GovernmentExecutive.com

Apparently Hillary Clinton wants to hire more federal employees to guard U.S. personnel and bases in Iraq -- a lot more. She has cosponsored legislation that would ban the use of private security contractors in the country and require that "all personnel at any U.S. diplomatic or consular mission in Iraq be provided security services only by federal government personnel."

But as Robert Brodsky pointed out in Government Executive in December, there are limited options when it comes to bringing all protective services in-house -- and they're expensive.

The General Services Administration announced today that it's making some changes in one of its key line sof business: acquiring real estate on behalf of federal agencies.

Here's the agency's full announcement (it's not online yet, as far as I can tell):

WASHINGTON—The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), in order to better fulfill its mission of providing world-class workspace to federal workers at best value to the American taxpayer, has added a new Office of Real Estate Acquisition, the agency announced today.

“As the government’s premier procurement agency, GSA must be vigilant in searching for ways to improve the way we acquire and manage federal assets,” said Administrator Lurita Doan. “This initiative will ensure that our real estate program is managed in the most effective and efficient manner possible.”

The Office of Real Estate Acquisition is responsible for the strategic direction for national real estate issues, including implementing the National Broker Contract, and the lease delegation program. Chip Morris, the former PBS senior legal counsel, was named Assistant Commissioner of the new office.

“This organizational shift is important because it more effectively responds to the fact that the amount of space we lease to house federal agencies has almost quadrupled over the last four decades,” said David Winstead, Commissioner of GSA’s Public Buildings Service. “Real estate is the backbone of GSA.”

It looks like the folks at the IRS may not have to burn the midnight oil this tax processing season. The National Retail Federation reports that 61.2 percent of Americans have already filed their tax returns or intend to file them by tomorrow. Only about 15 percent of respondents to a survey said they would wait until April to file. Apparently most people are anticipating a refund, and they want it now.

Well, it was worth a shot. When District of Columbia officials filed their application with the U.S. Mint for a design for a commemorative quarter, they made a couple of suggestions for inscriptions on the coin: "No Taxation Without Representation" and "Taxation Without Representation." Those refer, of course, to the District's lack of full representation in Congress.

Setting aside the fact that the two suggestions are diametrically opposite statements, Mint officials quickly rejected the suggestions for another reason, the Washington Post reports: They violated the agency's policy against controversial slogans on commemorative coins.

"Changing how the District of Columbia . . . is represented in Congress is a contemporary political issue on which there presently is no national consensus and over which reasonable minds differ," Mint officials said.

So what's the District suggesting as an alternative? "Justicia omnibus" -- that is, "justice for all." Given that it's Washington, it does seem fitting to get the word "omnibus" in there.

All federal agencies have multiple -- and sometimes competing -- goals that they're pursuing simultaneously. Why do they succeed in achieving some of them and fail to meet others? In a new research paper, Eric Biber, an acting professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley, provides an answer: "Agencies will systematically underperform on goals that are hard to measure and that conflict with the achievement of other more measurable goals. The lack of information about these hard-to-measure goals means that there will be fewer rewards to agencies for any success on those goals."

So what can be done about the problem -- especially at land management agencies, where tradeoffs on goals can be very difficult to reconcile? That's where it gets tricky. Biber explores a range of direct options, such as having Congress take back some authority from agencies, splitting agencies into components focused on different goals, or requiring that an agency figure out how to track progress on hard-to-measure goals. He also looks at other potential approaches, such as having a different agency monitor -- and even issue legally binding opinions -- on an agency's efforts.

NASA's everywhere! That's the message the agency is seeking to portray in a new presentation in its multimedia gallery called "NASA Home and City." The idea is that you can take a virtual tour of a home or town and see all the stuff we take for granted that is derived from space research. There's certainly a lot of information there I didn't know (space suit material eventually made its way into sneakers?), but I have to say it was a little unnerving to click on a graphic urging me to "Discover NASA" in the bedroom.

