by Frank James

A sign of the times. Here's a marketing pitch from an outfit called Fedmarket.com that purports to show business people how to make money from federal contracts:

New Seminar: Win Federal Contracts in the $1.5 Trillion Federal Bailout Market

Join Richard White, Fedmarket.com founder and CEO on Thursday, January 22, 2009 and find out how your company can prosper in the federal marketplace during these turbulent times.

Janet Hook, Noam Levey and Frank James, revised

President-elect Barack Obama has asked former Sen. Tom Daschle to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services, and the South Dakota Democrat has accepted the offer to head the agency that will handle the new administration's signature initiatve to expand health insurance coverage, a Democrat familiar with the process said.

The source said that Obama is expected to officially name Daschle and other Cabinet nominees early next week, although that timetable may be accelerated.

Daschle, who published a book on the health care system early this year, was an early supporter of Obama's bid for the presidency. Obama's campaign and transition staff has been heavily staffed by former Daschle aides. One of Obama's key Senate and transition staffers, Peter Rouse, was also Daschle's chief of staff. Rouse was appointed a senior adviser in the incoming Obama White House.

Daschle served in the Senate from 1986 after eight years in the House of Representatives. He was Senate Majority Leader in 2001-03 while Democrats controlled the chamber. But he was defeated in his 2004 bid for reelection after Republicans ran a bitter campaign targeting him as a national Democrat out of step with his home state.

But Daschle remains popular among his former colleagues and would be likely to face little challenge to his qualifications and character. However, Daschle had expressed some concern about going through the confirmation process because of questions likely to be raised about his wife, who is a registered lobbyist.

by Frank James

President Bush (remember him?) is making the rounds of the federal bureaucracy doing something of a farewell tour.

Today, he was at the Transportation Department talking up all that employees there and his administration have done to improve the nation's transportation system, such as better management of the New York City airspace, improvements that should have the salutary effect of making life better for holiday travelers, the president said.

Of course, because of economic slowdown, the airlines will be flying fewer planes so don't expect the airports to be any less crowded.

Anyway, the president started off with a joke which contained a kind of heckuva job compliment to the department's employees :

I appreciate you giving me a chance to come by and visit with you today. I want to thank you very much for the great job you are doing to make sure that across America our railroads and highways and airways are working to keep our citizens moving. You have done a terrific job, as far as I am concerned. The past eight years I have not seen a traffic jam -- (laughter) -- waited for an airplane -- (laughter) -- or had my bags lost. (Laughter.)

Yes, it's good to be the king. In Washington, he's the guy who creates the traffic jams.

I'm sure he didn't mean to rub anyone's face in it.

No doubt a lot of people next week will be wishing they could travel by private jumbo jet and motorcades with police escort to grandma's house.

by Frank James

One thing about being President-elect Obama is that you get a lot of advice, including potential to-do lists.

The Government Accountability Office, Congress's investigative agency, has just posted its list with supportive material on its website.

Here's GAO's list.

Many of the urgent policy concerns identified here are critical and time sensitive and require prioritized federal action. They include

rebuilding military readiness.

by Frank James

One of the biggest knocks on the Bush Administration's $700 billion bailout/rescue plan was that buying up toxic assets wouldn't do a lot to put cash in banks' coffers.

Many an expert said a better approach would be to inject U.S. taxpayer dollars directly into banks and getting some ownership in the form of preferred shares in return.

The banks didn't like this idea because it would mean they would have Uncle Sam as a partner which could throw its considerable weight around around. That would obviously be a pain in the neck for any free-wheeling businessman.

Conservatives didn't like the idea because it would mean government ownership of private enterprises, specifically banks. It smacked of socialism, some said and was too reminiscent of the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac situations. Before federal officials took them over, those companies were quasi-private but with federal government guarantees behind them business practices which many critics believe contributed to the current financial crisis.

Anyway, things move quickly in Washington these days and now it appears the Bush Administration has really warmed to the idea of buying into banks after all.

Here's the exchange between reporters and White House Press Secretary Dana Perino today.

Q Thanks. Does the idea of the federal government taking a part ownership in a number of U.S. banks fit with the president's philosophy of free enterprise?

Part of that package includes a broad range of authorities for the Treasury secretary. What you're referring to, I believe, is capital injections that would actually be investing in banks but not taking them over.

by Frank James

It wasn't a surprise that Washington Mutual, better known as WaMu, failed. For months It's been the thrift institution equivalent of a dead-man walking, finally being put to death by a run by its depositors, making it the largest bank failure in U.S. history.

