GovernmentExecutive.com

"In God We Trust" is younger than President Bush--by a decade. Who knew?

FedBlog will be lathering on the sunscreen next week and kickin' back for some R&R. We'll be back on Aug. 7, rarin' to go.

Ex-FEMA Fall Guy Michael Brown continues his nationwide comedy tour. "Good afternoon everyone," he told members of the Florida Emergency Preparedness Association yesterday. "My name is Michael Brown and I'm a recovering bureaucrat."

To my mind, the best part of the Washington Post's epic smackdown of House Government Reform Committee Chairman Tom Davis, R-Va., today is the inside scoop contained both in the main story and a sidebar on Davis' feud with Angela Styles, the Bush administration's first procurement policy chief.

"The businesses in Mr. Davis district are primarily government contractors and he wants to make sure the $$ are free flowing without much regard to the fiscal consequences," Styles wrote in a May 2002 e-mail. Davis fires back in the Post piece, telling the paper's reporters, "Our clashes with Angela Styles were very clear from Day One. We sat down with her two or three times, and she just was not getting any adult supervision at OMB. I don't think they had any idea of what was going on."

But Styles' former boss, ex-OMB chief and current Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, gets the last word: "She was getting plenty of supervision," he said. "If Tom had a problem with Angela, I suppose it was because she understood the issues too well."

The Marines may love MySpace, but Air Force officials have their doubts. Special Agent Jared Whittenberg of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations says the site's great for keeping in touch with friends, but warns service members against putting too much personal information on a MySpace page--or worse, posting inside information on military operations. About 30 people at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev., already have gotten in trouble, the Air Force says, for "posting inappropriate information, such as solicitation of homosexual prostitution, sensitive operational information and promotion of underage drinking."

Fran Mainella is out at the National Park Service, citing that age-old Washington reason: to "spend more time with my family." But it sounds like this may not be the typical resignation letter boilerplate. Mainella notes her "parents and in-laws ... have been having health issues."

Just when there was a glimmer of hope that the Indian trust fund case might be resolved comes further evidence of the kind that so incensed Judge Royce C. Lamberth that he got kicked off the case because his objectivity was called into question. AP reports that an Interior inspector general's report shows that senior managers in the department's Office of the Special Trustee for American Indians in Albuquerque, N.M., "golfed, drank and partied" with the executives of an accounting firm that won $6.6 million in business with the office over eight years.

The group Taxpayers Against Fraud says federal spending to root out health care scams is really paying off. From 2000 to 2004, the feds spent $444 million to recover $6.6 billion in health care fraud-related settlements and judgments. That's $15 back for every dollar invested in an effort that probably only gets at the tip of the iceberg in health fraud.

The Federal Aviation Administration has shifted work schedules for air traffic controllers at seven of its busiest locations, New York Times reports today. The move is designed to ensure that 70 percent of controllers are actually working at radar scopes at any given time. But controllers say the policy cuts down on their breaks and removes flexibility from the scheduling process. They've filed several grievances challenging the shift.

It has come to this: Wired News reports that the Marine Corps has set up its own MySpace page. More than 430 people have asked to contact a Marine recruiter through the site in the five months it's been up. Now the Army wants in on the action, and plans to set up its own page. (Thanks to Defense Tech for the link.)

Couple of interesting points from the Los Angeles Times report today on yesterday's hearings about staffing shortages in U.S. attorney's offices:

• In L.A., 40 out of 190 assistant U.S. attorney positions are vacant. A member of the office there told the paper that while the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration are on hiring sprees, the cases their arrests generate often stall for lack of prosecutors.


• At the L.A. office, basic supplies like envelopes and binder clips are hard to come by. And attorneys have been told to remove microwaves and small refrigerators from their offices because the General Services Administration has threatened to raise the rent due to high energy bills.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., headed out to the Arizona desert last weekend in an effort to score some political points for Republicans by highlighting problems with illegal immigration. But when a Border Patrol agent in the remote region found evidence of a recent border crossing and radioed for backup, the helicopters ferrying Hastert's delegation were pressed into service, the Washington Times reports today. Agents quickly clambered aboard the four UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters and ultimately seized more than 200 pounds of marijuana. The smugglers of the dope got away, though.

