GovernmentExecutive.com

This just in from Time magazine:

Polls show that while confidence in our democracy and our government is near an all-time low, volunteerism and civic participation since the '70s are near all-time highs. Political scientists are perplexed about this. If confidence is so low, why would people bother volunteering? The explanation is pretty simple. People, especially young people, think the government and the public sphere are broken, but they feel they can personally make a difference through community service. After 9/11, Americans were hungry to be asked to do something, to make some kind of sacrifice, and what they mostly remember is being asked to go shopping. The reason private volunteerism is so high is precisely that confidence in our public institutions is so low. People see volunteering not as a form of public service but as an antidote for it.

Time's solution is a proposal for a universal national service program. It would include the following elements: creating a Cabinet-level National Service Department; expanding programs like AmeriCorps and the National Senior Volunteer Corps; creating separate Education, Health, Green and Rapid-Response Reserve Corps; and implementing the proposal to create a Public Service Academy.

That latter effort is drawing increasing support on Capitol Hill, but is somewhat less popular in other quarters.

The Forest Service is thinking about moving its Bridger-Teton National Forest Supervisor's Office out of Jackson, Wyo. The reason? Its employees can't afford to live in the town, the Jackson Hole Star-Tribune reports. With no homes available for under $500,000, "housing is currently priced out of the market for most federal employees," a Forest Service official wrote in a recent memo. The agency is looking at pulling up stakes and moving to a less expensive town nearby. That has local residents concerned, the paper reports, because "employees of the Bridger-Teton make up a healthy chunk of volunteers for the county. They are volunteer firefighters, Rotarians, Garden Club members, arts supporters, pathway advocates, volunteer ski patrollers and sports coaches and debate team judges."

As scams go, it doesn't get much lower than this: the San Diego Union-Tribune reports that a U.S. Geological Service Survey employee in the city is facing federal charges that he faked cancer as a means of getting other employees to donate leave to him. Investigators say the employee forged four doctor's letters to document his "illness" and ended up collecting 869 hours of annual leave, worth about $35,000 in pay for time he wasn't working.

In Mexico, civil servants don't mess around when it comes to fighting back against changes in their benefits. The San Diego Union-Tribune reports today that a Mexican teachers union "plans to block ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border tomorrow to protest changes to federal employee pension plans."

The idea is to wreak havoc with U.S. travelers' efforts to venture into Mexico for Labor Day weekend. And it's not the first time the Mexican teachers have used this tactic: In June, thousands of them shut down traffic at the San Ysidro, Calif. border checkpoint.

The teachers, by the way, are unhappy with a new Mexican law requiring government employees in the country to contribute more to their pension plans and to work longer.

Shane Harris has come up with a bunch of reasons why Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff is unlikely to be the nominee to replace Alberto Gonzales at Justice. My favorite is #3:

Politicization and mismanagement at DHS. The new attorney general is supposed to restore credibility and career morale at the Justice Department. Given Chertoff's mixed track record on both fronts at Homeland Security, it's questionable whether lawmakers would see him as the right man for that job. The department is in the midst of a transition from mostly political leadership to career managers. Under Chertoff, the trend towards political management--and politicization--was palpable. The House Homeland Security Committee has cited "critical leadership vacancies" at the department; a quarter of top positions remain unfilled. As I wrote in June, DHS has a reputation as a land of misfit toys, a place where Bush loyalists and partisans get patronage posts for which they lack qualifications. Despite Chertoff's efforts now to turn that tide, the reputation has stuck, and one can imagine how lawmakers would judge skeptically his ability to cleanse Justice of the stain of partisanship.

The interest in just who's editing Wikipedia entries -- and especially, who at federal agencies might be doing so on government time -- is still running high. When Virgil Griffith, a California Institute of Technology graduate student, launched WikiScanner a couple of weeks ago, it suddenly became easy to track the names of organizations connected to the IP addresses of those who were making changes on the Wikipedia site. But the search function enabling users to find out exactly what they were adding or deleting was disabled due to high traffic on the site.

Well, apparently that problem has been solved, because FedSmith's Ralph Smith has been poking around and found some pretty interesting edits apparently originating from federal agencies. I won't give them away, except to say that I found it interesting that somebody at the Office of Personnel Management appears to be very interested in boosting the image of actor Sean Penn.

