed-up image that has him all hot and bothered? Her bland, generic songs? Her bad reality show? Nope. It's photos of her driving with her infant son on her lap, rather than in a child safety seat. "There's absolutely no excuse for this display - not instinct, not fear, not even reckless paparazzi," Mineta said Monday, while not coincidentally promoting a $25 million initiative to push new or tougher booster-seat laws. I'd say this qualifies as the biggest celebrity smackdown by a federal official since Dan Quayle went ballistic on Murphy Brown.

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Scientists Save Surfers
By Tom Shoop | Tuesday, February 14, 2006  |  12:12 PM

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have developed a "water-blown, closed-cell, rigid polyurethane foam that features formulations as low as 2 lbs.-per-cubic foot density." So what's the big deal? Well, for starters, the National Nuclear Security Administration can use the foam to protect sensitive electronic and mechanical equipment from "harsh weapons environments." But forget about that. The really important thing is that this material could save the country's $200 million surfboard manufacturing market, Sandia officials say. Manufacturers and sellers of surfboards have been in a panic since late last year, when the leading manufacturer of polyurethane surfboard foam closed its doors in the face of increasingly stringent environmental restrictions. Sandia's TufFoam, which the lab is actively seeking to license, doesn't require the chemical that has run afoul of regulators.

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MREs for Sale
By Tom Shoop | Tuesday, February 14, 2006  |  10:52 AM

Here's more from GAO: Apparently not only were people in hurricane-ravaged regions getting fraudulent funds, some were taking free meals and selling them on eBay. In just one day last October, GAO investigators found eight people who were selling military Meal, Ready-to-Eat rations on the auction site. GAO found evidence that at least some of the MREs were diverted from hurricane relief efforts--in more than one case, by people who should've known better. An example:

Case 4: Seller retired from the U.S. Air Force in July 2004, where he was a financial superintendent responsible for voucher processing. Seller stated that he obtained the MREs from neighbors and yard sales prior to the hurricanes. We asked Seller to provide specific names and addresses for these sources, but he said that he could not
do so. Seller said he has sold approximately 40 or 50 cases of MREs since March 2005.

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FEMA and Fraud
By Tom Shoop | Tuesday, February 14, 2006  |  09:19 AM

The Government Accountability Office reported yesterday that FEMA failed to apply even limited internal controls to its distribution of emergency aid after the Gulf Coast hurricanes, leading to potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent claims.

I was all set to cut FEMA a lot of slack on this. The agency's case, on the surface, is fairly compelling. The victim must come first, agency officials say, and we'll tolerate a certain amount of abuse in the interest of getting money to deserving people as quickly as possible. Makes sense to me, because let's face it: Getting money to disaster victims quickly is simply inconsistent with a fully robust set of internal controls that would prevent any instance of abuse.

But there are two problems:

• GAO's undercover investigators were able to obtain fraudulent benefits in October, months after the hurricanes hit.




• GAO reported that FEMA in fact had limited controls in place to prevent fraud in its expedited assistance program, but simply failed to apply them in many cases.

That leaves FEMA with very little wiggle room, and much to answer for.

UPDATE: A sharp-eyed reader notes that the GAO investigators weren't getting fraudulent benefits "months" after all of the hurricanes. I should've said "weeks."

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Memorabilia Crackdown
By Tom Shoop | Monday, February 13, 2006  |  10:50 AM

The folks at Immigration and Customs Enforcement are making the world safer for overpriced sports gear and memorabilia. ICE, in conjuction with the National Football League, the Detroit Police Department and Wayne County Sheriff's Department launched a joint initiative targeting the sale of counterfeit merchandise at Super Bowl XL in which they seized about 43,000 items valued at more than $535,000.

If you think the problem of counterfeit sports merchandise is somewhat less severe than other threats facing the country, Brian M. Moskowitz, special agent in charge of the ICE Office of Investigations in Detroit, says you're wrong. "It's about keeping sub-par and possibly unsafe merchandise off our streets and away from our children; and it's about trying to keep billions of dollars of illicit funds out of the hands of organized criminal groups here and abroad," he said.

