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The news that GSA's Lurita Doan was forced to resign yesterday wasn't exactly stunning. Given her history at the agency and the fact that, as Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., put it, "her management style was not everyone's cup of tea," it's somewhat surprising this didn't happen sooner.

But as Doan exits the public stage, I have to acknowledge that I (and, I'm sure, many of my colleagues in the media) will miss her. She is, to use an old newspaper term, "good copy."

The feeling, though, apparently isn't mutual. Doan made her feelings about reporters clear during a speech last week at a GSA expo in California in which she appeared with "arrows sticking out of her head, shoulders, arms and legs," according to an official transcript. One of those metaphorical arrows, she said, was shot at her by "the press who say: 'I’ve been covering this issue for some time. I’m the only one who really understands the issue. You need to consult me, listen to my recommendations.' ”

I really wish I knew who she was talking about here. As a general rule, the last thing those of us in the media want to do is consult with agency leaders and issue recommendations. If we did that, we might actually bear some responsibility if those recommendations turned out to be lousy. No thanks. We relish our role as outside observers.

Yesterday, the New York Times noted the passing of a truly impressive civil servant: William H. Stewart, who served as surgeon general in the Johnson administration. That was at a time, the paper noted, that the position was very different than it is now -- for example, it involved day-to-day oversight of the Public Health Service.

Stewart, who had joined the PHS in 1951, pressed for the integration of the agency as surgeon general, and used the then-new Medicare program as a wedge to force hospitals around the country to integrate, too. On top of that, he was responsible for the first health warnings on cigarette packs.

As Stewart's official biography indicates, he led PHS at a time of "dramatic changes" leading to "cycles of administrative upheaval." That included two major structural reorganizations during an "era characterized by ... complicated bureaucratic maneuvering, increased public involvement, and renewed efforts to control federal health expenditures." Stewart resigned his post midway through President Nixon's first year in office.

If not, we've got a tool to help you out. We've launched a new special report on the looming change in administrations, providing links to key resources and regularly updated coverage from Government Executive and GovernmentExecutive.com.

Help us out and let us know if there are any links we should add to the page.

The International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers has settled on its candidate for president, and the endorsement goes to ... Barack Obama.

The union represents engineers, scientists and technicians at the Defense and Energy departments and NASA.

Obama, said IFPTE president Gregory Junemann, "will immediately reverse the last eight years of the union busting promulgated on our nation’s civil servants; will stand against free trade agreements like NAFTA that fail to protect American workers; will address our nation’s dangerous health care crisis; will work to oppose irresponsible privatization schemes in the public and federal sectors; [and] will work to protect the pensions and retirement security of working Americans..."

Obama praised IFPTE for "working to make sure that Washington is working for working Americans." He added, "they’ll have a partner in the White House when I’m president. I’ll fight for organized labor by protecting the right to organize. I’ll support vigorous reinvestment in our federal research and development agencies, including NASA, to maintain America’s leadership in science and technology and to foster economic competitiveness."

James Surowiecki has an interesting piece in the New Yorker this week on the difference between "rules-based" and "principles-based" approaches to regulation. (It includes a terrific analogy: American football is rules-based, while soccer is principles-based.)

Along the way, Surowiecki makes a sobering argument about the federal government's recent performance in the regulatory arena:

In recent years, regulatory failures have occurred less because of bad rules than because of bad regulators. This is partly because Congress, following the Bush Administration’s lead, has underfunded regulatory agencies. The Consumer Products Safety Commission, for instance, has the authority to regulate toys from China but is hard pressed to do so, having only half as many employees as it had in 1980. To make things worse, many regulators have been captured by the industries they’re regulating, or are hostile to the regulations they’re responsible for enforcing. The recently publicized maintenance problems at Southwest Airlines were discovered years ago, but supervisors discouraged inspectors from cracking down. Federal bank regulators had the power to discover and curb the fraud and deception that helped fuel the subprime boom, but they were apparently oblivious. In all these cases, the rules were fine—it was the regulators that were the problem.

