GovernmentExecutive.com

The Office of Personnel Management has created a new register of qualified candidates agencies can draw from to hire administrative law judges. I'm guessing this guy's not on the list.

Baby boomers are supposed to be making way for the next generation of federal leaders to move into top management positions. So how many Generation Xers have entered the Senior Executive Service? Peter Ronayne, dean of faculty at the Federal Executive Institute, says the answer is 325. That's not exactly a groundswell, but it's the beginning of a trend, notes Brian Friel (a bona fide Gen Xer himself) in his latest Government Executive Management Matters column.

It also begs the question of who exactly is a Gen Xer. Wikipedia notes that "the exact demographic boundaries of Generation X are not well defined, depending on who is using the term, where and when."

But we know that it's the group that comes after the baby boomers, right? So here's Wikipedia's take on how that generation is defined:

There is some disagreement as to the exact beginning and end dates of the baby boom, but the range most commonly accepted is as starting in 1946 and ending in 1964. The problem with this definition is that this period may be too long for a cultural generation, even though it covers a time of increased births.

I'll say. In fact, this definition puts a bunch of us into the baby boom who have little or no association with the majority of boomers. I was born in 1962. I was a toddler when John F. Kennedy's term came to a tragic end, and I have no recollection of Woodstock or any of the other cultural touchstones of the 1960s. Heck, I was barely old enough to pay attention to Watergate. And while I'd love to be contemplating retirement, I'm nowhere near that stage of life yet.

Still, I always get a good laugh out of Brian and other Gen-Xers when I try to force my way into their generation, too. Generationally, people my age are doomed to perpetual tweener status.

Here's today's trivia question: How many times since 1977 has Congress managed to pass all of the annual appropriations bills on time? Three. That's according to Philip Joyce of The George Washington University, cited in this piece by the Washington Post's David Ignatius.

Ignatius details in all-too-familiar fashion the managerial inefficiencies that result from ongoing budget uncertainty. " How do you innovate if you don't know how much money you've got?" he asks. "A continuing-resolution world means business as usual."

This is the time of the presidential election cycle when candidates from both parties are out there letting Americans know how they would exercise the levers of power if elected. New Mexico governor and Democratic candidate Bill Richardson made one of his priorities clear last Friday: finding out what really happened in Roswell, N.M. in 1947. Of course, many UFO buffs think they know exactly what happened: an alien spacecraft landed, the U.S. military took possession of it, and has been covering up the incident ever since.

Richardson seems to share the belief that the feds aren't telling the whole truth about the matter.
"I've been in government a long time," he said at a town hall meeting. "I've been in the Cabinet, I've been in the Congress and I've always felt that the government doesn't tell the truth as much as it should on a lot of issues."

"When I was in Congress," Richardson added, "I said (to the) Department of Defense ... 'What is the data? What is the data you have?' " When he was told the details were classified, "That ticked me off," he said.

"What do you want me to do?" Richardson asked an alien enthusiast at the meeting. "You want me to open up all those files? I'll work with you on that."

By the way, this isn't the only recent alien-related federal news. Wired Science reports that NASA has agreed to search its files for documents related to a mysterious fireball that crashed near Kecksburg, Pa., on Dec. 9, 1965.

(Hat tip: Carpetbagger Report, via Danger Room.)

This is called making your point loud and clear:

"I think it was one of the dumbest and most inappropriate things I've seen since I've been in government. I have made unambiguously clear, in Anglo-Saxon prose, that it is not to ever happen again and there will be appropriate disciplinary action taken against those people who exhibited what I regard as extraordinarily poor judgment."

That's Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff speaking about FEMA's phony press conference last week.

Here's the Partnership for Public Service in its latest report on college students' perspectives on government and the possibility of working for federal agencies:

"With so many students applying for government opportunities and so few entering government, it is possible that the problem lies on the government side. The [federal hiring] process appears to be turning students off."

Do ya think?

At first glance, this report seems to be more evidence, in case we needed it, that the problem isn't that young people aren't civic-minded or interested in federal service, but that they just aren't aware of the opportunities out there and aren't impressed by the government's hiring process.

And yes, I know I'm running the risk of beating a dead horse here.

So OMB's Karen Evans is taking responsibility for the government's failure to meet a deadline of Oct. 27 to complete background checks for employees and contractors who have worked for the federal government for 15 years or less and to begin issuing new identity cards with fingerprints.

"The milestone was to hit this, and we didn't, so we're holding ourselves accountable," she says.

So what happens next? In what way, specifically, will Evans and others be held accountable? Until we find that out, this looks like the standard accountability lite.

By the way, I'm not at all sure Evans and OMB deserve all of the responsibility for this situation. But she's accepted it, and that's the beginning, not the end, of the process of true accountability.