John Edwards scored some points this week in New Orleans by proposing "Brownie's Law," requiring that political appointees be qualified for the positions for which they are nominated. (Actually it sounds more like a policy than an actual piece of legislation, since, of course, there's currently no law preventing a President Edwards from restricting his pool of nominees to fully qualified, experienced people. He'd just be the first president to actually do so.)

The proposal, of course, is sardonically named for former FEMA Director Michael Brown, who is forever linked to his role in the response to Hurricane Katrina and his previous work at the International Arabian Horse Association.

But as I've written before, and as Brown himself points out in an interview in the Washington Post today, Brown did have experience in emergency management when he was named to head FEMA. That experience was gained at FEMA itself. He started at the agency as general counsel and worked his way up over the course of a couple of years to the nomination for the top slot.

Now that may not have been the best experience, but if Edwards and other senators thought Brown lacked the qualifications to head FEMA, they had an easy remedy at their disposal: reject his nomination. They didn't.

None of this is to suggest that Brown did a stellar job, or was the best guy to run the agency. It is to suggest two other things:

• That sound bites and simple proposals about requiring appointee qualifications aren't going to improve the caliber of nominees.


• That continuing, even two years after the fact, to make Brown the designated scapegoat for Katrina merely serves to deflect attention away from the multiple systemic problems within the federal government in both preparing for a disaster like Katrina and responding to it.

The Los Angeles Times has weighed in on the subject of efforts to recruit more Hispanics into the federal workforce. One point that struck me in the story: The Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities, which sponsors government internships, says that recent surveys show that 80 percent of those who graduated after internships were offered full-time federal jobs, and 38 percent accepted. That's a higher percentage than the group expected.

It turns out the problem in recruiting Hispanics is the same as the problem in getting people in general interested in federal work. "I think people know that there's a federal government out there and that they have jobs, but they don't know how to apply for those jobs," says William Gil, HACU's assistant vice president of collegiate programs and federal relations. "That's where the big chasm is. The internships are a way to eliminate that chasm."

Of course, internships can only do so much. What would be even better would be to figure out how not only to publicize these jobs -- and things like USAJOBS have made strides in that area -- but to further streamline the process of applying for a federal position. That's the real sweet spot in recruiting the workforce of tomorrow.

Hurricane season is upon us, but Richard Reed, the General Services Administration's chief emergency response and recovery officer, says his agency is ready.

It seems like all departing political appointees go out of their way to compliment the career federal employees they worked with. (And doesn't it always come out sounding like they were a little surprised that turned out to be the case?) But it's not every day that an appointee praises the career folks when he's leaving at least partly because he was accused of playing a part in firing a bunch of them for political reasons lost their confidence by, allegedly, allowing the politicization of hiring and firing decisions at the department. (Note: This entry has been updated. See comments below for an explanation.)

The $100 bill is changing again, and this time it's going really high-tech, AP reports. New microprinting techniques will result in an image of Benjamin Franklin that seems to move up or down or side to side when the bill itself is moved.

The new bill is expected to go into circulation late next year.

Here's a bit of serendipity for you: In her Retirement Planning column for GovernmentExecutive.com this week, Tammy Flanagan discusses the sometimes complicated effects divorce can have on the distribution of an employee's retirement benefits. And today, FedSmith's Ralph Smith outlines a case study in just how convoluted these cases can become.

There's a cautionary tale for federal agency chiefs in the New York Times report today on the performance of Richard E. Stickler, head of the Mine Safety and Health Administration, during the response to the collapse of the Crandall Canyon Mine in Utah. The story says that Stickler is likely to face a grilling on Capitol Hill over the effort to rescue trapped miners, but he really seems to have done only one thing wrong: allowed the bombastic -- and, frankly, a little strange -- owner of the mine, Robert E. Murray, to hog the limelight. Murray, whose updates both confused the public and alienated miners' families, became the de facto voice of the response, with Stickler trailing in his wake.

The message is that even if you're the type of person who's disinclined to take center stage -- and Stickler is described in the Times piece as a "a thoughtful, bookish, behind-the-scenes man" -- at times of crisis, you'd better be prepared to step into the spotlight and be a voice of calm reassurance. And, of course, you'd also better be able to show your response efforts are swift and effective.

I hate to break it to my colleague Allan Holmes over at Tech Insider, but apparently I'm worth just a little more than he is. IRS phishing scammers e-mailed Allan to let him know that he had a $93.60 refund waiting for him, but just now they told me I'm eligible for $109.30. And that's on top of the $103.82 the scammers already said I had waiting for me.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration apparently has a new policy: nobody but its director, Nicole R. Nason, is allowed to speak to reporters on the record. Christopher Jensen, a contributer to the New York Times' "Wheels" blog, isn't happy about it.