Still, the timing of its demise, coming when it did at the very time Congress and the White House were trying to reach agreement on a Wall Street bailout, was like a thunder clap coming from the economic storm clouds hanging over the nation's capital.

Meanwhile, J.P. Morgan Chase was one of the few financial companies left standing with a strong enough balance sheet to do such a deal.

One of the best parts of the deal is it won't eat into Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. funds, which, if as many banks fail as is expected, will likely have to be replenished.

The Wall Street Journal does its typically comprehensive job of covering the story giving a lot a space to what the deal means for JP Morgan Chase. (In a nutshell, it should be very good for the Wall Street firm, permitting it, among other things, to expand into two markets it's lusted after -- California and Florida.)

An interesting bit of color from the story is this: The WaMu chief executive, only in the role 16 days, was in New York as he tried to find a buyer for the thrift institution and was on his way back to the West Coast when the Office of Thrift Supervision took his company over. He had no idea.

Here's an excerpt:

WaMu, founded in 1889, became a national mortgage- and consumer-lending giant via a string of mergers in the 1990s led by Chief Executive Officer Kerry Killinger. But Mr. Killinger made several missteps. He pursued an aggressive retail expansion marred by poor locations in too many markets. He steered WaMu into subprime mortgages, only to discover too late that the thrift was lending to many unqualified borrowers.

But it still posted a $3.3 billion second-quarter loss and said it expected to lose $19 billion on its mortgage portfolio over the next two and a half years. WaMu's biggest predicament was that it held large amounts of mortgages made in U.S. regions where housing prices have fallen sharply, such as California. WaMu has $53 billion in option adjustable-rate mortgages, a type of loan particularly vulnerable to default, as well as $16.1 billion in loans made to subprime borrowers.

by Frank James

It's a safe bet that the legislative proposal by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. to buy up bad Wall Street assets is going to undergo some fundamental revision.

Troubling to many critics is the breathtaking extraconstitutionality of the proposal which would give the Treasury secretary unusual powers that couldn't be countermanded by Congress or the courts.

That appears on its face to violate the Constitution's assertion of a balance of powers where no one branch is unchecked by the others.

On the Diane Rheem Show on public radio this morning, Alan Blinder, former Federal Reserve vice chair and normally a mild-mannered, live-and-let-live Princeton University economics professor, said Paulson should be fired for his proposal.

Here's Blinder from the program:

"I'm speaking now as one of the earliest advocates of creating an institution like this, many, many months ago. And it's a crying shame to see the way the Treasury has written this. I think the secretary of the Treasury should be dismissed, frankly. ... Asking for the authority to buy anything, with no review, with no court review, with no limits practically as to quantity or scope, with almost no congressional oversight. We have something more precious at stake than our precious financial system and that's our precious Constitution. And frankly, if I were a member of Congress, having advocated for this for nine or ten months, I would vote against this unless it's changed, dramatically..."

The administration should know its proposal is in deep trouble when both Paul Krugman and William Kristol agree the plan goes too far.

by Frank James

The not-so-invisible-hand of Washington reached out on Sunday and snatched the last two remaining big Wall Street investment banking firms into the world of increased federal regulation with the announcement that Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have decided to become commercial banks.

This is how the Federal Reserve announced it last night:

The Federal Reserve Board on Sunday approved, pending a statutory five-day antitrust waiting period, the applications of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to become bank holding companies.

To provide increased liquidity support to these firms as they transition to managing their funding within a bank holding company structure, the Federal Reserve Board authorized the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to extend credit to the U.S. broker-dealer subsidiaries of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley against all types of collateral that may be pledged at the Federal Reserve's primary credit facility for depository institutions or at the existing Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF); the Federal Reserve has also made these collateral arrangements available to the broker-dealer subsidiary of Merrill Lynch. In addition, the Board also authorized the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to extend credit to the London-based broker-dealer subsidiaries of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch against collateral that would be eligible to be pledged at the PDCF.

Now they'll be able to go out and get deposits from people like you and me which will help to stabilize their capital base.

Those deposits will be federally insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. which will give the companies the kind of insulation from capital flight they've lacked until now.

We'll be keeping our eyes open for those new Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs bank branches.

by Frank James

It's not easy being a federal judge.

They're typically accomplished lawyers who could make much more money in private practice.

Now comes word that the group of federal judges who oversee the federal judiciary's administration known as the Judicial Conference of the U.S. have decided that, to save money, semi-retired judges or "senior trial judges" will share courtrooms.
(The conference had earlier decided to cut space for judges' chambers and clerks and the like.)