"You know when you're a kid and you're growing up and you hear there'll be a cure for this and a cure for that, and who's in charge of that? You would think with the possibilities especially now we have, with all the technology, ... and the $100 billion that government and the private sector put into this stuff every year, you'd think that there'd be a Department of Cures, a Secretary of Cures. But there isn't."

Actor and Parkinson's research advocate Michael J. Fox in an appearance at a conference on philanthropy sponsored by Slate.

In Brittany Ballenstedt's story yesterday on workforce challenges, I was struck by the comments of Jeffrey Risinger, chief human capital officer at the Securities and Exchange Commission. He said the SEC sets aside a certain amount of funding each year to develop its people. Managers keep "ledgers" on every employee to keep track of how much training the agency has invested in them and how much it would cost to lose them.

"If we've invested in our employees, then the risk of losing them is a liability," Risinger said. "The balance of that -- the ones that we've retained -- is our equity."

I can understand not wanting to lose employees after you've put a lot of time, effort and money into training them, but what if the training didn't take? If an employee is still not up to par even after receiving training (and aren't poor performers the ones who tend to get a lot of training in an effort to improve their performance?) it doesn't make a lot of sense to me to hold on to them just to protect your training investment. Conversely, if someone has excelled even without having received a lot of formal training, doesn't an agency have even more "equity" in them?

Here's a sampling of some recent GovernmentExecutive.com headlines about various agencies and types of federal operations:

• Workforce issues complicate planning for cyberattacks


• Report: Contracting workforce needs more training


• DHS encouraged to improve IT workforce planning


• NASA urged to consider morale in reshaping workforce

FEMA apparently has found the answer to the age-old question of how to keep Washington news conferences from getting out of hand: eliminate the reporters.

With wildfires raging in southern California, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has continued to focus on its role of securing the borders and keeping traffic moving across the U.S.-Mexico border. But the agency also has taken on some new tasks, like rescuing six illegal aliens who called 911 after they became trapped by the fires in a World War II-era bunker in the mountains.

Here are the key links:

• OPM memo on donating to relief organizations through the Combined Federal Campaign


• Federal Employees Education & Assistance Fund announcement of the California Fire Fund

And if you're among those affected, and have questions about benefits and leave policies, OPM has set up a hotline number: 1-800-307-8298.

Some gloomy news from Forbes.com this week about future job growth in the American economy. People in manufacturing jobs can expect hard times ahead, along with computer programmers (blame that on outsourcing) , radio announcers and -- gulp -- journalists. But then Forbes adds this:

Worse off? Federal employees and their amazing benefits. Washington employs nearly 2 million people, not including the military, making it the country's largest employer. After Sept. 11, 2001, it expanded significantly due to homeland security needs. But those days may be coming to an end. By 2014, federal government jobs — excluding the Postal Service -- will only have increased by about 1.6 percent above 2004 levels due to the transfer of some jobs to state and local governments and the increased use of private contracting companies. Don't believe it? A report compiled by a House of Representatives panel earlier this year found that government spending on contracts rose by 103 percent between 2000 and 2005.

I guess civic-minded young people who are being told they should heed the call to public service better hope the long-anticipated federal retirement boom actually happens. Otherwise, there won't be any outlets for their civic energy.

He's hinted at it before, but Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., made it official Thursday. The Hill reports that Davis has announced he 's not running for the Senate seat being vacated by retiring GOPer John Warner next year.

Davis, the highly influential ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, didn't say whether he would run for reelection to his House seat.

In response to the wildfires raging in Southern California, the Office of Personnel Management has alerted agency heads to personnel flexibilities that can be used in times of emergency, and encouraged federal employees to make donations to charitable organizations assisting in response efforts.

Now the agency is launching a toll-free hotline for employees and federal retirees in affected areas (which are defined as the following counties: Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Ventura). Employees and annuitants in those areas can call with questions about benefits, health insurance, pay and leave issues, teleworking, and disaster assistance.

The number is 1-800-307-8298.

OPM also is sending a representative to help the Greater Los Angeles Federal Executive Board provide information to federal employees and retirees.

When is a whistleblower not a whistleblower? According to the Justice Department, it's when he's actually masterminding a bigger scheme than the one he's blowing the whistle on.

The votes are in, and Americans have made their choice for which Star Wars character they'd most like to see on his or her own stamp:

That's right, it's 900-year-old Jedi Master Yoda. Tomorrow, the Postal Service will unveil a set of 20 Yoda stamps at the Fall Postage Stamp Mega-Event at New York's Madison Square Garden. And "since this 10 a.m. event is just six days before Halloween, stamp enthusiasts Star Wars fans alike are encouraged to dress up as their favorite character from the Star Wars saga," USPS says.

Tomorrow also marks the day that USPS will begin taking down the special R2D2-styled mailboxes that have dotted street corners since the Star Wars-based postal campaign began in March. Those boxes will be moved to overseas military bases.

Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton has denounced what she calls a Bush administration "power grab" to concentrate more authority in the White House. She says she'd undertake a review of accumulated powers and would "absolutely" consider giving some of them up as president.

Matthew Yglesias has his doubts that Clinton would voluntary relinquish much in the way of executive power, arguing that "she's not committing herself to doing anything in particular." He notes that Charlie Savage, a legal affairs reporter for the Boston Blobe makes the case in this month's Atlantic that a rollback by any future president is unlikely:

Indeed, presidential power has been mostly growing—in fits and starts—since World War II. An early-20th-century president, such as Calvin Coolidge, had no large standing army to command, nor a CIA to use for covert operations. He would not have dreamed of launching a major overseas war without permission from Congress—as Harry Truman did in Korea. He could not utter the magic words state secrets or executive privilege to nullify lawsuits and evade congressional oversight—both of these precedents were set during Dwight Eisenhower’s administration. By exploiting the sense of permanent crisis that surrounded the early Cold War, presidents of both parties cowed both Congress and the Supreme Court. Today, the war on terrorism has provided a similar rationale.

In the "Mother Nature Has a Sick Sense of Humor" department, President Bush announced on Saturday that this is officially "National Forest Products Week." In his announcement, Bush noted that "Under the Healthy Forest Initiative, we are helping to protect the American people, their communities, and the environment from potentially devastating wildfires."

Federal Emergency Management Agency Director David Paulison says his agency has learned its lesson from Hurricane Katrina, and that when it comes to responding to wildfires in southern California, "this is a new FEMA." So far, so good, but CNN points out that this isn't exactly a comparable situation. An entire region isn't under water, and the local transportation network is still operating.

Still, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff maintains the department is putting lessons from Katrina into place in the wildfire response. For example, he said, "we have worked together and planned together with the Defense Department and with state authorities well in advance of the crisis. That's been a big help here."

With all due respect, FEMA did that kind of planning routinely in the years before it was shifted into DHS, and racked up an impressive track record in the 1990s of effectively responding not only to fires and hurricanes, but other types of disasters. So to the extent that it had to learn basic lessons like planning ahead after Katrina, that's a sad commentary on how far the agency had fallen.

General Services Administration chief Lurita Doan took to the airwaves Tuesday, appearing on Federal News Radio to respond to allegations by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, of improper influence on her part (and that of other GSA officials) with contract negotiations involving Sun Microsystems. Her response:

"I will say flat out to my knowledge I do not believe there was, but I'll tell you that I'm a glass half full kind of person, so I'd like to just kind of talk about some of the positives first -- which is that Sen. Grassley and I are both saying that we need to leave the contracting decisions to GSA's professional contracting staff. And I could not agree with him more on this issue, and truthfully, I welcome his change of mind on this. Because you know just a few weeks ago, he sent me a letter demanding that I cancel the Sun contract, and had I done so, I would've been the one who was improperly influencing the decisions of a warranted contracting officer. And quite bluntly, I refused. And so I commend him for recommending that no contracting officer should be improperly influenced, but he is just flat-out wrong when he states that I improperly influenced a contracting officer."

Doan has already publicly accused Grassley of using "false innuendo to impugn the motives of GSA management."

In her interview Tuesday, Doan also had some thoughts on the future of the federal contracting workforce:

"We cannot get young, smart people to go into the contracting profession, and I'm telling you, it's not because it's not interesting work, and it's not because of the pay or benefits. It's because we tell our contracting folks to be innovative, we tell them they need to be responsive to the needs of our government customers, but the minute they do something that looks different, we rake 'em over the coals."

You can find a link to the interview here.

It seems like there are more federal government blogs appearing every day, but for my money, one of the best is one that I have to admit I've just recently discovered: Flow of the River, written by Environmental Protection Agency Deputy Administrator Marcus Peacock. There are several reasons why I like it:

• Peacock updates it frequently -- or has guest bloggers do posts.


• It's topical.


• He devotes a lot of space to core federal management issues like performance measurement and program evaluation.


• He's willing to grapple publicly with issues like how you handle comments on a blog in the federal sphere.


• He's pretty clever.

Among the stereotypes of bureaucrats is that they are humorless, but every once in awhile you get some evidence that this can't possibly be true. Today's comes in the form of an Associated Press report that Sioux City, Iowa, has decided to give up and embrace the three-letter designation provided to its airport by the Federal Aviation Administration: SUX.

The city had previously begged the FAA to change the identifier, and was given a list of alternatives. Among them (I swear I'm not making this up): GAY.

Now the airport has launched a marketing campaign and a Web site playing off its unfortunate moniker: www.flysux.com.

(Hat tip: Wonkette)

Air traffic controllers are retiring at a faster rate than expected, the Associated Press reports today. But if you've been reading Government Executive, you already knew that.

The FAA, by the way, says it's known for years that 2007 would be the big year for retirements of controllers hired after the ill-fated strike of 1981, and that it has brought in "a lot of enthusiastic recruits" lately.

