GovernmentExecutive.com

The Wall Street Journal reports today that the Bush administration is considering issuing an executive order that would make it more difficult for labor unions to organize workers at federal contractors.

"The executive order would require large government contractors to use secret-ballot elections for union organizing or risk losing government contracts," the paper reported. Unions favor "card-check" systems, under which employees can form a union if a majority of a company's workers sign cards indicating they favor unionization.

Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has expressed support for a federal law that would give unions the option of using card checks whenever they choose.

It's not a done deal that Bush will even sign the order, the Journal reported. Doing so would risk provoking the Democratic Congress to pass legislation to undo the action.

So why did John McCain pick little-known Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate? To hear him tell it, one reason was her willingness to take on government employees. Among the attributes McCain lauded in introducing Palin today was her crusade on "entrenched bureaucracies" and "do-nothing bureaucrats."

Update: Here's some more specific info on Palin's experience as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, from her biography in the Almanac of American Politics:

Palin conflicted with the city’s staff and fired department heads who had stood by her predecessor, leading opponents to call her “Sarah Barracuda”, reviving a nickname she earned on the basketball court for her fierce and adversarial style.

For all the talk this week during the Democratic convention about an alleged rift between the Obama and Clinton camps, there was one telling sign of common ground last night -- on, of all issues, government reform.

When you're a Democrat running for president and you work the phrase "work better and cost less" in reference to the federal government in your acceptance speech, you're sending a very specific message. Because that wasn't just the catchphrase of the Clinton-Gore reinventing government effort, it was a mantra -- in fact, the tagline on all the different reports they produced.

In essence, Obama delivered the Bill Clinton message of 1992: I've got a bunch of liberal ideas to expand government, but I'll find a way to pay for them by making agencies do more with less.

And while we're at it, could Obama be a fan of the Bush administration's Program Assessment Rating Tool as well? After all, if you make a pledge to "go through the federal budget, line by line, eliminating programs that no longer work," you might end up noticing that the guy you want to succeed has set up a fairly sophisticated system to do exactly that.

Shorpy is a blog that specializes in century-old photos, including this great one of what a "computing division" of a federal agency (in this case, the War Department) looked like in 1924:

(Hat tip: BoingBoing)

From Joe Biden's speech last night accepting the Democratic vice presidential nomination:

Let me make this pledge to you right here and now. For every American who is trying to do the right thing, for all those people in government who are honoring their pledge to uphold the law and respect our Constitution, no longer will the eight most dreaded words in the English language be: "The vice president's office is on the phone."

Looks like Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., isn't going to drop his crusade against federal employees who fail to show up for work any time soon. Now he's threatening to add a rider to every appropriations bill requiring agencies to track employee absences without leave and publish the numbers.

"If you have to publish it then we can see," Coburn told Federal News Radio. "You gotta measure it, and you gotta have a plan, and so I'll try to tack a rider on appropriations bills that says you gotta report it. Once you have to report it, management ought to know it, and if they have to report it, they're going to address the problem."

Think the political conventions are all about speeches and parties? Perhaps in an effort to counter that perception, the Democrats are pushing delegates to complete service projects in and around Denver today. Michelle Obama and Jill Biden will be assembling care packages for troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The use of contract security guards at federal buildings has raised all kinds of issues in recent years. But here's a new one.

When Lapriss Gilbert went to the Social Security office in Van Nuys, Calif., Monday, she was quickly ordered to leave the premises. The problem? A contract security guard didn't like the t-shirt she was wearing, which advertised the Web site lesbian.com.

The guard, who worked for a contractor hired by the Homeland Security Department's Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau, told Gilbert that the government's official Rules and Regulations Governing Conduct on Federal Property gave him the authority to deny her entry for wearing the shirt.

That's not a position endorsed by DHS. Lori Haley, an ICE spokeswoman, told the Los Angeles Daily News the guard was wrong. "We believe that the actions of the contract security guard were inappropriate and unacceptable. We have notified his company, Paragon, of our position in the matter," she said.

(Hat tip: BoingBoing)

How many people does it take to levitate the U.S. Mint building in Denver? Apparently more than 75. National Journal's Convention Daily reports that an effort by that number of protestors at the Democratic National Convention to encircle the building and raise it off the ground -- similar to a protest years ago at the Pentagon -- didn't exactly work out.

Maybe the problem was that the protestors turned out to be "easily outnumbered by police." Or maybe it was the weight of all the coins.