A settlement finally may be on the way in the seemingly endless Indian trust fund lawsuit, AP reports today. Indian plaintiffs are seriously considering an offer floated by members of Congress to accept a payoff of $8 billion to cover historic oil, gas, timber and grazing royalties. That's a far cry from the $100 billion the Indian groups said they were owed when they filed the suit a decade ago, or the $27.5 billion they offered to settle for last year.

Hmmm, what to make of this one? I think I'll just let the report in Saturday's New York Post speak for itself:

A State Department worker cruising down 34th Street with three scantily clad women in what appeared to be a government car with flashing lights collided with a yellow cab last night after allegedly running a red light, police said.

Legislation pending in the Senate to overhaul the federal immigration process could prove to be a nightmare for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Washington Post reports today. The Senate bill would permit illegal immigrants who have lived in the United States for at least two years to apply for legal status and would set up a guest worker program. Without new resources, that kind of program would swamp CIS, which granted permanent residency to 1.1 million people last year and awarded 200,000 temporary worker visas.

This week, Entertainment Weekly takes on the case of Tommy Chong vs. the Drug Enforcement Administration. Chong, you may remember, spent some time in federal prison after being nailed in Operation Pipe Dreams, a DEA effort attacking the drug paraphernalia industry. He insists he was targeted because of his celebrity, and maintains the DEA planted an employee inside his family bong company. That doesn't sit well with Mary Beth Buchanan, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania and chief Operation Pipe Dreams prosecutor. Here's what she had to say about Chong's charges:

We identified all the major suppliers from around the country who were offering these illegal products for sale, and the business run by Chong and his family was one of those distributors. There were no employees of the DEA or agents of the DEA who were working in Chong's business. That's the polite way of saying, 'Bulls -- -.'

"Today Senator John McCain spoke on the United States Senate floor regarding the Defense Appropriations Bill," reads a press release issued by the senator's office yesterday. At first glance, the statement has a familiar ring to it: it's another of McCain's trademark diatribes against pork-barrel spending.

At second glance, though, the statement starts to look really familiar. "Why is Defense spending $2 million on the Olympic Games in Atlanta that will not even be held until 1996?" McCain asks. "Why should defense spend $9 million for World Cup USA?" A look back at the beginning of the statement and it becomes clear: "I have ... reviewed the Senate version of the 1993 Defense Appropriations Act, and I have found a number of areas that seem to turn a silk purse into a sow's ear," he says.

I know that McCain's line on pork spending hasn't changed much over the years, but his staff might want to be a little more careful with the cutting and pasting in the future. Update, 7/25/06: Four days later, and this still hasn't been changed.

Somebody at the Energy Department has been reprimanded because 1,500 workers weren't told for 10 months that their personal information had been stolen by a hacker. But the department's not saying who it was who got punished.

The Army's budget woes continue to deepen. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker has already told Congress that delays in supplemental funding mean that the service can't repair vital equipment fast enough. Now AP reports that the Army is freezing civilian hiring until the end of the fiscal year because of the budget crunch. The service also is canceling or postponing nonessential travel, stopping the shipment of goods unless they're needed for troops, restricting purchase card use, freezing contract awards, and releasing some temporary workers and contract employees.

The Senate yesterday passed legislation to protect military service members from unscrupulous sellers of of insurance, financial, and investment products. The bill (S. 418) would prohibit the sale of "periodic payment plan certificates," which are like mutual funds, only with very high sales commissions. The legislation is similar to a bill passed in the House last year. The slight differences between the two bills will have to be worked out before the measure goes to the president.

The Justice Department announced yesterday that it had won guilty pleas from two thieves who broke into a series of historical sites and museums in Texas and stole artifacts.

The break-ins took place in mid-April, starting at the Hallie Stillwell Museum in Brewster County, Texas, where Kirby Loren Amlee and Joey Kenneth Priddy nabbed a .38 caliber revolver with holster, an 1895 Winchester 30.06 rifle, a double barrel shotgun, two bandoliers, a box of .38 caliber ammunition, numerous Indian arrowheads, a knife with bone handle in a sheath, a tomahawk, a small wooden butter mold and money from the donation box.

The next day the thieves hit the Fort Davis Historical Site, stealing another set of historic weapons and more donated cash. Finally, five days later, Amlee and Priddy hit the Lajitas International Airport, where they took a 42" plasma TV, two boxes of medals and -- by this time apparently their life of crime had turned into something of a sleep-deprived headache -- packages of No-Doze and Tylenol.