Columnist/funnyman Dave Barry -- who's never been a big fan of the federal government -- chimes in this week with a piece on efforts to audit federal finances. Here's his reaction to reports that agencies can't account for billions of dollars in federal spending:

When you’re sucking in and spewing out money as fast as the federal government, you have to expect that here and there a billion dollars is going to fall between the cracks. I bet if federal employees took just a few minutes out of their work schedules to look around, they would quickly find a lot of this so-called “lost” money.

FIRST FEDERAL EMPLOYEE: OK, I’ll just check behind the cushions of this federal employee’s lounge sofa here and ... Hey, here’s some! Looks like a total of, let me see, two ... three ... four ... Wow! It’s $17 million!

SECOND FEDERAL EMPLOYEE: So THAT’S what happened to it!

The Associated Press reports that a federal judge has ruled that the Defense Department and other federal agencies can keep information -- including names, salaries and positions -- about more than 900,000 employees from being placed in a publicly accessible database.

Here's the backstory: In April 2004, Government Executive reported that Defense Undersecretary for Personnel and Readiness David Chu had asked the Office of Personnel Management not to make public lists of names and related information about Defense employees, citing national security concerns in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. OPM complied, and also stopped sending out information about certain other federal employees in jobs deemed sensitive.

In late 2005, the The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse -- a Syracuse University-based organization that compiles data on federal staffing and spending -- sued OPM, saying that withholding the data constituted a violation of the Freedom of Information Act.

But now Chief U.S. District Judge Norman Mordue has ruled that OPM doesn't have to put out the information. He said its release could infringe on the privacy rights of the employees in question, in addition to compromising national security.

TRAC is weighing an appeal of the decision, and notes that the government has been making data about the federal workforce public since 1816.

Relatively few Americans understand the power of the Combined Federal Campaign. Now you can add Rush Limbaugh to the list.

Think you could beat those people who play in the high-stakes poker tournaments that seem to be on TV all the time? If you can, the IRS wants to know about it. The agency announced Friday that starting next March, it will require poker tournament sponsors to report any winnings of more than $5,000. If they do, they won't need to withhold taxes from players' winnings. If they don't, they'll have to pay any tax that should have been withheld if withholding were required.

The war on terror has been tough on our enemies and arduous for U.S. forces deployed overseas, but one group has benefited: The deer at Fort Detrick, Md. The Associated Press reports that after the Army suspended archery hunts at Fort Detrick for security reasons in 2002 and 2003, the number of white-tailed deer on the installation's grounds increased dramatically.

Last year, the Agriculture Department recommended culling the herd, so sharpshooters killed 100 deer at the fort on Feb. 28 and March 1. Such an effort may be undertaken again, because biologists say the herd's still growing, even though bow-hunting has resumed.

"I appreciate that the man who has managed Iraq so well is going to give us a lecture about management. The man who gave us Katrina is going to tell us how to manage?"

Those concerned -- or heartened -- that Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., might leave his longtime perch at the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to run for the Senate in Virginia next year may need to do some rethinking. The Hill reports that Davis is now hinting he might not enter the race for the seat being vacated by retiring Republican John Warner. Instead, Davis said he theoretically could wait and take on Democratic Sen. James Webb in 2012.

“There are other races; this isn’t the only shot,” Davis said at a breakfast at the National Press Club on Tuesday. “You’ve got a very vulnerable guy sitting there in the other Senate seat right now who may or may not run in four years. And you know what? If you don’t go to the Senate, so what? I’ve been a committee chairman in the House. I’ve got my portrait hanging on a wall. I’ve been pretty productive legislatively.”

One assumes that Davis' thinking on this subject has been influenced by a recent Washington Post poll showing him trailing Mark Warner, the likely Democratic candidate for John Warner's seat, by 30 points.

Only obsessive fans of the movie Office Space will remember the character Milton Waddams, who was constantly shifted from one cubicle to another, and finally snapped when he was moved to a storage room and his precious red stapler was stolen:

But the real problem was that at one point Milton had been laid off and he didn't even know it. Well, apparently he's not the only one. Fedsmith's Susan Smith reports on the case of an IRS clerk who claimed that he didn't know that he had been fired from a previous job at the Air Force.

This just in from Network World's "Layer 8" blog: a new study shows that cursing in the workplace can be a positive thing.

Regular use of profanity to express and reinforce solidarity among staff, enabling them to express their feelings, such as frustration, and develop social relationships, according to researchers at the University of East Anglia (UES). Researchers said their aim was to challenge leadership styles and suggest ideas for best practice.