For those of you who are not big fans of congressional oversight, EPA's Marcus Peacock has a blog post today you might want to check out: "Why Hearings Are Good."

The Transportation Security Administration is still trying to figure out why so many of its employees leave its workforce every year -- about 20 percent, USA Today reports, compared to a governmentwide average of about 8 percent.

One possible reason, according to TSA Deputy Administrator Gale Rossides: The job involves hard work. "It is frequently not the job they expected," she says of recruits. For many people the job's requirements, from lifting luggage to spending hours studying X-ray images of bags is "more physically demanding than they expected," Rossides says. But Rossides doesn't seem too concerned. TSA's attrition rate, she says, is in line with other private-sector transportation jobs.

The Park Police made it to the front page and home page of the Washington Post today, but not in a way the agency would like. Apparently, staffing issues are worse than ever. The agency is down to 576 officers, its lowest level in 20 years, and several key top slots remain vacant.

Considering that former Park Police Chief Teresa Chambers got suspended and later fired for saying in 2003 that the agency couldn't get by on 620 officers, things look pretty grim.

And the problem extends beyond the uniformed officer ranks. "Key civilians have departed and not been replaced," the Post reported. That has led to delays in scheduled pay raises for some officers, and the postponement of promotion exams for aspiring sergeants and lieutenants.

Are you a government financial professional? If so, the Association of Government Accountants is interested in your opinions. The association is conducting an online survey on key issues facing the financial management community. Those include the performance of agency financial services and reporting and the impact of continuing resolutions on operations and support services.

From the U.S. Geological Survey: "Mount St. Helens Takes a Rest."

I've heard of research expeditions and cruises on the high seas. But a research cruise? Interesting. Of course, when the destination is the ocean surrounding Antarctica, it's pretty clear it's not a pleasure trip.

I was reading the print version of the Wall Street Journal today, and came upon an ad (which, according to this press release I dug up, has been running since Sept. 2006) that I think says a lot about how public service is viewed in this country now. I'll let the text of the ad speak for itself:

There’s an old saying: “The sins of the father will be visited upon the son.” But the same can be said about the father’s good deeds. Take Justin Kawabori, for example. His father is a civil servant in Seattle who develops programs for the elderly. From that influence, Justin became interested in public service at an early age. And after graduating from college, he became a campaign consultant for various political organizations and candidates. But rather than change policy from the top down, Justin wanted to make a difference from the bottom-up, grassroots level. So he left campaign consulting and went to work for several charitable organizations, where philanthropic entrepreneurship and fundraising allowed him to help advance initiatives in family-friendly business and faith-based welfare reform. Recently, Justin returned to consulting, but this time with an expanded expertise. He formed his own company, KC Communications, which covers a broad range of PR, marketing and communications. He enjoys his new line of work. He’s proud that he’s been able to make a difference. And so is his father.

Justin Kawabori drives the Infiniti G Sedan.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not trying to suggest by posting this that there's something illegitimate about what Kawabori is doing with his life -- just that today's concept of "public service" doesn't necessarily involve working for the government, and doesn't preclude making enough money that you can afford to drive an Infiniti.

In case you haven't wrapped your mind around the whole global warming thing yet, consider this: The U.S. Geological Survey reports that new climate maps show that roughly a third of the United States could provide favorable conditions for Burmese pythons if current trends hold.

Such pythons were discovered in the Florida Everglades in 2003 -- presumably they were pets released into the wild -- and have been spreading ever since. Global warming models indicate that areas in the United States that would be "climate matches" for the snakes, which live naturally from Pakistan to Indonesia, could significantly expand by the end of this century.

Along with EPA's Marcus Peacock, Jonathan Breul was featured at this morning's Government Executive Leadership Breakfast. Breul, the executive director of the IBM Center for the Business
of Government and a former high-ranking official at the Office of Management and Budget, contrasted the Bush and Clinton administration's approaches to management reform.

