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Desiree Rogers, the White House Social Secretary, takes what seems to me to be an oddly passive stance on Michelle Obama's visits to federal departments and agencies in her interview with the Washington Post. Rogers says:

"So, in a way, she is using that role to be a conduit for the American public to say, 'Thank you so much for all the work that you and your family are doing on behalf of the American people' as our as -- her husband is doing the work that he's doing. So, in many respects, I think it's a marvelous use of her time."

I don't mean to say that it's not a good thing that the First Lady is thanking federal employees for their service. It's wonderful. As I've said before, I wish the President was making this tour himself, but sending the First Lady is a gesture of respect at a point where the President faces enormous challenges and time constraints.

But Michelle Obama's been doing more than just conveying thanks on these visits. She's been having closed-press meetings with federal employees. She's taking suggestions. And she's laying out the President's views of how those agencies will operate in service of a larger mission of government. Obviously it remains to be seen what results her tour produces, but it's an engaging effort. Rogers may have her reasons for wanting to simplify the public image of the First Lady. But it does seem to downplay her work to streamline the description too much.

I've noticed in the comments that there's a debate shaping up over whether the pay gap actually exists. So I thought I'd post this story that I wrote a while back, looking at the way that some of the numbers seeking to prove and disprove the pay gap are broken down.

Chuck Grassley really cares about whistleblowers. He cares about them so much that he's asked President Obama to hold a Rose Garden ceremony honoring them, saying:

“In exchange for risking their livelihoods to do what’s right for the good of the country, most whistleblowers are treated like skunks at a Sunday afternoon picnic and often far worse,” Grassley said. “President Obama could help to change this culture of hostility and uproot wrongdoing in government with a Rose Garden ceremony honoring whistleblowers. It would send a message from the top of the bureaucracy on down that whistleblowers should be heard and treated with rewards not reprisals.”

It seems like a really nice idea, except if folks are afraid to go because it would reveal their identities as whistleblowers. Maybe everyone could wear snazzy masks and disguises? I forsee a run on Groucho-Marx-style glasses with attached noses and moustaches.

Elizabeth Newell hunted through the budget summaries yesterday and came up with a whole bunch of management tidbits the administration has planned. What I found most interesting about her article though, was the hints of how the Obama team feels about performance management as a concept:

The summary said Obama will address criticisms of PART by opening up the "insular performance measurement process" to the public, Congress and outside experts. The administration pledged to eliminate "ideological performance goals and replace them with goals Americans care about and that are based on congressional intent and feedback from the people served by government programs."

I guess I find the idea that performance management is perfectly clear to a group of people in government and the process is just being nefariously concealed a little absurd. Performance management is really, really complicated. Setting goals is one thing, but measuring progress towards them is something that everyone involved acknowledges is extremely difficult. And the idea that all the really important goals are ones that can, have been, and will be set by poll numbers seems...well, wrong. Certainly, a whole lot of things agencies were directed to do under the Bush administration were determined by that administration's agenda and ideology. But actual performance management criteria are a lot more procedural than that a lot of the time.

So says the Majority Leader:

“President Obama’s budget is a serious, honest document that truthfully lays out the fiscal challenges we face and the tough choices necessary to meet our Nation’s priorities and restore the economy. While it’s to be expected that during this time of shared sacrifice there will not likely be a federal employee adjustment equal to last year’s level, we must continue to adhere to the long-standing bipartisan principle of pay parity. This is just the beginning of the process, and I intend to work with President Obama to ensure a fair and equal adjustment for both our military and civilian personnel who work side-by-side to protect our Nation and keep our government running.”

Via Melanie Bender, apparently BoingBoing is sponsoring a contest to design the best ID cards for mule tenders...

I'm not going to make a judgement on whether the 2.0 percent pay increase is the right one or not. But this statement from the White House, "the 2010 pay increase for Federal civilian employees, 2.0 percent, is responsive to the current economic climate, bringing Federal pay and benefit practices more in line with the private sector," does seem to ENTIRELY ignore that a gap exists between public and private sector pay. It's probably just bad phrasing. But the phrasing seems a little clueless.

We've had an explosion of comments today, which is awesome. Please keep them coming. It did remind me though that I should post a reminder of our comments policy:

"By using this Service you agree not to post material that is obscene, harassing, defamatory, or otherwise objectionable. Although FedBlog does not monitor comments posted to this site (and has no obligation to), it reserves the right to delete, edit, or move any material that it deems to be in violation of this rule."

So if you posted something but aren't seeing it show up, it's likely because it violated one of these tenets, usually the one about profanity. Feel free to rewrite and resubmit.

But in lighter news, it appears the White House is finally free from the raccoon menace...

NTEU weighs in, and it looks like they may be pushing a bit harder on pay. From their press release:

“We understand that these are tough times, but we are very concerned about breaking the historic linkage of civilian and military pay parity,” said President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU).

“We want to find out why these pay raise numbers came out the way they did,” the NTEU leader further stated, “and what went into the analysis regarding pay parity. We also want to know what other proposals the administration will be pursuing this year that will affect federal workers.” She added that military and federal civilian employees work side by side in support of our nation’s security.

“I am also interested in starting a broader discussion with the White House on federal pay comparability with the private sector and the larger issues around federal pay that have historically been put on hold,” Kelley said.

The International Space Station's Node 3 should TOTALLY be named Serenity. Government should, on the whole, be a lot more like the Joss Whedon-created universe. Although I would personally not support budget appropriations for the Initiative.

The first union to send out a general press release about the budget summary is the American Federation of Government Employees. And while they're not thrilled about the pay raise President Obama proposed, it doesn't look like they're going to the mattresses about it yet either:

“However, AFGE is not happy with less than a full comparability pay raise but understand it given the severity of our nation’s economic situation, including the crisis for public workers at the state and local level,” said AFGE National President John Gage. “We understand that only modest steps can be taken this year to close the remaining pay gap between the federal and non-federal salaries. We also are optimistic in seeing an emphasis on controlling health care costs in the years to come.”

The politics of the pay raise are going to be fascinating to watch. Last year, President Bush proposed that members of the military receive a 3.4 percent pay increase, and members of the civil service receive a 2.9 percent increase, for a 0.5 percent disparity between the groups. The result? Lots of protest by unions, a movement for pay parity on the Hill, and a 3.9 percent pay hike for both groups sent to the President by Congress.

As a matter of politics pay raises were one fight unions seemed to be able to win fairly reliably during the Bush years. The membership of the Federal Labor Relations Authority and the Federal Service Impasses Panel was set by the president. The ability of Transportation Security Administration workers to bargain collectively was controlled by a presidential appointee. The fight over the National Security Personnel System kept union members out of it, but failed to kill the system entirely. The Federal Career Intern Program expanded. The president issued an executive order stripping Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives employees of their bargaining rights. Unions couldn't do a ton of things about those issues, but they could fight over pay raises, and they could win those fights.

Now, in the young Obama administration, federal employee unions have the potential to rack up a whole bunch of wins. Their ally is, at least for now, leading the Federal Labor Relations Authority, and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is contemplating expanding bargaining rights at TSA. A-76 competitions have been suspended.

When you're going to lose a lot of battles, it can be easier to decide where to focus your political capital, because you don't have a lot of choices. When you're going to win, the hard work starts. What priorities do you set? What do you choose to complain about? How much loyalty do you expect from the people you supported? The federal employee unions will have to answer those questions repeatedly over the next four years.

President Obama's budget has some more details--however slight--on the Chief Performance Officer's office and how it will work. Apparently:

Put Performance first. The President is creating a focused team within the White House that will work with agency leaders and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to improve results and outcomes for Federal Government programs while eliminating waste and inefficiency. This unit will be composed of top-performing and highly-trained Government professionals and will be headed by a new Chief Performance Officer (CPO). The CPO will work with Federal agencies to set tough performance targets and hold managers responsible for progress. The President will meet regularly with cabinet officers to review the progress their agencies are making toward meeting performance improvement targets.

I think there's a lot that's promising and interesting here. It would be amazing if assignments to work with the Chief Performance Officer functioned like a detail that drew from lots of different agencies, and became a real incentive to compete for. If the jobs were structured like that, they could lend a lot of prestige to people who are working on management, performance measurement, and human resources issues.

I don't know yet what "[setting] tough performance targets and [holding] managers responsible for progress," will look like, and I don't know that anyone does. But it sounds like Obama plans a flexible framework that can be adapted to agencies' needs.

As a big PDF here. Obama's asking for a 2.9 percent increase in pay for members of the military and 2.0 percent for civilians. More to come, of course, but the numbers are here and they're firm.

According to Marc Ambinder, that's what Obama's got in his budget.

From Robert Brodsky:

The Omnibus spending bill, which passed the House on Wednesday, could spell the end of the highly-controversial public-private job competitions.

The bill includes a one-year government-wide ban on any new A-76 job competitions for federal work under the Office of Management and Budget contracting rules. The job competitions have long been fought by government labor unions and some congressional Democrats.

“These provisions are the clearest sign yet that Congress recognizes the previous administration’s competitive sourcing initiative has been a disaster,” said Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union

The bill would require federal agencies to establish guidelines for insourcing work that is now being performed by private contractors, but at one point was done by federal employees and would prohibit funding for the privatization of federal tax collection.

For your consideration, ladies and gentlemen, former Washington Governor, Gary Locke. I don't know a ton about Locke other than that he's reputed to have a strong background in China, which seems relevant. Any thoughts from anyone who works at Commerce? Email me.

Charlie Dent is arguing that historical re-enactors who tend mules along the Erie Canal should not be required to get Transportation Worker Identification Credentials. I think it's possible there are better uses of Sec. Napolitano's time than answering questions about that particular exception in committee...

When asked whether FEMA should be moved out of DHS: "The issue to me is leadership and operations. If there’s good leadership and management, where it sits in the federal organizational chart becomes less of an acute issue."

Florida Republican Rep. John Mica has never been super-shy about the fact that he's not particularly fond of the nation's air traffic controllers and their union, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. And according to the DC Examiner, he really let rip on the air traffic controller who testified in Congress yesterday about the landing of a passenger plane on the Hudson:

Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., attacked the air traffic controller, Patrick Harten, with a barrage of questions that gave the impression Mica believed the birds shouldn’t take all the blame. Mica, with a tone much different from the other, more appreciative members’, asked if Harten had “dumbed down” the equipment on the afternoon of Sept. 15 — suggesting the possibility that the birds alleged to have caused the trouble went undetected because of his error. Mica continued to heckle the traffic controller with questions, leading to shocked faces in the audience, wide eyes and whispers in the crowd. One member even mumbled, “What an ass.”

Mica, of course, is entitled to his opinions and his personal style. But if he wants to continue playing a lead role in addressing FAA policy, he might use his political capital to better effect.

"Some bureaucrats shred documents. I shred cheese!" That line is delivered by a Dominos spokesman, pitching their new American Legends pizza, from an Oval Office set. The whole thing is deliberately corny and absurd, and I get that, but it just doesn't make any sense. And it seems weirdly out of synch with the gravity of the political season.

On the other hand, I saw the ad during an airing of an NCIS re-run. So perhaps realism isn't the point? All of which reminds me that I really do need to do my long-promised post on feds on TV sometime soon.

I just got out of a meeting with some really nice folks from WorldatWork, which, among other things, provides intensive training to federal agencies who are implementing pay for performance systems. They told me their federal-sector business has DOUBLED in the past year. That's certainly an indicator of where thinking is concentrated on this subject in agencies.

The Obama administration let White House pool reporters sit in on the breakout sessions at the fiscal summit yesterday, and the reporters, especially Jon Ward, the Washington Times writer assigned to the procurement breakout session, came away with some interesting tidbits on how lawmakers from both parties view the fiscal challenges facing government. In the procurement session, Ward wrote, lawmakers returned repeatedly to the workforce issues involved.

Susan Collins, the ranking Republican on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, cited the large number of procurement workers who are retiring. “It all comes down to an insufficient number of procurement officials," she said.