(On a side note, the vaunted New Yorker fact-checking operation isn't what it once was, apparently. The correct name of the agency referenced above is the Consumer Product Safety Commission.)

Christopher Lee of the Washington Post did a nice job today detailing how President Bush's effort to put federal jobs up for competition from the private sector has fallen short of its goals. But pride compels me to note that from where I sit, Robert Brodsky did just a little bit nicer job more than a month ago with the same subject in the pages of Government Executive.

Speaking of uniforms, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden will be giving his up in July. He's not going anywhere, though. Hayden is going to continue in his job in a civilian capacity. The four-star Air Force general says he's making the shift due to "practical considerations related to military retirement."

Remember the item about the Air Force's move to require its air reserve technicians (who technically are civilian federal employees, but must join the reserves as a condition of their employment) to wear military uniforms on the job? Officials at the American Federation of Government Employees, who represent the technicians, were not happy about the move, and now they've taken action. AFGE has filed an official complaint challenging the policy.

“We are arguing that the regulation regarding the uniforms is capricious and contrary to law,” said Eugene Fidell, an attorney handling the case on behalf of AFGE. “A civilian employee cannot be required to wear a military uniform. Requiring ARTs to wear military dress while serving in their civilian capacity improperly upsets settled expectations and confuses military and civilian status.”

David Walker, who left the Government Accountability Office in March to head the Peter G. Peterson foundation, has another new gig: The Partnership for Public Service has announced that Walker is joining the organization's board of directors. He joins other prominent ex-federal officials on the board, including former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig and former NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe.

(Hat tip: Fedsmith.)

Being president of the United States is a pretty tough job. The hours are long, you can never really escape the office and the pressure is, to say the least, intense at times.

But ex-president is a pretty cushy gig, the Washington Post reports today. First, there's the lifetime pension --$191,300 this year. Then there are "travel costs, postage, office rental and supplies" -- and Secret Service protection. And all of that, of course, is on top of the money and perks former presidents can generate for themselves in the private sector.

First, a press secretary comes to the aid of a reporter in distress, and now the Postal Service is honoring journalists with a series of stamps.

Admit it, federal folks: You like us. You really like us.

From the Federal Railroad Administration: "Trains Transporting the Most Toxic Hazardous Materials Must Use Safest, Most Secure Route."

Sounds like a good plan to me.

What happens when they get hungry at Food and Drug Administration headquarters (in the alternate universe of The Onion):

Hungry FDA Official Orders Massive Pot Pie Recall

Federal officials still working on the Gulf Coast recovery effort may be in for a kick in the pants. On Friday, President Bush named retired Marine Maj. Gen. Douglas V. O’Dell Jr., to be the new coordinator of the effort, replacing Donald E. Powell, who stepped down last month.

O'Dell immediately told the New York Times that his main concern was freeing up the $44 billion of the $120.7 billion authorized by Congress for reconstruction that hasn't been spent yet.

“The challenge for me is to get it out of the clutches of the bureaucracy,” he said. “I’m a muddy-boots marine. I’m about getting things done.”

I'm a little late on this, but there's still time to see the Earth from space on high-definition TV, courtesy of NASA. It's the agency's way of celebrating Earth Day.

This is above and beyond the call of duty for a government press secretary: Calling 911 on behalf of a reporter trapped by an attacker in his home.

Last night, I had the good fortune to attend the Presidential Distinguished Rank Award Banquet, sponsored by the Senior Executives Association (with a little help from Government Executive).

Everything about the event is a great reminder of the importance and value of public service. Before the dinner, you get to hang out in the State Department's Diplomatic Reception Rooms, where you can casually gaze at the 1783 Treaty of Paris and you need to be careful not to set your drink on Thomas Jefferson's writing desk.

Then you get to hear about the truly stunning accompishments of the winners of the distinguished rank awards. (You can read more about them in our special supplement in the April issue of the magazine.) It's genuinely inspiring to be in a roomful of people who have devoted their careers to public service and performed at such a high a level. And it's all the more amazing -- especially in such a classically Washington context -- when you talk to them and realize that they're virtually ego-free about what they've done.