But because these are lawyers we're talking about, they made sure to stick in an important qualifier. The new policy will only apply to senior judges working in brand new courthouses.

Other changes the judges made today probably won't please many court employees. The judges moved forward on rejiggering the organizational chart for court employees and how those workers will be evaluated, all in order to reduce overall compensation costs.

This presumably will apply to workers in both new and older courthouses.

by Frank James

There are apparently a lot of deadbeat businesses out there when it comes to paying their payroll taxes.

The General Accountability Office, Congress's investigative arm, estimates that the federal treasury is short $58 billion in unpaid payroll taxes.

Part of the problem is that there are a lot of payroll-tax scofflaws out there, the GAO determined following an audit of the Internal Revenue Service database.

As of September 30, 2007, IRS's records showed that over 1.6 million businesses owed over $58 billion in unpaid payroll taxes, including interest and penalties. Of that amount, 70 percent of all unpaid payroll taxes are owed by businesses with more than a year (4 tax quarters) of unpaid federal payroll taxes, and over a quarter of unpaid payroll taxes were owed by businesses that accumulated tax debt for more than 3 years (12 tax quarters).

And some of these business owners are pretty shameless, as the GAO found:

Our analysis of those businesses showed some owners/officers abuse the tax system, willfully diverting amounts withheld from their employees' salaries to fund their business operations or their own personal lifestyle. For example, the owner of one of our case study businesses that owed almost $2.5 million was under-reporting their personal income and was involved in possible check kiting and money laundering. Another had accumulated almost $2.5 million in unpaid payroll taxes and made large cash withdrawals prior to filing bankruptcy multiple times. A third had accumulated over $500,000 in unpaid payroll taxes over a 10-year period as well as another $500,000 in personal taxes. The owner had put property in a spouse's name and sold property to children for less than market value to avoid IRS collection action.

by Mark Silva

In the realm of the $3-trillion-a-year federal government, here's a noteworthy figure:

The cost of confidentiality: $9.9 billion last year.

And that's not counting the part they can't talk about, such as the costs of containing information at the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency.

The biggest share of the reported cost resides in the government agencies that classify and declassify information and protect it along the way: $8.65 billion last year, according to the new annual report of the National Archives office that monitors all of this activity, the Information Security Oversight Office.

It climbed by $450 million last year..

Add to that the $1.26 billion cost to industry of protecting information handled under government contract.

The total came to $9.9 billion in Fiscal 2007, up $439 million, or 4.6 percent, over the previous year. The biggest cause of the increase: Physical security, which ran $1.4 billion.

However, there is a silver lining in the rising cost of confidentiality.

"After an extensive surge to bolster government-wide security measures in the post-9/11 era, the annual rate of growth for total security costs is declining,'' the ISOO reports. "The annual rate of growth of total security costs for FY 2006 (3.3 percent) and FY 2007 (4.6 percent) are lower than those reported for any other year since FY 2001.''

There wasn't a lot more information being classified last year - with the ISOO's annual survey of executive agencies finding a 1 percent increase in the number of original classifications of documents, 233,639 such actions in 2007.

This tally, of course, does not include the Office of the Vice President, which, as the Tribune first reported a couple years back, does not report its activities to the National Archives because it considers itself apart from the Executive Branch. Vice President Dick Cheney's paycheck is signed by the Senate, where he presides. And that's no secret.

Defense Department Press Secretary Geoff Morell. (Pentagon photo.)

by Frank James

At today's Pentagon briefing, Defense Department press secretary Geoff Morrell, was asked about the preparations his agency is making to continue operating in the event Congress doesn't pass the war-spending bill.

He answered by saying that officials within the department were working now to figure out who the "essential" employees are who would have to work even if the department shutdown:

...And so we are, as you know, I think, taking some prudent planning measures just in case that money doesn't come through. Deputy Secretary Gordon England sent a memo throughout the department earlier this week asking for all the departments to begin planning for a possible shutdown, and all the departments are due to report back to him by June 30th with a plan as to what they would do to shut things down. And he's additionally, I think, asked that we figure out who sort of the essential civilian personnel is that would have to remain working even without pay in the event of a shutdown.

Morrell's use of the word "essential" would likely send shivers through some at the Pentagon and cause painful flashbacks for federal employees who lived through the government shutdowns of 1995 and 1996.

That's because all federal workers like to be regarded as essential. Otherwise, maybe federal managers will get it in their heads to start downsizing their agencies.