Special agents from the National Park Service led the investigation that nailed the thieves. The historic weapons have been recovered.

The Washington Times reports today on the rift that has opened up between two House softball leagues over the issue of how playoffs should be run. Included in the piece is a detail always included in reports about softball on Capitol Hill: Since playing space on the National Mall is scarce, congressional offices dispatch interns to spend entire afternoons squatting on fields to ensure they're reserved for evening games. And reading this, I wondered what I always wonder: How come no one ever questions the ethics of using interns who are supposed to be getting experience working in the federal government for this purpose? If a federal agency used its interns (even unpaid ones) to reserve softball fields, wouldn't somebody be crying waste, fraud and abuse? (Federal agencies don't do this...right?) I actually don't think it's that big a deal to use interns as field placeholders, I just think there's something of a double standard at work.

James R. Robinson, the NASA manager who was charged with distributing child pornography from his home and work computers has pleaded guilty. This is the guy, you may remember, who was nabbed at least partially by a NASA "skin tone filtering system" that determined he was viewing child porn at work.

Here come the purchase card abuse stories again. AP reports that a GAO report set to be released today details hundreds of thousands of dollars in unjustified Homeland Security charges during a five-month period before and after Hurricane Katrina. As usual, there's a depressing list of seemingly inappropriate items bought: booties for rescue dogs, iPods, designer rain jackets and beer-making equipment. But there's a little more to this story than meets the eye. Emergency responders concluded that the dog booties simply weren't appropriate for the canines at work in the Gulf Coast region, and the Secret Service says the iPods were legitimately used for "training and data storage." It's pretty hard to justify a home-brew setup for a Coast Guard social organizer, though.

The Los Angeles Times today takes a look inside the "Waxman Bureau of Investigation," the oversight apparatus built and maintained by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee and the "the self-appointed Inspector General of the World." Waxman's devotion to liberal partisanship, combined with the efforts of his staff of experienced investigators, has made him "the biggest pest east of the Mississippi" in the eyes of the GOP--and undoubtedly, in the eyes of some of the agencies whose work he probes, too.

Yet another example of your Agricultural Research Service at work: sliced apples that don't turn brown!

Congratulations to all those who ripped off FEMA when it offered $2,000 in immediate cash relief to hurricane victims last year. Now the agency apparently has decided that no one will get the money this year.

Well, I hope the folks at the Office of Personnel Management and the Partnership for Public Service who have been issuing dire warnings about the impending "retirement tsunami" are happy. Because they got Time.com to bite on the story. And here's how its reporters chose to describe the situation:

"Over the next five years, over half of the federal government workforce is likely to retire, completely gutting vital agencies like the Centers for Disease Control, the Internal Revenue Service, and Veterans Affairs. The higher up the management chain, the worse the problem; among top government officials, almost 70% are primed to retire. A culture of denial has set in, and the very people responsible to fix it are the ones who are going to ditch. Many agencies will enter an embarrassing phase of ineptitude, caused by a lack of staff or a newly hired and inexperienced staff. Get ready to hate your government again."

• "We will see the effects of this brain drain everywhere." (But the story falls back on weasel words when describing what actually might happen: The CDC "might" be short on biologists in a pandemic. Tax refunds "might" be late. Iraq veterans "may" get poor care at VA hospitals.)


• "Many of the 2,000 who were employed [at FEMA when Katrina hit] were clueless new hires."


• "Three million baby boomers will be applying for retirement benefits every year, but the [Social Security Administration] will have 40% less staff to process their claims."


• "The government will need to wake up to the modern age, using recruiters and newspaper advertising."


• Federal agencies "often pay your way through college or forgive your school loans."

Wall Street may be indifferent about whether federal agencies meet an Oct. 27 deadline to begin issuing new ID cards for employees. "If it's Oct. 27 or March 27, I don't care," Jay M. Meier, senior analyst at Minneapolis' MJSK Equity Research, told Forbes. Either way, he says, "the opportunity is so big" for companies seeking to provide credentialing technology to the government. And eventually, Meier predicts, the standards set by the feds will become the global benchmark for credentialing.

