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Here's the "ouch" statistic of the day, courtesy of Lyndsey Layton in the Washington Post, about an agency that's responsible for managing literally millions of American cultural resources: "In 2004, the Forest Service turned away more than one-third of the people seeking to help agency archaeologists because it did not have the resources to organize them."

Part of the reason is that an increasing share of the agency's budget is going to firefighting. And as a result, many sites, from Civil War battlefields to cabins built by the Civilian Conservation Corps, are falling into ruins. But it's hard to tell exactly how many, because the Forest Service simply doesn't know how many sites of archaeological or historical importance are on the lands under its control. The National Trust for Historic Preservation is pushing Congress to double the agency's budget for managing culturally important resources.

Here's Robert A. Sturgell, acting adminstrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, in the New York Times on the new air traffic control system the agency is installing:

"This is not your grandfather’s FAA.”

That suggests it just might be your father's FAA, which is not exactly encouraging, is it?

By the way, the Times story concludes that the root of the agency's current problems is that it's having trouble deciding whether it should be a tough regulator of the airlines or their partner. In that respect, the FAA can join a long list of agencies plagued by the difficulty of balancing those two roles.

The Federal Aviation Administration has missed more than 100 top-to-bottom safety reviews of airlines in recent years, the Wall Street Journal reports today. The reviews are supposed to be conducted at least once every five years, to make sure airlines have the systems in place to identify safety issues and deal with them.

Acting FAA Administrator Robert Sturgell told Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., that "inadequate resources" may have been a factor in the missed assesments. The agency says it has completed most reviews, and is developing a system to alert top officials when they are overdue.

Under a 1999 law, the head of the Patent and Trademark Office has the authority to appoint administrative judges to the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences. And PTO chiefs have done so 46 times since the law was passed.

There's just one problem, the New York Times reports today: Apparently, the law granting the authority is unconstitutional. That's what John F. Duffy, a professor at the George Washington University Law School, discovered and described in a recent paper.

At issue is Article II of the Constitution, which gives the president the power to appoint ambassadors, Supreme Court judges and certain other public officials, and says that in regard to additional federal positions, "Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments."

The PTO chief, of course, doesn't head a department. He's an undersecretary of Commerce. One could argue that patent administrative judges aren't the kind of "inferior officers" that the Constitution envisioned, but apparently the Supreme Court has made it pretty clear in previous decisions that they are. Even the Justice Department isn't challenging Duffy's interpretation. And that means that thousands of decisions involving patents stretching back several years could be in question.

(Hat tip: BoingBoing)

If you work in human resources at the Food and Drug Administration, your job is about to get a lot more challenging. The agency says it's going to hire 1,300 biologists, chemists, medical officers and other employees by October. That would triple the number of people hired between 2005 and 2007.

In the wake of the deaths of 81 people in the United States who took tainted versions of the blood thinner heparin, FDA has been under intense pressure from Congress over holes in its oversight and inspection processes. Yesterday, agency officials told Congress that they need $225 million annually to inspect foreign drugmakers every other year and another $100 million a year in their budget to keep up the pace of inspections with domestic plants.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do the following people have in common?

• Singer and Psychic Friend Dionne Warwick


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


• Comedian and actor Sinbad

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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

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

A couple of other factoids from Owen's piece:

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

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

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

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

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

Here's an excerpt from a piece in the Sunday Denver Post by Fred Brown, the paper's retired capitol bureau chief:

A reader recently forwarded what amounts to a gibberish generator. It's a list of 30 words, numbered 0 to 9 in each of three columns. The trick is to think of a three-digit number, then match those numbers with a word from each column. The result is a three-word phrase of stunningly bureaucratic buzzwords. For example, today's date, 323, yields "parallel, monitored mobility."

This highly amusing device is known as the Systematic Buzz Phrase Generator. I'd never heard of it, but apparently it's been around since 1968. And is it any surprise at all that the person who created it, a guy by the name of Philip Broughton, was a federal employee at the Public Health Service?

Here, by the way, are some other phrases the generator randomly turns out: "integrated reciprocal flexibility" (031) and "functional transitional contingency" (469). It strikes me that those are every bit as meaningful today as they would have been 40 years ago.