More tales from the TSA: A woman's bra causes her to miss a flight.

The Interagency Ethics Council Journal makes the case today that recent coverage of an investigation of an alleged diploma mill based in Spokane, Wash., was skewed to highlight potential malfeasance by federal employees.

"The diploma mill contained about 9,000 names in its customer database," IEC Journal notes. "Though only about a hundred or so of these names could be identified as federal employees, the headline for the USA Today story focused on those few: 'Probe: Fed employees may have bought fake degrees.' By this time, the news media pattern should be clear: Federal employees are favorite targets."

At the risk of being an apologist for the news media in general, I think there's a simple reason for the way this story has been covered. There's not much public interest at stake in the case of someone in the private sector who happens to buy a fake degree. But Americans have every right to be concerned about people who may have padded their resumes to win appointment to federal jobs for which they aren't actually qualified -- or to receive higher pay for higher education they don't actually have. That's defrauding the taxpayers, and focusing on it seems justified to me.

Colleen M. Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, has emailed her response to the story we posted Friday on an alleged rise in federal employees who skip work without taking leave. Here it is:

Gov Exec’s August 24 story (“Unexcused employees absences on the rise, senator says”) used data from Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma that is clearly politically-driven—as well as speculative and unsupported.

The broad extrapolations and innuendoes in the Coburn document are designed to reach a pre-determined conclusion that federal employees are not doing their jobs for the public. Any such conclusion is baseless.

The long-standing commitment and dedication to duty of federal workers is well-documented and widely-credited with having direct and positive impacts on the lives of all Americans. Federal employees are known go the extra mile in service of their country, and they do so because of the pride they have in their work.

What's the best way to reduce gun deaths in the United States? They're debating that question at the Freakonomics blog at the New York Times.

David Hemenway, professor of health policy and director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center at the Harvard School of Public Health, argues for a bureaucratic solution. He suggests creating a new National Firearm Safety Administration, modeled on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. NHTSA, he says, has "created a series of data systems on motor vehicle crashes and deaths and provided funding for data analysis," which in turn has "enabled us to know which policies work to reduce traffic injuries and which don’t."

A firearm safety agency, Hemenway argues, "should create and maintain comprehensive and detailed national data systems for firearms injuries and deaths and provide funding for research." In addition, he says, it should "require safety and crime-fighting characteristics on all firearms manufactured and sold in the U.S. It should ban from regular civilian use products which are not needed for hunting or protection and which only endanger the public. It should have the power to ensure that there are background checks for all firearm transfers to help prevent guns from being sold to criminals and terrorists."

(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)

"Being on a big military base, even one in a relatively dangerous spot, can feel a bit like being on a cruise ship," writes Graeme Wood in a dispatch on TheAtlantic.com. "Grand exertions are made to ensure comfort, and leisure is organized: basketball at six, bingo at 11."

Writing from Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan, Wood notes the dizzying array of multinational and multicultural restaurants that have been dropped into the war zone, and the other efforts to provide at least some of the comforts of home to a diverse group of coalition forces.

It's common for people to say that easy access to pizza and burger joints makes soldiers soft. (Wood quotes a Vietnam veteran in Iraq, working for DynCorp, as saying that today's soldiers "aren't worth a hair on a Nam vet's ass.") But ultimately, he writes, the real problem may be that making deployed life a pale imitation of the home front could sap troops' morale.

"The happiest soldiers I met, Wood says, "were the ones who spend months at a time in bleak, perilous conditions, and who scorn the doughnuts and menus of their less exposed countrymen."

I'm working my way through Doris Kearns Goodwin's fascinating assessment of the Lincoln presidency, Team of Rivals, trying to gain some insights on how one of the nation's greatest presidents took on the challenge of setting up his administration under especially difficult circumstances.

The book has some terrific details about the management challenges Lincoln faced at the outset of his term, as the Civil War broke out.

"The demands placed on the War Department in the early days of the war were indeed excruciating," Goodwin writes. "Not only were weapons in short supply, but uniforms, blankets, horses, medical supplies, food and everything else necessary to outfit the vast numbers of volunteer soldiers arriving in Washington daily were unobtainable. It would have taken thousands of personnel to handle the varied functions of the quartermasters department, the ordnance office, the engineering department, the medical office and the pay department. Yet in 1861, the War Department consisted of fewer than two hundred people, including clerks, messengers and watchmen."