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B-List Blogging
By Tom Shoop | Monday, February 13, 2006  |  09:54 AM

New York magazine on blogs:

It’s as if there were an A-list of a few extremely lucky, well-trafficked blogs—then hordes of people stuck on the B-list or C-list, also-rans who can’t figure out why their audiences stay so comparatively puny no matter how hard they work.

Tell me about it.

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Cautionary Katrina Tale
By Tom Shoop | Monday, February 13, 2006  |  09:41 AM

From the House select committee's report on Hurricane Katrina, due to be released Wednesday, but already being leaked all over the place:

Our investigation revealed that Katrina was a national failure, an abdication of the most solemn obligation to provide for the common welfare. At every level — individual, corporate, philanthropic and governmental — we failed to meet the challenge that was Katrina. In this cautionary tale, all the little pigs built houses of straw.

And this: "If 9/11 was a failure of imagination, then Katrina was a failure of initiative."

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Wiretapping: The Competence Issue
By Tom Shoop | Thursday, February 09, 2006  |  02:17 PM

Michael Hirsh makes a compelling argument in the online edition of Newsweek that the most important issue in the debate over warrantless wiretapping is not legality, but competence:

After four and a half years, our intelligence and national-security apparatus still hasn’t learned how to track terrorists, and the Bush administration has put forward little more than cosmetic reforms. The legal controversy over the NSA surveillance program has obscured an intelligence issue that is at least as important to the nation’s future: sheer competence. Do we have any idea what we’re doing? One reason the NSA is listening in on so many domestic conversations fruitlessly—few of the thousands of tips panned out, according to The Washington Post -- is that the agency barely has a clue as to who, or what, it is supposed to be monitoring.

It's one thing to trade some degree of civil liberties for safety. It's another to make the trade without knowing how much, if any, additional safety you're actually getting.

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Muzzling a Researcher
By Tom Shoop | Thursday, February 09, 2006  |  09:13 AM

Sometimes by reporting the news, you become part of it. The Wall Street Journal reports today on the case of Louis Fisher, a 36-year veteran of the Congressional Research Service, who's in hot water over an interview with GovExec's Chris Strohm. In the interview, parts of which were included in a GovExec.com story Jan. 10, Fisher said he believes that things have become worse for whistleblowers since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks because Congress and the courts have overly deferred to the executive branch. "I get the picture that people can do really awful things inside agencies and they never pay any price at all, and that's really scary," he said.

Fisher's supervisor, Robert Dilger, responded to the story by sending him a memo saying that his statements would cause readers to assume Fisher was biased, which Dilger characterized as an "intolerable result." Fisher fired back with a stinging memo of his own to CRS Director Daniel Mulhollan, in which he charged that "the Dilger memo is so unbalanced, so punitive, and so lacking in any persuasive reasoning or information that he should not be my supervisor and should not be allowed to evaluate my work."

Now both sides are keeping mum about what happens next.

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When Parity Isn't Parity
By Tom Shoop | Wednesday, February 08, 2006  |  11:06 AM

The Office of Management and Budget is still trying to make the strained case that the 2.2 percent proposed pay increases for military service members and civilian employees in its fiscal 2007 budget are purely coincidental, and not an endorsement of the concept of pay parity. Today, OMB's Alex Conant tells
the Washington Post's Steve Barr:

The proposed 2.2 percent 2007 civilian pay increase is comparable to the increases private-sector employees are experiencing. The 2.2 percent military pay raise is the same as is called for by current law.

But what does that "current law" require that military pay be tied to? Increases private sector employees are receiving, as reflected in the Employment Cost Index. (For a full explanation of this, see Karen Rutzick's Jan. 12 Pay and Benefits Watch column, "The Real Pay Formula.")

I really don't understand why the folks at OMB are trying to press this point. There's no shame in deciding to stop fighting a losing pay parity battle every year. But it's a little silly to pretend that parity somehow happened by accident.

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Iraq: A Civilian Agency Problem?
By Tom Shoop | Wednesday, February 08, 2006  |  10:36 AM

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner dropped a bomb yesterday at a hearing on the proposed fiscal 2007 defense budget, the Washington Times reports. The real problem in Iraq, Warner charged, is that civilian agencies aren't doing enough to help the U.S. military. "Mr. Warner was airing what has primarily been debated behind closed doors in the Bush administration," the paper reported. "The Pentagon's complaint is that other agencies, such as Justice, State and Treasury, are not always sending over their best people in sufficient numbers and duration to help the Iraqis build democratic institutions such as courts, banks and police."