The New York Times picked up on the IRS tax collection privatization story yesterday, with a headline that doesn't exactly mince words: "Taxpayer Advocate Says Outsourcing at I.R.S. Is Inept."

This, of course, isn't the first time that the taxpayer advocate, Nina Olson, has raised concerns about the IRS effort to use private debt collection firms. But this kind of mainstream media attention to the issue may put the program in jeopardy, especially if it becomes a factor in the confirmation hearings of Douglas H. Shulman, whose nomination to head the agency is pending in the Senate.

Update: Oops. As I should have known, Shulman already has had his confirmation hearing. In fact, the Senate approved his nomination early this morning.

The Wall Street Journal has a great story today about Martin Bennett, who spends his days hunting down unsafe products and hassling their makers to comply with federal laws and regulations. So he must work for the Conusmer Product Safety Commission, right? Not any more.

The 69-year-old Bennett retired from the agency more than six years ago. But he just can't stop spending his days researching products at his computer and making unannounced visits to manufacturers and suppliers -- even if that results in him getting thrown off the premises from time to time.

"It's part of the job," he says. "I mean my old job."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


• Accomplish world-class management of travel and relocation.


• Install travel and relocation best business practices.


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


• Expand the use of e-government.

The deadline for entries is March 31.

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

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


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


• 82 percent of programs are achieving their goals.


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


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


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


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

U.S. Comptroller General David Walker was the featured speaker at Government Executive's Leadership Breakfast this morning, in what could be called an unofficial stop on his Fiscal Wake-Up Tour. (For full details on Walker's presentation about the impending fiscal crisis, see this GAO publication.)

In addition to plugging his appearance in a new documentary, I.O.U.S.A., which played last week at the Sundance Film Festival, Walker offered a few other observations:

• On the lack of attention to the country's looming fiscal problem: "If it was well understood, people would do something about it."


• On the political process: "Congress is a committee, and you can't run a country by committee. We're a long way from what the Founding Fathers intended."


• On the need for reengineering federal programs: "Government in many cases is based on conditions that existed from the 1940s to the 1960s."


• On oversight of federal operations: "The problem in government is not fraud, but waste. It's huge, and getting bigger."

As federal agencies become increasingly concerned about losing baby boomers who are reaching retirement age, they are looking to pick up experienced workers from the private sector to fill the gaps. Hence the announcement last week of the Partnership for Public Service's FedExperience program involving IBM and the Treasury Department.

Also last week, the Dallas Morning News reported on the Senior Environmental Employment Program, under which 1,500 people 55 and older have been hired to work on a full- or part-time basis at the Environmental Protection Agency as clerical staff, data administrators, engineers and inspectors. The program is run by the National Older Worker Career Center, which manages a similar effort for the Agriculture Department and is looking to extend its reach to other agencies. Private sector workers seem eager to sign up, given the generous federal benefits they can receive after working for the government for only a few years.

This seems all well and good, but here are a couple of caveats:

• Bringing a lot of new baby boomers into government could end up costing taxpayers a lot of money. Last year, the Bush administration implicitly recognized this by including a proposal in its fiscal 2008 budget to scale back the government's contribution to health care premiums for new federal retirees with less than a decade of government service. The government's current subsidy is "the envy of many people in the private sector," said OPM Director Linda M. Springer. (That proposal hasn't gone anywhere on Capitol Hill yet, and federal labor unions have vowed to fight it.)
• Recruiting replacement boomers shouldn't come at the expense of giving the people who have been in government a long time, but who are not retiring soon, a shot at the top career jobs in agencies. The last thing the government needs is to force out talented younger people by denying them the chance at advancement for which they have patiently been waiting.

Fred Thompson has made it official: He's out of the presidential race. Politics aside, this means that the race has lost the candidate with arguably the strongest working knowledge of the management challenges facing the federal government right now -- certainly the strongest on the Republican side. And as I keep saying, these issues really matter -- and not just to the people who work in government, but to the country as a whole.

The issue of professional liability insurance for federal managers hit the mainstream media again Sunday, with a New York Times story about CIA officers who are turning to Wright & Company for policies to cover their legal costs in the event they get hauled into federal court or become ensnared in a congressional investigation.