Whats more, Lincoln believed that many employees in the War Department and other agencies couldn't be trusted to remain loyal to the Union. So he took a highly unusual procurement approach. "With the Cabinet's unanimous consent," Goodwin writes, "he directed [Treasury Secretary Salmon P.] Chase to dispense millions of dollars to a small number of trusted private individuals to negotiate and sign contracts that would mobilize the military. Acting 'without compensation,' the majority of these men did their utmost under the circumstances."

Now that's outsourcing.

I guess you can't blame the Small Business Administration for doing what Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and everybody else is doing these days: Jumping on the Michael Phelps bandwagon.

This factoid just made its way to our offices, courtesy of the folks at the SBA public affairs office:

The Meadowbrook Aquatic & Fitness Club in Baltimore, MD, home training facility of Olympians Michael Phelps and Katie Hoff, received SBA financing through a 504 loan in 1994.

In 1987, new owners purchased Meadowbrook and began a transformation
from a pool of the past to a facility for the future. They wanted to
create an aquatics venue in Baltimore comparable to competitive training
centers in Florida and California. Ground was broken in December of
1994 for the indoor pools which began year-round operation in September
of 1995.

SBA's 504 program provides long-term, fixed-rate, subordinate mortgage
financing for acquiring or renovating capital assets including land,
buildings and equipment.

I guess that the airlines' old policy of charging military service members for the extra bags they need to check as they head off to deployments wasn't working out too well. One by one, airlines are rescinding such requirements, the Associated Press reports.

Here are two things you should not say to an Internal Revenue Service officer if one shows up to ask you about an alleged tax liability of more than $100,000:

• "I should have killed you when I first met you."


• "If you show up again, I'll start shooting."

That's what Anthony Blasi, part owner of A. Blasi & Son Trucking & Earthmoving Inc., is accused of saying to a pair of IRS agents earlier this month. He could spend up to a year in prison and a be fined $100,000 if he's convicted on intimidation and interference charges.

Another wonderful story from the annals of government purchase card abuse: Tristin Napoleon Watson of Maricopa, Ariz., was sentenced this week to six months in federal prison for lying to investigators about using a federal purchase card to buy $2,678.95 worth of pro football tickets (and a parking pass), the Arizona Daily Star reports.

The kicker? Watson's not even a federal employee. He was found to have used a card issued to an employee at the Tucson Federal Correctional Institution to buy the tickets. Two Bureau of Prisons employees were investigated in connection with the incident, but they were cleared.

Fedblog's off to the beach for a little R&R. I'll be back on the job Aug. 18.

So if Army scientist Bruce Ivins had a history of mental problems and access to anthrax, why did it take so long for him to become a suspect in the anthrax killings of 2001?

The New York Times provides at least a partial answer today: Because at the beginning of the investigation, Ivins was nothing but helpful to FBI investigators working the case. He even served as a Red Cross volunteer when the FBI searched a pond near Frederick, Md., in 2002 for clues related to Stephen Hatfill, who was then the leading suspect in the case. Ivins served coffee, doughnuts and chocolate bars to agents before they realized where he worked and told him to leave before he compromised the investigation.

Shocking statistic of the day: Americans 65 and older are more likely than their counterparts in the 18-34 demographic to oppose the use of cell phones on airline flights, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics reports.

Overall, only about four in 10 Americans favor allowing people to use cell phones on airplanes if they don't interfere with aircraft communication systems. About 45 percent are opposed, either because they're not cell phone users or they simply can't stomach the idea of listening to a seatmate yammer throughout an entire flight.

The folks in the latter group have some support on Capitol Hill. The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee recently approved a bill that would make the current Federal Aviation Administration and Federal Communication Commission ban on cell phone use during flights permanent.

I always assumed that every federal employee was at least aware of the Hatch Act, and its limitations on partisan political activities. Apparently not. The Saginaw News reported late last week that three Postal Service employees who serve as elected local government officials in Gratiot County, Mich., were shocked to discover that they were, in fact, serving illegally.

One of the officials, Tresha Graham-Mikek, a rural letter carrier, has been in office as Bethany Township clerk for 12 years. "I don't know what putting letters in mailboxes has to do with being a township clerk," she told the paper. "I've been a carrier for 23 years and the clerk for 12, and it's never been an issue. But the law is the law, and I understand that."