Dinosaur hunters take note: The Dinosaur National Monument Visitor Center in Utah has been closed indefinitely, AP reports. The center allowed visitors to see paleontologists at work and view dinosaur bones still embedded in a cliff. The building has constructed on unstable clay soil in 1957, and has suffered from various problems ever since. The National Park Service says the center "will remain closed indefinitely until significant life, health, and safety issues are addressed." Given the repair backlog at the agency, that could be awhile.

"On Parents' Day," President Bush says, "we pay tribute to the hard work and sacrifice of the millions of devoted parents who provide guidance, support, and unconditional love to their children." We do? I've got two kids, and I've never heard of this holiday. Mother's and Father's Days aren't enough? Apparently not. Because Parents' Day is the law. And it's on July 23.

So what's your agency doing about it? Bush is calling upon "citizens, private organizations, and governmental bodies at all levels to engage in activities and educational efforts that recognize, support, and honor parents."

From USA Today: "Army Reshapes Training to Spare Enlistees the Boot." I thought this meant they were switching to combat sneakers. But it's actually about how the service is changing its training methods so that fewer recruits wash out. With recruiting goals harder and harder to meet, the Army can't afford to send too many would-be soldiers packing.

A group of Democratic and Republican political strategists have teamed together to build HotSoup.com, a social networking site aimed at creating "a new community of influence among those in government, politics, business and entertainment who make the decisions and those who want to impact them." The site isn't scheduled to officially launch until October, so it's pretty bare-bones right now. But it does have one poll question on it: "What issue or concern do you wish you heard more about from the mainstream media and your leaders?" As of this morning, the top response, with 35 percent of the vote? "Making government work." That handily beat out "The changing U.S. and global economies" (19 percent) and "Ethics/honesty in American life" (18 percent).

With the news that an appeals court has ordered that federal judge Royce Lamberth be removed from the long-running Indian trust fund case, we might actually see a resolution of the dispute sometime soon. It had become clear that a major impediment to progress in the case was Lamberth himself, and his vituperative criticism of the Interior Department--which he once called "the morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down of a disgracefully racist and imperialist government that should have been buried a century ago."

The National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation say that more than half of the 7,000 languages spoken around the world today are headed for extinction by the end of the century. And they aim to do something about it, to the tune of $5 million.

In his column this week, George Will plugs One Party Country, the new book by Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten of the Los Angeles Times, who argue that the Democrats face a steep uphill climb in attempting to wrest control of government from the GOP. Here's the part I found interesting:

Hamburger and Wallsten know that "all presidents, at least since John Adams," have rewarded friends and handicapped adversaries, but they credit "[Karl] Rove and his lieutenants" with an unprecedentedly ambitious politicization of "the day-to-day functioning of the executive branch." Republicans theoretically favor much less government. But they use business skills of market segmentation to defeat Democrats by mastering the favor-dispensing and constituency-assembling power of the sprawling government that Democrats did so much to build and justify. Conservatives might say that while Democrats, whipsawed by Republicans wielding the power of big government, are getting what they deserve, Republicans do not deserve the dominance they are thereby achieving.

The New York Times goes in-depth today on the issue of Defense procurement cost overruns. The gist: since 9/11, efforts to rein in the costs of huge weapons programs have fallen by the wayside. The result: Billions of dollars in cost overruns.

The piece includes a quote from House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., that ought to give everyone pause: “Acquisition inefficiencies may, in the end, drive American vulnerabilities more than any other dimension of America’s national security complex.” Lawrence J. Korb, former Pentagon assistant secretary, adds, "It’s always been bad, but I’ve never seen it this bad.”

I'm at our Excellence in Government conference today. I sat in on a session this morning led by OPM's Raymond Kirk and Tammy Flanagan of the National Institute for Transition Planning (and of course, our own Retirement Planning columnist). Read my full post about it on our EIG Blog here.

The IRS says be on the lookout for more of those scam e-mails designed to get people to divulge personal information. Apparently, there's been an increase in them over the past few weeks, with 1,300 forwarded to the agency in June. So again, if you get an e-mail from the IRS saying you're eligible for an unexpected refund, yes, it's too good to be true.

Our annual Excellence in Government conference gets underway Monday in Washington. If you're going, we'll see you there. If not, don't worry. You'll be able to get a taste of the show online at our EIG Blog. We're deploying a group of people to "live blog" the conference, bringing you highlights and insights from EIG track sessions. So whether or not you're attending, you can read the blog and share your thoughts and comments on what's going on.