As the story notes, FBI agents, Secret Service officers, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees also have purchased the insurance. They're not the only ones. In the late 1990s, professional liability insurance became popular at the IRS after reform legislation provided a new avenue for agency employees to file complaints against their supervisors.

Exactly who should get the insurance has long been open to question. The Justice Department typically represents federal employees in proceedings resulting from actions taken in the course of their job duties, but some managers see the benefit of having personal representation, too.

In a 1998 report, the Office of Personnel Management found that in the previous five years, only 14 federal employees had been found personally liable in lawsuits brought against them in relation to their government duties. And in only one reported case did an employee actually have to pay damages. The Justice Department reported that it had received about 7,000 requests for representation from federal employees in the same period, and had rejected 150 of those requests, or 2 percent.

The insurance costs about $300 a year, and the government pays half the premium for supervisors and certain other employees.

With the race for the Democratic presidential nomination seeming to come down to a choice between Barack Obama's push for change and Hillary Clinton's focus on experienced leadership, an interesting shift has occurred: Suddenly, the issue of managing the federal government has taken center stage. It started on Monday, when Obama, in an interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal, said the following:

I'm not an operating officer. Some in this debate around experience seem to think the job of the president is to go in and run some bureaucracy. Well, that's not my job. My job is to set a vision of "here's where the bureaucracy needs to go."

Clinton took issue with that in a Democratic debate Tuesday night in Las Vegas:

I do think that being president is the chief executive officer. I respect what Barack said about setting the vision, setting the tone, bringing people together. But I think you have to be able to manage and run the bureaucracy. You've got to pick good people, certainly, but you have to hold them accountable every single day. We've seen the results of a president who, frankly, failed at that. You know, he went in to office saying he was going to have the kind of Harvard Business School CEO model where he'd set the tone, he'd set the goals and then everybody else would have to implement it.

And we saw the failures. We saw the failures along the Gulf Coast with, you know, people who were totally incompetent and insensitive failing to help our fellow Americans. We've seen the failures with holding the administration accountable with the no-bid contracts and the cronyism. So I do think you have to do both. It's a really hard job, and in America we put the head of state and the head of government together in one person.

But I think you've got to set the tone, you've got to set the vision, you've got to set the goals, you've got to bring the country together. And then you do have to manage and operate and hold that bureaucracy accountable to get the results you're trying to achieve.

Obama responded:

Well, there's no doubt that you've got to be a good manager. And that's not what I was arguing. The point, in terms of bringing together a team, is that you get the best people and you're able to execute and hold them accountable. But I think that there's something, if we're going to evaluate George Bush and his failures as president, that I think are much more important. He was very efficient. He was on time all the time, and you know, and had... You know, I'm sure he never lost a paper. I'm sure he knows where it is. What he could not do is to listen to perspectives that didn't agree with his ideological predispositions. ...

I mean, those are the kinds of failures that have to do with judgment. They have to do with vision, the capacity to inspire people. They don't have to do with whether or not he was managing the bureaucracy properly. That's not to deny that there has to be strong management skills in the presidency. It is to say that what has been missing is the ability to bring people together, to mobilize the country, to move us in a better direction, and to be straight with the American people.

I'm not about to make any kind of endorsement in this race or the Republican one, but I'll acknowledge that I'm already on the record as saying that management really matters. In fact, nine months ago, I noted that it looked like the issue of effectively managing government operations might play a central role in this year's presidential contest, and I've been waiting for it to happen ever since.

Most of the recent scary stories about the loss or theft of federal employees' personally identifiable information involve the theoretical possibility that such data could be used for fraudulent purposes. Now comes a story where it came much closer to really happening.

On Jan. 5, four people were arrested in Bensalem Township, Pa., for attempted identity fraud, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports. One of the suspects had two pages of a 1994 report that included names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, salary information and other data about roughly 100 employees of the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division in Dahlgren, Va. The listed employees all had last names beginning with the letter B.