Clinton's National Performance Review, he noted, generated some 1,600 recommendations, while Bush's President's Management Agenda focused on only five key cross-cutting areas. The two president's approaches were "starkly different," he said. Clinton worked from the bottom up, seeking to empower employees on the front lines, and actively going around established management agencies such as OMB and the Office of Personnel Management. Bush, on the other hand, took the "MBA president" approach, tying his initiatives directly to the budget process and implementing them via OMB.

The interesting thing is that both approaches shared common themes: a focus on measuring results, a belief in the value of competition, and an emphasis on service to citizens. Whoever is elected in the fall will likely choose from this same general menu of management improvement options. So the big question, Breul said, is what tactical approach he or she will choose. That will make all the difference.

At the Government Executive Leadership Breakfast this morning, Marcus Peacock, deputy administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, talked not only about his pioneering blog, but about how the agency managed to win the President's Quality Award for overall management. Some of the interesting things he noted:

• When Peacock took his current job, he learned there already were "tons of metrics" available about EPA operations. In fact, he said, the agency has cut the number of metrics it follows from about 500 to 100, which he said is "still too many."
• The agency has developed a quarterly management report on progress toward meeting its goals. Most of the metrics that figure into the report still measure outputs -- such as the number of farmers trained in practices that are designed to reduce the flow of nutrients from farms into the water supply -- rather than outcomes. But the agency is working on "logic models" that will provide better reporting on how its efforts translate into actual environmental improvements.
• Peacock considers his blog to be a valuable tool for communicating with the agency's 17,000 employees -- even though he said that since he started accepting comments on posts he's been called a "weasel" and a "Bush crony."
• One of government's singular problems, he acknowledged, was that career employees are rarely rewarded for taking risks, but often punished when something goes wrong.
• EPA, he said, is still "far too conservative" in setting goals for itself. Peacock carries a laminated card in his pocket listing his personal "stretch goals" for the year.

I had hoped that this maybe was a joke, even though it appeared in the New York Times. Because it's very hard for me to believe, first, that there's actually going to be a sequel to the 2004 stoner flick Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle. But there is, and it -- I swear I'm not making this up -- is called Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay.

(Hat tip: BoingBoing)

In a new study, the Congressional Research Service reports that presidents, presidents-elect, and candidates for president have been attacked 15 times in the country's history, and five of them have been killed. Four of the past six presidents have been victims or targets.

Given that recent history, this line from the study's summary is depressing: "The report will be updated and revised if developments require."

Holy crap! Russian cosmonauts pack heat in space? Maybe they can do some target practice on that U.S. spy satellite as it falls toward the Earth.

(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)

Can auto racing go green? Two Environmental Protection Agency officials think so, and they're working to make it a reality.

I know I'm somewhat obsessed with generational issues, but I can't help myself.

Have you ever been to a Chinese restaurant that uses those placemats listing all the animals in the Chinese zodiac (dog, dragon, horse, rat, etc.) for each year, along with the personal characteristics of the people born that year? The notion that everybody born in a particular 365-day period shares the same personality traits has always struck me as hilarious.

Increasingly, though, the federal government seems to have adopted the Chinese animal zodiac approach to future workforce planning. As agencies become more and more obsessed with baby boomer retirements, they're becoming increasingly reliant on sweeping generalizations about the workers of the future based on when they happen to have been born. The latest example I've seen is in a new Air Force publication on future training and education efforts. It contains the following "description of generational differences:"

Baby Boomer (Group I)

• Born from 1946 to 1954
• Key characteristics: experimental, individualism, free spirited, social cause oriented

Baby Boomer (Group II)

• Born from 1955 to 1964
• Key characteristics: less optimistic, distrust of government, general cynicism
• Digital Immigrants

Generation X

• Born from 1965 to 1979
• Key characteristics: quest for emotional security, independent, informality, entrepreneurial
• Digital Immigrants

Millenial (Generation Y)

• Born from 1980 to 2001
• Key characteristics: quest for physical security and safety, patriotism, heightened fears, acceptance of change, technically-savvy, environmental issues
• Digital Natives

There may be less than a year left in the Bush administration, but the Office of Personnel Management still has a singular message for new members of the Senior Executive Service: It's all about implementing the President's Management Agenda. The agency is continuing to send out invitations to its regularly scheduled orientation sessions on the president's plans for new SES members.