Congratulations to the winners and thanks to SEA for a terrific evening.

John McCain may be a big fan of citizenship and public service, but he's no fan of big government. Here he is yesterday on CNBC's Kudlow and Company, talking about his economic recovery plan:

We need to have a year pause, a year pause on discretionary spending, except for veterans and defense. And let’s scrutinize every agency of government. ... It is not taxes that are insufficient, it’s spending that’s out of control. And one of the areas I would go after first and hardest is defense acquisition.

Yesterday, members of a House Appropriations subcommittee celebrated Tax Day by grilling new IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman about the agency's use of private debt collection agencies. IRS Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson reported early this year that the program has a "dismal return on investment." But that didn't stop the IRS from renewing its contracts with two debt collection firms last month.

Shulman pleaded ignorance of the whole issue, saying he's only been on the job for three weeks and needs more time to study it.

House members seem disinclined to give him that time. After Tuesday's hearing, the House voted 238-189 to prohibit the use of private firms for tax debt collection. “The collection of taxes is an inherently governmental function that should be restricted to properly trained and proficient IRS personnel,” said National Treasury Employees Union president Colleen M. Kelley after the vote.

It's not exactly news that the Defense Department can't get its financial house in order. Still, this piece from Portfolio is a pretty damning indictment of the slow pace of improvements on this front.

Almost a decade ago, Government Executive was reporting that the Pentagon was making progress in financial reform. Four years ago we listed Defense among the agencies said to be on brink of a financial breakthrough. As recently as last fall, Defense comptroller Tina Jonas insisted that the department's financial management was better than perceived. It would be nice if the Pentagon bean-counters could clear the hurdle of being able to produce a clean financial statement, if only because of the symbolic value such an achievement would have.

Are you one of those lucky people who works in a vast cubicle farm, or oversees those who do? If so, you may be interested in "The Moral Life of Cubicles," by David Franz, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Virginia, in The New Atlantis. Franz has an interesting take on how cubicle-based workplaces came into being. Aside from the obvious cost savings associated in replacing individual offices with prefabricated work units, there was this:

Offices in the 1970s and 1980s seemed to their critics burdensome remnants of an older age, symbolic shackles of bureaucracy—a system as inhuman as it was ineffective. Cubicles, by contrast, seemed to lack the fixity, and the constraints of bureaucracy of the old office. Moreover, cubicles eliminated the hierarchical distinctions between managers and workers; every cubicle had an open door, everyone was equally a worker. Empowering and humane, cubicles seemed to create a workplace with a soul.

It hasn't quite worked out that way, has it?

(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)

What do the following people have in common?

• Singer and Psychic Friend Dionne Warwick


• Dick Morris, Fox News analyst and former political adviser to Bill Clinton


• Comedian and actor Sinbad

The answer, USA Today reports, is that the IRS is after all of them for failure to pay taxes. The agency estimates that more than 21 precent of federal income taxes go unpaid each year. But IRS officials also take pains to note that the agency is collecting far more in delinquent taxes and penalties than it did a decade ago ($32 billion in 2007, up from $21 billion in 1998), with a smaller staff.

Forgive me for a little promotion of one of our events. A big one, actually -- our annual Excellence in Government conference. This year, it's actually two one-day conferences, focusing on key issues in federal management. The first, devoted to human capital topics, is coming up on May 12. Here are some of the featured tracks:

• Bring on the Next Generation: Did Your Agency Have You at Hello?


• Why Some Leaders Thrive Where Others Fail in Times of Transition


• The ME Factor: Social Networking, Virtual Worlds


• Reducing Risk during the Presidential Transition in a Post-9/11 Environment


• "The Office:" Working Across Cultures & Generations


• Data-Driven Decision-Making in a Flexible Multisector Environment

Here's a schedule of all the day's events.

The conference will be held at the Ronald Reagan building in Washington. Here's full registration information.