Officials don't know whether the suspects have all of the pages of the report, but as many as 10,000 employees may be at risk of identity theft. Dahlgren officials say they notified employees on Jan. 10 of the situation via an all-hands e-mail. Those possibily affected could have worked at the Naval Facilities Command, NSWC Dahlgren, NSWC White Oak, Md., NSWC Panama City, Fla., the Joint Warfare Analysis Center, the Naval Space Command and the Aegis Training and Readiness Center. The Navy has set up a call center at 1-800-352-7967 to provide more information.

(Hat tip: Fedsmith.)

Federal Executive Boards across the country are getting the job done, the Office of Personnel Management says. Among the accomplishments highlighted in the FEB 2007 annual report:

• Efforts by the Minnesota FEB to coordinate federal agencies' response to the 35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis.


• Settlement of more than 565 cases through low-cost or no-cost mediation programs.


• A program to provide free or reduced cost training to more than 23,000 federal employees saved agencies more than $6 million.

So if FEBs are so effective, why don't they get more support? Alyssa Rosenberg noted in a November piece in Government Executive, "though the Office of Personnel Management oversees FEBs, their staffs consist of employees detailed from offices in the area. That lack of consistent staffing, and the fact that there is no standard for determining the jurisdiction of FEBs based on the number of federal workers in a given area, can leave directors dangerously short-handed in a crisis." Kathrene L. Hansen, executive director of the Greater Los Angeles FEB, which covers 125,000 federal employees at 230 agencies, told Rosenberg she was serving as a one-person office at the time of last fall's wildfires in southern California, because the only other employee -- her secretary -- had recently resigned.

If FEBs can really help government be more effective, maybe it's time to give them a stable source of funding and adequate staff.

The Justice Department announced Thursday that Dessie Ruth Nelson, 65, of Oakland, Calif., a former longtime employee of the General Services Administration, had pleaded guilty to accepting more than $100,000 in bribes from a firm providing security to federal buildings in return for awarding the company three federal contracts worth more than $130 million.

In exchange for steering contracts to Holiday International Security Inc. (which later changed its name to USProtect Corp.) Nelson received, among other things, a shopping bag filled with $35,000 in cash, an envelope containing $10,000, and a $7,000 Caribbean cruise.

Nelson's case was pursued by Justice's Procurement Fraud Task Force, which is chaired by Assistant Attorney General Alice S. Fisher and includes representatives from U.S. Attorneys' Offices, the FBI, agency inspector general offices, and other federal law enforcement agencies.

The folks over at the editorial page of the Washington Times are disappointed in the recently unveiled Office of Management and Budget Web site containing data on federal contracts, grants and loans, USAspending.gov.

It's not that the data presented on the site isn't useful. USAspending.gov provides "real insight into government's operations," the paper's editorial writers say. They also laud "the ease with which ordinary Internet users can ask questions, begin searches and find information."

So what's the problem? More detailed data would be nice, the paper says. And then comes the real issue: "Nor are $700 hammers and new "Bridges to Nowhere" easily discoverable on this site, we're sorry to report."

At the end of the day, it's all about the horror stories, isn't it?

The National Institutes of Health has begun spending more than $1 million a month in rent on its brand-new $250 million Biomedical Research Center in southeast Baltimore, the Baltimore Sun reports. But some of the scientists who are supposed to be working there haven't moved in yet, because the facility suffers from a vibration problem. The shakiness is well within industry standards, but presents a potential problem for researchers using super-sensitive scientific equipment. NIH has spent a decade planning to build the facility and getting permission for the unusual leasing arrangement.

It's the holiday season, and you know what that means: party invitations from vendors. If you're in need of some ethical guidance on how to handle them, the Defense Department General Counsel's Standards of Conduct Office has issued a helpful list of rules and regulations.

(Hat tip: IEC Journal)

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has weighed in on the subject of tattoos and body piercings. They're misunderstood, NIOSH says:

For people who do not know much about the body art industry, tattoos and body piercings appear as permanent markings and decorative metal. But this industry is actually a unique form of art. Tattoo artists can honor people or memories that were an important part of a person's life. Body piercers intricately place each piercing to express a person's individuality or culture.