The briefings, writes OPM Director Linda M. Springer in the invitation, provide an opportunity for the newly minted execs to "learn about the President’s Management Agenda, his vision and values, and to discuss the unique challenges you face with your new responsibilities. As a new member of the SES, you will play a key role in turning President Bush’s principles of a citizen-centered, results-oriented, and market-based government into reality."

The SESers better be prepared to move quickly. The next session isn't until the end of March, and come next January, there's likely to be a whole new management agenda.

I realize that congressional hearings are rarely nonpartisan, or even fully bipartisan, affairs. But when you title your hearing on pay-for-performance in government "Robbing Mary to Pay Peter & Paul," aren't you kind of tipping your hand that this isn't exactly going to be a dispassionate analysis of the concept?

"She's our girl!" That's what the National Federation of Federal Employees screamed in a press release issued Friday. And just who is the "girl" in question? That would be Hillary Clinton.

“In her time in the United States Senate, Hillary has been a tremendous advocate of federal workers,” said Richard N. Brown, NFFE's president. So, he added, "We are proud and honored to give her our endorsement.”

Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Thad Allen took the unusual step of sharing a highly-critical assessment of a key Coast Guard modernization program with an audience at the National Press Club Friday:

Let me share with you a detailed report that would trouble any senior leader regarding a high-profile shipbuilding program. The report states the initial construction costs of the new fleet of cutters will be much higher than projected; delivery will almost certainly be delayed; and the cutters will not carry out all the functions they were originally designed to carry out… An early attempt to reconfigure the vessel was so poorly done we were forced to remove it from service without obtaining any value for the taxpayer money invested… During machinery trials, the captain reported: "never has a vessel left a port so badly qualified to encounter seas."

As Allen said, “Change is hard.”

--Katherine McIntire Peters

Not long from now, we will make laws, set policies, write regulations and create programs by first "playing" the likely consequences in synthetic worlds, says Anne Laurent, longtime observer of federal management and creator, just this year, of a new blog, “The Agile Mind.”

Laurent has written and edited for Government Executive for 12 years and did the same for Federal Times for 10 years before that. Now, she is blazing a new trail both in journalism and government, exploring how new human-computer interfaces, gaming, virtual worlds and other innovations will reshape the way agencies function and the way we explain what they do and how they do it.

Laurent has written recently for Tech Insider about NASA and other agencies venturing into synthetic worlds such as Second Life. She has written for Government Executive about the Defense Department’s increasing use of gaming software for training, and about the Army’s move into private virtual worlds.

On “The Agile Mind,” she's weaving all these trends and others into a vision of a virtual government in which, she writes:

We will interact with all kinds of data--program results, claims processed, rates of environmental change, response times, performance, cost, schedule, etc.--physically via wall-sized multi-touch screens and computer tables, not keyboards and monitors.

Displaying and manipulating on one large screen both live and historical information about the past and current conditions and the effects of agency actions will allow us to see trends and possibilities and make predictions in ways we simply cannot today, when information resides in silos and behind the walls of very different organizations and is static and lifeless. Most of what we do digitally will involve touching and moving images or actually stepping into situations via our digital doubles--avatars--in uncannily accurate models of the real world.

For a sneak peak at the future, she points out, we need only turn to CNN, which began using a multi-touch computer wall as a news broadcasting tool on Jan. 2. Or visit NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Second Life. Or test the online game, “America’s Army,” the hugely popular recruiting tool. Or join the Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds.