A large crane lies in this intersection on Manhattan's Upper East Side after it collapsed Friday, May 30, 2008 in New York City just before first responders arrived. (AP Photo/Seth Holladay)

by Frank James

It's still too early to know what caused today's deadly construction crane collapse in New York City, the second this year.

But it's safe to say this--the accident is likely to increase calls for the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration to play a more active role in helping to prevent such accidents.

That's what happened following this year's earlier collapse of a crane in Manhattan which killed seven people.

A May 2, 2008 editorial in the Baltimore Sun noted that the deadly accident in March spurred state and local officials into action to retrain their construction inspectors. That wasn't enough, however, said the newspaper which added this:

... The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration should really take the lead in this area to ensure that training for crane operators coincides with changes in the industry. About 80 workers each year die from crane-related incidents, according to OSHA.

It just so happens that OSHA has been working on an update of federal crane safety rules which apparently haven't been revised in more than 30 years despite numerous advances in crane technology--the equipment being more hydraulic and computerized now than they were decades ago, according to this piece from this Seton Alerts for Safety newsletter.

by Frank James

Does paper money discriminate against the blind and visually impaired? Common sense would suggest as much. Then does that mean that the U.S. will have to change its paper currency in order to end that discrimination?

Yes, according to the U.S. Appeals Court for the District of Columbia.

The court's decision was handed down in a case called American Council for the Blind et al v. Henry M. Paulson Jr., Secretary of the Treasury . The U.S. Mint which prints the nation's currency is part of the Treasury Department.

Unless the Treasury Department is able to get the Supreme Court to overturn the decision, it looks like U.S. currency is going to have to be redesigned with raised, tactile features or other elements so the blind can tell the difference between denominations.

by Mark Silva

A mug-shot and a set of finger-prints won't be enough at the booking desk anymore.

The government is demanding DNA as well.

"The attorney general is directing all agencies of the United States that arrest or detain individuals or supervise individuals facing charges to collect DNA samples from
individuals who are arrested, facing charges, or convicted, and from non-United States persons who are detained under the authority of the United States...''

So goes the notice in the Federal Register.

It stems from the requirements of the DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005 and the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006.

Agencies that collect DNA will have to submit it to the FBI.

Now, DNA has served to absolve some people - including Death Row convicts - of the crimes they were accused of committing.

But this is an intriguing new data base for the government to control.

And, so long as you don't get arrested, the government won't have your DNA.

by Frank James

As we view the images of the aftermath of the earthquake in China's Sichuan Province and the reports of an estimated 12,000 dead, it's impossible to escape the sense that not only could it happen here but it will.

And it's not just California that we should be concerned about. While the Golden State obviously has had the most experience with earthquakes because of the very active San Andreas Fault, which is overdue for the Big One, the Midwest is at risk too.

That's largely because of the New Madrid Fault, although that quake zone isn't the only one in the central part of the country to worry about. It was the Wabash Valley Fault, after all, that caused an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale in Southern Illinois.

The combination of April's Midwest earthquake and this week's calamity in Sichuan Province should remind federal, state and local officials, as well as individuals themselves, to do more to prepare for and respond to the inevitable earth shaking that most scientists say is only a matter of time.

(AP Photo/Themba Hadebe)

by Frank James

False positives in any kind of warning system are a bad thing, whether they're produced by an overly sensitive screening procedure for dangerous, blood-borne viruses or al Qaeda terrorists.

Any screening approach that gives off a lot of bad hits adds to overall costs, and wastes time and attention needed to deal with the actual threat.

If you're getting a lot of false positives, you've got a problem that needs fixing and quickly.

Unless, that is, you're the federal government which appears to be stuck with a terrorism watch list that gives off many false positives and yet seems unable to do much about it.

The latest example of this is found in a USA Today story by Mimi Hall who writes that the U.S. terrorism watch list contains the name of Nelson Mandela, the 89-year old Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former president of South Africa, one of the most beloved and respected human beings on the planet.

Mandela and other South African officials are on the terrorist list because they're members of the African National Congress, South Africa's dominant political party.

Before it came to power in 1994 however, the ANC used violence to overthrow the racist apartheid regime in South Africa, a government which labeled it a terrorist group. And it is still evidently listed that way for U.S. terror watch list purposes.

by Frank James

It doesn't seem to happen too often that FEMA gets to tell a good-news story about itself but the agency believes it has one now.