But, NIOSH warns, "body artists may be exposed to a bloodborne pathogen by getting stuck with a used needle or if blood splashes into their eyes, nose, or mouth." Ick.

So NIOSH officials met with a bunch of tattoo and body-piercing organizations and came up with a list of things that can be done to reduce the risk of spreading diseases. The list includes vaccinating and educating, preventing needlestick injuries and reducing cross-contamination.

There was a moment in the CNN-YouTube Republican debate last night when Fred Thompson gave as honest an answer as I think you'll ever hear from a politician on reducing federal spending.

Asked what three programs he would cut to help balance the budget, Thompson responded this way:

The problem is that most of the programs we talk about, the ones that get the headlines, would not begin to solve the problem. ... That's why I have laid out a program not to attack entitlements, but to save Social Security. ... Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are the ones we're really going to have to reform if we're going to make any headway on the spending.

Rudy Giuliani was at it again last night in the CNN-YouTube Republican debate. Asked what he would do to reduce the national debt, he once more took the opportunity to flog his pet proposal to slash federal spending and the federal workforce. Here's what he said:

I think you have to do across-the-board spending cuts like Ronald Reagan did -- 5, 10 percent per civilian agency. It should be done right now, actually. President Bush should do it to strengthen the dollar. We should commit not to rehire half of the civilian employees that will retire. That's 42 percent of the federal workforce that will retire in the next 10 years. Don't rehire half of them. Use technology -- one person doing the job of two or three. Every business has done it; the government has to do it.

Isn't it about time somebody started calling him on this stuff? Such as:

• Nobody knows how many federal employees actually will retire in the next 10 years. That 42 percent is merely a projection of people likely to retire based on estimates that have proven less than fully accurate in the past.
• Is Giuliani really in favor of a haphazard cut to federal operations based on who happens to retire? So if FEMA gets an unusually high number of retirements, he's fine with cutting our disaster response capability and potentially leaving excess capacity elsewhere?
• Government, just like the businesses Giuliani touts, already has replaced hundreds of thousands of workers with technology. Bill Clinton proudly claimed credit for slashing nearly 400,000 jobs during his administration, and agencies spent billions of dollars on technology (and contract workers) to continue to meet their missions. (By the way, does anybody think the federal government improved as a result?) Since George W. Bush took office, thousands of jobs have been added back, but mostly in the homeland security and defense areas. Does Mr. 9/11 really think that those are the jobs that we need to eliminate?

As I've said before, issues like these are simply too important to let candidates slide by with glib promises.

It's time for federal agencies to stop using the special Outstanding Scholar and Bilingual/Bicultural hiring authorities, the Office of Personnel Management says. The agency "strongly advises against further use" of the authorities, officials said in a statement issued earlier this month.

The programs were created after a 1981 lawsuit challenged the civil service hiring examination on the grounds that it discriminated against blacks and Hispanics. They enabled agencies to circumvent the traditional civil service hiring process to bring highly talented students and minorities into the workforce quickly. But after years of use, the two hiring authorities came under fire themselves. Last year, the Merit Systems Protection Board said agencies couldn't use them unless they also applied veterans preference procedures. OPM says that just isn't possible, so agencies should quit using them altogether.

That still leaves the Federal Career Internship Program as an option for agencies looking to make quick non-traditional hires. But as Karen Rutzick reported earlier this year, that program, too has come under legal fire.

Interested in reading the latest federal ethics horror stories? The Defense Department's Standards of Conduct Office has updated its "Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure." (I wrote about the encyclopedia earlier this year.)

You can download the new version (it's a Microsoft Word document) here, or just get the latest updates here.

Some of the new entries:

• Affair with Assistant Leads to Employee Removal


• One Happy Family Spends Time Together in Jail


• Stealing Isn’t the Only Way to Misuse a Government Issued Credit Card


• Federal Employee Stole Credit Card Numbers to Hire Prostitutes (more on that here)


• Boyfriends Can Be Very Expensive For Employees Who Steal Funds


• Law Enforcement Official Fired for Landing Government Helicopter at His Daughter’s School


• 29-Year Veteran of the VA Loses Job Over Dirty Emails


• Stopping at the Base Eatery Not an “Official Visit”

(Hat tip: IEC Journal)

Need to get some early holiday shipping done? The Postal Service is offering an early treat: A bunch of free stuff, from package pickup to shipping supplies.

