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Have fun on the Fourth of July, but not with M-80s, M-1000s, Silver Salutes, Quarter Sticks, Quarter Pounders, and Cherry Bombs. That's the advice of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, anyway. Those fireworks are banned by the federal government because they "have almost instantaneous fuses and are designed to detonate other explosives in close proximity." If you must buy fireworks, ATF says, make sure they're legal in your neck of the woods and that you buy them only through licensed dealers.

What does the College Access Program, which allows District of Columbia high school graduates to attend colleges all over the country at in-state rates, have to do with the Office of Special Counsel? Rep. Tom Davis, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has managed to make a connection between the two. This week, he proposed to support the college program by stripping $1 million from OSC's budget. That move just happens to come in the immediate aftermath of OSC's controversial investigation into the head of the General Services Administration.

Here's Davis' press release on his efforts (it's not on his Web site yet):

Davis: House Democrats Choose Politics Over D.C. Grads

Amendment Defeat 'A Clear Indication of Priorities'

Washington, D.C. - Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) expressed dismay today that, in a blatant show of partisan politics, House Democrats chose to support a widely criticized head of the Office of Special Counsel over giving enhanced support to high school graduates in the nation's capital.

"For years, Democrats have vilified Special Counsel Scott Bloch for mismanaging and politicizing his office, undermining employee rights and targeting whistleblowers within his agency," Davis said. "Now that he's turned his heavy-handed, retaliatory sights on Bush administration officials, they're rushing to his defense - even when it's at the expense of D.C. students trying to go on to college, at a time when Mayor Fenty is doing all he can to rescue the city's schools system. Today's vote is a clear indication of Democrats' priorities: politics over education."

The Davis amendment would have taken $1 million from OSC and redirected it entirely to D.C.'s much-touted, overwhelmingly successful College Access Program, which levels the playing field by allowing D.C. high school graduates to attend colleges around the nation at in-state rates.

Democrats have repeatedly questioned whether OSC was doing its job - until OSC set its sights on a high-ranking Bush administration appointee:

"Mr. Bloch ought to find a new job. He ought to be fired. President Bush should not tolerate this from someone he appointed," Rep. Elliot Engel told AP in 2004.

"Mr. Bloch's actions are part of a larger attack on the federal civil service by the Bush Administration. Over the past 3 ½ years, federal employees have lost collective bargaining and appeals rights, they have seen their jobs outsourced and now they face discrimination based on their sexual orientation," Rep. Henry Waxman wrote in 2004.

"Where were these Democrats and many others today, when OSC is still politicized and mismanaged and when D.C. grads are looking for additional support?" Davis asked.

The Washington Post lets fly today with another of its periodic salvos against federal agencies' contracting processes, with a piece about the Homeland Security Department's $2 billion million "no-bid contract" with Booz-Allen Hamilton that ballooned into a $124 million project to create an information analysis and infrastructure protection organization.

A couple of quick thoughts about the piece:

• The repeated use of the highly charged phrase "no-bid" conjures up cronyistic contracts shoveled out to preferred contractors with connections, political or otherwise. But it's clear from the story that these weren't no-bid deals in the sense of being doled out without any competition. The Veterans Affairs Department handled the procurement on behalf of DHS, using General Services Administration contract vehicles. Booz Allen had to go through a level of competition simply to be included on one of those vehicles.
• What's more, is the "no-bid" aspect really the point? If the contracts had been properly bid out with full procedures, DHS would in all likelihood have had to spend even more money to get the office off the ground. The real issue here is that the department utterly lacked the internal capacity not only to fulfill the mission it was assigned, but even to find a contractor to do it for them. Any way you slice it, they were going to have to spend a ton of money with contractors to do the job they were assigned to do.

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"Federal Wage Slave." Awesome. My favorite quote so far, from a post last week:

Is it too much to ask of my fellow federal wage slaves that you read your $%#@! e-mails starting with the most recent messages first? If I get one more e-mail from one of my betters solving a problem that was already solved two hours ago by people who keep up with their e-mail traffic, I will self-immolate.

It's not just in government, Wage Slave, I can assure you.

Here's an interesting factoid, courtesy of the West Fargo Pioneer (registration required): When Congress first made Independence Day a holiday for federal employees in 1870, those employees weren't paid for the day off.

Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., wants federal agencies to show the way when it comes to energy efficiency. In an op-ed in The Hill today, she notes that her committee worked to include several measures affecting agencies in the energy bill that passed the Senate June 21. They would:

• Require lighting retrofits and increased energy efficiency in as many as 8,000 federal buildings, with a $100 million grant program for local governments to upgrade their own buildings.
• Establish a “Green Buildings” program for new and upgraded government buildings, using sustainable products, practices and materials.
• Authorize construction of a photovoltaic “solar wall” to generate electricity at Energy Department headquarters in Washington.

Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England doesn't think much of legislative proposals to create a chief management officer at the Pentagon, the Washington Post's Stephen Barr reports. England told the House Armed Services Committee yesterday that he'd rather see his job retooled to be the department's chief operating officer, with responsibility for budgeting and management.

Overall, England said, "I am of a mind when it comes to management that less is better."

Gettin' hitched? The Postal Service has just the stamps for you.

Ever wondered if the FBI was snooping on one of your ancestors? Then this is the Web site for you: Get Grandpa's FBI File.

(Hat tip: POGO Blog)

Illumination flares used by U.S. forces in search and rescue missions are supposed to pass a simple test: that they can be dropped from a height of 10 feet without igniting. A former employee of Alliant Techsystems Inc. says in a whistleblower lawsuit that the company provided flares to the military knowing they might not pass that test due to problems with their igniters. Later, the flares did in fact fail a Navy test.

Now the U.S. government has joined the whistleblower's suit. And if you think this is a small potatoes case, remember this: the Air Force and the Army bought $100 million worth of the flares.

The good news, the New York Times reports, is that Boeing is about to debut Project 28, the first phase of the Secure Border Initiative. It involves a network of high-definition cameras, radar and other equipment that lets the Border Patrol see exactly what's happening along a 28-mile stretch of the Arizona-Mexico border.

The bad news? Project 28 was supposed to launch June 13.

Here we go again with the reports that federal employees are overpaid. The Asbury Park Press has crunched the numbers, and declares that feds, on average, are paid almost 50 percent more than private-sector employees -- $59,864 vs. $40,505, according to 2005 data compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Almost a year ago, you'll remember, Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute published an analysis showing that when benefits are factored in, feds make double what private workers do.

My initial reaction is always to be highly skeptical of these kinds of comparisons because of the apples-to-oranges issue. After all, it shouldn't surprise anybody that the average federal employee, who's likely to be a white-collar professional, is paid more than the average private sector worker, who could be serving up lattes at Starbucks.

The Asbury Park Press insists that "Where job titles could be compared be it for engineers, doctors or food service workers the federal government still paid better than the private sector in three out of four cases." But that "where job titles could be compared" bit is a rather large loophole. What exactly are the titles? And what's in that fourth case?

Anyway, the most interesting part of the Asbury Park Press is its database of federal salary information, in which you can find a list of employees by locality and what they make, or search by individual name to find out his or her salary.

First, Defense Secretary Robert Gates admits that he's a "very low-tech person." Now, President Bush acknowledges that he has a thing or two to learn about computer security. Here he is speaking about his meeting with Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves at the White House Monday:

"We also talked about an interesting subject, and one that I can learn a lot about, and that is the cyber attack that makes us all vulnerable. Estonia recently went through a wave of cyber attacks. And this President, one, understands the issue well; two, has got some ideas, including a NATO center of excellence in Estonia to deal with this issue."

The expansion of private security screening forces at airports continues apace, with the announcement Friday that Trinity Technology Group, Inc., of Fairfax, Va., would take over screening at Charles M. Schulz-Sonoma County (Calif.) Airport under the Transportation Security Administration's Screening Partnership Program. The program has been in place since late 2004, after TSA completed a pilot program to test private screening at five airports: San Francisco International; Kansas City International; Greater Rochester International; Jackson Hole, Wyo.; and Tupelo (Miss.) Regional. All five of those airports opted to continue using private screeners at the end of the pilot phase. Since then, Joe Foss Field in Sioux Falls, S.D., Key West International Airport, and the Florida Keys Marathon Airport also have chosen to go the private sector route.

TSA is now using a streamlined acquisition process under which any interested vendor can apply to an airport's request for proposals for screening services. Previously, companies had to be pre-certified to participate in the program.

Before you purchase and deploy robots to places like Iraq to search for bombs or victims of attacks, it's a good idea to test them to figure out if they actually work. And before you do that, it's a good idea to make sure you have a test that actually separates the effective robots from the ones that aren't so good. That's where the Science and Technology Directorate at the Homeland Security Department and the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology come in, the New York Times reports today. Their tests of the tests take place at Disaster City, a 52-acre area of wreckage and rubble in College Station, Texas, operated by Texas A&M University's Texas Engineering Extension Service.

Here's some background on the Disaster City tests, courtesy of my colleague Allan Holmes at Tech Insider.