Apparently, half of the agency's employees think the disaster-management agency's officials are managing the agency's employees well. The other half? Well, draw your own conclusions from this snippet from a FEMA press release:

• 49 percent of FEMA employees responded positively to questions related to Leadership & Knowledge Management
• 50 percent of FEMA employees believed the agency fostered a Results-Oriented Performance Culture
• 51 percent of FEMA employees gave positive responses to questions relating to the agency's Talent Management

At a lot of places, having half the employees fail to respond positively about their managers would be seen as quite the failure.

But this is FEMA we're talking about after all, the agency that became the butt of jokes and scorn following its mishandling of Hurricane Katrina.

by Mark Silva

Some time has passed since Halloween, and for that matter the report of House Democrats who say that then-acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Chief Julie Myers showed "poor judgment" by giving an award at her agency's Halloween party to an employee wearing prison stripes, a wig of dreadlocks wig and face-darkening make-up.

The report of the Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee, released Tuesday, criticized Myers (right) for ordering staff to delete digital photographs of Myers with the costumed man, saying her actions "appeared to be an attempt to conceal her actions from public disclosure." The report disclosed that ICE learned on Nov. 8 -- a week after the party -- that the deleted photographs could be electronically restored.

In February, six weeks after Myers was confirmed by the Senate as the official head of ICE, the agency released the restored photos in response to a CNN Freedom of Information request.
The report calls on the Department of Homeland Security, ICE's parent agency, to conduct a full investigation into "the concealment of this incident."

When the costumed ICE employee showed up at the afternoon party, "several employees were shocked and offended by the costume -- some even left immediately after seeing the disguise," the report concludes. The costume "caused grave concern and distress, especially for the African-Americans that were present.''

When the costumed employee arrived at the judge's table, he told the judges, which included Myers, "I'm a Jamaican detainee from Krome (a federal detention center outside Miami), obviously, I've escaped," the report says. "The response from the judges was laughter. Not one of the judges expressed concern over the costume or its racial overtones.''

by Frank James

Identity theft is, by all accounts, a vast and growing problem. Congress knows this full well since lawmakers have held any number of hearings on the subject and there's an uproar on Capitol Hill everytime it's discovered that a government laptop with personal information on thousands of Americans has gone missing or some other lapse occurs.

All of which makes it curious that Congress itself made public the sensitive personal information of of numerous legislative aides by not redacting beforehand the information on required financial-disclosure documents.

According to a story in the Hill newspaper:

Furious senior House aides are demanding committee action against a website that has posted their bank account numbers, signatures, home addresses and children’s names that are included in financial disclosure documents.

Some are demanding legal action against the website LegiStorm, which since February has been posting congressional documents online as a way to increase transparency in government. Aides have brought their complaints to the House Administration Committee and the clerk of the House

by Mike Dorning and Bay Fang

BECKLEY, W.Va.—The State Department's inspector general is investigating three contract employees -- two fired and one disciplined -- who improperly accessed Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s private passport files, the department confirmed Thursday.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said two employees were fired and one disciplined for accessing the files on three separate occasions this year -- one as recently as last week.

The incident immediately stirred memories of a scandal in the 1992 campaign when pages were removed from the passport files of Bill Clinton, who at the time was challenging the re-election of then-President George H.W. Bush.

An Obama campaign spokesman immediately demanded a “complete investigation,” including the identities of the people who accessed the files and their possible motives. In a hastily scheduled conference call with reporters late Thursday night after news of the security breach broke, McCormack declined to identify the employees involved but said the improper access was uncovered through internal department controls.

“This is an outrageous breach of security and privacy, even from an administration that has shown little regard for either over the last eight years,” Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement e-mailed to reporters.

Initially, however, there could be one significant difference between the workers who looked at Obama's records and the passport search during Clinton's campaign:

The last time a Democratic presidential candidate’s passport records were rifled by a Republican administration – in 1992 – it led to a bigger investigation. Joseph diGenova, a former U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., was appointed independent counsel in December 1992.

Then, it was a high-ranking State Department official, acting assistant secretary for legislative affairs Steven K. Berry, who had gone through Clinton’s passport files during the election campaign. State’s inspector general, Sherman Funk, said Berry had helped arrange a search in an effort to find politically damaging information about Clinton.

by Frank James

It's the holiday season, not necessarily the best time to be told that you're not going to get the pay raise you had hoped for.

But that's exactly what President Bush is telling federal workers as he gets very Scrooge-like, announcing a reduction in their expected pay raises, in some cases quite substantial, just in time for the holidays.

For workers who live in pricey metropolitan areas, like Washington, D.C., New York, Los Angeles or Chicago, the president is pretty much doing away with a cost-of-living adjustment meant to narrow the gap somewhat between what federal workers and private-sector workers earn in such areas.