Joe Lieberman, who chairs the committee, said of agencies, “It is obvious that they're not following that law,” against contracting out inherently governmental functions in services contracts. Claire McCaskill, who will be chairing a subcommittee on procurement, said "it's stupid" that it's easier to hire contractors at the Department of Homeland Security than it is to bring in less expensive federal employees. And Darrell Issa, the new ranking member on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said the federal government should be paying premiums to federal employees who stay beyond retirement age.

All of these issues are going to be big this year, so it's great to get a preview of where key lawmakers stand, at least on how hiring and pay ought to work. I just wish Janet Napolitano, the Homeland Security Secretary, hadn't started the breakout session by warning that it might be dry. She shouldn't downplay these issues--they're vital, and they'll get more attention if she calls attention to them without denigrating them.

The announcement of more Obama administration nominees grinds forward, and two of the picks announced yesterday have some resonance for those of us in the federal management community. Dr. Ashton Carter is Obama's pick to be Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics at the Defense Department, and Seth Harris is set to become Deputy Secretary at the Labor Department. I've put their full biographies below the jump, but one thing in each man's resume stood out to me.

First, Carter is a former manager of Cooperative Threat Reduction, the bipartisan program designed by Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar to secure fissile materials in the Former Soviet Union. CTR was a hugely complicated and important effort, and it points to a commitment to internationalism by the Obama administration. While buying up loose nukes and uranium may not exactly be the same thing as ordering new helicopters or computers, it's acquisition none the less, done with very, very high stakes.

Second, Harris is a committed advocate for people with disabilities and workplace flexibilities. Long-time readers may know that both are issues I've covered extensively and am very interested in. Harris is an expert in other facets of labor law, too, but getting the Labor Department up to speed and ready to regulate a workplace that's changed dramatically to accommodate flexible schedules and people with disabilities is going to be a major issue.

Continue reading "Deputies" »

John Kamensky has a thought-provoking and important post up today asking a key question: does the stimulus package create a parallel government? The amount of oversight, reporting, and sheer programmatic mobilization required by the bill are immense. And as Robert Brodsky reports, agencies are already missing the deadlines to get their spending oversight officials in place, in part because Obama hasn't appointed enough high-level people to provide suitable candidates for the positions. It's hard to have a parallel government when you don't really have the government up and running yet either...

President Obama talked a bunch about the line-by-line review of programs his administration is doing at the fiscal responsibility summit today:

To start reducing these deficits, I've committed to going through our budget line by line to root out waste and inefficiency -- a process that Peter and our administration, our team, has already begun. And I'll soon be instructing each member of my Cabinet to go through every item in their budgets, as well. And already we've seen how much money we can save, just in the last 30 days.

Take one example -- the Department of Agriculture has moved some of its training programs online, saving an estimated $1.3 million a year. They're modernizing their financial management system, saving an estimated $17.5 million. They're saving tens of thousands of dollars by cutting back on conferences and travel and other small expenses that add up over time.

So we will replicate these efforts throughout the federal government, eliminating programs that don't work to make room for ones that do -- and making the ones that we keep work better. We'll end the payments to agribusiness that don't need them and eliminate the no-bid contracts that have wasted billions in Iraq. We'll end the tax breaks for companies shipping jobs overseas and we'll stop the fraud and abuse in our Medicare program.

Not to be all Debbie Downer or anything, but the actual identifications of waste Obama cites, rather than the actual changes in policy that he says will save money, are pretty meager. None of these things are tough choices, either; not going to a conference is not a major decision. Moving training online probably has to be done anyway. Modernizations are one-offs, at least in the short term. It'll be interesting to see what happens when--and if--Obama decides to cut a program that wasn't part of his political platform and that still has its adherents.

Megan McArdle and I tend to come at many issues from different perspectives, since she's writing from a well-established political position, and I'm writing as a reporter. But I think this post of hers on the accumulation of rules in the federal bureaucracy is thought-provoking. It's hard to roll back rules once they're in place, and it's an enormously daunting task to even consider going through the entirety of federal regulations to determine which of them ought to be eliminated in the first place. Instead, we discover that a rule is cumbersome when we bump up against it, and then the contingency passes, and the rule's troublesome nature fades from memory again. It's a huge problem. I don't know how it can be fixed, though.

Before I get started again, let me take a minute to thank Elizabeth and Dan for filling in for me last week; I hope y'all still want me back! Blogging is a big thing to take on, so I'm extremely grateful that amidst the stimulus bill, and their day jobs, Elizabeth and Dan took the time to keep FedBlog going.

I'm back after a week in Rome, which, in between eating myself silly in trattorias and wandering through lots and lots of ruins, inspired some thoughts on governance. The thing about Italy is, that while the food is remarkable, and much of Rome at least, is gorgeous, some important parts of the city don't really seem to work. The Forum, for example, one of the most important tourist locations in a country with a tourism economy, doesn't have labels for any of the ruins. Not in English, not in Italian. Nothing. It doesn't mar the beauty of triumphal arches like this one (with something this big, it's hard to miss the point), but some explanation sure might be helpful:

Some of it's political, some of it's personal, but it's all impressive in volume and scope. But it's also clear that the city's just given up fighting that particular battle, and a lot of battles over historical preservation. The church that houses Michaelangelo's Moses looks as if the ceiling is about to start shedding large chunks of plaster. The Colosseum and the Forum look dangerously ill-preserved. At Pompeii, there's moss and plants growing inside the plastic used to protect some of the frescoes that survive. I felt a bit on edge all the time, as if someone in government out to be sweeping in to save this stuff. Historical preservation in the United States may be underfunded, but I'd say the National Park Service in general does quite a fine job of keeping things from looking as if they're about to rot or fall apart.

But I guess I have to remember, as this monument to Garibaldi attests, that Italy is still fairly new to the business of being a unified country:

Or maybe it's just that, as Bill Bryson puts it, "If the Italians had the work ethic of the Japanese they could be masters of the planet." I wouldn't necessarily trade Italian cookery, for example, for historic preservation. But it doesn't seem like it has to be a one-off. Yes, the Mafia is a major problem. Yes, there's a LOT of stuff to protect. Yes, the economy's going to hell in a handbasket. But historic preservation is at the root of Italy's economy, and in Italy, the stuff to be preserved is so significant it ought not to be lost. It shouldn't be a choice, between divine food, and high fashion, and a relaxed way of life, and keeping the Pantheon standing.

Anyway, just some travel thoughts. Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Okay, well, maybe it is. This is -- sniff -- my final post filling in for Alyssa here at FedBlog. There's so much still to cover! For example: What does it mean that Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), who will be leading a Senate subcommittee auditing Defense spending, is an avid and prolific Twitterer? Who will, ultimately, take the helm at Commerce? What, exactly, are Janet Napolitano's plans for DHS? The world may never know! Okay, they will. But I won't get to blog about it!

Anyway: Not to get all Sally Field on you good folks, but a few thanks are in order. Thanks to my wonderful co-blogger, Elizabeth Newell, for being, well, wonderful. Thanks to Alyssa and to Tom Shoop for so graciously lending me this space and your eyeballs for a week and, frankly, letting me say just about whatever I want. Thanks to Svetlania Wiczer for keeping the technical wheels turning behind the scenes. And finally, thanks, of course, to all of you for reading, commenting, and prodding me to think differently and more carefully about issues than I had before. It was truly a fun and gratifying experience.

Now, I'll return to my also-very-cool day job at the National Academy of Public Administration, and more specifically, the Collaboration Project, where we're helping to bring government into the Web 2.0 era if it's the last thing we do. (Also, in case I didn't mention this, my opinions are not necessarily those of my employer.) If you're truly a glutton for punishment, you can also follow me on Twitter at dan_munz; it's a fairly random mix of political observation, miscellany, amusing links, and personal administrivia. (What'd you expect in 140 characters?)

Thanks again for having me -- it's been a blast.

President Obama will inevitably be scrutinized on the number or percentage of campaign promises he keeps now that he’s in office. But with the stimulus package’s explicit preference for fixed-price contracts, he may make progress on one of his wonkier pledges.

The federal management plan Obama laid out in September included a promise to minimize or eliminate the use of noncompetitive and cost-plus contracts in favor of fixed-price or incentive-based contracts.

The new president is using the stimulus as an opportunity to stress that agenda.

“Agencies should emphasize the importance of selecting a contract type that supports requirements for meaningful and measurable outcomes consistent with agency plans for, and the goals of, the Recovery Act,” OMB Director Paul Orszag wrote in guidance to agencies. “Fixed price contracts provide maximum incentive for the contractor to control costs and perform effectively and impose a minimum burden upon t he contracting parties. These contracts expose the government to the least risk.”

But things are never quite that simple. If fixed-price contracts were universally the best deal for the taxpayers, then they would be universally used. But the goal and type of the program must be the driving factor in deciding what type of contract to use. By listing non-competed and non-fixed price contracts in a special section of Recovery.gov, the administration is sending the message that these types of contracts are inherently bad.

There is obviously tension between what is best for the government and what’s best for the contractor, but Professional Services Council President had it right when he said “The question really isn't fixed-price versus cost-type. It's the appropriate use of the appropriate contract in the appropriate environment ... Acquisition strategy should identify the contract type that makes the most sense for each individual circumstance.”

That’s just good common sense.

Even for an avowed techhead like me, this is a truly unnerving development:

A few days ago Dianne Feinstein got into a little bit of trouble for admitting in public that the U.S. drones used to attack terrorist bases in Pakistan are launched from within Pakistan itself. Since the Pakistani government officially opposes the American attacks, they were none too happy about this — and Feinstein later backtracked, saying that she was just repeating something that had been previously reported in the Washington Post.

The News, an English-language newspaper in Pakistan, decided to dig up the truth, so they went to the best source they could find: Google Earth.

Outsourcing National Security functions is one thing; crowdsourcing them is something else entirely.

In my post yesterday about data transparency, I promised to write more today about someone named Vivek Kundra, claiming that simply Googling his name could reveal profound truths about the Obama administration's likely approach to data, transparency, disclosure, and civic engagement.

Okay, so who is Vivek Kundra?

Until recently, residents of Washington, D.C. (myself among them) have known him as Mayor Adrian Fenty's dynamic, innovative Chief Technology Officer. As CTO, among other things, he undertook a massive initiative to basically put a huge amount of data online. Not a portal, not a PDF -- just raw data. Wondering what construction projects are currently underway here in our fair District? Let's just go to the real-time Google Map. Want to keep track of crime in D.C.? Check the RSS feed. Want to track individual contractors and their hourly rates? Not a problem.

Why did I say "until recently"? Because, about two weeks ago, Kundra was tapped to join the Obama Administration as OMB's Administrator for E-Government and Information Technology. The position, created in 2002 by the E-Government Act (pdf), is charged specifically with "provid[ing] effective leadership of Federal Government efforts to develop and promote electronic Government services and processes." (Wikipedia, of all places, has a nice article summarizing the Act's other provisions.) During the Bush years, the job focused primarily on enhancing efficiency, increasing government's capacity to use IT strategically, and providing citizens with clearer access points to various government services.

Of course, technology has moved forward a lot since 2002 (c.f. Whitehouse.gov in 2002!). Today, consumers define the computing experience largely through web-based services like Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and yes, even these crazy blogs -- mashed up through Google Maps and aggregated in RSS. The one thing that nearly all of these divergent services have in common is that they rely on user-generated content -- i.e., external data -- to function. (Think about it: The world's largest supplier of video on the Internet isn't a production company, but instead a company-slash-website that has nothing to do with video production. If you said that would be true in 1996, you'd get looked at awful strange.) Needless to say, and government hasn't exactly caught up. Portals proliferate, but the lifeblood of nearly every application that actual people actually use -- raw data -- is hard to come by.

I have a feeling that's about to change, and you'll (largely) have a man named Vivek Kundra to thank for it. Don't say I didn't warn you.

UPDATE: Via Twitter, Gautham Nagesh reminds me of this great profile of Vivek that ran on Nextgov back in November '08.

As my clever editor Tom Shoop said, the House giveth, and the House taketh away. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent letters to committee chairs yesterday, asking them to schedule oversight hearings examining the budgets of federal agencies under their jurisdiction.