Christopher Hayes of The Nation takes up one of life's most thankless tasks: defending the bureaucracy. Given the nature of the publication that his piece appears in, it's not surprising that it's presented in the context of a searing critique of the current administration. But whatever you think of the politics, this is an impassioned defense, presented with panache. An excerpt:

A funny thing has happened over the past six years. At a time when the press failed to check a reactionary Administration, when the opposition party all too often chose timidity, it was the lowly and anonymous bureaucrats, clad in rumpled suits, ID badges dangling from their necks, who, in their own quiet, behind-the-scenes way, took to the ramparts to defend the integrity of the American system of government.

It was the midlevel intelligence professionals in the CIA whose expertise led them to argue that Iraq had no means of acquiring nuclear material; it was the planners and country experts at the State Department who prepared a 1,200-page document about postwar Iraq outlining in depressing detail the many challenges and brutalizing exigencies our occupying forces now face. It was professional scientists in the bowels of the Environmental Protection Agency who pushed their reports warning of the effects of climate change, only to have them censored and purged. It was concerned and conscientious spooks and cryptographers at the National Security Agency who contacted reporters to raise alarms about the warrantless wiretapping of Americans. It was a midlevel career bureaucrat at the Department of Education named Jon Oberg who spent his own time--nights and weekends--studying the student loan program and discovered that taxpayers were being ripped off by private lenders to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

(Hat tip to my colleague at The Atlantic Online, Matthew Yglesias.)

The Postal Service has a form letter that its carriers deliver to homeowners whose dogs are impeding mail delivery, warning that they must take responsibility. But what happens when the animal bothering -- attacking, actually -- a mail carrier is a wild bird? The same letter goes out, the Tulsa World reports, with the words "your dog" crossed out and "mockingbird" written in. The only problem, of course, is that none of the homeowners in the bird's neighborhood can actually do anything about the problem.

(Hat tip: Fedsmith)

Remember when federal executives would say that they didn't use those newfangled computer things? It was kind of quaint right up to the point where it became absurd. Haven't we about reached that stage with e-mail and Internet usage? It's a little disturbing when the head of the entire United States Defense Department says, "I don't do e-mail."

USA Today reports on Cmdr. Mark Russell, who says the Navy's trying to run him out because he has criticized the military's mental health care system. Russell has filed a complaint with the Defense Department inspector general alleging that he received negative job reviews this year and last after speaking out.

A Navy spokesman says the drop in ratings of Russell's advancement prospects from "early promote" to "promotable" doesn't mean that he couldn't advance to captain someday. But a former Navy public affairs officer calls the two "promotable" ratings a "kiss of death" and "career-ender."

It seems clear from this RAND report that "promotable" ain't much of a rating. Here's the full scale of rankings, from the bottom to the top: “not observed,” “significant problems,” “progressing,” “promotable,” “must promote,” and “early promote.”

Among the "family jewels" -- documents detailing illegal and scandalous activities by the CIA -- set for release next week, are papers detailing a 1969 program to infiltrate antiwar groups in the United States and monitor their activities. Under the program, 10,000 American names were collected. Why did the agency not only gather but hang onto all of this data? Here's former CIA Director William Colby's explanation, as reported in the Washington Post: "the tendency of bureaucrats to retain paper whether they needed it or acted on it or not."

Here's another thing you don't want private security contractors who guard federal buildings to do: Use security cameras to peep on adjacent buildings.

The Army wants to increase the total size of its training areas by 70 percent, USA Today reports. That would involve adding almost 5 million acres worth of space by 2011. The service says the problem is that most of its existing ranges just aren't big enough to accommodate new faster vehicles and high-tech weapons. Adding to the problem is the fact that the Army is boosting the size of its forces and presumably at some point will be bringing a whole bunch of people home from overseas.

Of course, any effort to add more space will involve getting the necessary funding and overcoming the inevitable environmental issues associated with large-scale military training.

Between 2002 and 2005, the IRS sent out more than 2 million tax liens containing the full Social Security numbers of recipients, New York Times reports today. The Government Accountability Office says many of those documents are still publicly available to identity thieves.

Last year, the tax agency started truncating Social Security numbers to the last four digits in its notices. But that's not foolproof either, because many large data vendors sell millions of government records with the first five digits of Social Security numbers, which criminals could combine with the tax lien data to reconstruct full numbers.

The Washington Post weighs in today with a story about plans to cut personnel at the Federal Protective Service and rely more heavily on contract guards to protect federal facilities. I say, welcome to the party. We've been writing about budget and staffing issues at the agency for almost a year now. (And those links are just the tip of the iceberg of our coverage.) The agency says it's all part of an effort to beef up oversight of the 15,000 contract security guards FPS employs. Which is good, because you don't want private security guards doing stuff like shooting each other.

Web Worker Daily points out this great tidbit in OPM's latest telework report: The National Archives and Records Administration reported that it had 85 workers eligible to telework and 129 employees actually teleworking, for a truly impressive participation rate of 151.76 percent.