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Peter Pace said civilian agencies have the same problem the military did two decades ago before the Goldwater-Nichols Act reorganized the services and emphasized joint operations. Here's his quote:

Our system simply at this point in time, just like our system for the military 20 years ago, is not designed to encourage or reward tours of duty between various departments of our government or to reward joint interagency education or to facilitate and reward those who would want to volunteer or be assigned on deployments.

It's tempting to write off the effort to point the finger at civilian agencies as buck-passing at a time when our military efforts to achieve stability in Iraq are clearly not having the effect we'd hoped. And one wonders whether the military could guarantee the security required to allow civil servants to enter Iraq in large numbers. But there's also a great deal of truth to the notion that in this as in many other respects, flexibility and adaptability are simply not the hallmarks of the federal civil service system.

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Unforgiveable Whistleblowing
By Tom Shoop | Wednesday, February 08, 2006  |  10:05 AM

Earle Dixon says he was fired from the Bureau of Land Management because he publicized health and safety problems at the former Anaconda copper mine near Yerington, Nev., AP reports. But agency officials contend the problem was that he couldn't play well with others. BLM and Interior Department lawyers called Dixon "strident, unforgiving ... and obstructionist," and said his inability to work with other agencies undermined efforts to get Atlantic Richfield Company to voluntarily clean up contamination at the mine.

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NASA Appointee Fibs, Gets Booted
By Tom Shoop | Wednesday, February 08, 2006  |  09:28 AM

George C. Deutsch, a 24-year-old political appointee in NASA's public affairs office, quit yesterday after Texas A&M University confirmed that his claim to have graduated from the school was false, the New York Times reports. Several midlevel public affairs officers had told the Times that Deutsch and other political appointees tried to prevent James E. Hansen and other NASA scientists from sharing their views on the subject of global warming. Deutsch's pre-NASA experience? He served on President Bush's re-election campaign and inaugural committee.

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Earmarks and Layoffs
By Tom Shoop | Wednesday, February 08, 2006  |  08:46 AM

The Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., announced yesterday that it had cut its staff by 32 people due to a $28 million budget shortfall. What's interesting is the reason lab officials gave for the layoffs:

Congressionally directed projects, or earmarks, reduced the budget available to the Department of Energy for funding renewable energy and energy efficiency research at the Laboratory, leaving $28 million less in operating funds for NREL for fiscal year 2006. The Laboratory made substantial cuts in other areas, including travel, outside contracts and other operating expenses, before reducing staff.

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Princeton's Public Service Struggle
By Tom Shoop | Tuesday, February 07, 2006  |  04:53 PM

Nice update in today's Wall Street Journal on the Robertson family's lawsuit against Princeton University. The suit alleges that the school has failed to use $35 million donated in 1961 (after investments, the fund is worth $650 million now) in the way it was intended: to train graduate students at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs to serve in the federal government.

It's unclear at this point who is likely to prevail in the suit, but documents provided by the family to the Journal indicate that the university has struggled for decades with meeting the mandate to develop federal civil servants. Here's an excerpt from the piece:

In a confidential 1972 memo to Princeton's president, the then-dean of the Wilson School expressed impatience with the Robertsons' insistence on preparing students for federal service with a focus on international affairs. "What bothers me" about the terms of the gift, wrote the dean, John Lewis, is "the unspoken premise that, with respect to any American institution dealing in public affairs, the highest per-se loyalty automatically must be to the U.S. government. ... The university should resist a blind commitment to nation-state parochialism."

Princeton reports that from 1973 through 2005, 229, or 12 percent, of the 1,923 graduates of the Wilson School's graduate school took their first job with the federal government in international affairs, and another 184, or 10 percent, worked for the U.S. government in other capacities. The rest went into law, academia, consulting, state and local governments and nongovernmental organizations. The university calls the goals laid out when the fund was established "aspirational."

It's going to get harder, not easier, to meet these goals from here on out. The federal government continues to grow as a force in society (and internationally), but is adding few of its own employees. Increasingly, its work focuses on leveraging the work of contractors and non-governmental organizations--especially in the foreign affairs arena in which the Wilson School specializes. More than ever, Princeton's graduates can expect to do their work from outside the civil service. And if they're like most other college graduates in recent years, they're just fine with that.