In a letter the president sent congressional leaders, he essentially says federal workers must take one for the team, as it were, since giving them the raises they expected would hurt the nation's war on terror.

In a formulation Bush himself might appreciate, we must cut the bureaucrats' pay raises here, so we can fight the terrorists over there. You really can't make this stuff up.

Here's how the Associated Press reported the story:

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush ordered Wednesday that federal workers living in more expensive regions of the country will get smaller pay raises than expected, citing what he called unacceptably high costs to the nation.

Current law provides that federal civilian workers will get a 2.5 percent across-the-board raise in January. That will not change under Bush's order.

by Mark Silva

"This is Ed.''

That's how Ed Schafer liked to answer the phone in the governor's office in North Dakota. It wasn't a very big office -- the staff photo fit on a page of the state Web-site.

It's not a very big state either -- with fewer people counted by the U.S. Census there in 2000 than were counted in 1900. We got a chance to know it, and to love it, during the aftermath of the Red River Flood in 1997, when the river overflowed the levees and deluged the city, followed by fire that decimated a good piece of downtown, including the newspaper -- the company formerly known as Knight Ridder summoned reinforcements to staff the stricken paper.

And it was there, dealing with the governor's office, that we first met "Ed.''

Schafer probably won't be answering his own phone at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where President Bush hopes to station him as secretary for the president's remaining year and then some in office. The far-flung agency counts more than 100,000 employees -- a little more than one-sixth the number of people who live in the state of North Dakota.

(Schafer and Bush. AP Photo b by Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

by Frank James

The FEMA public-relations official who staged the by-now infamous fake press conference during the California fires apparently was fired from a new job before he could even start it, a position as the top spokesman for National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell.

John Philbin was supposed to start that new job today, according to the Associated Press. But the offer went up in smoke following the outrage that ensued after Philbin's blunder became public knowledge.

It didn't take much time at all for McConnell to decide that the last thing the intelligence community needed was a guy who staged a fake press conference. The spooks are is still trying to live down their own credibility problems related to that "slam dunk" intelligence they provided in the run up to the Iraq War.

Maybe Philbin should be forgiven however for what he did. This is the same Bush Administration, after all, that produced the phony "video news segments" which it then distributed to small-market television news programs.

Remember this New York Times story from a couple of years ago?

It is the kind of TV news coverage every president covets.

"Thank you, Bush. Thank you, U.S.A.," a jubilant Iraqi-American told a camera crew in Kansas City for a segment about reaction to the fall of Baghdad. A second report told of "another success" in the Bush administration's "drive to strengthen aviation security"; the reporter called it "one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history." A third segment, broadcast in January, described the administration's determination to open markets for American farmers.

To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on the local news. In fact, the federal government produced all three. The report from Kansas City was made by the State Department. The "reporter" covering airport safety was actually a public relations professional working under a false name for the Transportation Security Administration. The farming segment was done by the Agriculture Department's office of communications.

Kathleen Casey-Kirschling, the first Baby Boomer to file for Social Security retirement benefits, submits her application as Michael Astrue, Social Security Administration commissioner stands nearby on October 15, 2007 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

by Frank James

The Social Security Administration organized a photo op today to showcase the first Baby Boomer to apply for retirement benefits, Kathleen Casey-Kirschling, 61, who was born, according to the agency, one second after midnight on Jan. 1, 1946.

The photo op allowed the agency to plug its on-line services, of which it is very proud. The agency crowed in a press release:

In The Federal American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) Scorecard, Social Security’s online benefit application has the highest score among all federal websites followed closely by Social Security’s application for extra help with Medicare drug costs. ACSI notes “Their respective scores of 88 and 87 put them in the elite company of online private sector satisfaction leaders like Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.”

The agency probably thought it was doing some good with the event. But SSA no doubt caused probably considerable psychic pain for many a Baby Boomer who, after all, are part of a an increasingly creaky generation that is decidedly not okay with the idea of growing old, that refuses to act its age. As Exhibit A, I offer Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, born March 26, 1948.

Thanks, SSA, for ruining our day.

(Inset photo: Aerosmith's Steven Tyler performs Sept. 20, 2007, in the Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Conn. (AP Photo/Norwich Bulletin, Khoi Ton)

by Frank James

How's this for a reaction to a newspaper investigation? Actually, it's probably more accurate to call it pre-action.