Richard Seven of the Seattle Times laments that his last name isn't the good-luck charm that so many of the people he meets seem to think it is. But isn't it a treasured connection to a long line of family history? Not exactly. Here's how he describes the name's origins:

"As my family tells it, some federal employee at the immigration office made it up when my grandparents entered the country from Luxembourg just after the turn of the 20th century. He told them their name sounded too weird to be American and a lot like "Seven." So they and I became Seven."

This has got to be one of the least enviable jobs in America: American Lawyer profiles David Hammond of the law firm Crowell & Moring, who represents some of the top private security companies working in Iraq. As such, he "not only does much of the contracting and contract-related litigation for these companies, but he also provides the political and legal justification for the growing reliance on their services," the publication says. Of course, Crowell & Moring has long experience in the federal contracting arena. One of their current partners is Angela Styles, who headed the Office of Federal Procurement Policy in the early years of the Bush administration.

Two years ago, here's what Maura Harty, head of the Bureau of Consular Affairs, the State Department's passport processing office, had to say about impending requirements that passports be used for travel between the United States and neighboring countries:

"I don't want anybody to run out tomorrow and buy a passport because two-and-a-half years from now they're thinking about a trip."

Here's what she had to say yesterday:

"One of the things we failed to predict was how quickly Americans would decide to apply for a passport ... It was a mistake."

So what is Harty doing to deal with the backlog of passport applications? According to the St. Petersburg Times, "Hiring 1,400 employees since January. Expanding several regional centers. Keeping [the agency's] main processing center in Portsmouth, N.H., open all night. Adding a megacenter in Arkansas. Harty's department now is churning out more than 1.5-million passports a month."

Also, the Washington Post's Al Kamen reports, she's begging Foreign Service officers to pitch in as volunteers at passport processing offices around the country.

Awhile back, I did a series of posts on federal mascots, in the process learning that there are many more of them than I ever knew existed. And apparently more are being added all the time. Here, for example, is a one I just found out about: Leon the Lightning Lion:

Leon is the creation of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and he's designed to call attention to the dangers of lightning strikes. (Next week is, after all, Lightning Safety Week.) And he's got an awesome catchphrase: "When thunder roars, go indoors!"

By the way, in case you thought getting struck by lightning was no big deal, NOAA reports that it can cause "memory loss, attention deficits, sleep disorders, numbness, dizziness, stiffness in joints, irritability, fatigue, weakness, muscle spasms, depression, and an inability to sit for long." Oh, and also, death.

NASA's getting more serious about commercializing space. The agency has signed agreements with three more companies to develop the capacity to transport people and goods into low-earth orbit.

Of course, this is all part of an effort to hand over more of NASA's operations to the private sector that stretches back to the Clinton administration.

What's the next phase? Purchasing transportation services to supply the International Space Station as NASA focuses on its next goals: exploring the moon and Mars.

Feds posted to Iraq and Afghanistan "face varying degrees of real danger," Mike Causey writes in his Washington Times column today. But there's an upside: They get to work out a lot.

Ryan Crocker, U.S. ambassador to Iraq, has a message for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the Washington Post reports today: He wants the department's best employees. "Simply put, we cannot do the nation's most important work if we do not have the department's best people," Crocker said in a memo to Rice. But in interview with the paper, Crocker said the real issue is that he simply needs more people. "The people here are heroic," he said. "I need more people, and that's the thing, not that the people who are here shouldn't be here or couldn't do it." The department's human resources office, Crocker said in his memo, also has made "heroic" efforts, but needs more support from State's top management team.

When he helmed the Office of Management and Budget during the first few years of George W. Bush's presidency, Mitch Daniels made no secret of his affinity for the administration's "competitive sourcing" initiative to put federal jobs up for competition from private firms. But then he left in 2003 to make what turned out to be successful run for governor of Indiana. So I guess it should come as no surprise that the New York Times reported this weekend that Daniels has earned a new nickname in the state: "Governor Privatize." He's outsourced some welfare-applicant screening, running a prison and operating the Indiana Toll Road in the northern part of the state. Now he wants to put the state lottery up for bid.

“Government is the last monopoly,” says Daniels, who announced Saturday that he would seek a second term. “So competition is the key. That’s why I’m indifferent — public or private, as long as the benefits of competition are brought to bear.”

His old boss would be proud.

I know that "bad apple" stories on some level just reinforce stereotypes of the federal workforce, but sometimes they're just irresistible. Case in point: using your government purchase card to buy DirecTV service. That's just not very smart. And Charrisse Fairfax Brown may be headed to federal prison for doing it -- and for buying more than $24,000 worth of other personal stuff with her purchase card.