This is an increasing phenomenon in federal agencies, and can't tell whether it's due to:

• Bush administration message control.


• Paranoia about negative or inaccurate media coverage (the latter being less rare than I'd like to admit).


• Egotism on the part of political appointees who want to see only their own names in the press.


• Some combination of all of the above.

In any case, from where I sit I see a lot of instances where an agency's efforts to get out accurate information about its operations are genuinely hurt by allowing only the person at the top to talk on the record. And whose interest does that serve?

When it comes to cracking down on employers who hire illegal aliens, the federal government should clean up its own house first, says a House Republican. Rep. Peter King of New York tells the Washington Times that a 2006 audit shows that seven federal agencies are among the largest employers of people with "non-work" Social Security numbers. These numbers were once used to qualify people for certain benefits programs, but not for work in the United States.

The Homeland Security and Commerce departments are writing regulations that would require federal contractors to use the E-Verify system to check employees' Social Security numbers to make sure they're actually eligible to work in this country, but agencies themselves aren't required to use the system.

With Congress having passed an ethics bill that places new restrictions on lobbyist-funded travel by legislators, USA Today delves into the issue of executive branch travel. It turns out that it's pretty routine for agency officials to take the kind of trips that now will be off-limits for lawmakers. Executive branch officials can accept corporate reimbursement for travel, as long as a trip wouldn't "cause a reasonable person … to question the integrity of agency programs or operations."

That causes some agencies to walk a pretty fine line. The Federal Trade Commission won't "go anywhere near" accepting trips from companies doing business with the commission, says FTC deputy director Eileen Harrington, but does take reimbursement from the Consumer Electronics Association for officials to attend the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

This anecdote from Peter Baker's Washington Post piece Monday on bureaucratic resistance to President Bush's second-term democracy-building initiative is making the rounds of the blogosphere:

Defiance of Bush's mandate could be subtle or brazen. The official recalled a conversation with a State Department bureaucrat over a democracy issue.

"It's our policy," the official said.

"What do you mean?" the bureaucrat asked.

"Read the president's speech," the official said.

"Policy is not what the president says in speeches," the bureaucrat replied. "Policy is what emerges from interagency meetings."

I tend to agree with my colleague Matt Yglesias' take on this: "The bureaucrat is sounding silly and, well, bureaucratic here, but in a fundamental sense he's exactly right. The president gave a speech about the democracy agenda, but he never put a democracy agenda together." Saying that "policy emerges from interagency meetings," does sound hopelessly bureaucratic, but good solid policy in fact does -- as opposed to the airy concepts that are laid out in speeches (which, of course, ought to form the basis of good policy).

And I'd go a couple of steps further:

• First, this variant of the "blame the bureaucracy" theme is a very convenient and effective tool for politicians. Indeed, Baker's lead to the story has President Bush referring to himself as a "dissident" within his own government when trying to explain slow progress on his initiative to a gathering of opposition leaders from various authoritarian countries. That's like saying you'd love to play golf with your buddies on Saturday morning, but your wife just won't let you.
• Second, this is typical of the kind of blame-shifting that occurs at the end of presidential administrations. "Look," administration officials want to say, "it's not likely we didn't have big ideas, and we even tried to act on them. But the mean ol' bureaucracy got in the way." It's a way of preemptively deflecting criticism of their own actions (or lack thereof).

The Washington Post's Robert O'Harrow is back on the subject of "no-bid" federal contracts today (and on the front page of the paper), with a story centered on a contract issued by the Homeland Security Department's Office of Counternarcotics Enforcement to prepare a long-delayed plan.

That particular contract is placed in the overall context of growth in federal contracts awarded without full and open competition. O'Harrow notes that "government auditors say the result is often higher prices for taxpayers and an undue reliance on a limited number of contractors."

I don't doubt that. But I wonder if the result is actually higher total costs for taxpayers. The reason why the government implemented the procurement reforms back in the 1990s that have created the opportunity to award contracts with little or no bidding was that agencies were spending billions of dollars on "full and open competitions" -- and often not getting what they were supposed to be paying for.

This is not to suggest that there aren't some serious issues to explore in the area of contemporary federal contracting, but only to note that it's one of those areas where the danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater is very real.

I'm back from the beach, and ready to get back in the swing of things. So I'll be back shortly with some updates.