“Employees use swearing on a continuous basis, but not necessarily in a negative, abusive manner. Swearing was as a social phenomenon to reflect solidarity and enhance group cohesiveness, or as a psychological phenomenon to release stress, ” the study stated. “Most of the cases were reported by employees at the lower levels of the organizational hierarchies and it was clear that executives use swearing language less frequently. "

(Hat tip: Slashdot)

The Washington Post reports the sad news today that Charles D. Riechers, 47, principal deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisitions was found dead Sunday night in an apparent suicide. The Post had reported a couple of weeks ago that Riechers had received what the paper characterized as a "no-work contract" with a contractor while awaiting confirmation to his Air Force job.

I picked up on that "no-work" designation in an item I wrote about the Post story. But as a few of the commenters on that item noted, the shorthand expression doesn't really accurately characterize the arrangement under which Riechers was working.

As Sharon Weinberger of Danger Room pointed out yesterday, Riechers appeared to be employed under a "systems engineering and technical services contract," a very common type of arrangement in the Pentagon. And while such contracts are subject to abuse, Riechers' admission that he "didn't do anything" for the contractor doesn't mean that he wasn't working.

The New York Times reports today on the growing number of acting officials at the top of the Justice, Homeland Security and Health and Human Services departments -- and lots of other agencies.

This is one of those stories that tend to arise at this point in a president's term, when top folks start to head for the exits, and it becomes harder to find qualified, politically acceptable people willing to take jobs in an administration that's not going to be around much longer.

In 1998, for example, National Journal reported that senators (including then-Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., who is hoping to make a few appointments of his own starting in January 2009) were outraged that in President Clinton's second term, acting officials were holding down 20 per cent of Cabinet-level department jobs that were supposed to require Senate confirmation.

The Times says that "While exact comparisons are difficult to come by, researchers say that the vacancy rate for senior jobs in the executive branch is far higher at the end of the Bush administration than it was at the same point in the terms of Mr. Bush’s recent predecessors in the White House."

I was struck by one comment in the story by Paul Light, a professor at New York University, erstwhile Government Executive contributor, and longtime expert on the appointments process:

He said the problems of having so many acting senior government officials were obvious: “One of the things we know is that they just aren’t as effective as Senate-confirmed appointees. They just don’t have the standing in their agencies. Acting people are very shy about making decisions.”

On one level I'm sure this is true. Acting officials typically don't have the standing to launch major new initiatives. But in another way, at least some of them have more standing than your average political appointee. I'm talking here about those acting officials -- and there are many of them -- who have risen through the ranks and demonstrated both strong leadership and a good working knowledge of an agency's operations. Aren't such people often more respected by the people who report to them than an appointee who comes in from the outside without much government experience?

The Washington Post reported this weekend on how the plans for the proposed $3 billion, 14,000 4.5 million-square foot new headquarters for the Homeland Security Department are about to get their first serious review.

I was struck by the final paragraph in the story:

[GSA spokesman Michael McGill] said Homeland Security doesn't want to build a smaller headquarters, because it needs many employees at the site in the event of a national emergency. And the four-year-old agency wants to "achieve a critical mass of people to establish a common culture," he said.

Of all agencies, wouldn't Homeland Security be the one that would want not to have all of its employees in downtown Washington in the event of an emergency? Why put all of your eggs in one basket in a city that is one of the country's biggest terrorist targets, especially when modern information technology makes it less important than ever to co-locate employees?

Homeland Security officials have said that leasing space all over town isn't cheap. And with scattered locations, employees have to spend lots of time stuck in traffic trying to get to meetings. That sounds like an argument for better leases and fewer meetings.

As for culture, if the common goal of protecting the country hasn't united the employees of various DHS agencies yet, it seems unlikely that putting them in different buildings scattered around the same campus in Washington will do the trick. But maybe the employees will get to know each other better by hanging around the barber shop and gym that are slated to be built on the site.

Drew Carey is suddenly a busy man. The ex-sitcom star is not only the new host of "The Price is Right," but he's teamed up with the Reason Foundation to launch the Drew Carey Project on the organization's Reason.tv Web site. The idea is to create a series of short documentaries on hot-button issues of the day, from immigration to traffic congestion.

As you might expect, given Reason's status as a leading libertarian organization, there are unlikely to be any warm and fuzzy segments about bureaucrats. "We need Reason to help fight the stupid drug laws, the stupid immigration laws, and stupid big government in general," says Carey in a press release touting the new venture.

All right, let's have a little fun here. In preparing another item this morning, I noticed that a story in today's Washington Post quoted an Office of Personnel Management spokesman named Peter Graves. I assume he's not the same guy who used to star in Mission: Impossible.

That made me think of soon-to-be-departed Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Michael Jackson, who is emphatically not the notorious pop singer. And that, in turn took me back to the days when the General Services Administration was headed by a Steve Perry who certainly was not the former lead singer of Journey.

So now my question is, how many other current and former federal officials share their names with celebrities?

Pretty damning (so to speak) piece in the Washington Post today about federal employees' abuse of policies regarding compensatory time for attendance at religious services.