The State Department may be overwhelmed trying to process the new applications that have rolled in due to regulations requiring passports for air travel to Mexico, Canada, Bermuda or the Caribbean, but the Homeland Security Department says that shouldn't tempt Congress to delay rules scheduled to go into effect starting next year that also would require passports for land and sea travel to these destinations. A growing move in Congress to delay the land and sea requirement "is just simply not acceptable to us," DHS spokesman Russ Knocke tells USA Today. Right now, he notes, border agents have to examine up to 8,000 different forms of identification that people can present when trying to get into the country.

Maybe the Office of Personnel Management is taking the wrong approach with its federal recruitment TV ad campaign. Perhaps the agency should take its lead from the Ukrainian military. Check out this innovative recruiting pitch, courtesy of Danger Room:

The Drug Enforcement Administration is always on the lookout for tetrahydrocannabinols (THC). That's the key ingredient in marijuana, and if it turns up in other products, like industrial hemp, well, then as far as DEA's concerned, those products are just as illegal. Now two North Dakota farmers are challenging that position by suing the agency in federal court in an effort to end a ban on commercial hemp farming. They've already got licenses from the state Agriculture Commission to grow the crop.

The General Services Administration announced yesterday that Tony Reed has taken over as regional administrator of the agency's National Capital Region as of this week. There he'll oversee 93 million square feet of office space in more than 880 government-owned and leased facilities housing nearly 300,000 federal workers. Before joining GSA Reed was assistant secretary of the Maryland Department of General Services.

GSA also announced that Leslie L. Plomondon has taken over as head of the agency's Rocky Mountain Region. She'll oversee 615 buildings housing almost 50,000 workers in Colorado, Utah, Montana, Wyoming, and North and South Dakota.

From BBC News: "FBI Tries to Fight Zombie Hordes."

(Hat tip: Wonkette)

Who knew that federal many federal buildings in Washington were constructed in a style actually known as "Brutalist"? The term, Bloomberg News reports, derives from a French term meaning "raw concrete," the cheap and easy building material used to get buildings off the ground quickly to accommodate the burgeoning ranks of the federal workforce several decades ago. Now New York architectural firms are taking over some of the old buildings no longer used by agencies and either demolishing them or giving them face-lifts featuring neon, glass and steel.

(Hat tip: FedSmith)

So President Bush says that the story that his watch was stolen when he glad-handed a crowd of Albanians is "ludicrous" and "unbelievable." In fact, the White House says, the president took his watch off before plunging into the crowd. But if it's "ludicrous" to imagine the watch would have been swiped, why did he take it off in the first place?

Maybe the multiple ongoing efforts to market the federal government as a great place to work are having some effect. A new survey out this week shows that undergraduates at American universities rank several federal agencies among the top career destinations. In the survey, conducted by Universum, a firm that specializes in helping companies market themselves to potential employees, the State Department, the CIA, the FBI and the Peace Corps all ranked among the Top 10 prospective employers.

Here are the top 10 rankings:

1. Google


2. Walt Disney


3. Apple Computer


4. State Department


5. Peace Corps


6. CIA


7. PricewaterhouseCoopers


8. Microsoft


9. FBI


10. Teach for America

Among liberal arts students, federal agencies took three of the top five slots. The other two went to Teach for America and Google. Weirdly, Google also took fifth place in the "Best Government/Public Service agency" category.

The agencies that scored well are either those that have a strong public profile or a demonstrated social service ethic. “The new rankings reflect a shift in undergraduates’ mindsets when it comes to their careers,” said Universum USA CEO Claudia Tattanelli. “The millennial generation’s outlook on career is quite complex." It'll be interesting if this outlook extends to careers in other federal agencies.

This just in: Airport baggage screeners do a better job when they're not sleep-deprived.

Congratulations to Harry K. Thomas Jr., whom President Bush has tapped to be director general of the Foreign Service. Thomas, a career member of the Senior Foreign Service, is now a special assistant to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Before that, he was ambassador to Bangladesh and, earlier in his career, director of the National Security Council.

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., is on the trail of federal waste again. This time his target is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In a new report detailed in USA Today, Coburn questions a billion-dollar construction project at the agency's headquarters in Atlanta. The project includes a $106 million communications center, an $18.6 million video production studio, and a new employee fitness center with "$200,000 in equipment such as zero-gravity chairs and a mood-enhancing light show."

The CDC says the agency needs "first-rate facilities for first-rate employees."

Coburn also decries the $1.7 million the CDC has spent on a Hollywood liaison office aimed at improving the accuracy of medical information in TV shows. "It is hard to argue in this day and age that television producers do not have an incentive, without federal taxpayer involvement, to get their story lines correct," Coburn's report says.