Your loyal Fedblogger is going to the beach. If I find something interesting to post, I might ... oh, who am I kidding? I'm taking a vacation, and I'll see you when I return Aug. 22.

Cal Ripken Jr. will get a new job next week, USA Today: The State Department is set to name Ripken as a "special sports envoy." He'll work with Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes to reach out "to a worldwide audience of young people while visiting their schools and clubs, hosting baseball skills clinics, and sharing the keys to his success: character, hard work and perseverance," the department says.

I don't pretend to be any kind of expert on this kind of stuff, but this sounds pretty significant: The General Services Administration has issued a new Common Governmentwide Accounting Classification. The idea is to standardize the way agencies code and categorize financial transactions, so that there's a common financial structure across government. Of course, there's so much variation now that it will take several years to implement the new standards, as agencies upgrade their financial systems.

It's safe to say that Robert Weiner, former spokesman for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, isn't thrilled that Barry Bonds broke baseball's home run record this week. In an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle Weiner, along with Kate Berenato, a senior at Lehigh University, argue that the Justice Department should put Bonds on trial on charges that he used steroids and other illegal drugs:

He should be tried in drug court for use of illegal substances and, if found to have used them, should be given mandatory treatment. Drug court allows for people to be convicted of non-aggressive drug charges without being sent to jail, rather they are given the help they need in rehab programs.

Wonkette goes for the local angle on crumbling infrastructure, with a report on the collapse Wednesday of a decorative ceiling at a parking area in Columbia Plaza next to State Department headquarters on Wednesday. A bunch of cars were damaged, but no people were hurt. While the ceiling is being fixed, department employees can't use the ground level entrance into State's SA-1 building.

The General Services Administration has a program under which it transfers lighthouses owned by the federal government to other governmental organizations and nonprofits, if they agree to take care of the properties. Now the group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals wants to take GSA up on its offer. The organization is interested in taking over a bunch of different lighthouses.

But what it seeks to do with them may give GSA pause. PETA wants to use the lighthouses as headquarters for its Fish Empathy Project, which, the group says, "aims to inform people that fish are intelligent, intriguing animals who feel pain just as all animals do and that they don't deserve to be violently killed for food, painfully hooked for 'sport,' or cruelly confined to aquariums."

In a letter to GSA, PETA says it would like to renovate the Cleveland East Ledge Light in Buzzards Bay, Mass., and stock it with interactive educational displays; an exhibit of a 300-square-foot "fish empathy quilt," and a café serving faux fish sticks and other vegan "seafood."

The Bush administration has begun pulling National Guard troops from their deployment along the U.S. border with Mexico, the Washington Times reports today. It's the beginning of a gradual phase-out of Operation Jump Start, the administration initiative launched last year to beef up the border presence while the Border Patrol seeks to hire and train 6,000 new agents.

State officials in Arizona and New Mexico are not pleased with the move. Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano said it was "ill-timed and should be halted and re-examined" in a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. But DHS says the Border Patrol is building up as the National Guard draws down, so there won't be any reduction in the level of intensity of enforcement at the border.

Rep. Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa., isn't one of those people waxing rhapsodic about the need to help our fellow citizens in need after last week's 35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis. On the contrary, according to this report in the Wilkes-Barre, Pa., Times Leader, he thinks the $250 million bill Congress passed to rebuild the bridge was a taxpayer ripoff because it exceeded the normal $100 million limit for emergency relief projects.

The folks of Minnesota "discovered they were going to get all the money from the federal government and they were taking all they could get,” Kanjorski said at an economic summit at the University of Scranton. They used the tragedy “to screw us,” he added.

At the same event, Kanjorski declared that we're not just living through a seemingly endless era when people lack confidence in the performance of the government. No, he said, we're the brink of civil war. “I’m in fear for the survival of the republic,” he said. “People want to get their deer rifles out and go to the barricades.”

I haven't seen any barricades lately, but maybe I'm just not looking hard enough.

This is what's known in the news business as "burying the lead:" USA Today starts off a story today with the following:

The Homeland Security Department is aiming to arm federal agents with a light-saber-type weapon that emits a dazzling strobe capable of subduing criminals, terrorists and even unruly airline passengers.

It's not until seven paragraphs later that the story quotes Bob Lieberman, president of the company that's developing the device under a $1 million contract from the Homeland Security Department, as saying, "It's like someone shooting off a flashbulb in your face every few seconds. Because of the wavelengths and frequencies we use, there are psychophysical effects -- a real disorientation. The reaction can range through vertigo to nausea."