Do you remember what you were paid at the dawn of your career? If you need to jog your memory, or if you just want to see what feds have made over the past several decades, the Office of Personnel Management has put General Schedule pay tables dating back to 1949 on its Web site.

The Chief Human Capital Officers Council released a report last week that could help federal agencies develop better human capital strategies. In the 96-page report, called “Collection of Human Capital Practices,” 12 high-performing agencies describe their approaches to not only performance management, training and telework programs, but pandemic influenza planning, and preparations for the transition to the next presidential administration.

The CHCO Council chose the agencies featured in the report -- which include the Social Security Administration, the National Science Foundation and the Homeland Security Department -- for their human capital successes based on two studies (here and here), and a performance culture index established by the Office of Personnel Management. OPM described the “high performing” agencies as having had “the greatest improvements in performance management.” -- Rafael Enrique Valero

Here's Bush administration management chief Clay Johnson, quoted in Steve Barr's Federal Diary column in the Washington Post, on the latest revelations of misuse of government charge cards:

"The vast majority of civilian employees, government employees, use the cards responsibly. At the same time, I would say there is abuse, and the goal is zero, and we need to make it zero."

Zero? Setting aside the issue of whether that's at all realistic, it strikes me that getting even close to such a goal would be a lot more expensive than simply setting tough controls and accepting some minimal level of abuse as unavoidable. I know the anecdotes about misuse of cards are irritating (and, at the same time, amusing) but eliminating them entirely seems like a very costly and labor-intensive endeavor. Why does that have to be the standard for an effective card program?

(Hat tip: IEC Journal.)

From the House Small Business Committee: "House Approves Resolution Recognizing The Work of American Plumbers."

I can't believe I forgot to blog about this yesterday: The Washington Post has blown the lid off the biggest Washington story in ages: An analysis of maps reveals conclusively that the city is the lair of Satan. The scoop comes courtesy of David Bay, director of Cutting Edge Ministries in Lexington, S.C.

The paper reports: "Using Dupont and Logan circles as northern points, Bay instructs, you can trace various interlocking streets to form a demonic pentagram, one that bores directly into 1600 Pennsylvania Ave."

That explains all kinds of things.

Of course, over at BoingBoing, they've reported what might be an even bigger cartographical discovery: "A giant malevolent dachshund bearing down on the Capitol."

Hillary Clinton has made her experience and leadership a centerpiece of her presidential campaign. She may live to regret that.

In a piece in The Politico today, Jim VandeHei and David Paul Kuhn come down pretty hard on Clinton:

Clinton has overseen two major staff shake-ups in two months. She has left a trail of unpaid bills and unhappy vendors and had to loan her own campaign $5 million to keep it afloat in January. Her campaign badly underestimated her main adversary, Barack Obama, miscalculated the importance of organizing caucus states and was caught flat-footed after failing to lock up the nomination on Super Tuesday.

It would be easy to dismiss all of this as fairly conventional political stumbling — if she hadn’t made her supreme readiness and managerial competence the central issue of her presidential campaign.

As I've already noted, I think running a campaign effectively is not necessarily an indicator that a person will be great at being CEO of a sprawling federal bureaucracy. But running a campaign ineffectively certainly isn't a good sign.

EPA's Marcus Peacock, government's most consistently entertaining blogger, is at it again, with a post involving his dog, Greek Hedonists, poop and the agency's regional structure. Tell me you're not going to click on that.

In an annual survey conducted by a think tank devoted to assessing privacy issues, the U.S. Postal Service is rated by Americans as the most trusted government agency -- for the fourth year in a row.

In the Ponemon Institute report, which assessed 74 federal agencies, the Postal Service earned a "privacy trust score" of 86 percent, up from 83 percent last year. The other top trusted agencies were the Federal Trade Commission, the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, the Census Bureau and the National Institutes of Health.

The least trusted agencies were U.S. Customs and Border Protection (with a score of only 20 percent), the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Justice Department and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. That's not a surprising list, given the hot-button nature of immigration issues, recent scandals at Justice and the super-secret mission of spy agencies.