Laurent suggests that gaming and synthetic worlds and visualization and ubiquitous computing will become commonplace in government because the next generation of politicians and employees will expect and demand it. "These people will not, cannot, manage information on paper, or in spreadsheets or online dashboards," she writes. "They will not endure the kludgy, slow, inefficient process of learning new software and keeping that knowledge up to date merely to be able to manipulate data. . . . They will demand to see and touch and manipulate what is known about problems and to 'play' possible solutions so they can view the likely outcomes before choosing how to proceed."

It’s a beguiling vision filled with promise and peril. Laurent is an able and engaging chronicler of it.

The Pentagon is pushing President Bush's proposal to provide federal hiring preferences for spouses of military service members. Kathleen Ott of the Pentagon’s Office of Civilian Personnel Policy has met with officials at the Office of Personnel Management to discuss the concept, Army Times reports.

The Defense Department already has a spousal preference program in place for its civilian jobs. One reason that Pentagon officials want to extend it to the rest of government is that military spouses must move frequently, and "often do not have a portable occupation which they can take with them,” Ott said. But the civilian federal government has offices all over the world.

Implementing the new hiring preferences across government probably will require legislative action, and it's unclear at this point when or if that might happen.

NASA's on the hunt for aliens. The agency's Deep Impact spacecraft is being sent to observe five nearby stars with "transiting exosolar planets."

"We're on the hunt for planets down to the size of Earth, orbiting some of our closest neighboring stars," said Drake Deming of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. And if they're the size of Earth, maybe they're kind of like Earth, and if they're like Earth, well...

In his withdrawal announcement today, erstwhile GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney couldn't resist one final shot at the federal bureaucracy:

Did you see that today, government workers make more money than people who work in the private sector. Can you imagine what happens to an economy where the best opportunities are for bureaucrats? It’s high time to lower taxes, including corporate taxes, to take a weed-whacker to government regulations, to reform entitlements, and to stand up to the increasingly voracious appetite of the unions in our government!

Are you a travel innovator? If so, the General Services Administration’s Office of Governmentwide Policy wants to hear about what you've done. The office is seeking applications for its biennial Travel and Relocation Innovation Award. Winners will be those who:

• Forge more results-oriented, cost effective travel and relocation programs and policy.


• Accomplish world-class management of travel and relocation.


• Install travel and relocation best business practices.


• Improve workforce planning and quality of life in areas related to travel and relocation.


• Expand the use of e-government.

The deadline for entries is March 31.

The White House is so yesterday. Or so thinks the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City, apparently. The organization has launched a contest called "White House Redux" to gather new designs for what it calls the "the ultimate architectural symbol of political power." The best "ideas, designs, descriptions, images, and videos" submitted will be featured in a month-long exhibition at the Storefront in July.

(Hat tip: BoingBoing)

"Perhaps the most telling critique of [Barack] Obama, to my mind, is his lack of executive experience," Andrew Sullivan writes today. He notes that he asked Obama directly about this issue during an interview in connection with a profile Sullivan wrote on the candidate in the December 2007 issue of our sister publication, The Atlantic. Obama responded, he writes, by talking about his campaign:

He observed out that he was up against the full Clinton establishment, all the chits she and her husband had acquired over the years, and the apparatus they had constructed within the party. He had to build a national campaign from scratch, raise money, staff an extremely complex electoral map, and make key decisions on spending and travel. He asked me to judge his executive skills by observing how he was managing a campaign.

"By that standard," Sullivan says, "who isn't impressed?"

Very few aren't impressed, I'd guess. But is Obama's standard appropriate? I'd suggest that historically there's a fairly weak correlation between skill at campaigning and skill at running the executive branch. Bill Clinton was a campaigner par excellence, but a strong case could be made that didn't translate into above-average effectiveness running the executive branch. The same could be said for George W. Bush. Jimmy Carter ran a highly impressive out-of-nowhere presidential campaign, but seemed overwhelmed at times by the challenge of running the massive federal apparatus.