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Suit Satellite Stopped Cold
By Tom Shoop | Tuesday, February 07, 2006  |  10:47 AM

Bad news about the NASA effort to put an old spacesuit filled with radio equipment into orbit. When astronauts on the space station threw the suit out the station's hatch, it didn't work. The suit made only a couple of orbits of earth before it stopped transmitting, possibly because its batteries froze.

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Pay Raise Victory Comes With Price
By Tom Shoop | Tuesday, February 07, 2006  |  09:00 AM

Be careful what you wish for. That's the message of this year's debate over the federal pay raise. Those who were shouting for military civilian pay-parity got their wish yesterday, as President Bush proposed identical 2.2 percent pay increases for both groups.

But while the raise may be equal, it's not what one would characterize as overly generous. And it may be the best employees can hope for. Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., the influential chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, signaled that with parity in place, the fight over the raise is over. "This will be the first time in many years that Davis and the Washington-area delegation will not have to wage a battle in Congress to protect pay parity, the belief that our federal workers should be treated equally in the annual cost-of-living pay raises," the congressman's office said in a press release.

But Davis' team got it wrong: Annual federal pay increases are tied (albeit loosely, as a practical matter) to the cost of labor, not the cost of living. That's why the Bush administration made it clear that this year's raise proposal was not an effort to help federal wages keep pace with inflation, or to endorse the parity concept. Instead, OMB spokesman Alex Conant told the Washington Post the 2.2 figure simply represents "an amount that will most effectively and responsibly allow us to recruit, retain and reward quality employees." Translation: We still have a lot of people apply for every opening, and we don't think too many people already in the workforce will quit if we keep the raise this low.

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Executive Pay: Highly Variable
By Tom Shoop | Monday, February 06, 2006  |  11:20 AM

With the new performance-based Senior Executive Service pay system, executives who get the same performance ratings are getting very different raises this year, depending on where they work, Federal Times' Tim Kauffman reports today. Outstanding executives at the Education Department, for example, could receive a maximum 10.9 percent pay hike, while Health and Human Services limited its top-ranked executives to 6 percent increases. All 87 executives at Education got at least a 1 percent raise this year, while 15 percent of top managers at Housing and Urban Development and Veterans Affairs departments got nothing--even if they were rated "fully successful" or higher.

Imagine the outcry about this kind of situation if the Bush administration gets its way and performance-based pay is extended across the entire federal workforce.

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ExpectLess.gov
By Tom Shoop | Monday, February 06, 2006  |  10:49 AM

President Bush's just-released fiscal 2007 budget touts a new Web site, ExpectMore.gov "to provide candid information on how programs are performing and what they are doing to improve." But this morning, attempts to access links to information on the page were met with the following response: "The file you have attempted to access cannot be found." That includes both the category titled "Show me the programs that are performing" and the one called "Show me the programs that are not performing." I guess you can't expect that much more. (Thanks for the tip, D.P.)

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Matchmaking Mission
By Tom Shoop | Monday, February 06, 2006  |  10:01 AM

The military's chaplains have a new mission: Teaching the troops how to choose a spouse. This is the military, so of course their program comes ready-made with its own set of acronyms: PICK ("Premarital Interpersonal Choices and Knowledge") FACES ("Family background, Attitudes, Compatibility, Experiences in previous relationships and Skills") and RAM ("Relationship Attachment Model"). But it also has a more straightforward name: "How to Avoid Marrying a Jerk."

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Quadrennial Buzzword Review
By Tom Shoop | Friday, February 03, 2006  |  04:22 PM

Just looked over the "Reshaping the Defense Enterprise" section of the Quadrennial Defense Review, which the Pentagon unveiled today. It reads, frankly, like an effort to see how many corporate buzzwords they could cram into a single document. An excerpt:

Most importantly, the Department has made
notable progress toward an outcome-oriented,
capabilities-based planning approach that
provides the joint warfighter with the capabilities
needed to address a wider range of asymmetric
challenges.

Recent operational experiences have
demonstrated the need to bring further agility,
flexibility and horizontal integration to the
defense support infrastructure. The Department
has responded to that need with several
innovations in its organizations and support
services.