“As our nation continues to confront severe budget deficits as a result of unsound economic policy and lax regulation over the last eight years, it is essential that, as we advance our priorities, House Committees also conduct rigorous oversight of all aspects of federal spending and government operations to help achieve deficit reduction and long-term fiscal responsibility,” Pelosi wrote.

Congressional oversight of agency spending seems like the most obvious of oversight roles. But for Pelosi to say this oversight is necessary to combat the “unsound economic policy and lax regulation over the last eight years” seems a little silly, given the $787 billion elephant in the room.

The push for more oversight hearings coincides with a House Rules change proposed by Rep. John Tanner, D-Tenn., last month which would require committees to hold at least three hearings per year on waste, fraud and abuse in the federal agencies that fall within their purview. Is Tanner the new Waxman?

Since it was announced a few weeks ago that this New York Times op-ed by Bill Kristol would be his last, there's been considerable speculation about what the Times will do with the column space. Gawker proposed the increasingly-ubiquitous Former Bush Person; Slate's ever-curmudgeounly Jack Shafer suggested 'Nobody'. It's quite a quandary: What do you do with the print equivalent of dead air?

If I may make a modest proposal: How about someone who knows about federal government? The op-ed page has some great writers; Paul Krugman in his non-partisan mode is a genuinely lucid explainer of economics, and Nick Kristof is bravely using his column space to report on things that, frankly, no one else wants to talk about. But there's no one there who really understands how federal government works, from the inside and at a detailed level, and how to explain that in a relevant way to the average reader. Particularly given the more active role that government is likely to begin taking in our economy and our lives, at least in the short-term, I think we would all benefit from having a voice on that page that demystifies the black box here in D.C. for the 300 million citizens (and counting!) that it serves.

Okay, so who? Well, the obvious candidate would be FedBlog's own Alyssa Rosenberg! (And that's how you make sure you get invited back.) But assuming she's unavailable, I think there are a few good candidates. Paul Light, the Paulette Goddard Professor of Public Service at NYU's Wagner school, has been a visible and prolific writer about how the sausage is made. Also from NYU Wagner, Rogan Kersh, who I've had the privilege of knowing personally, is a similarly gifted writer with a true grasp of the nuance of how law becomes policy becomes reality. Don Kettl, the Director of UPenn's Fels Institute of Government, has just written a great book on how to bring government into the 21st century, and it's full of ideas that deserve a broader audience.

These are just a few good candidates; there are tons more. Who do you think belongs in the Op-Fed slot?

From Brittany Ballenstedt:

Office of Personnel Management Deputy Director Howard Weizmann has stepped down to lead the human resources practice at EquaTerra, a Texas-based consulting firm. During his tenure at OPM, Weizmann was well-known for his efforts to overhaul the federal hiring process. At EquaTerra, he will assist federal agencies and departments in improving human resources functions to generate better performance.

The Onion once again blurs the line between fact and parody:

FDA Prepares Nation For Switch To Digital Food Format

WASHINGTON—Urging the estimated 60 million Americans who have not yet made the transition to the more advanced form of sustenance to do so as soon as possible, acting FDA commissioner Frank Torti announced Wednesday that the nationwide conversion to Digital Food (DF) will take place on Apr.17, 2009. "The only thing consumers who currently rely on analog foods will need is a digital converter box, which you can purchase at any grocery store," Torti said at a press conference, adding that every American household is eligible for a $40 coupon to digitize its current pantry. "DF offers higher texture quality and better taste, as well as multiple spice choices and interactive capabilities. I must stress, however, that after the deadline you will no longer be able to eat your current food." On the heels of the announcement, President Obama has begun pressuring the Senate to pass legislation that would require all food to be completely wireless by 2015.

Warning: Long post ahead!

In comments to this post about Recovery.gov, commenter "Concerned Retiree" makes the fair point that a lot of folks' predictions about how great it will be When We All Have Data have a...vaguely aspirational quality to them. Or, as Concerned puts it:

The heart of the matter - I say -- is simply what you -- Munz and Newell - or your blog references -- e.g. WaPo -- expect, predict, or speculate will occur as the Administration showers more and more data - let's assume accurate data and relevant data -- on the public. The story is the result, NOT the equipment of delivery – it’s what IN the letter, not the media. I'm a pessimist, or let's say a restrained realist.

My immediate reaction is that Concerned Retiree should probably cut three or four carafes of espresso out of their morning routine. But this really is a legitimate question: Does this kind of transparency actually improve government? Where's the beef?

First, it's worth acknowledging that if Policy X is fundamentally ill-equipped to meet its intended goal (say, saving the American economy), there's nothing about implementing Policy X really transparently that's going to change that. Transparency is a procedural virtue. That said, assuming Policy X isn't totally off-the-rails wacky, does transparency actually improve implementation? The answer is Absolutely, for two reasons.

First, particularly when it comes to data, transparency means customizability, which means citizen engagement. Government has spent years believing that transparency means "put stuff up on our website." But as DOT CIO Dan Mintz is fond of saying, TV isn't radio with pictures, and government 2.0 isn't putting documents online. So what is government 2.0? President Obama spoke repeatedly during the campaign about iPod Government -- the idea that government should be like every other web 2.0 service in the universe: lightweight, portable, and easy to integrate into your life and customize to your needs and interests. Government should be a push service.

This also gives me a chance to cite this great Atlantic article about iPod Government in action at San Francisco's transit authority. (Read the whole thing: Obama himself makes an appearance!) For years, transparency advocates have had the basic problem that, like a horse to water, you can post stuff online, but you can't make people care. Publishing data out, and letting enterprising citizens remix and redistribute it in ways that interest them, can actually make people care. That's not trivial, and if you think this isn't the route that the Obama folks are going to take, just Google "Vivek Kundra" and see what comes up. (More on this tomorrow.)

A second, related point is that transparency is the heart of accountability. There's a famous story about FDR where he's meeting with a group of constituents who are pushing a policy proposal that he likes but that really doesn't have much popular support. Finally, at the end of the meeting, he said: "I agree with you. I want to do it. Now, make me do it." Accountable government requires citizens who are well-informed enough to tell government what they'd like done differently; in other words, it enhances our ability to "make them do it." If you think this hasn't worked in practice, I refer you to this case study of TSA's Evolution of Security blog*:

Site administrators on February 4th, 2008 began receiving questions from concerned passengers about airports that were requiring all electronics including blackberrys and iPods to be removed from carry-on bags. TSA conducted a subsequent investigation and learned that the exercises had been set up by local TSA offices and were not part of any national security strategy. The agency promptly stopped the exercises, and all airports returned to standard security procedures regarding electronics. On February 6th, Evolution of Security issued a post entitled "Hooray for Bloggers" which thanked the online community for improving TSA operations.

Obviously, this also requires that government is willing to listen to what people say once they have the facts. But if they are, some truly high-quality governance can take place. It's not hard to see how this same kind of thing (times 787 billion!) could work with the ARRA funds.

So, Concerned Retiree: No, publishing data won't suddenly make our banks solvent or resurrect our manufacturing base. But it actually might help ensure that when government tries to do these things, citizens are informed, engaged, and leading the way to better outcomes.

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* Note: This content is content is courtesy of an initiative run by my employer, the National Academy of Public Administration.

The Cable reports on a bunch of new names who are likely to enter the Pentagon*, thus beginning to fill out DoD's most senior civilian leadership ranks.

They're all interesting names, but one that stuck out at me is Phillip Carter, who will be Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Issues. The reason for this is that Carter, in addition to being a veteran and truly superb writer on military affairs, is...a blogger. (He's currently at the Washington Post, but wrote his own blog long before that.)

In fact, it turns out that there are actually a non-trivial number of bloggers in relatively senior-level administration positions. I don't think any Cabinet Secretaries count themselves among the blogging elite, but cabinet-level OMB Director Peter Orszag started a great blog back when he ran CBO (his posts were much more conversational than current Director Steve Elmendorf's -- sorry, Steve!). There's also some law bloggers joining the ranks of government, such as Marty Lederman at DoJ's Office of Legal Counsel and Cass Sunstein at OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. I'm pretty sure a few of Obama's National Security appointments have been Democracy Arsenal alums. And Joe Biden's office may as well be sitting in the basement with its pajamas covered in Cheeto dust! Spokesman/press wrangler Jay Carney was a Swamplander, and top economic advisor Jared Bernstein held court at Talking Points Memo (literally!) before joining the administration. Sanjay Gupta sort-of-counts, if he's ever officially appointed Surgeon General. Am I missing anyone?

I note this all because actual, successful blogging requires a much different kind of voice and relationship with "the public" than we're accustomed to seeing in government. It involves pulling back the curtain on process, being self-effacing, and recognizing that good ideas and noteworthy arguments mostly start in other places -- all traits that you don't get from most agency communications shops. So here's hoping that the culture of blogging trickles down, in some small measure, from these elite few to the whole bureaucracy. The idea of a government full of bloggers may scare the pants off of some folks, but for my money, it's an incredibly effective medium for letting people know more about your mission, why you do what you do, and where your head is at on any given day -- and don't we all wonder where government's head is at from time to time?

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* Doesn't "Enter the Pentagon!" sound like a phrase that should kick off a cage wrestling match?

WaPo's Dan Froomkin has a helpful roundup of reactions to the newly-launched Recovery.gov. Particularly worth reading is Julian Sanchez, who has an interesting take on the unintended consequences of federal transparency schemes:

The real test of the site's efficacy, of course, will come as actual data about funded projects begins to pour in. And while it's easy to celebrate an effort to provide greater political transparency, it may also be worth recalling the fate of the congressional franking privilege: meant to enable legislators to keep their constituents informed about matters of public concern, it's become primarily a means of mailing out free, self-congratulatory press releases. Given that the current incarnation of the site is arguably an ad for an "unprecedented effort to jumpstart our economy, create or save millions of jobs, and put a down payment on addressing long-neglected challenges so our country can thrive in the 21st century," the best recipe for accountability may be to ignore the site itself and wait to see what third-party analysts make of that exportable data.

The SBA is warning small businesses of an ongoing scam and urging them not to respond to letters asking for bank account information in order to qualify the businesses for federal tax rebates.

The fraudulent letters were sent out with what appears to be an SBA letterhead to small businesses across the country, advising recipients that they may be eligible for a tax rebate under the Economic Stimulus Act, and that SBA is assessing their eligibility for such a rebate. The letter asks the small business to provide the name of its bank and account number.

The SBA is comparing the scheme to e-mail "phishing" schemes which seek personal data and financial account information that another party to access and individual’s bank accounts or to engage in identity theft.

SBA asks that anyone who receives the letter report it to the SBA Office of the Inspector General Fraud Line at 1 (800) 767-0385, or OIGHotline@sba.gov.

Yesterday, Elizabeth had a great post about OMB's newly-issued reporting requirements for the dispersal of ARRA funds, including some specific provisions about Recovery.gov. Today, OPM is getting in on the act, announcing an interagency forum to remind departments and agencies -- CHCOs in particular -- of the many flexibilities they have in hiring or requesting to hire new personnel to support the increased reporting and contracting workload that ARRA is sure to bring. It's good to see that, even with an acting head in place (free John Berry!), OPM is stepping up to make sure the stimulus is fully staffed.

OMB distributed initial guidance to agencies today on how to implement the stimulus package. We’ll have a full story up in a few hours but I wanted to share some initial thoughts, particularly on agencies’ reporting requirements for Recovery.gov.

-- Agencies must establish policies for posting to the ‘Announcements’ section of the site in press release form in addition to providing the financial data and summary descriptions of all major actions.

-- Recovery.gov will not just consolidate existing data; it requires more extensive reporting than existing regulations. For example, under the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, agencies are only required to report information above $25,000 to USASpending.gov. The stimulus act requires reporting on ALL funding, although guidance on reporting these small actions is till forthcoming.

-- OMB is stressing the importance of accuracy in Recovery.gov data. Agencies are expected to complete reviews of the information before it is posted on the site and an information quality point-of-contact will be listed on each agency’s Recovery.gov page.

-- For contracts over $500,000, agencies must provide a summary of the contract or order, including a description of the required products and services, to be posted online.