Neo-Nazi groups and other extremist organizations are infiltrating the ranks of the U.S. military, according to a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Neo-Nazis "stretch across all branches of service, they are linking up across the branches once they're inside, and they are hard-core," Defense Department investigator told the organization. "We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad," he added. "That's a problem."

Once again, we're seeing a flurry of stories about whether we really need pennies, this time based on reports that it actually costs more than a cent to mint a penny. There seems to be one ironclad rule of reporting this story or publishing editorials about it: Headlines must include bad puns. To wit:

• Do Pennies Still Make Sense? (Washington Post)


• A Penny Saved Could Become a Penny Spurned (USA Today)


• Cents-Less To Keep The Penny? (Student-Operated Press)


• Is It Time for the U.S. to Become Penniless? (Montgomery Advertiser)


• Do Pennies Make Cents? (Chicago Daily Herald)


• How to Deal With Change (Fort Wayne News-Sentinel


• Penny For Your Thoughts on the Penny (WTOP Radio)


• Penny-Foolish? (Naperville Sun)
  

In a piece on the Wall Street Journal's editorial page today, Jonathan Gurwitz, a columnist at the San Antonio Express-News, details the effort to set up Fisher Houses, which serve as homes away from home for the families of wounded military service members. The houses, he reports, are the result of an "innovative partnership between government and private philanthropy." The philanthropy is courtesy of New York developer Zachary Fisher. Private funds are raised to build the houses. The military provides land for construction, and takes over operations and maintenance after they're built.

That's a highly laudable endeavor, but for me the piece was slightly marred by a quote from Arnold Fisher, Zachary Fisher's nephew, who is heavily involved in the project. "We don't want government money," he says. "This is Americans doing for Americans."

But land and operations and maintenance aren't free, are they? The Fisher Houses seem like a highly laudable project--and one that it appears couldn't be pulled off without Uncle Sam's help. That's great. And since the government money that is dedicated to this effort presumably comes from our tax dollars, it constitutes "Americans doing for Americans," too.

I just finished taping the next edition of Fedcast this morning. I don't want to give away too many details, but let's just say we're giving ourselves a whole new look. Keep an eye out for it next week.

A federal judge has told the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to stop flying its Gulfstream jet into hurricanes. Before conducting such flights, the agency must complete negotiations with the National Weather Service Employees Organization, which says flying through the storms changes the working conditions of the meteorologists it represents, the Tampa Tribune reports. In the meantime, NOAA can keep flying two propeller aircraft into the storms.

USA Today, along with seemingly every other media outlet, is pondering the implications of President Bush's 60th birthday this week. Today, the paper helpfully lists other famous Americans turning the big 6-0 this year:

First lady Laura Bush, singers Cher and Dolly Parton, Hall of Fame baseball player Reggie Jackson, former Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge, Wheel of Fortune host Pat Sajak, movie directors Steven Spielberg and Oliver Stone, real estate tycoon Donald Trump, former EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman. Actor Sylvester Stallone shares his birthday with President Bush.

Excuse me, but Pat Sajak? An entire generation of Americans to pick from, and he's the seventh-most famous one marking six decades on the planet in 2006?

The Air Force thinks there might be some nuggets of information in these little things called "blogs." The Air Force Office of Scientific Research has given Versatile Information Systems Inc. of Framingham, Mass., $450,000 for a three-year project called, "Automated Ontologically-Based Link Analysis of International Web Logs for the Timely Discovery of Relevant and Credible Information." The idea, the Air Force says, is to develop a tool to figure out what information flying around in the blogosphere at any given moment in time is actually important. Good luck with that.

Vice President Cheney's heart is stable, his doctors reported after his physical Saturday. So what does he do? Decides to give the old ticker a test by heading off to Daytona International Speedway for the Pepsi 400 NASCAR race--an event that sounded like it involved a little more excitement than your average person with a heart condition should experience. In an interview with Fox News, Cheney called it "an awesome undertaking -- just the sheer size of the crowd, the energy, the complexity of what goes on in the pits, and with the teams and the crews." He also revealed that he hasn't driven a car himself since the day President Bush asked him to be his running mate almost seven years ago.

"Experts debate whether children should be told they're fat." The feds, apparently, favor fuzzy language, while some medical experts say give it to 'em straight.