Danger Room, on the other hand, gets right to the point in the first sentence of its report on the same device:

Government-funded researchers are building a flashlight that makes people puke on command.

The members of the National Treasury Employees Union have apparently decided that they like their leadership just fine. The union’s top officers -- President Colleen M. Kelley and Executive Vice President Frank D. Ferris -- were reelected to third terms at the union's annual convention in New York. More than 400 leaders of NTEU chapters are gathered at the four-day event, which ends Thursday.

In a letter to various newspapers, Cmdr. Scott J. Kelly, who is heading up the space shuttle mission scheduled for launch tomorrow, says his crew will be stone cold sober, reports the New York Times. Recent reports of astronaut drinking before missions are being blown out of proportion, Kelly says, and to imply that members of his team would tie one on before launch is "utterly ridiculous."

"Someone who was actually an addict is probably not going to satisfy our needs."

--Jeffrey J. Berkin, deputy assistant director of the FBI's security division, on new guidelines allowing the agency to hire analysts, programmers and special agents who have a history of occasional drug use, as long as they swear they haven't used any illegal substances lately.

Today's Washington Post Style section delivered the sad news: the delightfully wacky Weekly World News is no more. One of tabloid's best recurring features involved Bat Boy, the half-child, half-bat who allegedly was captured in a cave in West Virginia. He later escaped, and continued to narrowly avoid the clutches of the FBI.

Bob Lind, a former writer, for the paper, tells the Post a great story about how the WWN's managing editor, Eddie Clontz, pushed for more and more Bat Boy stories -- leading to a run-in with federal law enforcement officials:

"Eddie fell in love with Bat Boy," Lind says. "He was one of the most in-depth characters we dealt with. He could be mean, he could be spiteful, but he could also be kind. And every once in while, he would be captured by the FBI and held in an undisclosed location near Lexington, Kentucky."

One day -- Lind swears this is true -- Eddie Clontz got a call from an irate FBI agent complaining that the bureau's switchboard was swamped with calls demanding that they free Bat Boy.

"Eddie said, 'I'll never do it again,' " Lind says, "then he hung up the phone and went on to the next Bat Boy story."

The Army wants new soldiers, and it wants them now. The service is offering a $20,000 "quick-ship" bonus for recruits who agree to report to basic training within 30 days of enlistment, and then serve for two years on active duty.

From the "What To Do After Federal Retirement?" files: How about becoming a knife-maker? That's what Andy Nobregas of Yuma, Ariz., did, the Yuma Sun reports. But make sure your benefits are all in place first. "This is definitely a hobby," Nobregas says. "I think I would starve if I had to do this for a living."

The New York Times reports today on an innovative program by the U.S. Marshals Service that "helps ease court backlogs and gives nonviolent fugitives a chance to resolve their court problems in a neutral setting." The innovation? The "neutral setting" was a church in Nashville. The idea is to encourage more people -- especially those who have only committed minor offenses -- to turn themselves in voluntarily, by giving them a non-threatening location to do so.

Give Transportation Security Administation chief Kip Hawley points for bravery: He recently agreed to go toe-to-toe with security expert and blogger Bruce Schneier. It's as tough an interview as you'll ever see, and Hawley holds up his end of the fight pretty well. My favorite exchange is right up front:

Bruce Schneier: By today's rules, I can carry on liquids in quantities of three ounces or less, unless they're in larger bottles. But I can carry on multiple three-ounce bottles. Or a single larger bottle with a non-prescription medicine label, like contact lens fluid. It all has to fit inside a one-quart plastic bag, except for that large bottle of contact lens fluid. And if you confiscate my liquids, you're going to toss them into a large pile right next to the screening station—which you would never do if anyone thought they were actually dangerous.

Can you please convince me there's not an Office for Annoying Air Travelers making this sort of stuff up?

Kip Hawley: Screening ideas are indeed thought up by the Office for Annoying Air Travelers and vetted through the Directorate for Confusion and Complexity, and then we review them to insure that there are sufficient unintended irritating consequences so that the blogosphere is constantly fueled. Imagine for a moment that TSA people are somewhat bright, and motivated to protect the public with the least intrusion into their lives, not to mention travel themselves. How might you engineer backwards from that premise to get to three ounces and a baggie?