Points like these litter the 62-page memo. Some of the recovery reporting, I imagine, will just entail extending the parameters of existing requirements, but some will cost significant time and effort. Writing press releases and reviewing financial data takes manpower; do agencies have it? The other unknown is the extent to which the White House and OMB can come down on agencies for complying with these reporting guidelines. It’s one thing if agencies are dragging their feet to avoid being transparent, it’s quite another if they don’t have the capacity to meet the requirements.

Via kottke, the good folks at 26 Variable have produced a startling interactive chart of market capitalization for various firms over the past year.

This isn't directly government related, but with all the clamor for sites like Recovery.gov to post data, it's worth pointing out the great things that ordinary folks could do if government freed more of its raw data unto the masses. As platforms for mashing up data become more and more ubiquitous and user-friendly, the claim that government is the only source of "official" data is going to get less tenable. (Google Flu Trends, anyone?) More cynically, the rise of the interactive web has only added truth to the old adage that a lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.

If government is going to keep ensuring that its data is "The Data" on any given issue, it's going to have to make sure that this data is utterly ubiquitous, transparent, and easy to spin into any number of eye-catching and (hopefully) elucidating mashups. Data should be a national asset, and making it free is a critical way to maintain government's relevance to the citizen.

GAO's RSS feed is a truly excellent source of both information and amusement. Today, we learn that: Executive Office of the President Fiscal Year 2007 Certificated Expenditures Were Used for Authorized Purposes (pdf). The text of the report itself begins:

Pursuant to 3 U.S.C. §§ 105(d) and 106(b), we reviewed certificated expenditures from fiscal year 2007 appropriations of the President of the United States and the Vice President of the United States.

If GAO says you're in the Executive Branch, then by golly, that's where you are!

While we're on the topic, it's worth noting that there's a surprisingly large amount of Twitter activity being conducted by the government. The (apparently bankrupt) consulting firm BearingPoint has compiled a great government Twitter directory.

Blogger Ana Marie Cox, of Wonkette fame, has discovered the Federal Register! Cox described it as “actually pretty fascinating” on her Twitter stream this morning, which may or may not be hilarious to those of us who have to sift through it every day.

She particularly got a kick out of this notice from the SEC that “pursuant to the provisions of the
Government in the Sunshine Act … the Securities and Exchange Commission will hold a Closed Meeting on Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 2 p.m.”

Cox’s quip about the ironic notice sent off a little flurry of jokes about the Federal Register, which is not exactly inviting to the general public. I’d be curious how many of our readers check in with the Federal Register regularly and even more curious if anyone else finds it “actually pretty fascinating.”

With all the focus on folks transitioning into the new administration, we sometimes forget to keep track of the folks leaving the last one. This morning brings news of Michael Mukasey's next stop: Debevoise & Plimpton, a high-powered D.C. litigation outfit.

Possibly worth noting is Mukasey's reason for joining Debevoise, rather than his old firm, Patterson Belknap. Per an interview with the WSJ Law Blog:

Why did you choose Debevoise?

It’s particularly strong in litigation and in conducting major corporate investigations and preparing reports to boards. Also, it has many former government lawyers, including Mary Jo.

Yeah, I guess that should keep him pretty busy for the next decade or so.

One of the more fascinating parts of this transition has been watching new Secretaries show up at various departments and be greeted as liberators. A notable exception, of course, has been Commerce, where Acting Secretary Otto Wolff labors in obscurity and employees are still waiting for new leadership to be put in place.

All of this, predictably, has inspired a fresh round of blogospheric navel-gazing about the Commerce Department's raison d'être. Harold Meyerson, tongue firmly in cheek, contemplates the Department's role in a post-centralized-industrial-base world. David Rothkopf, a former Acting Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade (and author of a great book on the NSC), puts things less delicately but ultimately comes to the right conclusion:

Here's the problem: the job of this administration is to rebuild our economy and for all its myriad structural flaws and like of budgetary clout, the Commerce Department is the only place with anything like the capability to play a role this area. High financial policy types don't typically think much about the grunt work of job-creation or supporting the businesses that actually create the jobs. And we have been so ideologically opposed to anything that had a hint of industrial policy to it for so long that there is no capability elsewhere to help determine where to best invest stimulus money or what the future of the U.S. economy will look like.

Bingo. The Obama Administration has made a point of noting that this whole stimulus deal depends on something like 90% of the jobs being created in the private sector. That, of course, requires cajoling leaders of non-decrepit industries to get back into gear and start making stuff again. I think it's great that Obama is engaged in this issue, but when you've got the President himself personally congratulating individual corporate executives on their continued participation in the economy, there's a capacity issue somewhere along the line. While we wait to learn who will ultimately take the Commerce gig, it's important to remember why the post exists in the first place, and that whatever you think of the Department's org chart, the top job is one vacancy that needs filling ASAP.

The Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee has already announced the first of what is sure to be a very, very long string of oversight hearings on the stimulus.

Sens. Lieberman and Collins said they will hold a hearing on March 5, with OMB Director Peter Orszag, GAO Acting Comptroller General Eugene Dodaro and Phyllis Fong, chair of the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, testifying.

The senators said in a press release that their inquiry will focus on “ensuring that appropriate measures are taken to prevent cost overruns as agencies enter into contracts to spend [American Recovery and Reinvestment Act] funds, that strict oversight of contractor performance occurs, that grant conditions are met, and that fraud is promptly prosecuted.”

By listing their specific concerns, though, Lieberman and Collins, are highlighting the government’s failure to prevent cost overruns, poor performance and fraud in the past, both during contingencies like Katrina, Iraq and Afghanistan and in everyday procurements. Despite the additional funding for GAO and inspectors general attached to the stimulus, it seems unrealistic to expect more from federal agencies during this spending spree than you’d see on any given Monday/Tuesday/Thursday.

It will be very interesting to see who becomes the scapegoat for the inevitable waste, fraud and abuse of stimulus funds. It seems likely with a heavily Democratic congress that lawmakers would turn their ire on contractors rather than Obama administration officials, but Republicans like Rep. Darrel Issa, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, are likely to play a prominent oversight role.

John Kamensky of the IBM Center for the Business of Government, whose blog is required reading, has a great post about the myriad contracting-related difficulties that stand in the way of actually Welcoming Our New Stimulus Overlords -- including this little factoid:

Last year, the IBM Center co-sponsored with George Mason University a series of acquisition reform seminars with leading figures in the federal acquisition community. They found that “the federal government spends almost half a trillion dollars a year on contracted support. This comprises over two-fifths of all discretionary spending.” The Stimulus Bill will nearly double that activity.

Read the whole thing.

Yesterday, I expressed hope that Recovery.gov, the Administration's planned stimulus-tracking site, would employ some minimal level of collaborative functionality to actually engage people in tracking the funds dispersed under ARRA. Today, the site has already gone live (evidently the White House New Media team isn't functioning on Mountain Time), and via Twitter, Slate's John Dickerson has the first review:

Continuing the administration's effort to break new ground in revitalizing the press release, they have launched www.recovery.gov

Unfortunately, I'm inclined to sort-of agree. The site does have some cool features, such as a map of (estimated) saved jobs and a front-page timeline of milestones. As I said yesterday, this stuff isn't trivial. Explaining what's actually in a multi-hundred-page bill that contains lines like "subparagraph (E) of section 34(a)(1) of the Federal Fire Prevention and Control Act of 1974 (15 U.S.C. 2229a(a)(1)(E)) shall not apply with respect to funds appropriated in this or any other Act making appropriations for fiscal year 2009 or 2010 for grants under such section 34" is a legitimately useful public service, and a nod towards the fact that citizen participation requires a citizenry that can figure out what on earth you're doing. That said, in terms of actually engaging citizens in the economic recovery, I think it's a missed opportunity.


UPDATE: Micah Sifry has more on what is and isn't missing on Recovery.gov. My favorite:

Data. Data. Data. Of course, with the act three hours old, there just isn't much yet. That said, whether Recovery.gov will give open-government advocates the raw data that they're hungering for is still an open question. The site is, thus far, populated by the shiny consumer-end charts. A that's good start, but no replacement, advocates say, for raw XML data then can then use for mash-ups and number crunching.

re: Elizabeth's post below: It looks like that's just one of several department-wide reviews that Secretary Napolitano has ordered.

DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano announced a new department-wide efficiency effort this morning, designed at “challenging every agency, component and office to generate new efficiencies and to promote greater accountability, transparency and customer satisfaction.”

The action directive establishes an Efficiency Review Initiative Steering Committee, composed of key leaders from within DHS offices and component agencies, to meet before the end of the month. The committee will be charged with identifying and developing strategies to reduce costs, streamline processes, eliminate duplication and improve transparency and customer service.

Napolitano also charged each agency with initiating an internal review of current efforts related to improving efficiency, which will be incorporated into a department-wide inventory. According to DHS, the initiative is similar to one Napolitano oversaw as governor of Arizona. The Arizona efficiency initiative focused on procurement, energy conservation, travel, fleet management, training and electronic communications and resulted in more than $1 billion in savings and cost avoidances for the state.

Government observers are justifiably skeptical about the creation of steering committees to handle massive management challenges like those at DHS, but at least the new secretary is clearly delineating management and efficiency as a priority. We’ll see how components respond and what this committee comes up with.

VA and DoD are notorious for being hampered by coordination issues when it comes to veterans. Maybe this will help:

On Friday, the White House announced its intention to nominate W. Scott Gould, a former Navy Reserve intelligence officer, to be VA deputy secretary under retired Army Gen. Eric Shinseki, the former Army chief of staff recently named to head VA...Gould is married to Michelle Flournoy, whom Obama has nominated to be undersecretary of defense for policy.

On Monday, the Washington Post ran a piece indicating that Tom Daschle's double-withdrawal from both HHS and White House Office of Health Reform (OHR) has health care reform advocates worried that, Obama's reassurances to the contrary notwithstanding, their agenda might be stalled out for now. But James Capretta at The Corner (yes, that The Corner) makes the point that even without Daschle, health care has an eager and capable advocate in the White House:

But it’s seems just as likely that Obama’s health agenda is still moving forward, just with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), not HHS, in the driver’s seat — at least for now.

OMB’s power tends to rise at the beginning of a new presidency anyway. Cabinet departments and agencies take months to get re-organized when their political leadership leaves en masse, as they did at HHS on January 20th. That leaves a power vacuum which OMB’s staff is eager to fill.

Capretta goes on to note that OMB's new Director, Peter Orszag, chosen in large measure because of his knowledge of and advocacy for serious, structural health care reform.

On one level, this makes sense. Orszag knows the issue, and you probably won't find a better source of insight on how the Senate -- as well as the all-important CBO, which Orszag used to head -- will react to any given reform proposal. Plus, putting health care reform with OMB would be a powerful way of sticking with the administration's argument that it is complementary to, rather than in opposition with, fiscal austerity. That said, I think it also raises two concerns:

• What happens to Jeanne Lambrew? She's currently Deputy Director of an office that doesn't have a Director, and while no one doubts her ability, I get the sense that she's not a heavy enough hitter to have the ear of the President the way that a Tom Daschle would have. Having OMB step in to fill the health care vacuum temporarily is fine, but if they try to take lead on the issue long-term -- which The Law Of Bureaucractic Inertia suggests they might -- there's going to be some major internal confusion about what, exactly, Ms. Lambrew is supposed to be doing. With all the external stakeholders that health care reform is likely to involve, this could spell doom.
• Would this portend the abandonment of a public-centric approach to selling health care reform? One of the lessons that Team O has allegedly learned from the stimulus debate is that their boss strengthens his hand by going on the road, and probably weakens it when he stays in DC. Daschle's perfunctory tenure was rife with YouTube videos, town hall meetings, and other similar public outreach initiatives; it's hard to imagine that OMB could or would want to duplicate that effort. Orszag may be an expert navigator of the Senate, but navigating isn't the same as manipulating, and ultimately, most Senators are going to vote whichever way they think gets them re-elected. In other words, public pressure is key.