Looks like the Federal Aviation Administration official who drew criticism over the agency's handling of missed safety inspections at Southwest Airlines is out of the safety business. Thomas Stuckey is no longer the director of flight standards for the five-state Southwest region, FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown told the Associated Press. He's been reassigned to “an administrative position that doesn’t have safety oversight.”

Before it fades into the mists of time, I wanted to take note of John McCain's speech last week at the Naval Academy. Here's what he had to say on the subject of government, public service and citizenship:

I'm a conservative, and I believe it is a very healthy thing for Americans to be skeptical about the purposes and practices of public officials. We shouldn't expect too much from government -- nor should it expect too much from us. Self-reliance -- not foisting our responsibilities off on others -- is the ethic that made America great.

But when healthy skepticism sours into corrosive cynicism, our expectations of our government become reduced to the delivery of services. And to some people the expectations of liberty are reduced to the right to choose among competing brands of designer coffee.

What is lost is, in a word, citizenship. For too many Americans, the idea of good citizenship does not extend beyond walking into a voting booth every two or four years and pulling a lever. And too few Americans demand of themselves even that first obligation of self-government.

But citizenship properly understood is what Ronald Reagan was talking about when he said that Americans "are a nation that has a government -- not the other way around." Citizenship is not just the imposition of the mundane duties of democracy. Nor is it the unqualified entitlement to the protections and services of the state.

Citizenship thrives in the communal spaces where government is absent. Anywhere Americans come together to govern their lives and their communities -- in families, churches, synagogues, museums, symphonies, the Little League, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, the Salvation Army or the VFW -- they are exercising their citizenship.

Citizenship is defined by countless acts of love, kindness and courage that have no witness or heraldry and are especially commendable because they are unrecorded.

Although it exists apart from government, citizenship is the habits and institutions that preserve democracy. It is the ways, small and large, we come together to govern ourselves. Citizenship is the responsible exercise of freedom, and is indispensable to the proper functioning of a democracy. ...

Love of country, my friends, is another way of saying love of your fellow countrymen -- a truth I learned a long time ago in a country very different from ours.

That is the good cause that summons every American to service. If you find faults with our country, make it a better one. If you are disappointed with the mistakes of government, join its ranks and work to correct them. I hope more Americans would consider enlisting in our Armed Forces. I hope more would consider running for public office or working in federal, state and local governments. But there are many public causes where your service can make our country a stronger, better one than we inherited. Wherever there is a hungry child, a great cause exists. Where there is an illiterate adult, a great cause exists. Wherever there are people who are denied the basic rights of Man, a great cause exists. Wherever there is suffering, a great cause exists.

Last night, the Associated Press moved a story over the wires that went out with this headline: "AP Impact: VA Workers Charge $2.6B on Gov't Credit Cards at Luxury Hotels, High-End Retailers."

That's a grabber, huh? And given the fact that we at Government Executive have reported on these kinds of abuses at various agencies in the past, it didn't come as that much of a surprise.

But it turns out there's quite a bit less here than meets the eye. First of all, the $2.6 billion figure refers to the total amount of spending by Veterans Affairs employees using federal purchase cards. And a detailed list of purchases obtained by the AP "reveals few outward signs of questionable spending, with hundreds of purchases at prosthetic, orthopedic and other medical supply stores," the story acknowledges.

Even the stuff the AP characterizes as questionable seems fairly routine -- and doesn't add up to a lot of dollars. It includes purchases totaling $8,471 at Sharper Image, a high-tech electronics specialty store, and less than $2,000 worth of spending at Franklin Covey, purveyor of high-end planners for executives. Those purchases could be perfectly legitimate, and they're certainly not on the order of using a government card to buy photos of Elvis or get DirecTV service.