The Campaign for America's Future wants Consumer Product Safety Commissioner Nancy Nord out of her job, arguing that she isn't sufficiently committed to getting more resources for the agency to step up inspections of toys for dangers like lead-based paint. And the organization has enlisted Barbie into its cause:

(Hat tip: Washington Post)

The employees of the Office of Governmentwide Policy at the General Services Administration have given agency administrator Lurita Doan an early Christmas present: a check for $2 million. That's how much the employees of the office saved through efficiency improvements, officials say.

Now Doan just needs to decide what to do with the money. Kevin Messner, acting associate GSA administrator in charge of OGP, has an idea: "It is my hope that the money will remain unspent and thus contribute to reducing the federal deficit," he says.

Over at The Atlantic, James Fallows has some bad news about the Bush administration's much-hyped plan to open up military airspace to ease air traffic congestion over the Thanksgiving weekend. In Fallows' words, the idea is "preposterous," and "will not make the slightest difference in airline delays or the general neuralgia of Thanksgiving travel." Not only is there little military airspace near places that experience the most congestion, it's already routinely opened to civilian traffic over the holidays.

So the State Department has determined that it has all the volunteers it needs to fill positions in Iraq, and won't have to force diplomats to go to the country against their will. Which begs the question: From a management perspective, wouldn't it have made more sense to make that determination before telling people they'd be forced to go if the department couldn't find sufficient volunteers? Why create all kinds of angst in your workforce when it turns out you didn't need to? The answer isn't that State needed to send a message that forced assignments might be coming. That message already had been sent loud and clear.

Here's just a sampling of headlines from today's Washington Post:

• State Dept. Won't Order Diplomats to Iraq
• TSA Minimizes Failure to Detect Threats
• FEMA Accused Of Wasting More Katrina Funding
• Justice Dept. Conducting Criminal Probe of Baghdad Embassy Contracts

This is a pretty typical day for the newspaper. Can there be any doubt at this stage that management of federal operations is not just something that's worthy of the next president's attention, but the critical issue facing the country in the next few years? If recent history has taught us anything, it's that we should be judging our candidates on the basis of how well they will manage the critical functions of the federal government, which are literally a matter of life and death to Americans. And we should be holding their feet to the fire when they make cavalier policy proposals like not replacing half of federal employees who retire and threatening to cut health benefits for political appointees.

While presidential candidates like to focus on policy proposals, and political reporters remain obsessed with the who's-up-who's-down horse race aspects of the campaign, the critically important issue is whether the next president will form an effective team of appointees, make sure agencies have the capacity to perform the roles they've been assigned, and hold federal managers and executives accountable for results. This issue ought to be central to the campaign, and its barely on the periphery.

Can you sell the concept of activist government like it was a hip computer brand? Judge for yourself:

(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan.)

Who gets affected most when gas prices keep going higher and higher? One likely answer, NPR reports today, is the U.S. military. Its 340,000-barrel-a-day rate of oil consumption would rank it 38th in the world if it were a country. The C-130 Hercules transport plane, to take just one Defense gas-guzzler, gets three gallons to the mile (that's not miles to the gallon).

So how does the Pentagon cope with rising fuel costs? "It is, in the short term, a management challenge," says Michael O'Hanlon, a former Defense Department budgeteer who's now with the Brookings Institution. "And there are many Pentagon comptroller types who are staying up late into the evening figuring out how to make this work."

Interesting juxtaposition of stories on our home page today. First, Jill Aitoro uncovers the story of two more information technology vendors who have quietly dropped their General Services Administration schedule contracts, one of them openly citing "unreasonable demands" by the agency's inspector general.

At the same time, though, CongressDaily's Dan Friedman reports that a bipartisan group of senators are concerned about IGs who they say "work too closely with agency leaders or succumb to political pressure from the Bush administration." They're pushing a bill aimed at making IGs more independent by, among other things, prohibiting them from accepting bonuses from agency heads and reducing the control of agencies over IG pay.