Don't get me wrong; Orszag was a great choice for OMB and would probably be a good steward of the administration's health care reform agenda while the search for Daschle v.2.0 is ongoing. But letting that portfolio mission-creep its way over to OMB in the longer term could wind up really complicating things.

UPDATE: Ezra Klein has a more in-depth look at the various players emerging into the health care vacuum, and why it could mean the dawn of the Age Of Wyden!

Notorious security contractor Blackwater Worldwide has changed it name… to “Xe” (pronounced like the letter Z). While it makes perfect sense that a company with a near-obliterated reputation and a dropped contract to provide private security services in Iraq would want to rebrand, “Xe” seems almost as villain-esque as the original.

Blackwater president Gary Jackson announced the name change in a memo to employees, the Associated Press reported this weekend, saying it reflects a shift in the company's focus away from private security and toward operating training facilities around the world.

Xe will be the parent brand for two-dozen subsidiaries, none of which will have “Blackwater” anywhere in their name. To me it seems like Blackwater would have done better to go in the direction it chose for its former Blackwater Lodge and Training Center, now renamed “the U.S. Training Center, Inc.” Unless you’re going to change the name to “The American-Iraqi Friendship Alliance” or “Puppies and Rainbows, Inc.” it seems like extreme neutrality in title would be the way to go.

Since the company is not providing any information on how it came up with “Xe”, we’re left to speculate. A friend of mine suggested it was some derivative of Xerxes, the ancient Persian ruler. Interesting that the name Xerxes means “rule of heroes.”

Courtesy of GAO:

Iraq and Afghanistan: Availability of Forces, Equipment, and Infrastructure Should Be Considered in Developing U.S. Strategy and Plans

What can you say?

As the President prepares to sign the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) in Denver tomorrow, the geeks among us (you know who you are!) are eagerly awaiting the launch of Recovery.gov -- the online home of ARRA that will, according to a weekly presidential address in January, allow "every American...to see how and where we spend taxpayer dollars."

Accountability is the stated goal, but notice the language there: Every American can see how the ARRA money is spent. Well, that's fine, but what happens if a citizen doesn't like something they see? This is a non-trivial question, because it gets to the key question of exactly how the Obama administration will define "accountability"? While there's no question that breaking down multi-hundred-page legislation into a comprehensible format is a valuable public service, it still keeps the citizen at the end of the process, letting them witness the results of government deliberations but not actually inform them.

This is important because Recovery.gov isn't the only game in town. Meet Stimulus Watch, a site that compiles individual stimulus projects on a wiki-based site and asks users to comment on them and rate them in terms of perceived importance. Could this kind of model ever be incorporated directly into government?

There are some difficulties. First of all, the site doesn't mirror ARRA exactly: As the site's authors acknowledge, it is based on a list of shovel-ready projects issued by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and the projects don't really align with how funding is allocated in the actual stimulus bill. More broadly, there's the question of whether you want this kind of thing "crowdsourced": There's a matter of fact about how many jobs a given project will create, regardless of how many votes it gets. Do we really want the crowd that kept Sanjaya on American Idol for two months determining federal infrastructure spending?

But one thing that Recovery.gov could incorporate is the wiki functionality that lets folks on the ground add their own knowledge about how projects are going. Think the workers on that highway repaving job are taking super-sized lunch breaks? Know a better way to educate folks in your community about the relief they may be entitled to? Let government know! $787 billion is a lot of money, and enlisting citizens in keeping track of it all would be a good first step in bridging the gap from merely transparent government to actual participatory government.

Welcome FedBlog readers! As Alyssa noted in her gracious introduction, I'm Dan Munz, and I'll be your humble blogger for the week while she recharges her batteries and enjoys the waning Euro-to-Dollar exchange rate. (Thanks, global financial meltdown!) Blogging will pick up considerably over the week as we recover from Valentine's Day-Related Program Activities, but I wanted first to elaborate a little bit on Alyssa's introduction, and explain who I am and why I'm here.

As she explained, my day job is at the National Academy of Public Administration, which is essentially a non-profit chartered by Congress to provide expert management advice to government. We were founded by moon-going NASA Administrator Jim Webb (no, not this guy), who noticed that he had the National Academy of Sciences for expert technical advice, but no counterpart for issues of organization, financial management, procurement, human capital, program evaluation, and the like. So, he went and started one.

Over the last year or so, one of the emerging management issues we've identified is the rise of social media, collaborative tools, and "web 2.0" in government -- not just because they're neat, but because they result in more efficient, transparent, participatory, and just plain better government. Now, as luck would have it, we have a President who's made an unprecedented public commitment to thinking along these same lines and, recognizing that federal agencies and departments are the main point of interaction between government and We The People, has ordered those agencies and departments to do likewise.

So, part of my mission for the week will be writing about how the White House, and the sprawling federal apparatus over which it presides, endeavor to fulfill their self-imposed mandate of dragging government into the wired world with minimal kicking and screaming. It's certainly going to be interesting.

I'm going to be on vacation next week, but no worries--you'll still be getting your daily dose of FedBlog goodness, thanks to two terrific guest bloggers who have agreed to fill in for me.

In-house, we'll have Government Executive staff correspondent Elizabeth Newell. Elizabeth covers management and oversight for us, and is a frequent contributor to this blog. She's a contracting reform whiz, and was all over our recent coverage of Nancy Killefer's nomination and withdrawal.

And joining Elizabeth from outside GovExec is Dan Munz, project manager for the National Academy for Public Administration's Collaboration Project. Dan spends a lot of time thinking about social media and politics, and has spent a lot of time cracking me up since the two of us worked on a blog together in college.

It should be a fun week. Keep the comments coming, and I'll be back on Feb. 23.

The Washington Post's Federal Eye, Ed O'Keefe, has an interesting speculation: could second-term Clinton Census Director Ken Prewitt be on his way back to the office? Apparently, Judd Gregg is a fan...

The original version of the stimulus bill included a cash payment to Social Security, Veterans, Supplemental Security Income and Railroad Retirement recipients, but not Civil Service Retirement System annuitants. The National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association is claiming a bit of the credit for getting that changed, so CSRS retirees will get a one-time $250 refundable tax credit. “Thanks to the tireless efforts of Senator John Kerry (D-MA) as well as Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) and other federal-friendly lawmakers, no federal retirees were excluded. These lawmakers went to the mat for federal retirees, and fought an uphill policy and timing battle to include these individuals at each step of the process,” Margaret Baptiste, NARFE's president, said in a statement today.

Update: NTEU was in on the lobbying on this too. Colleen Kelley says "This language will ensure that federal retirees who spent their lives in public service are provided the economic relief they have earned and deserve."

GovGab is kind enough to point out that Feb. 14 National Organ Donor Day in addition to Valentine's Day. Obviously, organ donation isn't for everyone, and I understand that. But there's a nice symmetry to the multiple ways of giving your heart to someone.

Rob Brodsky is reporting that the White House is requiring agencies to have in place by today senior-level officials to oversee the spending of stimulus funding to make sure it's being done appropriately. This is a laudable effort, but it also seems like one that underscores the fact that all of Obama's agency heads aren't in place yet.

In an ideal world, this would be a great first test of agency heads. If they were the ones accountable for oversight, in conjunction with other officials, of course, they'd have to dig deeply into the operations of their new agencies, getting acquainted with their personnel and programs in the process. They'd also have to show immediately that they can both follow contracting and ethics rules while moving money quickly and effectively.

But instead, there are a lot of acting agency heads in place. Presumably, those are the folks who will be picking the officials to do oversight. Neither of those people is really there to defend the President's policy priorities or his ethics ones. It seems like a situation that's guaranteed to produce results the White House isn't thrilled with. But since they don't have their agency leaders in place, it's kind of what they're stuck with.

Obama's top spokesman, Robert Gibbs, has this to say about Gregg's withdrawal:

“Senator Gregg reached out to the President and offered his name for Secretary of Commerce. He was very clear throughout the interviewing process that despite past disagreements about policies, he would support, embrace, and move forward with the President’s agenda. Once it became clear after his nomination that Senator Gregg was not going to be supporting some of President Obama’s key economic priorities, it became necessary for Senator Gregg and the Obama administration to part ways. We regret that he has had a change of heart.”

In Judd Gregg's full statement (reproduced after the jump), this paragraph stood out at me:

“However, it has become apparent during this process that this will not work for me as I have found that on issues such as the stimulus package and the Census there are irresolvable conflicts for me. Prior to accepting this post, we had discussed these and other potential differences, but unfortunately we did not adequately focus on these concerns. We are functioning from a different set of views on many critical items of policy."

Clearly, Congressional Republicans are furious about the decision to have the Census Director report directly to the White House. But "we did not adequately focus on these concerns" is what really gets me. How long did they spend discussing this nomination? What in heaven's name did they talk about? Gregg always seemed like a strange choice for the Commerce job given his attitude towards the department, and his major political differences with Obama. Now it appears those differences caused him to drop out of the running for the job. So why did Obama ask him to serve in the first place? And what caused him to accept?

Continue reading "More on the Gregg Mess" »

He says there were "irresolvable conflicts" on issues like the stimulus package, but it's not clear who those differences were with. So much for reaching across the aisle on this one...

(H/T: Gautham Nagesh)

Huh. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press has a new study out, and among the findings is that only 46 percent of government employees of federal, state, or local governments think the financial state of their employer is excellent or good. 63 percent of private-sector employees stay the same. I'm somewhat suspicious of this number, because I think state and local governments are REALLY pinched, which is one of the reasons stimulus aid to them is such a hot topic--furloughs and layoffs are starting or already under way. But I am surprised to see government as a whole score below the private sector. Maybe private-sector workers are more optimistic? Or government workers are more likely to be conservative in their estimates of an organization's financial health?

I'm on the Hill for the introduction of a new bill that would change the Veterans Affairs appropriations process. In the briefing room, we've got a joker, who interrupted Sen. Akaka from the crowd to remind him that it was appropriate that he was introducing the bill on Lincoln's birthday. Later, he chimed in to tell Rep. John Hall, a former member of the band Orleans, "you're still the one!" a reference to one of the band's most famous songs.

Sister site Lost in Transition points out that if Hilda Solis is confirmed, 230,000 federal employees from State, Interior, Transportation, Commerce, the CIA and Labor will be run by former Congressmen. That's a lot of department and agency heads without a lot of organizational management experience. There are some exceptions (Leon Panetta ran the Office of Management and Budget, for example.), but it's going to be very interesting to see how these new leaders adapt to the management challenges they encounter.

Abraham Lincoln was born 200 years ago today, and I thought I'd take that anniversary as an opportunity to make a book recommendation. Everyone here should read Harvard President Drew Faust's This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. I know a book about American's understanding of death is a pretty grim thing to recommend around Valentine's Day. But while This Republic of Suffering is partially a cultural history, addressing things like the American conception of a "good death," and the war's influence on Walt Whitman. But it's also an extremely important book about how the federal government came to operate like it did, and how the war shaped public expectations of the government.

Going into the civil war, the federal government (and the Confederate government for that matter) didn't have a formal system for cataloging casualties or informing families of deaths or injuries. There were no government cemeteries, something that contributed to mass burials or abandonment of bodies, and in the South, widespread mutilation of the Union dead, especially after Appomattax Courthouse. Families who wanted to know if their loved ones were dead had to go to battlefields themselves, or rely on a number of mutual aid societies. A whole industry rose up around selling soldiers means of identifying themselves in case they were killed--there were no dog tags.

The mass scale of death during the Civil War meant that the informal structures set up to deal with wartime death were no longer remotely adequate. At one newly established federal cemetery, the War Department Quartermaster estimated that 54 percent of the bodies in it had been identified, and that was a fairly good rate. But the government got involved because citizens demanded that there be an official response to their anguish, that something more be done to confirm that their loved ones were dead. The Civil War is a turning point for many reasons--lethality of combat, the cultural differences between North and South, etc. But Faust does a terrific job of explaining how it also changed how citizens view their government. It's well worth a read.

The Washington Post reports today that investigators are interviewing key witnesses in the Justice Department U.S. Attorneys scandal. I admit to not having thought about the scandal in a while, but it's important that this is proceeding.