(Hat tip: Danger Room)

The General Services Administration's Rocky Mountain Region has announced that it has awarded a $6.9 million contract to SunEdison to build a solar park at the Denver Federal Center. The one-megawatt system will generate nearly 10 percent of the electricity used on the one square mile campus of federal buildings.

Construction is supposed to start late this summer, with the solar park delivering electric power by the end of the year.

There are two sides to every argument, right? Well, I thought maybe not every one, but I guess I'm wrong. I'll let Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer explain what I'm talking about. Today, he writes, "I rise in defense of drunken astronauts."

Why would it be OK for an astronaut to get a little lit up before launch? Think of it this way, Krauthammer writes:

Imagine it's you sitting on top of a 12-story winged tube bolted to a gigantic canister filled with 2 million liters of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. Then picture your own buddies -- the "closeout crew" -- who met you at the pad, fastened your emergency chute, strapped you into your launch seat, sealed the hatch and waved smiling to you through the window. Having left you lashed to what is the largest bomb on planet Earth, they then proceed 200 feet down the elevator and drive not one, not two, but three miles away to watch as the button is pressed that lights the candle that ignites the fuel that blows you into space.

Under such circumstances, the columnist argues, "Would you not want to be a bit soused"?

Suppose you work with somebody who's looking to move over to the private sector. Can you call up a company and make a pitch on behalf of your pal? As in all other federal ethics situations, the answer's complicated, but the Office of Government Ethics has offered some guidance on what feds can and cannot do in this situation.

(Hat tip: IEC Journal)

I'm guessing this bill is on the fast track as of today.

[Warning: You probably don't want to click on the links below from a federal computer.]

The contractors get all the perks. "Tori of Atlanta," a professional "escort," reports on the Erotic Review Web site that she's heading to Baghdad's Green Zone to provide a little "R&R....American Style."

Then she adds, "My apologies but at this time I am UNABLE to plan any meetings w/ACTIVE DUTY MILITARY. (The members of [the private military contractor] community has an exclusive arrangement during this visit.)"

(Hat tip: Wonkette, via Danger Room.)

Last month, I wrote a column about how bonuses for federal executives were attracting increased scrutiny. In just the past few months, top officials from the Veterans Affairs and Education departments to the Government Accountability Office have been called upon to explain awards they've handed out.

Well, the beat goes on with the Washington Post front-page story today about bonuses at the Food and Drug Administration - which quadrupled in four years, to a total of $13.6 million in 2005.

As I wrote in my column, some agencies' bonuses are more defensible than others. At first glance, the FDA situation looks pretty bad, due to several factors:

• The bonuses were supposed to be retention-based, but were awarded to some officials on the basis of merely signing declarations that they were "likely to leave the federal government for a higher paying position in the private sector."
• Large bonuses seem to have gone disproportionately to managers in FDA's Office of the Commissioner, rather than the scientists, inspectors and doctors who would seem to be more likely to command higher salaries in the private sector.
• The bonuses were awarded at time when FDA was enduring some high-profile problems with everything from flu vaccine shortages to a plan to the plan to close field laboratories that was suspended yesterday.

Just when the Office of Personnel Management would like to bask in the glow of a record-setting year in 2006 for the Combined Federal Campaign, along comes a little snag for this year's effort. The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports that a federal court has ruled that OPM must reconsider the application of the Stuttering Foundation of America of to join the charity drive. The agency had said the organization did not qualify for the CFC under a new rule adopted last year requiring that groups in the program must be “public charities” as defined in the tax code. The judge ruled that OPM's regulation violates federal law.

"People with disabilities should be able to eat at their favorite establishments, and this agreement is designed to improve access to 20,000 Subway shops across the nation."

--Wan J. Kim, assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, on a Justice Department settlement under the Americans With Disabilities Act that is designed to make 20,000 Subway sandwich shops physically accessible to people with disabilities.

Remember that ominous TSA bulletin a couple of weeks ago about inspections turning up blocks of cheese and clay-like substances with wires attached to them? This was supposed to be evidence of possible "dry runs" of terrorist attacks. Well, it turns out that all of the incidents in question actually were false alarms, according to sources ranging from CNN (via The Raw Story -- check out the video where the 66-year-old woman describes being interrogated about whether she knows Osama bin Laden personally) to the San Diego Union-Tribune. If TSA's goal is to make Americans take the threat of another attack involving American airliners more seriously, and to have confidence that its efforts protect the public from genuine threats, then it looks like they've succeeded in doing exactly the opposite.