The AP report also noted that "employees based at VA headquarters made credit card charges at Las Vegas casino hotels totaling $26,198." But the agency is building a VA hospital in the city and -- for better or for worse -- a lot of conferences and events are held there. So $26,000 doesn't seem like an outlandish amount of total spending in Vegas. And the details included in the piece on how the money was spent could be misleading. "One VA headquarters employee appears to have passed up casino hotels by booking at a Holiday Inn Express in Las Vegas for $787.75," the AP notes. But virtually all federal travelers stay at government rates under federal per diem policies, so who's to say if the Holiday Inn Express actually was cheaper?

On the whole, I'm with the folks over at the OhMyGov site on this one: The facts don't appear to support the tone of the article, and the righteous indignation drummed up by the usual-suspects list of members of Congress and heads of watchdog groups quoted in the story isn't terribly convincing.

More and more federal officials are becoming bloggers. But they better be careful. If they really get into it, they might be susceptible to what the New York Times calls "death by blogging."

I don't think I'm in any danger. But you probably already knew that, since I'm not exactly killing myself in terms of sheer numbers of posts lately.

By now I hope you've had a chance to see the story, broken by our sister site Nextgov.com yesterday, on the Census Bureau's decision to dramatically scale back its plans to use handheld computers to conduct the 2010 census. That was followed by a report on the grilling Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez took at the hands of a House Appropriations subcommittee about the move.

In case you didn't see this coming, I would point you to some of the work that Allan Holmes and the members of the team he has assembled at Nextgov have done on this issue over the past several months.

Allan got the ball rolling last summer with a "On the Brink," a piece in Government Executive that noted that the Census Bureau's leap of faith with handhelds "sends shivers down the spines of risk management experts."

Since then he, Gautham Nagesh and Jill Aitoro have followed up with a series of stories leading up to yesterday's blockbuster:

• GAO cites cost, schedule risks in IT projects supporting census (Oct. 10, 2007)


• GAO: Delays in systems testing put 2010 census at risk (Dec. 12, 2007)


• Census program to use handheld computers said to be in 'serious trouble' (Jan. 2, 2008)


• Census Bureau facing huge cost increase, possible delays in 2010 effort (March 5, 2008)

In a recent New Yorker piece, David Owen resurrected the issue of why the United States persists in minting and using pennies. It's common knowledge that it costs the U.S. Mint more to make a penny (1.7 cents) than it's worth. But one problem with eliminating the annoying low-denomination coins would boost our reliance on nickels -- and those cost almost 10 cents to manufacture.

A couple of other factoids from Owen's piece:

• "The U.S. Mint took more than two years to manufacture its first million coins; the Philadelphia Mint now makes that many every forty-five minutes or so."
• "One of the biggest challenges of coin design is portraying realistic-looking three-dimensional facial features on a metal surface that is nearly flat. This difficulty explains why the faces on coins are almost always shown in profile: doing so keeps noses recognizable. The 2006 nickel, which features a likeness of Jefferson ... is the first circulating U.S. coin to have a forward-facing portrait; it is considered by coin aficionados to be an engraving tour de force."

I wonder if Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, was a little late getting to the office this morning. If he was, he has a pretty good excuse: He was on the same plane I was that was stuck on the ground in Minneapolis for three hours in a driving snowstorm while a repair crew fixed a hole in the wing.

I don't travel all that much, but when I do, I trust that agencies like the Transportation Security Administration and the Federal Aviation Administration are doing their jobs and keeping me safe from terrorists and faulty airplanes. Sometimes that involves crossing my fingers just a little, though.

Like last night, as I waited on a plane on the ground for three hours at Minneapois/St. Paul International Airport, in a driving snowstorm, staring out at the wing of an airplane with a hole about four inches across in it. The hole had been covered up by what I swear appeared to be duct tape until moments earlier, when the tape had been ripped off during the de-icing process. We taxied back to the gate and, to my amazement, a couple of mechanics came out, applied more tape (which actually seemed to involve some kind of heat-activated adhesive) and pronounced the plane ready to fly -- which it then did, all the way to Washington.

As nervous as I was watching this whole process unfold, I'm assuming, until the FAA tells me different, that this was a fully approved repair technique. And I feel just a little better about my own duct-tape-based home repair efforts.