County Clerk Carol A. Vernon got an anonymous letter tipping her off to the situation, but she didn't know anything about the Hatch Act either. So she and county Prosecutor Keith Kushion did a little research, and lo and behold, they discovered that Uncle Sam, did in fact, frown on his employees holding partisan positions.

"Vernon suggested that federal, state or local government employees with partisan positions check with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel in Washington, D.C., to clarify their status," the Saginaw News reported. Yeah, that probably would be a good idea.

Once again, the Washington Times reports on the unnerving habit that members of the Mexican military apparently have of crossing the border into the United States and pointing their weapons at U.S. Border Patrol agents.

Since 1996, there have been more than 200 confirmed incidents in which Mexican military members entered the United States. The Mexican Embassy chalks them up to misunderstandings, saying that's the kind of thing that happens when both sides are trying to patrol the border. Mexican officials also have said in the past that they think outlaws may be wearing Mexican uniforms to throw off U.S. authorities.

The folks at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, which is operated by the Homeland Security Department and includes researchers from the Agriculture Department, boast that they're "proud of our role as America's first line of defense against foreign animal diseases," and that they're "equally proud of our safety record. Not once in our nearly 50 years of operation has an animal pathogen escaped from the island."

Oh really? Well how about a full-fledged animal? Say, maybe, a freakish monster? That's the question managers at the facility have been forced to address since last week, when Gawker began publishing updates on the "Montauk Monster," a weird-looking creature that washed ashore on Long Island not far from the Plum Island facility. (Here's a picture of it.)

As a media frenzy began to build, Plum Island's director, Larry Barrett, insisted that his facility had nothing to do with, well, whatever the thing is. In a statement issued last Thursday, Barnett said:

It is impossible to accurately identify the species of animal from the photo. There is no scale from which to judge its size. Additionally, when a body has had prolonged exposure to water and predators, it can be altered or appear different from its normal form. If we had the actual body, we could tell you what it is; however, from viewing a canine tooth in the picture, we could guess it may be a cat or raccoon. I can state categorically that it is not associated with the work performed at Plum Island Animal Disease Center.

As of yesterday, Barnett's guess had changed a little. In a slightly different statement, he went with "dog or raccoon" as the possibilities.

Oh, well that clears everything up.

Meanwhile, rampant speculation in the blogosphere has centered on everything from a pig to a vole to, of course, the spawn of Satan. My money's on a chupacabra.

Oh boy. Here's more fodder for Chuck Grassley. The Associated Press reports that General Services Administration data shows that the federal government has 642,233 cars in its fleet, and operating them costs $3.4 billion a year.

Now for the factoids that already no doubt have garnered the attention of the senior senator from Iowa:

• At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, fuel consumption and inventory are down, yet overall costs of operating the fleet are up, and officials don't know why.


• Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt's personal driver is paid $90,000 a year.


• Transportation Secretary Mary Peters has two drivers at her disposal.

I think righteous indignation and hearings are in these agencies' and officials' future.

Update: I originally wrote that the AP story was based on a Government Accountability Office report. My apologies for the mistake.

Congratulations to Col. Robert D. Cabana, who was inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame earlier this year.

Cabana, who became an astronaut in 1985, has logged more than 900 hours in space, and commanded the first International Space Station assembly mission. He's currently director of the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.

Cabana, a Minneapolis native, will throw out the first pitch on Aug. 11 when the Minnesota Twins play the New York Yankees at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome.

All of which definitely makes him one of the coolest guys ever to graduate from my high school.

Here's more on the developing government alien coverup conspiracy story. Asked by a reporter what he would do if he "learned that the government knew aliens had visited Earth, and the public didn't know," Barack Obama had a simple answer yesterday: "It depends on what these aliens were like, and whether they were Democrats or Republicans."

Here's the video proof:

(Hat tip: Politico's Ben Smith, via Wonkette)

When soldiers deploy to Iraq, they need to bring a lot of gear -- uniforms, boots and other equipment. When Staff Sgt. Ashley Serrano, an Army National Guard reservist, left El Paso recently to head to a Guard facility in Texas for training before deployment, his stuff took up three bags.

The El Paso Times reports that American Airlines was happy to accommodate Serrano's gear -- for an extra charge of $100. Rules are rules after all, and American's policy is that military passengers are allowed to check only two bags without incurring an additional charge. (Since June 15, civilian passengers pay for every bag they check on American, starting at $15 and working up to $100 by the third bag.)