Obviously, firing people because of their political beliefs is a violation of civil service laws. But the scandal was also an example of human resources failure. Monica Goodling was not remotely someone who should have been making decisions about whether U.S. Attorneys were qualified in the first place, given her extremely scant credentials. Obviously, she was sent in there with a mission. But even if she hadn't been, the chances that she'd make a bad decision were greater because of her in experience in both law and human resources. While the political scandal is what's dramatic about this story, the implications for workforce management shouldn't be lost either.

Again, from Elizabeth Newell:

The Senate has confirmed Raytheon senior vice president for government operations and strategy William Lynn as deputy Defense secretary with a 93-4 vote. The lobbyist’s nomination stirred controversy in the wake of President Obama’s ethics executive order banning any lobbyists entering the administration from handling issues or agencies they had lobbied in the previous two years.

Despite the controversy, only four senators – Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, all Republicans – voted against confirming the nominee.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has acknowledged the potential problems with the executive order, saying it is becoming increasingly more difficult for experts “who understand the acquisition business, who understand systems management” but have worked in the private sector to come into public service.

"The president recognized ... that to be able to get some of these people he'd need to exercise a waiver and he provided for that, I think wisely, in the executive order," Gates said. "But I think all of us -- the Congress, the executive branch -- together need to look at this and see if we're cutting off our nose to spite our face."

From Elizabeth Newell:

Think you’re anti-Valentine’s Day?

Customs and Border Protection agriculture specialists are working round overtime to make sure flowers being imported for Valentine’s Day bouquets are free from insects and disease that could harm the agriculture and floral industries in the U.S.

According to CBP, agents processed approximately 500 million cut flower stems during the 2008 Valentine’s Day season. The top 10 ports of entry processing cut flowers last year were: Miami; Laredo, Texas; New York; Otay Mesa, Calif.; Los Angeles; Newark; Chicago; Wilmington, Del.; Boston and San Juan, Puerto Rico. Most of the cut flower shipments are imported from South America, primarily Colombia. The top three cut flower imports are mixed bouquets, dianthus and chrysanthemum and the most common type of insect found in flower inputs is the “Lepidoptera larva” also known as… a moth.

There are a lot of cool conversations about technology going on there today. (Easy registration may be required)

David Mullen has a good piece over at Communications Catalyst about a possible impending exodus of teenagers and twenty-somethings from Facebook. They're leaving, he says, because their parents and older relatives have joined Facebook, making it a less cool space to overshare in. But I think he pinpoints something that's been a trend in media, and what I'd bet will be a trend in social networking as well: niches.

One reason Government Executive works as a business model is because we provide an outlet for people to get information about something extremely specific. You want information about your pay and benefits? Here we are. General interest magazines have struggled, recently. The New Yorker's seen big drops in revenue, for example. And that's in part because while people like publications that take on a fairly random assortment of topics, they need news on the things that affect their careers.

On Facebook, it can be entertaining to reconnect with a lot of people. It can be amusing to be given "gifts," or to see what someone you haven't talked to in ten years is up to. But none of us really need the connectivity that Facebook provides. What folks do need is sites that let them network with people who are in their career fields, who are discussing issues relevant to their jobs. That's one of the reasons GovLoop is so successful. It's got all the connectivity features of Facebook (minus the ability to throw sheep at people, I guess), but it's targeted in terms of who you can connect to.

Apparently, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack wants a consolidated food safety agency. That seems like an extremely logical thing to do, but apparently, it's tricky.

Most of my favorite bloggers write about subjects other than government, which means I have little cause to link to them here most of the time. So it's nice to be able to point to this thoughtful rumination by Matt Yglesias on the value of public sector investments and the stimulus, particularly his defense of greening federal buildings. Matt argues:

"Japan entered its “lost decade” with infrastructure that was in many ways much more advanced than America’s. The abysmal quality of our current passenger rail service means, for example, that there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit that would improve things. And it seems to me that increasing the energy efficiency of federal buildings and doing repairs on our schools would be extremely valuable. After all, for decades now the country has been persistently governed by folks ideologically predisposed to underinvestment in the public sector. Individual projects are, however, always going to be subject to debate. What most conservatives seem to be doing, however, is just kind of pounding the table and insisting that any public sector undertaking is, by definition, 'pork' and/or 'waste' and that’s just not a tenable position."

I think this is a problem for public service in general. It's possible to estimate the ultimate economic value of the National Science Foundation, or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or the Education Department. But it's hard to prove it. Agencies don't produce revenue and profit, they produce the conditions in which we live. It's easy for political parties to float ideas like abolishing the Education or Commerce Departments in part because it's hard to imagine what our society would be like without them--they're far-fetched plans. And because we're used to the conditions in which we live, we don't pay much attention to the processes by which they're produced.

And that's a recruiting and performance problem, too. All the agencies that are trying to draw direct lines between individual positions and agency mission are recognizing this: you've got to tell people what they're producing in order to convince them their jobs are interesting, and to convince them to perform.

From Robert Brodsky:

Maybe the new House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Edolphus Towns, D-NY, “misremembers” how much fun, at least for the media, the past few hearings on steroid abuse in major league baseball have been.

In an announcement today, Towns said he has no plans to hold a follow-up hearing in light of revelations that Yankees superstar third baseman has admitted to using steroids:

“The news that another one of baseball’s premier players—in addition to another 103 unnamed players—used performance enhancing drugs is disturbing and sends yet another horrible message to our young people.

“With unemployment in this country approaching double digits and our constituents’ very livelihoods being threatened by the nation’s economic woes, I intend to focus on passing President Obama’s Economic Recovery legislation to get Americans back to work to fix our sinking economy. The American people need leaders who will focus on stemming job losses and getting credit to flow in the marketplace before hearing from yet another person who cheated both himself and the game of baseball.

“The Committee began this investigation in the face of a weak and ineffective drug testing policy that compromised the integrity of Major League Baseball. Now that baseball is implementing one of the most comprehensive drug testing policies in major league sports, I look forward to monitoring how well the policy is working to ensure the credibility of our national pastime.”

From National Air Traffic Controllers Association president Pat Forrey's statement:

“News of the security breach is bad enough. It’s a sickening feeling for FAA employees that we represent; employees who have suffered mightily under this rogue FAA management team for many years now. What’s worse is that this breach was preventable. The FAA was reckless and negligent in the creation of its electronic personnel file system and then showed a blatant disregard for its employees’ interests by refusing to listen to our concerns about the security of the electronic information or meet with NATCA to bargain over the impact and implementation of electronic security and files.

“Beginning three years ago, NATCA filed numerous requests for briefing and bargaining on this issue. We held deep concerns and we wanted to discuss them with the FAA. As usual, the agency ignored many of our requests and, on the others, told us to go take a hike.

“Furthermore, in 2005, we brought up the issue of data security during our controller contract negotiations with the FAA. We specifically proposed at the table a contract article that stated, ‘The agency shall protect all bargaining unit employees and their data from becoming victims of identity theft and criminal mischief.’ The FAA responded by saying that language was non-negotiable, believing that they didn’t have to entertain that proposal.

“This is typical of the arrogance and lack of collaboration the agency has shown toward its employees. The FAA waited an entire week before notifying the unions that its members’ personal information had been breached by a hacker. This is indicative of the manner in which the FAA treats its employees. The agency has excluded controllers on NextGen and modernization projects and now finds itself holding full responsibility for the continued breakdowns in progress and the inevitable cost overruns that will result. Same goes for this security matter.

“Bottom line: the senior executives and managers responsible for these critical systems should be fired. The FAA needs to demonstrate some level of commitment in order to regain the trust of its employees who rightly feel violated and now have been placed in extreme vulnerability to identity theft and financial harm. Apologies and explanations from the agency aren’t going to cut it. NATCA members are outraged and demand some accountability for these preventable mistakes that have now led to this serious security breach.”

Apparently, 48 Federal Aviation Administration computers were hacked, two of which had personal information on current and retired personnel. Not good. Particularly not if, as one union president is claiming, the personal information included confidential medical files...

I didn't think very much about Michelle Obama's visit to the Housing and Urban Development headquarters last week other than to think that it was nice the Obama administration was doing something to acknowledged federal employees akin to President George H.W. Bush's semi-legendary early meeting with the Senior Executive Service. But now that it's clear that this is going to be a regular part of the First Lady's portfolio, and it's also clear how much criticism she's getting for doing it, I do have some thoughts.

Look, obviously I would prefer that President Obama be immediately and deeply engaged with his career workforce. I would love for him to be making a multi-agency tour, I'd love for him to have a great permanent director of the Office of Personnel Management in place and for his Chief Performance Officer to be confirmed and hard at work. I would also like a lightsaber and a nicer handbag, but you know, you can't always get what you want.

But the economy is tanking. Obama's tied up in an increasingly tense fight over the stimulus bill, which will just be a preview of the budget fight looming in March. He's also got to manage the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, too. The guy has no time. I get that.

Under those circumstances, I think Michelle Obama is the perfect person to make a tour of the agencies and listen to the career workforce. It's like Eleanor Roosevelt going where her husband couldn't. Of course Obama and Roosevelt's face entirely different constraints on their mobility, but the challenge is the same--who do you send in to represent the President on a very personal visit when he can't show himself. Michelle Obama is perfect for this role, and it's perfect for her. She's the person closest to the President, so she brings a little bit of his aura with her when she visits the agencies, and sending her is a signal that he cares personally about both what she's saying and what she's hearing. She has direct access to the President in a way that no one else, not even Joe Biden, does, so he'll hear back from her more swiftly than he would from anyone else.

But it's not a job that requires her to commit to anything, to take any sort of major stance on reform, etc. This isn't Hillary Clinton taking on healthcare reform and raising issues and resentments about nepotism. It's genuinely not her overstepping her boundaries. It's just a serious listen, and a serious expression of gratitude. Lady Bird Johnson said that "The First Lady is an unpaid public servant elected by one person --- her husband." It's true. It's kind of a miserable job, and a miserable balancing act for an accomplished, intelligent person to find something substantive to do within the confines of the First Lady's role. This seems to be something both substantive but apolitical that meets those requirements.

From Brittany Ballenstedt:

The Office of Personnel Management has settled its dispute with Hewitt Associates over a faulty retirement calculator for the agency's RetireEZ modernization project. According to a Hewitt statement issued earlier today:

"OPM and Hewitt have settled their dispute and OPM has rescinded its October 16, 2008 termination of the contract for default. The contract has been terminated by mutual agreement."

OPM originally cancelled the 10-year, $290 million contract with Hewitt in October because the company could not demonstrate that the retirement calculator and modeling portal worked. The contract required testing of the portal to have a 95 percent pass rate, but Hewitt's calculator passed only 33 percent of the time.

Amy Wulfestieg, a Hewitt spokeswoman, said Monday that the agreement means Hewitt is no longer considered in default of the contract. "The dispute is now settled, so we expect no further action by either party," she said. "The specific terms of the settlement are confidential."

OPM spokesman Michael Orenstein said Monday that other components of RetireEZ, such as cleansing and converting retirement data to an electronic format, are continuing as planned. "We're looking at our options in terms of moving forward with the calculator," he said.

The Council for Excellence In Government will close its doors after 25 years, and the majority of its programs will be absorbed by the Partnership for Public Service. I just talked to Lynn Jennings, the interim president at the Council, and Max Stier, the president at the Partnership, and will have a story up with details shortly.

"You need to start reading that regularly."

-Craig Newmark, craigslist founder, on GovExec's sister publication, NextGov

She just declared: "We’ve got to get rid of this so-called pay for performance. That’s pay for sucking up to your boss."

That is one Senator who doesn't mince words when she's making a point.

I'm at the American Federation of Government Employees Legislative and Grassroots Mobilization Conference, and president John Gage just said the union added 13,000 members last year, capping 8 solid years of growth. That sure accounts for some of the 78,000 new federal union members the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in 2008.

