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I expressed some sympathy for the British counterterrorism official who lost his job for carrying a document the wrong way yesterday. But a couple of our awesome commenters explain why my sympathy is misplaced. TomS writes:

One of the first rules of handling classified information is that you use coversheets, and when acting as a courier, all classified is properly wrapped to prevent such a disclosure. He violated the simplest and most basic procedures for protecting classified information. I have no sympathy for someone in his position making such a mistake with classified, highly time-sensitive information.

And Bud chimes in:

Anyone in such a role knows - from day two at least - that you NEVER take any classified document out of the building to another location without the proper "cover", be it a secure, locked bag or whatever is dictated by your particular agency. It is NOT the kind of "unconscious mistake anyone could make" unless maybe they are in Congress or work as a political appointee. The slip does not come from pressure, it originates in either carelessness or ego. Neither of which is acceptable in our world.

Fair enough. Rules are rules, and procedures are procedures.

I don't really have an opinion on whether Barack Obama's aunt is getting special treatment in her deportation proceedings, but I do think it's ironic that she's getting extra time in the country because of crazy backlogs at the Boston immigration court. If her nephew was inheriting a workforce in better shape, she might be gone.

From Rob Brodsky:

Hard to believe but it took the U.S. Congress until last year to prohibit the Department of Homeland Security from awarding a Federal Protective Service contract for guard services to a business concern that is “owned, controlled, or operated by an individual who has been convicted of a serious felony.”

DHS has now issued a proposed rule detailing which felonies may prohibit a contractor from being awarded a contract and to require companies to provide information regarding those crimes to government officials.

And if you’re curious what qualifies as a serious felony, the rule spells out some examples including: fraud arising out of a contract with the federal, state or local government; bribery; threatening physical harm to a government official; counterfeiting; forgery or willful failure to collect or pay federal taxes.

I'm talking about CBS hit show, not the Naval Criminal Investigative Service itself. What? It's Friday. I can write about pop culture if I want to. And I have a serious point to make, I promise.

I watch a lot of NCIS. It's syndicated on USA before House re-runs (and I watch a LOT of House). It's easy on the brain. And I'm pretty much in favor of anything that keeps Mark Harmon working. And a lot of Americans watch with me: on a good night, the new episodes can get 19 million viewers.

But while I think NCIS is a pleasant diversion, I don't think it's a particularly good show. And it exemplifies some of the more annoying things about how I think federal employees are depicted on television.

First, it's a procedural based in a law-enforcement agency. Almost all federal employees or federal employee characters on television work for agencies like the FBI, or the Department of Homeland Security, even when they're part of a larger constellation of characters on a show like The Wire. That's not necessarily a bad thing. People like to see cops solve crimes--it's why the Law & Order franchise has such enormous staying power. And it means that the vast majority of federal employees on television look like heroes, the occasional rogue agent aside. But it's an extremely limited view of the wide range of work that federal employees perform. And by focusing on law enforcement, the federal government looks punitive, rather than service-oriented.

And NCIS, like JAG (which it's a spin-off from) is fairly ensconced in the Naval community. The show's characters only interact with civilians who are related or otherwise directly connected to the members of the military who are the victims or criminals in the cases they tackle. It's a hermetic look at the federal world. That's also not to say that the IRS, which touches the life of every adult American, would make a fascinating show (though it's the subject of David Foster Wallace's new novel). USA's In Plain Sight, about U.S. Marshals, does a better job of placing its characters in broader communities, and showing how government can make people's lives better and safer.

But for my money, the best show about federal employees on the air right now is Fox's Bones. Yes, it's a procedural, and it's got an FBI agent. But it's set in a federal scientific lab, among a group of employees with a wide range of skills. Solving murders is what the show focuses on, but it's not the only thing the characters do. They interact with a broad array of members of the public. And the show makes frequent references to coordinating with other agencies. The show isn't a documentary, of course--I don't think a lot of federal labs include vaults set up by serial killers, and David Boreanaz and Emily Deschanel, who play the two main characters "deviate from the norm" in terms of physical appearance, as Deschanel's character would say. But despite those necessary elements of fantasy, the show has a feeling of interconnectivity, and shows the characters doing a whole bunch of things other than brandishing guns and kicking in doors. With NCIS as the counter-example, that feels like progress.

John Gage just said at a hearing that 25 percent of Transportation Security Officers are American Federation of Government Employees members. That's the first hard number I've heard about any organizing campaign at TSA. I'm assuming TSA employees will get collective bargaining rights in this administration, so I'll be curious to see how many of them join AFGE and the National Treasury Employees Union when they can bargain.

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."

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.

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.

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.