I was especially taken with the three words the document uses to characterize Defense officials' responsibilities. The department's senior leaders, the report notes, are concerned with "governance." At the next level down, leaders of components act in a "management" role. And what's the term for what everybody else in the sprawling military establishment does? "Work." It's nice that they make a clear distinction between this and what happens at the higher levels.

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No Performance Pay for IGs?
By Tom Shoop | Friday, February 03, 2006  |  09:10 AM

Environmental Protection Agency Inspector General Nikki Tinsley is leaving her post March 3, and it's worth noting the reason why. Government Computer News reported last week that Tinsley pointed the finger at the new Senior Executive Service pay-for-performance system. IGs can't get the higher salaries available under the system, Tinsley said, because only the head of an agency can evaluate an IG's performance, and that would represent a conflict of interest. Here's what Tinsley told President Bush in her resignation letter:

I fear the pay inequities that were created with the implementation of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2004 will make it increasingly difficult to convince career employees to accept IG appointments in the future. I hope your administration will work with Congress to address this issue and to encourage qualified career employees to serve as inspectors general in the future.

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The Growing Federal Workforce
By Tom Shoop | Thursday, February 02, 2006  |  10:02 AM

Steve Barr highlights some new data today on federal employment, issued by the Office of Personnel Management. The high points:

Overall federal employment increased during the 2002-2004 period, by 38,302 workers, to bring the total number of executive branch employees to 1.85 million.

In 2004, according to OPM, the "typical fed" was 46.8 years old, had served in government for 16.5 years, held a white-collar job under the General Schedule pay system and earned $59,238. (This year, the average GS salary was $63,125, and $80,425 in the Washington area.)

So much for the end of big government. Oh, I forgot, Defense and Homeland Security don't count.

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Navy's Martial Arts
By Tom Shoop | Wednesday, February 01, 2006  |  04:53 PM

The Navy's Navy Special Warfare Group 2 is in the market for somebody who can teach its forces to bring some serious pain. Here's an excerpt from the organization's their solicitation for a contractor to provide "sustainment training in an advanced armed/unarmed combat course of instruction:"

Course instruction shall include Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ), Thai Kickboxing, and Kali weapons training. Course of instruction shall incorporate the tactical employment of these hand-to-hand techniques while teaching students how to adapt to different scenarios and specific needs....

Course of instruction will include at a minimum the following fighting techniques:

a. BRAZILIAN JUI-JITSU (BJJ): ground-fighting focusing on body control and submission grappling.

b. THAI KICKBOXING: hand-to-hand combat to include punches, kicks, elbows, knees, standing grappling, and head-butts.

c. KALI TECHNIQUE: weapons, knife and stick fighting.

My favorite part: the contract is listed under the category "Sports and Recreation Instruction." (Thanks for the link, RS).

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Feds Aided Murrow Crusade
By Tom Shoop | Wednesday, February 01, 2006  |  03:09 PM

In a recent The New Yorker piece, Nicholas Lemann makes an interesting argument about crusading journalist Edward R. Murrow, and the image portrayed of him in the Oscar-nominated movie Good Night and Good Luck:

The structure that encouraged Murrow, uncomfortable as it may be to admit, was federal regulation of broadcasting. CBS, in Murrow’s heyday, felt that its prosperity, even its survival, depended on demonstrating to Washington its deep commitment to public affairs. The price of not doing so could be regulation, breakup, the loss of a part of the spectrum, or license revocation. Those dire possibilities would cause a corporation to err on the side of too much “See It Now” and “CBS Reports.” In parts of the speech [to a broadcasters’ trade-association convention in 1958] which aren’t in the movie, Murrow made it clear that the main pressure on broadcasting to do what he considered the right thing came from the F.C.C. The idea that, in taking on McCarthy, Murrow was “standing up to government” greatly oversimplifies the issue.

Thanks to Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine for the link. Here's his take on the story.

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The (Detailed) State of the Union
By Tom Shoop | Wednesday, February 01, 2006  |  11:18 AM

Want to drill deeper on the subjects the president addressed in the State of the Union address, and learn where other organizations stand on these issues? Look no further than the annotated version of the speech prepared by our colleagues at National Journal's Policy Council.

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