Is it? TV producers need to make their shows compelling and dramatic, but they don't gain much by investing their own time and energy in medical accuracy. In fact, they could lose a lot if being accurate made their shows less sensational. Of course, you can argue that it's still not worth spending taxpayer dollars to try to get Hollywood producers to stick to the facts, but that's a different issue than whether they would do it by themselves without any prodding. And remember, the military's done much to burnish its image by aggressively reaching out to Hollywood. So have other agencies over the past decade.

"Oh, yeah, I'd much rather use a stick that was invented 71 years ago. Twenty years before NASA? That's great."

Golf pro Phil Mickelson, sarcastically endorsing the "Stimpmeter," which is traditionally used to measure the speed of golf greens, over the "Pelzmeter," a more high-tech device developed by Mickelson adviser Dave Pelz, a former NASA employee.

The Internal Revenue Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration are facing eviction from their quarters in downtown Buffalo, N.Y. The Buffalo News reports that Sen. Charles E. Schumer has signed on to the effort to force the General Services Administration to find new space for the two agencies so a planned $12 million restoration of the historic Guaranty Building in which they now reside can proceed. Hodgson Russ, a law firm that owns the building, says it has already extended the agencies' lease once, and now it looks like they won't be able to meet a July deadline to leave, either. Enough's enough, said Schumer, who has written a letter to GSA Administrator Lurita Doan asking her to personally intervene to deal with the situation.

It's just not true, a U.S. embassy official insists: President Bush's watch was not stolen when he waded into a crowd of admiring Albanians on Sunday.

My colleague Jonathan Rauch has yet another thought-provoking piece (subscription required) in the Atlantic this month, on the subject of the seemingly endless presidential campaigns. They're a good thing, Rauch argues: "They give U.S. politics an opportunity to mimic one of the best features of British-style parliamentary politics: the shadow government."

With the nomination process likely to be all but over early next year, candidates, he says, will be able to trot out prospective nominees for top administration positions: "If Giuliani and Clinton, or McCain and Obama, or whoever and whoever, stitched up the nomination in mid-February, they could easily vet and name slates of key appointees in time for the conventions."

It certainly would be intriguing if that actually happened, but I'm not holding my breath. Any candidate for a Cabinet position floated by a presumptive nominee would immediately become the subject of an intensive media vetting process that could turn up something embarrassing, costing the candidate dearly. It might be worth taking that chance with one or two names who could attract a few votes, but why run the risk with a whole slate of nominees if you didn't have to?

This weekend the Washington Post's "Sunday Source" section featured the semifinalists in the Funniest Fed Competition taking place in Washington this summer. A few thoughts on reviewing some of the clips of performers:

• These are not just office clowns; for the most part they have real experience working comedy clubs.


• Nevertheless, they might want to hang on to their day jobs for awhile. Being one of the funniest feds doesn't necessarily mean you're Chris Rock or Jon Stewart.


• Interestingly, the comics are at their worst when they're trying to joke about the government itself, mostly just playing off stereotypes of lazy, fat unqualified bureaucrats.

The General Services Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are dedicating NOAA's new $80 million Satellite Operations Facility in Suitland, Md, today. The building, which will house 650 employees, features one of the largest "green roofs" in North America.

Here's how the facility looks in an artist's rendering:

Straight from the White House: "President Bush Makes Toast in Albania."

After everything that's gone wrong with the space shuttle, you'd think that NASA would come up with a better word than "blanket" to describe the thermal material that helps protect the shuttle --especially now that there's a "gap" in said blanket on the shuttle Atlantis that seems at least a little worrisome. I'm assuming that whatever this material is, it provides more protection than a down comforter, but it would be nice if the descriptive term was a little more substantial.

The CIA has decided to cut its contractor workforce by 10 percent, the Washington Post reports today. The agency also has implemented a rule barring employees from going to work for contractors serving the CIA within 18 months of leaving the agency. "Over the past three years or so, a fairly significant number of those individuals who resigned -- not retired, but resigned -- from CIA end up coming back as contractors within a short period of time," said CIA Associate Deputy Director Michael Morell. "We want to decrease the number of people who do that."

Apparently, with all the hiring the agency's been doing lately, the CIA figures it can get more of its work done in-house. This represents a pretty big shift from the agency's post-9/11 thinking. As recently as May 2005, Shane Harris was writing the following in Government Executive about the CIA's then-burgeoning efforts to outsource intelligence collection and analysis:

John Negroponte, the new director of national intelligence, might end up presiding over a network of official agencies and outside analysts. A former CIA analyst and manager says the need to do so couldn't be more pressing. He notes that President Bush has ordered a 50 percent increase in the CIA's analyst workforce as soon as possible. "The only way to do that," he says, "is to outsource."