Just in case you missed it, I wanted to draw your attention to this tidbit, courtesy of our friends at CongressDaily, about Congress' contingency planning for its ongoing failure to pass any appropriations bills -- more than a month into the fiscal year:

If Congress cannot get its work done in time for Christmas, as a fallback, federal agencies have already been instructed to plan as if Congress will eventually pass a CR running through Feb. 15, sources said.

Looks like we can count on budget uncertainty running well into the new year. Again.

The Center for Investigative Reporting and Salon have teamed up on a new report arguing that "federal whistleblowers almost never receive legal protection after they take action."

Among the alleged reprisals detailed:

• Joseph D. Whitson Jr. was a civilian chemist in the Air Force who spoke out about superiors falsifying drug test results. His desk was moved to a room in the basement and his job duties stripped.

• Vernie Gee Sr. was an agricultural inspector who sounded the alarm about tainted meat in the U.S. food supply and inspectors taking bribes from slaughterhouses. Gee was beaten up by a plant worker during an inspection -- and then reprimanded by superiors for fighting.
• George Randall Taylor, a chief of police at a Navy base in Bermuda, exposed coverups of rapes on the base. He was then forced into a psychiatric hospital.
• Before Teresa Chambers was fired from the Park Police, she found used condoms on her car, and someone pepper-sprayed her office door.

Of course, the report also notes that recent whistleblower cases "included one in which an employee sought protection after reporting missing candy bars at a government commissary. In another case, a worker complained about colleagues using a drinking fountain as a spittoon. One government worker was discovered by investigators to have fabricated his entire complaint. Most such cases, however, are weeded out of the system."

My favorite part, though, was the video highlighting the efforts of one of the pioneers of whistleblower protection legislation: Sen. Richard M. Nixon.

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

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

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

(Hat tip: Wonkette)

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

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

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

The good news for the Postal Service is that next year it expects to increase income and reduce spending. The bad news is the agency still expects to lose $600 million.

For immigrants, the path to citizenship in the United States these days can be long and difficult. But if you think you can do an end run around the process by paying some money to a guy who calls himself Grand Chief Thunderbird IV, head of the "Kaweah Indian Nation," who promises Hispanic people that they can join the tribe as a means of getting official U.S. papers, then you need to think again. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Bureau and the Social Security Administration's inspector general have teamed up to indict the Grand Chief, whose real name, by the way, is Malcolm Webber.

There was a great little first-person account in the Washington Post yesterday by a civil servant about trying to secure an upgrade to business class for a political appointee at an agency -- and being rescued from embarrassment (or worse) by a savvy flight attendant.

(Hat tip: IEC Journal)

Andrew Sullivan today:

My nagging worry about Obama is management capability. If we've learned anything from the debacle of the last six years, it's that managing the government and getting it to do even the most basic tasks competently should not be under-estimated as a task.

It's sad that it took some of the extreme events of the last six years to demonstrate this to us as a nation.

Nancy Finigan of Washington's exclusive Georgetown neighborhood has a bone to pick with the Secret Service. She tells D.C.'s Fox 5 News that after she rented a townhouse to a group of agents in the fall of 2005, they trashed the place, leaving filthy carpets, damaged drywall and stained basement floors when they moved out after their 18-month lease was up.

Finigan says the damage cost $19,000 to repair. The General Services Administration, which negotiated the lease for the property on behalf of the Secret Service, has now opened discussions with Finigan about a settlement relating to the damages.

So what was the Secret Service doing renting a tony Georgetown townhouse in the first place? Finigan says she was told it would be used as a safe house, but also points out that first daughter Jenna Bush lived just a few doors down.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama wants the IRS to do your taxes for you -- if you take the standard deduction, that is. From an AP story describing tax proposals Obama unveiled yesterday:

Additionally, the IRS would send prefilled tax forms to 40 million workers who take the standard deduction and have a bank account. They would simply have to sign and return it, which Obama estimates would save more than $2 billion in tax preparer fees, 200 million hours of work and "an incalculable amount of headache and heartburn."

The question is, how much of those costs and hours of work would be transferred to the IRS workforce, and would the agency's budget and staff be increased accordingly?

(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)