This story goes back awhile. In May 2002, GovExec's Brian Friel reported that two executives at a Navy facility in Rhode Island had been suspended after an inspector general's report concluded that they and other employees had used religious comp time for non-religious purposes. Two years later, he followed up with a column about how the two were eventually forced to retire.

In 2005, OPM issued rules requiring that employees who take time off for religious observances provide documentation of their activities. But the agency continues to promote the concept of time off for religious activities, noting in an April 2005 memo that federal employees could use such leave to "participate in the observance of Pope John Paul's funeral service."

Now, the Post reports, congressional investigators have found that Food and Drug employees were allowed to accrue large balances of religious leave -- and some were paid for unused portions of such leave when they changed jobs or retired.

By the way, it's worth noting, though, that some employees appear to have honestly accumulated leave, and some have notified their agencies when they received reimbursement for it they thought was unwarranted. For example, the Post reports, the FDA's Joseph A. Biviano got reimbursed more than $20,000 for unused religious leave when he was promoted to be associate director of management at the agency's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. As soon as he got the money, Biviano questioned whether he should have received it, and wrote the agency a check for $13,000 -- the net amount he got after taxes.

The Office of Personnel Management says there are no governmentwide rules for reporting on how religious comp time is being used. I bet that's about to change, since several members of Congress appear to be interested in that information.

My Atlantic colleague Matthew Yglesias on his visit to a Washington Social Security office to secure a new card:

Service at the Social Security Administration office at 2100 M Street was very prompt. I'd sort of been expecting an interminable wait during which I could make a serious dent in The Conscience of a Liberal but my number got called almost as soon as I was finished filling out the brief form. The employees working at the office were polite and helpful. Bureaucracy works!

There's really nothing funny about weapons of mass destruction, but I have to admit that when I happened upon the Wikipedia entry for "Doomsday device," I chuckled when I saw the following disclaimer at the top:

This article is about the theoretical world-ending destruction. For the professional wrestling maneuver, see Doomsday Device.

Let me get this straight: First the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure Commission votes to shift thousands of jobs from leased facilities in northern Virginia to Fort Belvoir. Then, when it becomes clear that this will create a traffic nightmare, officials push the idea of instead moving some of the folks to land in Springfield, Va., that is currently home to General Services Administration warehouses.

Now, the Washington Post reports, the Springfield site faces some competition from a piece of property in Alexandria that developers are pushing the Army to consider. Some or all of the jobs slated for Springfield could ultimately end up at the Alexandria site.

It's now starting to look like this shift --which affects about 6,000 of the more than 22,000 jobs originally targeted for consolidation at Fort Belvoir -- will simply move people out of one set of leased space in Virginia to another. If that's the case, my question is: Why bother? Wasn't the whole point of the BRAC move to get these agencies out of leased offices and onto a military base?

If you've been following GovernmentExecutive.com for awhile, you may have noticed the byline of Greta Wodele up until late last year on some news stories. She was a reporter at our sister publication, CongressDaily, and we enjoyed publishing her work because she had a keen eye for covering homeland security stories.

Well, now Greta's over at C-SPAN, hosting its Washington Journal program from time to time, and the folks at Esquire magazine have taken notice of her as well. And they enjoy her for, um, entirely different reasons, today's Washington Post "Reliable Source" column notes. Here's the magazine's tribute to her:

"She is not hot; she's beautiful. Her hair, thick and mahogany, shows no trace of having been put through much but a brush. Her dark eyes are moist, her smile prim and pink. Each facial plane -- her high, wide brow; that long, smooth heart-shaped stretch from cheekbone down to neck -- sings in milky harmony. . . . O, Greta! I need coffee; I want you."

If you must judge for yourself, you can find a link to Greta's latest Washington Journal appearance here. Click on the 10/04/2007 edition.

Here's a novel idea: The head of Disabled American Veterans thinks President Bush should name someone to head the Veterans Affairs Department who knows something about the agency's programs and how they work.

"It is absolutely vital that the person selected to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs be thoroughly versed in all aspects of veterans affairs," says DAV Washington Headquarters Executive Director David W. Gorman. "With the urgently needed funding increase for veterans programs and services being delayed yet again, a flood of wounded and injured from Iraq and Afghanistan coming to the VA for health care and other earned benefits and the huge backlog of pending disability compensation claims, the VA needs a strong leader who can immediately take charge of the department."

It's a radical notion. But it just might work.

Last week's New York Times profile of Spencer H. Lewis Jr., the head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's New York office, is one of those studies in quiet, earnest commitment to serving the public good that reinforces one's faith in the country's civil service.

Lewis is in the news because his office issued a report finding that New York Knicks executive Anucha Browne Sanders was a victim of sexual harassment and workplace discrimination by the team's head coach, Isiah Thomas. That determination paved the way for a lawsuit by Sanders that recently resulted in a jury awarding her $11.6 million in damages.