The Government Accountability Office released a presentation to Congress on Friday on the state of the Transportation Security Inspector workforce, the people who ensure security compliance at airports, foreign and domestic air carriers, and flight schools. The responsibilities of these workers have grown since they were transferred from the Department of Transportation to Homeland Security, but the number of workers has fluctuated, the GAO said. And the report noted that it was difficult to determine if there were enough workers to do the job because, as GAO wrote:

TSA was unable to provide information on the size of the TSI workforce prior to fiscal year 2005.

• TSA does not have a mechanism for tracking time TSIs spend on nonprogram activities. TSIs are to record the amount of time spent on duties related to conducting inspections, investigations, other
regulated and operational activities, and outreach in TSA’s regulatory reporting system. However, TSA does not have an activity-based time and attendance system that would allow officials to track time spent on other activities.

• TSA was unable to provide data prior to fiscal year 2008 reflecting TSI inspections completed relative to TSA inspection requirements.

It's tough to keep a group of workers on the job while moving them from one agency to another and changing their job functions. It's hard to do all three of those things while developing new performance metrics. But it's precisely because government rearrangements are possible, because the work that TSIs do is critical and requires continuity, because their job is evolving, that it's important to have metrics established in the first place.

Maybe Transportation didn't have established mechanisms for Homeland Security to build off of. Maybe adding flight schools to TSIs purview took precedence over developing metrics where none existed before. And I don't want to say that developing these workforce measurements should have taken precedence over getting security up and running. But this report is an argument for having strong human resources and workforce offices in agencies, so there's good data to evaluate the workforce under your supervision, and to hand off to a new department should part of the workforce get handed over.

President Obama issued another labor-friendly executive order on Friday, giving agencies the authority to require that contractors enter into labor agreements to prevent disputes that could delay the projects. It's a victory for labor organizations, and while the order doesn't mandate that labor agreements be used on all projects, one provision of the order does open up the possibility of broader implementation down the road. One section of the order reads:

The Director of OMB, in consultation with the Secretary of Labor and with other officials as appropriate, shall provide the President within 180 days of this order, recommendations about whether broader use of project labor agreements, with respect to both construction projects undertaken under Federal contracts and construction projects receiving Federal financial assistance, would help to promote the economical, efficient, and timely completion of such projects.

So keep an eye out for future developments sometime this summer.

I've written before that if officials are going to blog, they--or their staffers--need to figure out how to make their voices sound natural, rather than official. That's why I love Claire McCaskill's Twitter feed. It sounds like she's writing it herself. And she sounds pretty neat. For example, her latest Tweet: "Democratic Caucus meeting in 15 minutes. There will be some hollering, but I think wwe [sic] will get this done."

I'm being told by a reliable source that former Air Line Pilots Association chief Randy Babbitt is being vetted for the top slot at the FAA and has pulled away from the other contenders to become the most likely candidate to head the agency.

Carl Goldman, the Executive Director of AFSCME Council 26, emailed me with another take on the debate shaping up on how to move forward with a revival of labor-management partnerships. Carl writes:

"The major problem with Clinton's executive order labor-management relations was that there was no enforcement on the management requirement to negotiate over the "permissive" areas of the federal labor-management statute, i.e. "the numbers, types and grades of employees or positions assigned to any organization subdivision, work project, or tour of duty, or on the technology, methods and means of performing work." (5 USC Section 7106 (b)(1). In fact, management at most agencies refused to bargain over these areas, and the Clinton Administration did nothing about it. At one point the Administration floated a new Executive Order that would have required compliance, but the manager associations complained and the President caved and it disappeared. Any new Executive Order must include a mechanism to ensure management compliance."

I think this gets to a larger point. If the unions want to permanently enshrine partnership, an executive order isn't the ticket. They'll need legislation, which the National Treasury Employees Union will push for. I don't know if it'll be harder to build consensus around an executive order or a piece of legislation. Either way, it'll be interesting.

Wired has an absolutely fantastic story on President Obama's challenges in making the White House a Web 2.0 insitution. It's great for two reasons. First, because it addresses the divide between the campaign and the governing process, and how the Obama team needs different things from its supporters moving from the former to the latter, and how supporters want different things from Obama during the campaign and then now that his presidency has become. But second, the authors actually went and talked to the General Services Administration and lay out in clear, reasonable language, the legal barriers to doing some of what Obama wants to do. I know we here recognize the challenges to making government more Web 2.0 oriented, but as I've written here before, I don't think folks who aren't in government understand those roadblocks particularly well. So to have a piece that melds the philosophical and the legal challenges to provide a clear portrait of what's going on with Obama's web efforts is really valuable. You should go read it. But if you're not, here are some key takeaways from the article(A Note: readers here sometimes seem to assume that things in indented blocks of text are things I've written. They're not. They are always quotations from the piece to which I'm referring):

1) Using Web 2.0 technologies doesn't actually mean you're more connected:

It wasn't long, however, before savvy observers noted what was missing from this and other Obama videos: the chance for ordinary citizens to talk back. The campaign initially disabled the comment function on YouTube and prevented response videos from appearing alongside. A YouTube video without comments, some pundits groused, is more like a monologue than a chat, fireside or not. "I don't see how one-way messages provide any more transparency for the work of the White House or government than the current old-style radio addresses," blogged Ellen Miller, director of the Sunlight Foundation, a government-transparency watchdog group. "Is Obama ready," challenged TechCrunch, "to be a two-way president?"

2) Even if you're getting more responses, the content of those responses won't necessarily be meaningful:

Building that intimacy from the Oval Office will be a delicate and complex task, and just letting "AcidTrout" respond to a YouTube address with "Who's the black guy?!?" isn't going to do it. "One of the things that gives me ulcers is that there are a lot of high expectations," says an Obama aide. "But we're going to have to change how government thinks about the Internet before we can do the things we want to do."

3) Even if feedback is meaningful, it doesn't mean it's actionable:

with everything he's done so far, Obama has been acknowledging feedback but not necessarily heeding it. And that's what we can expect from Obama's plan to post all pending nonemergency legislation online and allow the public to comment for five days before he acts on it. By mid-December, technology advisers were still struggling to determine the best way to implement the idea. The bigger question is, what will it accomplish? Even the system's own architects concede that it's unlikely that online comments and voting will sway the decision to sign or veto.

I don't link to John Kamensky's awesome blog for the IBM Center for the Business of Government nearly as often as I should, in part because I get caught up in the news cycle a lot of the time, and he's often doing important thinking about questions a little bit outside the news cycle. But I'm home sick today (thus the slow blogging folks, sorry) and feeling a little removed from the news cycle myself, so I thought this would be an opportune time to call attention to this very smart post on what the Chief Technology Officer and Chief Performance Officer will actually do.

I think he inadvertently raises two larger points. First, czars without clearly defined kingdoms are kind of stuck. A lot of attention's been paid to who Obama is going to slot into the CTO and CPO gigs, but there's been a much less effective debate about what those people will actually do. It's unlikely to get clearer now that Nancy Killefer's withdrawn from her nomination to be CPO and take a linked deputy position at OMB. Second, management czars get even less attention, at least from mainstream press. It's really sad to me that Killefer's withdrawal will get far more ink than what she was actually set up to do.

But really, all of this is just a way of saying you should read John Kamensky's blog, if you're not already.

Gina Talamona, the Justice Department's Deputy Director for Public Affairs, has asked me to clarify that the department will continue to conduct tests of its employees' awareness of email scams and phishing; it's just that they'll change the way they communicate with agencies that might be implicated by their tests. Apparently, some folks mis-read a line from our story from yesterday to mean that Justice would no longer conduct social engineering tests. That is not the case.

Because it wouldn't be FedBlog without the occasional News of the Weird, the Washington Post reports that the White House has been invaded by raccoons:

The National Park Service is in pursuit of one very large raccoon and several medium-sized raccoons, who have been spotted roaming the grounds around the Executive Mansion and the West Wing, a spokesman said.

"The idea of raccoons on the White House grounds give us great pause," spokesman Bill Burton said.

(H/T: Dan Munz, who always has great stuff in his Twitter feed)

My colleage Rob Brodsky emails the following observations from the Senate, Banking and Urban Affairs Committee hearing:

In his first report to Congress, the Troubled Asset Relief Program Inspector General Neil Barofsky said he is starting a pair of audits: one will be a case study on how Bank of America received $45 billion of government funds in three separate bailout programs; the second will investigate how lobbyists are influencing the application process for banks to receive capital infusions.

Barofsky also told the panel that he has begun sending letters to companies that received TARP funds during the past few months and how they plan to spend future funds. The IG will also probe how the companies plan to comply with President Obama’s order, limiting the executive compensation of TARP recipients to $500,000.

And Rob also writes:

Professor Elizabeth Warren, chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program just told the committee that her team has conducted an analysis of the 10 largest TARP transactions made in 2008. Warren found that the Treasury paid $254 billion for assets worth approximately $176 billion, a shortfall of $78 billion.

Warren further told the panel that Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson “was not completely candid” with the American people about how the bailout funds would be spent.

Committee Chairman Chris Dodd called the findings “infuriating.”

Congressional Quarterly is reporting that the director of the Census Bureau will report directly to the White House and not to Commerce Secretary-designate Judd Gregg. My sense from the story is that this is mostly about political optics. Black and Latino advocacy groups aren't fond of Gregg period, and they're not happy about the fact that he pushed back against emergency funding for the 2000 Census.

But this makes good management sense. As Allan Holmes has reported over and over again, the 2010 Census is in real danger. Putting it directly in the White House's line of sight makes it a priority, and ups the need for serious accountability.

I haven't had a chance to read through the whole thing yet, but the National Academy of Public Administration's Collaboration Project has put together what appears to be a really interesting white paper laying out a philosophical approach for the Obama administration's use of technology. After our big IT debate of mid-January I thought it was refreshing to see a group take a step back into that 30,000 foot zone and look not at code, not necessarily at where information should be located on a page, but to do some writing about what technology should be designed to accomplish. I think it's easy to forget about asking those forward-thinking questions when we can't find some information we want (I know I've gone round and round looking for reports, or contact information, for example). But that's different from deciding what we think federal IT should do in the future as to opposed to what we're frustrated it can't do now.

So, I've been curious about what happened to John Berry's potential nomination to head the Office of Personnel Management. The news that he was in serious talks or had been asked to take the position was greeted by uniformly positive reactions from the people I talked to, and then...nothing, and the appointment of an acting director at OPM.

I asked Beth Moten, the American Federation of Government Employees' legislative and political director yesterday at the union's legislative briefing yesterday what she thought the big wait was. Her answer? Not much. It's her understanding, Moten says, that Berry has been offered the job and has accepted it, but that the standard vetting process, likely heightened by the withdrawals of Tom Daschle and Nancy Killefer (not to mention Bill Richardson), is under way. This would actually be consistent with Obama's earlier pattern of leaking nominations, showing that they can resolve the issues surrounding them (Bill Clinton's foundation disclosure, for example), and then having fairly smooth confirmation hearings. Berry's nomination and confirmation, if they happen, won't be as big a deal as Clinton's, of course, and won't be a show of competence to many people besides those of us who work for and write about good government. But it still matters to get the process right.

For those of you who have been following, and commenting, on the Justice Department's fake scam email to employees, this is your lucky day. I interviewed the Chief Information Officer at Justice today about the hoax. We've got the full details here.

At least at Housing and Urban Development. From a pool report today:

The First Lady arrived at Housing and Urban Development HQ in Washington wearing a grey jacket and skirt suit with a purple top. A purple print scarf was removed before her entrance, a White House official confided.

She was introduced to crowd of quite enthusiastic HUD employees by HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan. According to the Secret Service, as relayed by the White House, the room included 800 people with a separate overflow group of another 200. As she entered, gleeful cheers and applause and lots of cameras held high. Someone called out “We love you,” and the sentiment was echoed throughout the room. She responded, “I love you.”

Mrs. Obama described her appearance as the second stop on a general tour she is making of the agencies, during which she wants to say “hello” and thank the federal workers. She urged HUD employees to rededicate themselves to their work, given the need to keep people in their homes. A transcript will follow.

Notable that before her entrance, thumping dance floor music was on to get the crowd warmed up. They didn’t need it.

If you get a visit from the First Lady, send details to me!