Even before the Tribune could run a scheduled investigative piece on a crib flaw that has killed several children, Simplicity, the manufacturer, is recalling one million of the cribs.

Here's how the Chicago Tribune website is reporting the situation:

In response to a Tribune investigation coming this weekend, the Consumer Product Safety Commission today announced it is recalling one million cribs made by Simplicity for a potentially deadly drop rail hazard. Three deaths have been linked to the flaw. The Tribune special report will detail how the company and the federal agency were slow to react to this danger.

by Frank James

More bad news for the Veterans Affairs Department. A class-action lawsuit was filed today against departing Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson, his agency and other governmental plaintiffs by veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars who say they didn't receive the medical care to which they were they were entitled for their post-traumatic stress disorder.

The agency has been one of the most beleaguered of all the federal departments, criticized for long waits and inconvenient distances between the veterans and the services they seek. There've also been privacy problems with veterans records.

The agency with the mission to "care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan," words of Abraham Lincoln that are on plaques outside the headquarters building near the White House, is clearly itself in need of help.

According to the Associated Press story:

The lawsuit comes amid intense political and public scrutiny of the VA and Pentagon following reports of shoddy outpatient care of injured soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and elsewhere.

"Unless systemic and drastic measures are instituted immediately, the costs to these veterans, their families and our nation will be incalculable, including broken families, a new generation of unemployed and homeless veterans, increases in drug abuse and alcoholism, and crushing burdens on the health care delivery system," the complaint says.

It asks that a federal court order the VA to make immediate improvements.

by Frank James

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has all this two-year old ice it doesn't know what to do with, ice it bought both pre- and post-Hurricane Katrina as part of its preparations and response effort.

How much ice? Around nearly 225 million pounds. That's a lot of margaritas.

But the problem is you probably wouldn't want to use them that way since there are questions about just how safe two-year old ice would be to drink. A lot of Americans would be willing to take their chances but the Centers for Disease Control is already plenty busy.

So that means FEMA needs to get rid of the ice which it is planning to do. It's told the company which has been storing the ice to ditch it. That's probably a story by itself.

Still, it strikes many as wasteful, especially to those suffering through summer heat, that FEMA would be ditching this ice right now. Maybe the ice could be sent to the North Pole or Antarctica to slow down global warming. It's a thought.

Because FEMA is still in a defensive crouch from its mishandling of Katrina, it issued a press release today explaining it's position, just in time for the late night talk shows.

For the Record

Date: July 16, 2007

No.: HQ-07-141

FEMA ICE DISPOSITION

FEMA initiated a contract clause for its ice storage vendor to dispose of ice that it purchased to support the 2005 hurricane season. The vendor, Americold Logistics, Inc. is executing this contract across 22 locations nationwide.

Between June and December 2005 FEMA purchased approximately 224.3 million pounds ice to support the Hurricane Katrina relief effort and stored the remaining unused 84.9 million pounds of ice for responses to the 2006 hurricane season. However, the predicted hurricane activity for 2006 did not materialize, so the ice was not used and remained in storage.

by Sonja Deaner

And this from Newsday's Carol Eisenberg.

by Frank James

The U.S. passport appears to be becoming the identification document of choice for a lot of Americans, even those without immediate plans to go on an overseas trip.

That's what Maura Harty, Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs told a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee yesterday as she tried to explain the massive backlog in passport applications caused by the new federal requirement that U.S. citizens produce passports upon returning from locations in the Western Hemisphere.

In her testimony, Harty said:

American citizens, due to our outreach and I think, in fact, due to a lot of the media coverage of this new requirement, have applied for passports in droves, and it is not always because they mean to travel. American citizens have realized this is the premier document on the planet, but also in this country, to make sure that when they apply for a federal benefit, they can prove who they are and that they're an American citizen.

by Frank James

An aspect worth considering that's unmentioned in the above video report is that the federal government was warned years ago it didn't have the resources to process all the passport applications that would pour in.

The phase in of the passport requirement was initially scheduled for Dec. 2005. At a Senate subcommittee hearing in June 2005, Paul Ruden of the American Society of Travel Agents told lawmakers in oral and written testimony of the limits of the State Department's abilities to turn out passports.

Yet another dimension of the advance planning impact is the question whether, in the time available, the Department of State can gear up sufficiently to handle a vast increase in passport applications in the normal course, without forcing many travelers to incur still higher costs for passport expediting services. While we have heard anecdotally that passport applications have increased in recent weeks, we have seen nothing that measures that increase against the total need if the new rules are made effective with the year-end 2005 deadline in place. Since the vast majority of Americans do not have passports now and since the markets affected by the WHTI (Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative) are traveled predominantly by persons without passports, we anticipate the demand for passports in the wake of a rule requiring them may well exceed the processing capacity of the State Department.