Even for those of us who cover the federal government on a regular basis, it's easy to focus on stories of employees who run rental subsidy scams or rip the heads off ducks. It's nice to get a reminder that stories like Lewis's are a lot more typical of the people who devote their careers to federal service.

You can't accuse the Smithsonian of failing to use incentives to recruit and retain employees. The organization has paid out nearly $2 million in cash advances, relocation expense payments and tuition reimbursements in recent years, the Washington Times reports. But the institution failed to report some of the payments to the IRS and "may not have withheld the proper tax amounts for employee pay," its inspector general says in a new report.

Smithsonian officials say they're taking steps to address issues surrounding the incentive program. For example, they told the IG that as of Oct. 1, the organization no longer offers to reimburse moving expenses to new employees "except in limited circumstances where justified."

There are bad apples in any organization -- and more of them in large organizations, naturally. Still, it is dismaying to me to learn that apparently the problem of federal employees lying about their incomes to get government rental subsidies is so widespread that the Department of Housing and Urban Development has an initiative called "Operation FedRent" aimed at rooting out the cheats. The Dallas Business Journal reports that five feds in Texas have been charged with defrauding HUD out of almost $150,000 in subsidies.

In case you haven't seen it, I want to draw your attention to Government Executive's Oct. 1 feature on Army Chief of Staff Gen. George W. Casey Jr. As former commander in Iraq, Casey has a unique perspective on not just military efforts overseas, but those of civilian agencies, too:

It's not just the armed forces that are going to cause this nation to succeed at what it's doing in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terror. In this type of war, it's the political; it's the economic elements that have to reinforce what the military is doing. So there are huge opportunities for the rest of the government to contribute to what is going on here. And I think that is going to take some real cultural change in the different organizations of the government. The military wasn't the only one that was downsized as a result of the Cold War.

USAID [the U.S. Agency for International Development], the United States Information Agency, those things were really taken down, so we don't necessarily have the capability anymore to go out and do the things we need to. What do the other agencies or governments need to do to operate in the environment we're going to be operating in for the next decade or so?

“Americans clearly love the idea and practice of blogging,” says GSA Administrator Lurita Doan. So the agency has unleashed a blog of its own, known as "GovGab."

The blog features daily posts from a team of five GSA managers who post on a rotating basis (in fact, they seem to have divided up the task by each taking a different day of the week). They're supposed to "help spotlight U.S. government information and services of greatest use in Americans’ daily lives."

GSA's clearly operating under the theory that it's the young folks who are really into this whole blogging thing, because the bios of the bloggers make it clear that they don't exactly represent a generational cross-section of the agency's workforce.

And so far, their posts certainly do highlight a wide range of government information -- on everything from grass seed to shoes to Sonic Youth records.

A North Carolina man has been indicted by a federal grand jury in Roanoke, Va., on charges of making fraudulent military retirement and disability claims, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Virginia reports.

He's innocent until proven guilty of course, but it looks like he may have just been looking for a way to live up to his name: Randall A. Moneymaker.

The ongoing story about employee reaction to stepped-up background checks required under Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 is fascinating. This week, a judge ruled that NASA's new questionnaire isn't unduly intrusive, much to the dismay of contract scientists at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who have challenged the investigations.

I sympathize with the scientists in their quest not to have federal investigators probe their personal lives, but I'm not sure that the following element of their argument -- as expressed by Robert Nelson, the lead plaintiff in the case -- is going to play well either in a court of law or the court of public opinion:

"Regardless of what the legal outcome is, there will be a small number of people who won't be here anymore for reasons not having to do with their scientific or technical talent," but who would rather quit than sign the background check waivers, Nelson said.

Knowing that their pasts can be investigated "breeds in people the tendency to conform," he continued. "One reason we think that JPL has been so successful is that we've been so tolerant of people with a wide range of personal idiosyncrasies."

"The rapid increase of federally contracted dollars—100 percent since 2000—makes outsourcing the fastest growing component of discretionary spending. The government’s preference for using outside contractors to provide goods and services makes careful scrutiny of the process and the decisions more important than in the past. At present, loose rules, lack of competition, and limited accountability permit so-called ‘bad actors’ to receive contracts that put taxpayers and our money at risk."

--From "Forgiving Fraud and Failure," a new report by U.S. PIRG, the federation of state Public Interest Research Groups.

The SANS Institute's "Internet Storm Center" reports that the Homeland Security Department ran into a little issue yesterday with its daily e-mail "Open Source Intelligence Report:"

This morning a reader replied to the list address with a request for a change and his note got re-sent to all of the list subscribers. In the next hour or so, dozens of readers have replied .... This points out an important point -- if you maintain a broadcast mailing list make sure that the address will not reflect email from sources other than the owner of the list.

Having been on the receiving end of this kind of vicious e-mail cycle, I can only say, amen. And also, there but for the grace of God go all of us in the e-newsletter business.