In his 2000 book The Presidential Difference, Fred I. Greenstein of Princeton University makes the case that the most effective modern presidential executive was someone who had never before run for office until he was elected president -- Dwight Eisenhower. What Eisenhower had done was to run what was in essence a massive bureaucratic operation.

Many presidential candidates fall into the trap of thinking that doing things like making "key decisions on spending and travel" are great preparation for governing the country. But tough as they are, such decisions are small potatoes compared to, say, developing and implementing a $3.1 trillion budget.

Running a campaign has very little in common with running a country -- which is not to suggest, of course, that Obama might not be as great at the latter as he appears to be at the former. But if he is, it'll be much more impressive than winning a race for office.

Will the CIA's Mike Hayden be able to predict al Qaeda's next move? If football prognostication skills are any indication, the answer may be yes. Check out Hayden's response to a Scripps Howard News Service survey of 100 famous people last week about who they thought would win the Super Bowl:

Giants, 28-24. The spread favors the Pats, but careful intelligence work looks beyond the obvious. The Giants are hot now. Three playoff wins on the road (like the Steelers before Super Bowl XL). Regular season finale shows they match up well against the Pats. Besides, nobody's perfect!

That's as good a piece of analysis as any football expert provided leading up to the big game.

(Hat tip: Danger Room)

As only The Onion can do it: "Dept. Of Homeland Security: 'Has Anybody Seen A Blue Folder?' "

Secret Service agents tend to play it very close to the vest -- staying mysteriously aloof and calm is part of the job description. But sometimes even they can get a little worked up, according to Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama.

Here's what Obama said about his Secret Service detail during an appearance in East Rutherford, N.J., with actor Robert DeNiro, according to the Chicago Tribune's blog, The Swamp: "Those guys never smile. They're always cool. But I noticed when De Niro walks in, they're all like elbowing each other…They were excited."

Here's President Bush crowing about his administration's (relatively) paperless fiscal 2009 budget:

I submitted the budget today to Congress -- it's on a laptop notebook, an e-budget. It saves paper, saves trees, saves money. I think it's the first budget submitted electronically.

At the risk of parsing the president's words too closely, I hope his budget team didn't actually submit the budget on a "laptop notebook." I think that the process could've been handled more efficiently over that newfangled Internet thing.

Press releases on the president's annual budget submission are among the least subtle forms of communication in recorded history. Here's one of my favorites from today, courtesy of the Center for Law and Social Policy: "President's Budget Says: Young Children Don't Count."

In his fiscal 2009 budget proposal, President Bush takes his last opportunity to declare that his management reform efforts of the past seven years are actually working. Among the accomplishments he cites:

• More than 1,000 federal programs have been evaluated using the administration's Program Assessment Rating Tool.


• Almost 90 percent of those programs have established or clarified their performance goals.


• 82 percent of programs are achieving their goals.


• 55 percent of programs that were initially unable to demonstrate any results have improved on that rating.


• 81 percent of agencies have reduced "skills gaps" in mission-critical occupations.
  
• 78 percent of new federal employees are now hired within 45 days, up from 64 percent in 2006.


• For the third straight year, all agencies completed their annual financial statements with 45 days after the close of the fiscal year.


• Last year, 13 agencies got clean audit opinions on their financial statements. The administration is shooting for 21 agencies to meet that goal this year.

NASA turns 50 on Monday, the same day the Beatles recorded the song "Across the Universe" 40 years ago. Space agency officials aren't letting that coincidence go unnoticed. They've arranged to beam the song into deep space at 7 p.m. It'll be aimed at the north star, Polaris.

"Amazing! Well done, NASA!" said Paul McCartney, one of the two surviving Beatles, in a message to the agency. "Send my love to the aliens." Of course, McCartney didn't actually write "Across the Universe." It's a John Lennon song.