Update: My colleague Anne Laurent reminds me that I foolishly overlooked Shane Harris' much more recent look at contractors and the CIA's human capital crisis, from the May 1, 2007 issue of the magazine. Key quote from that piece:

In the nearly six years since Sept. 11, the CIA and other agencies haven't wanted for applicants; there are more people who want jobs than there are billets. But training employees takes years. To fill the gap in the meantime, during wartime, the agencies have hired contractors in record numbers. The agencies have outsourced some of the most sensitive functions, including analysis, spying on foreign adversaries, prisoner interrogation and translation services.

The outsourcing could be temporary, assuming intelligence agencies eventually replenish their personnel stocks. Except that the agencies actually are competing with the contractors for workers. According to the five-year strategic human capital plan at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, "those same contractors recruit our employees, already cleared and trained at government expense, and then 'lease' them back to us at considerably greater expense."

Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt's staff might want to do a little bit better job of keeping up with the news. The Washington Post's Mary Ann Akers reported last week that Leavitt's staff called the office of Sen. Craig Thomas, R-Wyo., on Thursday to request a meeting with the senator. The HHS folks were informed that wouldn't be possible, given that Thomas died earlier in the week after a battle with leukemia.

The Transportation Security Administration wants $219 million from various airlines in unpaid security fees, Bloomberg News reports. The agency and the airlines have been embroiled in an 18-month dispute over exactly how much of the cost of screening passengers and bags the carriers should have to cover. And the battle's not over yet. A Southwest Airlines spokeswoman says the airlines now will head to court to challenge the fees.

The headline in The Hill today is a grabber: "GAO Executives Got Bonuses as Others Were Denied Raises." While the agency denied 17 percent of its employees cost-of-living allowances last year, executives and other senior-level employees at the agency took home a total of more than $900,000 in bonuses.

I'm having a little trouble seeing what the scandal is here. The employees were denied raises on the grounds they were overpaid relative to their occupational peers. The jury is still out on whether that decision was fair, but it doesn't really have anything to do with whether or not executives deserved the bonuses they received. If they did good work -- and especially if it was work unrelated to the issue of compensation for the GAO analysts who were denied raises -- why shouldn't they get bonuses?

Executive bonuses represent less than one half of 1 percent of the agency's overall personnel costs, the agency reports. GAO executives get bonuses at a lower rate than their counterparts in executive branch agencies, and at slightly smaller amounts. And in case you're wondering, GAO chief David Walker hasn't received any bonuses in the past two years.

NASA Inspector General Robert "Moose" Cobb said at a joint House-Senate hearing yesterday that he's going nowhere, despite calls for his resignation by members of Congress and associates who, the Washington Post reports, describe him as "abusive, vulgar, unprofessional and seemingly beholden to top management of the agency he oversees." Cobb has been the subject of 24 formal complaints and an ethics panel concluded earlier this year that he should be fired or otherwise punished.

Now here's a blog name to make you stand up and take notice: Angry Drunk Bureaucrat. Warning: View at your own risk. It's really not safe for work, but somewhat entertaining.

"Hard to Say Goodbye when Mom's Lost in the Mail"

Employees and contractors at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Los Angeles are the latest to complain about the background checks required to get new federal ID badges under a presidential directive. NASA Administrator Michael Griffin heard their complaints during an all-hands meeting at the lab this week, the Associated Press reported. Griffin said he doesn't mind giving up personal information in the course of such investigations. "I‘m sorry if it sounds to you that I‘ve surrendered to the dark side," he said. "I don‘t see it that way."

The NASA folks are not the only ones concerned about the new background checks, of course. Just check out the comments we've received on this subject since Daniel Pulliam wrote about complaints regarding the new investigations from a union representing workers at the General Services Administration earlier this week.

Just in case you needed to be reminded that the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program is a big business, Bloomberg News reports that shares of CVS Caremark and Medco Health Solutions were up in trading this morning. That's due to an announcement yesterday by Blue Cross and Blue Shield that it had issued contracts to the two companies for pharmacy services covering the 4.7 million people in its Federal Employee Program. Caremark will handle retail pharmacy benefits management, which it estimates will generate about $4 billion a year in revenue. Medco will handle Blue Cross and Blue Shield's mail order prescription drug program. Caremark had handled both the retail and mail order operations since 2005.

The Defense Department announced today that Kenneth J. Krieg, undersecretary of Defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, would resign effective July 20. The move comes two years to the day after Krieg was named to the Pentagon's top procurement position. He had previously served as the department's director for program analysis and evaluation.

In the July 1, 2005, issue of Government Executive, Katherine McIntire Peters told the story of how Krieg was one of only a handful of people at Defense who questioned a multibillion-dollar deal to lease aerial refueling tankers from Boeing that turned into a procurement scandal.