(Hat tip: Danger Room)

Update: The New York Times reports that the incident involved "a flood of more than 2.2 million messages nationwide that clogged the e-mail accounts of government and private experts on domestic security, including the operators of an Illinois nuclear power station."

Slate stakes out the position this week that President Bush's Cabinet is a "weirdly anonymous bunch" -- and attempts to back up the assertion with a quiz challenging readers to match Cabinet members' names with their faces and job titles.

I got 'em all -- after a little noodling. But then again, I work at a place called Government Executive, so it'd be a little embarrassing if I didn't.

By the way, Slate itself had to take two shots at launching the contest. Its initial version failed to account for the fact that Agriculture's Mike Johanns and Veterans Affairs' James Nicholson have departed their posts within the past couple of weeks.

Sorry I forgot to post about this yesterday, but in case you missed it, I wanted to take notice of this exchange detailed in the Washington Post between a Navy lawyer and the attorney for Shaker Aamer, a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It involves the issue of exactly how Aamer came into possession of a pair of Under Armour briefs, and it is priceless.

No, this isn't another bird decapitation item. It's about our country's elected legislators, actually.

If the goal of members of Congress is to try to drive their approval ratings ever lower, I have to say they are doing a remarkable job. The latest case in point is the push by a group of House Democrats to engineer a resolution condemning Rush Limbaugh for allegedly insinuating military service members who speak out against the war in Iraq are "phony soldiers." This, of course, is payback for Republicans maneuvering Democrats into voting for a measure that criticized the group MoveOn.org for running a newspaper ad referring to Gen. David H. Petraeus as “General Betray Us.”

I'm not even going to bother trying to sort out who might be in the right or in the wrong here. The broader point is this: Nobody cares. Whatever your position on the war, or Gen. Petraeus, or Rush Limbaugh, one thing is certain: It's a trivial waste of time for Congress to take ceremonial votes of outrage purely for the purposes of scoring political points.

“What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” says House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer, D-Md. No it isn't. It's bad for the goose, the gander and the country.

Just in case you missed it in today's story about improper premium-class travel by federal officials, there was some interesting news out of the Defense Department. You can find it at the bottom (of course) of this New York Times piece: First- and business-class travel by Pentagon officials has declined significantly since 2003, saving taxpayers tens of millions of dollars a year, according to Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn. “I don’t pat [agencies] on the back too often,” Coleman said. “Here, they deserve it.”

It apparently has occurred to the Transportation Security Administration that remote-control toys could be used as bomb detonators. So, kiddies, if you stuff that radio-controlled car in your Dora the Explorer backpack and try to carry it onto a plane, you can expect to get pulled aside for a pat-down.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has released an updated version of its naturalization test for would-be citizens. I took the civics section of the test and I have to say it wasn't quite what I expected. Some of the questions seem a little open-ended -- such as, "During the Cold War, what was the main concern of the United States?" (The answer provided, "Communism," seems a little too pat.) Other questions seemed painfully obvious, in the sense that the answer is embedded in the query -- "What is freedom of religion?" "What is the rule of law?"

I was embarrassed not to know the full answer to one question -- "What are two rights only for United States citizens?" Three of the potential responses occurred to me pretty quickly: vote, run for office and carry a U.S. passport. But the last one seemed obvious only after I peeked at the correct answers: "Apply for a federal job."

Naturalization applicants will begin taking the revised test on Oct. 1, 2008.

For awhile now, the Council for Excellence in Government has been running a its Strategic Advice for Government Executives (SAGE) program to provide counsel to federal chief information officers. Now the organization is broadening its reach, with a new SAGE program, developed with BearingPoint, that is aimed at chief financial officers.

According to the Council, the CFO SAGE program "brings together former and current public sector CFOs and other senior financial management leaders into a live and online community that provides thought leadership and strategic advice, counsel, and mentoring opportunities to incoming and newly appointed CFOs." The actual strategic advisers are former public sector financial leaders currently working in the private sector -- and, in some instances, current senior federal officials in the financial management arena.

President Bush, in his radio address Saturday:

Today I am signing emergency legislation to fund the federal government for the next seven weeks. This legislation was necessary because Congress failed in its most basic responsibility: to pass the spending bills that fund the day-to-day operations of the government. There are 12 of these bills this year, and Congress did not complete a single one of them, so Congress had to send me a stop-gap measure before the fiscal year ends this Sunday at midnight.

When you take a no-work job with a federal contractor while waiting for your civil service job at the Air Force to come through, here's what you shouldn't tell the Washington Post's Robert O'Harrow when he calls for an interview for a story he's writing:

• "I really didn't do anything for [the contractor] CRI."


• "We needed some way to kind of gap me [between jobs]."

Still that's exactly what Charles Riechers told O'Harrow. And the Air Force insists it did nothing wrong in arranging for him to get the contractor pay while he was actually working for the service.