From Darrell Issa:

Oversight and Government Reform Committee Ranking Members for the 111th Congress:

Domestic Policy: Rep. Jim. Jordan (OH)

Federal Workforce, Postal Service, and the District of Columbia: Rep. Jason Chaffetz (UT)

Government Management, Organization, and Procurement: Rep. Brian Bilbray (CA)

Information Policy, Census, and National Archives: Rep. Patrick McHenry (NC)

National Security and Foreign Affairs: Rep. Jeff Flake (AZ)

Full list is here and below the jump:

Subcommittee on Domestic Policy

Chair, Dennis J. Kucinich, Ohio

Elijah Cummings, Maryland

John Tierney, Massachusetts

Diane Watson, California

Jim Cooper, Tennessee

Patrick Kennedy, Rhode Island

Peter Welch, Vermont

Bill Foster, Illinois

Subcommittee on Federal Workforce, Postal Service and District of Columbia

Chair, Stephen F. Lynch, Massachusetts

Eleanor Holmes Norton, District of Columbia

Danny Davis, Illinois

Elijah Cummings, Maryland

Dennis Kucinich, Ohio

Lacy Clay, Missouri

Gerry Connolly, Virginia

Continue reading "Oversight Subcommittee Lineups Announced" »

I'm here at a press briefing at the American Federation of Government Employees headquarters and AFGE president John Gage just said some interesting things about how he views labor-management partnerships. I thought I'd reproduce them verbatim. Gage says:

I’ll probably get in trouble for this. But I don’t think the way the partnership was structured under president Clinton was really that clear. There was such a trust issue. A lot of people couldn’t buy if we’re partners, and we have to trust you, we really have to know what’s going on. I trust management. I trust them to be management. And I trust the union to be the union. Under Partnership, I was running a council, and we made great strides once we got by this philosophical dilemma. I would like a stripped down partnership. Yes, I want B-1 rights. All the rules on consensus, I don’t know if we need them. To go through all the rules that came up from the Clinton administration, and how many facilitators we made right, and how the philosophy of it got in the way of doing good, solid, labor-management business, I think was unnecessary. We didn’t have a lot of time on this. We had to write a partnership proposal very, very quickly. What we did was just scale down a lot of the bells and whistles that were in the old partnership agreements, kept the rights issue, and the encouragement that agencies would sit down. And I’m speaking for myself here really, I thought the process hurt good, solid communications. [On what they included in their proposal to the Obama administration:] Take the old partnership, and everywhere it says consensus, and training, and joint, cross it out. We have the lead on these things as the largest federal union. We talked to some of the smaller federal unions, and I think they were all gung-ho about getting partnership back. I think we could have had more time to talk to them about the actual results, they would have been enthusiastic [about a more stripped down version of partnership.]

I guess that's one way of closing the pay gap between the public and private sectors?

Don Kettl is always a lot of fun to talk to about government. But since not all of you call him up and ask him questions on a regular basis, you should read what he has to say about the huge realignments we've been going through in this months Government Executive. He warns:

"We're not very good at asking, let alone answering, such questions. We're likely to carom along from issue to issue, without confronting the big puzzles until the implications begin to accumulate. We'll probably slide sideways into a whole new understanding of whom government will help and how it will act."

And he says a lot of other great things, too. So go check it out!

I understand why Interior Secretary Ken Salazar wants to clean house at the Minerals Management Service. Scandals involving sex and drugs are fun and dramatic to talk about, and they provide an easy target for a surgical strike that leaves everyone feeling good about the agency once the problem's been excised. But it's also a mistake to think that you can nuke the people who behave in a really egregious manner and that afterwards, any and all ethics problems in your agency will miraculously vanish and everyone will behave well until the end of time.

This is part and parcel of the problem with the Obama administration's response to its nominees' tax problems. They nuked someone big--Tom Daschle--and someone smaller--Nancy Killefer. But they've still got Tim Geithner serving in the administration. And more importantly, getting rid of folks with ethics problems doesn't mean that no one will ever have another slip, and it doesn't mean that people won't continue to behave badly.

If you want a new culture in Washington, you don't just need to get rid of the obvious examples of ethical lapses. You need to foster respect among employees at all levels of agencies. You need to end cultures of retaliation and dishonesty. You need to make it clear that documents and processes need to be approached with integrity. Legal problems are terrible, of course. As I've said before, no one ought to get a pass on not paying huge amounts of taxes, or suborning corruption, or otherwise breaking the law. But no one should get a pass on retaliating against a whistleblower, lying to their subordinate, falsifying paperwork, or intimidating a co-worker either. And so if Salazar cleans up MMS and declares himself done, he'll have done the equivalent of only taking half a course of antibiotics to fight an infection, producing resistant strains of disease. Bad behavior will remain, and the people who commit it will be even more confident in behaving poorly, secure in the knowledge that you have to do something really sexy and outrageous to get in trouble.

The National Active and Retired Federal Employees is turning out the troops to try to convince the Obama administration to include premium conversion in the stimulus package currently getting hackey-sacked about on Capitol Hill. That means that federal annuitants, members of the armed services and military retirees could use pre-tax dollars to pay for their health insurance. It's a perennial battle, and a time when a lot of folks are calling for stuff to come out of the stimulus package, it seems unlikely that a lot more's going to get in.

President Obama tells a group of charter-school students that he and the First Lady came to read to "the reason we came to visit, A, we wanted to get out of the White House."

The press secretary also says "we all take responsibility" for the mess surrounding Richardson, Geithner, Daschle and Killefer. As Ta-Nehisi Coates like to say, weak-sauce.

The New York Times says he's withdrawn his nomination to be Health and Human Services Secretary. Marc Ambinder, as usual, was correct when he wrote about Nancy Killefer less than an hour ago:

"In fact, doesn't her withdrawal blur the line between doozies-of-a-mistake like Daschle, and dribbles, like Killefer's $936 tax lien? Doesn't her withdrawal detract attention from the real ethical principle being debated?"

When the news came out that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner had a tax problem, I didn't pay too much attention to it. It seemed evident that he'd disclosed the problem to Obama during the vetting process, and he'd decided that Geithner had dealt with it appropriately, or would deal with it appropriately, and that there was no need to withdraw Geithner's nomination. Then, it became clear that Tom Daschle, the Health and Human Services Secretary-designate, also had not paid taxes properly on a company car and driver he'd had use of. And today, Nancy Killefer, Obama's nominee to be the government's first Chief Performance Officer and Office of Management and Budget Deputy Director for Management, withdrew her nomination over concerns that she had not appropriately paid taxes for her household help.

Two thoughts on all of this. First, pay your taxes. It's really not hard, particularly not if you're in an income bracket where you can afford to hire a competent accountant. Even if you're not, the forms are complicated, but if you sit with them for a bit, they're fairly easy to figure out. So pay your taxes.

Second, there are two options here. Either the Obama team, despite its lengthy ethics questionnaire, just did an incredibly sloppy vetting jobs. Or his team knew about all of these problems, and they just didn't care. Either way, Obama's ethics pledges seem to be something he didn't care about enough to try to stick to, or that he doesn't care about enough to try to defend. We were talking about this in the office, and Tom Shoop, my editor, said he thinks no candidate for President should ever be allowed to claim that they'll change the culture of Washington ever again. I think I agree with him.

February 3, 2009

Dear Mr. President,

I recognize that your agenda and the duties facing your Chief Performance Officer are urgent. I have also come to realize in the current environment that my personal tax issue of D.C. Unemployment tax could be used to create exactly the kind of distraction and delay those duties must avoid. Because of this I must reluctantly ask you to withdraw my name from consideration.

I am deeply honored to have been selected by you and you have my deep appreciation for your confidence in me. You have my heartfelt support and best wishes for success in all your endeavors.

Respectfully yours,

Nancy Killefer

I'm sorry about the delay in posting and getting to comments this morning--we've been migrating servers here at Atlantic Media, our parent company, and my access to this one was temporarily shut down.

And speaking of technical difficulties, Elizabeth Newell has information and thoughts on Nancy Killefer's withdrawal of her nomination to be the Chief Performance Officer:

Chief performance officer and Office of Management and Budget deputy director for management nominee Nancy Killefer has withdrawn her nomination, the White House confirmed on Tuesday. A spokesman refused to cite the reason for her withdrawal but said more information would be available later in the day.

President Obama named the former assistant Treasury secretary to the position on Jan. 7, touting Killefer as “uniquely qualified” to take on the task of eliminating poor-performing programs and streamlining effective ones.

When her selection was announced, The Associated Press reported that in 2005 the District of Columbia government had filed a more than $900 tax lien on Killefer’s home for failure to pay unemployment compensation tax on household help.

Other things to note:

This is very likely to delay other nominations at OMB, seems to me they would want to get the dep director for mngmnt in place before naming others. Also, Killefer was among the only names we heard being thrown around for the CPO position, do they have a backup? If they hadn’t also named her as OMB dep director for management, nomination wouldn’t have been required, would she still have withdrawn?

EEOC General Counsel Ronald Cooper is headed back to private practice, shortly after Obama appointed a new acting chair and vice-chair of the Commission.

On another note, I just finished reading a new book that deals partially with the EEOC's evolution as an institution. I'm reviewing it for later in the week, so I'll hold off on commenting now, but suffice it to say, it was interesting to me to read how marginalized the EEOC was in its early years.

Sister-blog Lost in Transition has a good roundup of the problems with President Obama's promise to cull the ranks of management in the federal government. That always struck me as one of those things that sounds good to voters at large but doesn't have a ton to do with actual cost analysis and work flow in the federal government. We'll see how it works out. I don't exactly see this ending up a top-tier promise that gets executed quickly.

An eagle-eyed reader sends in this email sent to Department of Commerce employees regarding the Justice Department-designed scam to test readers' vulnerability to internet scams by offering to help them recoup their losses in the Thrift Savings Plan:

Distribution: All DOC Employees (EXCEPT PTO)

The Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) has reported that some participants have received an email purporting to be from the TSP. It states that if participants have lost more than 30% of their TSP account value, they are eligible for a one-time U.S. Government bailout to recover their losses. The message directs participants to a "look-alike" TSP web site that asks for account credentials (User Name and Password). The email is signed "TSP Account Coordinator."

This email is not an official TSP communication.

The TSP does not initiate requests for sensitive information such as account numbers, user IDs, passwords, or PINs from participants via email. Furthermore, the TSP does not collect or maintain a list of participants' email addresses.

If you receive an email from someone claiming to be a "TSP Account Coordinator," please do not reply to it, click on any links, or open any attachments. If you responded to this "phishing" email and provided any personal information, please contact the TSP immediately at 1-877-968-3778. The bogus web site is being disabled, and the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board is actively investigating the matter.

When accessing your TSP account online, always be certain to close your browser after you've finished. For more information on how to avoid email scams, refer to http://www.onguardonline.gov/topics/email-scams.aspx#2. This is a web site maintained by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

If you receive a similar email, let me know. I want to track how far this thing has spread.

Okay, so someone in her office will actually write the posts. But new Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has vowed to be a regular poster to DHS Leadership Journal and to expand the use of the Transportation Security Administration's Evolution of Security blog.

While it'll probably take her time to get up to the level that Peter Orszag reached when he was at the Congressional Budget Office, I think it's a good thing that Napolitano is jumping into the blogosphere. I know not everyone reads blogs, and not everyone is fond of the form. But they serve two good purposes: transparency, and responsiveness. Blogging lets Napolitano give readers a sense of what she's up to and what her schedule is like. And even if it's not anything as official as comments on a Federal Register notice, blog comments give readers a place to weigh in, creating at least a sense of dialogue.

Blogging also, frankly, gives Napolitano a chance to show off her personality, a little. Even if she's making stiff jokes about rooting for the Cardinals in the Super Bowl, at least she comes across as a person. Too often, I think, Cabinet Secretaries seem impossibly out of reach, especially when they're elevated from state-level positions. They don't seem like real people, they're not elected so they're not accountable or familiar from the pace of a campaign. Blogging is a way to step beyond that and put faces on more parts of government. Whoever's writing Napolitano's entries should strive for a more natural voice for her. But that they're doing it at all is progress.