For Jesse D. Lane, a former civilian Defense Department employee, the temptations of having access to the department's personnel and pay systems proved a little too tempting. He pleaded guilty yesterday to conspiracy and wire fraud in a federal court in Los Angeles. Lane conspired with other members of the 223rd Finance Detachment of the California National Guard to rig Defense pay-processing systems to provide themselves thousands of dollars in unauthorized pay and other entitlements after they returned home from service in Iraq and Kuwait in February 2005. Lane's co-conspirators pleaded guilty last year. The scheme was investigated by the Army's Criminal Investigation Division, the IRS, the FBI, and the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, working in connection with the Justice Department’s National Procurement Fraud Task Force.

In Washington, the General Services Administration tends to get treated as a backwater agency. But it has a nationwide presence, and it's easy to forget that everything GSA does has political implications. Here's today's case in point. In a column in the Fort Wayne (Ind.) News-Sentinel yesterday, Kevin Leininger reported that Rep. Mark Souder, R-Ind., has a beef about the new Social Security Administration office GSA has arranged to construct near the city. Local critics have already complained about the site picked for the building, because public transportation is limited. Now Souder says he thinks GSA should have gotten more than two bids for the project. Potential local bidders, he says, may not have even known about the opportunity because they don't routinely monitor federal procurement Web sites.

“People sit in Washington offices and look for that stuff,” Souder said. “That’s why we call them ‘Beltway bandits.’ You can’t bid if you don’t know about the contract.”

Rapidly rising gas prices on your mind this vacation seas? On June 6, 1932, the Census Bureau reports, the first federal gasoline tax was levied -- at the rate of one cent a gallon. Now the federal rate is 18.4 cents per gallon, and states tack on their own levies, at widely varying rates. Want a full history of the gas tax? The Transportation Department has one here.

The Government Accountability Office thinks that Federal Executive Boards across the country could play a bigger role in federal emergency response operations. In a new report, GAO says that the boards, which are located in 28 cities that have large numbers of federal employees in them, already are involved in emergency planning efforts. Indeed, some, such as the Oklahoma FEB after the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, have made important contributions to response efforts. But since their role isn't defined in national response plans, the expectations for what they're supposed to do aren't entirely clear.

Also, since the FEBs have to rely on whatever happens to be the largest agency in their region for funding and staff, it's uncertain just how much help they can provide. The Office of Personnel Management says it is working on a strategic plan for the boards that will set out emergency preparedness, security, and employee safety as one of their core functions.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin didn't mince words yesterday in his response to a federal appeals court's ruling that invalidated the agency's policy against accidentally aired profanities on broadcast TV. Here's what he said:

"I find it hard to believe that the New York court would tell American families that 'shit' and 'fuck' are fine to say on broadcast television during the hours when children are most likely to be in the audience. ... If ever there was an appropriate time for Commission action, this was it. If we can’t restrict the use of the words 'fuck' and 'shit' during prime time, Hollywood will be able to say anything they want, whenever they want."

(Hat tip: My colleague Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic Online.)

Why exactly was an Atlanta lawyer with extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis allowed to fly back and forth across the Atlantic and enter the country by car, despite warnings from public health agencies about his condition? It boils down to "bureaucratic turf fights, legal concerns over applying counterterrorism tools to public health cases, and technological problems," the Washington Post reports today.

"Air Travel Tips From Arkansas Official: No Guns in Carry-On"

Brian Conant made a curious discovery while training in the National Guard, reports Laura Castellano of Columbia News Service: He could pass gas in his chemical weapons protective suit and nobody would notice the smell. That led to his new invention: the Flatulence Deodorizer.

(Hat tip: Danger Room.)

From the Bureau of Land Management: "Adopt a Wild Horse or Burro and Get a Free Gas Card!!!"

The Red Cross reports that identity theft scammers are targeting military spouses in a particularly egregious scam. They call up the spouse, identify themselves as representing the Red Cross, and say that the spouse's husband has been hurt in Iraq and evacuated to Germany. Then they ask for a bunch of personal information about the service member.

The Red Cross, of course, notes that in the real world, it never relates this kind of casualty information to anybody under any circumstances, or attempts to collect personal data about service members.

(Hat tip: Snopes.com.)

"My goal in life is to get the federal government down to half its present size and under control and then I can write murder mysteries."

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, and longtime government critic, in an interview with the Washington Post.

GSA's Lurita Doan gains a key defender today in syndicated columnist Robert Novak. In a column headlined "Hatch Act Hatchet Job" in the Washington Post, Novak says Doan is "the victim of a fiercely partisan Democratic congressman, an obscure government official trying to vindicate himself and a lame-duck Republican White House unwilling