The State Department wound up getting extra time before the entire program was implemented and still couldn't meet the demand. But they can't say they weren't warned.

Posted by Patricia Callahan at 6:09 pm CDT

Reacting to a Tribune series, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) today began investigating the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s response to warnings about a dangerous toy.

The agency, the CPSC, announced a limited recall of Magnetix building sets last year and just last month expanded that recall to cover another 4 million boxes after acknowledging 1,500 complaints of the toys breaking and shedding aspirin-sized magnets. Both recall alerts were confusing to retailers and consumers. In all, one child died and 27 others suffered serious injuries after swallowing loose magnets that twisted or tore the children's intestines.

“This recall has raised concerns about CPSC’s actions in this case and the Commission’s ability to protect the public from risks associated with the consumer products under its jurisdiction,” Durbin wrote in a letter to the acting chairwoman of the agency.

Durbin asked the chairwoman in the next two weeks to answer more than two dozen detailed questions about the agency’s investigation of Magnetix and procedures safety regulators follow to accommodate manufacturers’ concerns during voluntary recalls. “Based on your experience with Magnetix, what steps do you plan to take, or are you considering to better protect consumer safety?” he asked.

Posted by Frank James at 1:39 pm CDT

Many Americans have somehow gotten the notion that the federal government is supposed to protect them from defective and unsafe consumer products.

They can be forgiven that belief given the existence, after all, of a federal agency known as the Consumer Products Safety Commission. Any reasonable person would assume that, given its name, the agency would be forward-leaning in protecting consumers, especially children, the most vulnerable consumers of them all.

But a series in the Chicago Tribune called "Hidden Hazards" tells you what you need to know about how the CPSC may be called many things. But aggressive in protecting consumers isn't one of them.

As the series reports, the agency was warned by a pre-school provider that a defective toy, when it broke, let loose small but powerful magnets that could prove dangerous if swallowed by children.

Here's the top of the first part of the series:

By Patricia Callahan
Tribune staff reporter

May 5, 2007

Sharon Grigsby pleaded with the operator at the federal safety hot line. A popular new toy, Magnetix, nearly killed one of her preschoolers.

Please do something, Grigsby remembers urging.

When the plastic building sets broke, she told the operator, they shed powerful magnets inside her northern Indiana preschool. Grigsby didn't see the loose magnets, not much bigger than baby aspirin.

But one of her 5-year-old students did. He found some and swallowed them. The extraordinarily strong magnets connected in the boy's digestive tract, squeezed the folds of his intestines and tore holes through his bowels. Only emergency surgery saved his life.

If this product isn't recalled, Grigsby remembers warning, children will die.

Posted by Steve Hedges at 4:30 pm CDT

Amid a rising storm of concern over the safety of imported food, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration today announced that it was establishing a new position, the assistant commissioner for food safety, to ensure more protection for consumers.

The post, which will be immediately filled by the FDA’s chief food safety medical officer, David Acheson, comes after the FDA’s own finding that pet food and livestock feed ingredients imported from China may have been tainted with melamine, a nitrogen rich chemical that is used in plastics.

In his new job, Acheson will work with other FDA offices and “coordinate FDA's food safety and defense assignments and commitments,” the agency said in a statement.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Edmund P. Giambastiani, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center on Feb. 23, 2007. Photo from Defense Dept. web site.

Posted by Frank James at 6:03 pm CST

It’s not often that a senior member of a president’s cabinet, whether it be the Bush Administration or any other, thanks journalists for exposing shameful problems within the government agency he runs.

But that’s what happened today at Defense Secretary Robert Gates press conference at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

This week, the nation, including Gates, the White House and top military brass, learned through a Washington Post series about the tribulations of some injured soldiers at that facility, all outpatients, who’ve been subjected to bureaucratic difficulties and in some instances poor living conditions.

Posted by Pete Souza at 9:36 am CST

News photographers snap close-ups of Budget books after they were delivered to the Senate Budget Committee this morning. (Chicago Tribune photo by Pete Souza)

Posted by Frank James at 12:24 pm CST

Remember the controversy that erupted after we all learned about that laptop with sensitive personal data of millions upon millions of veterans was stolen from the home of a Veterans Administration employee?

The laptop was eventually recovered with the personal information untouched, putting to rest concerns of wide-scale identity theft.

Posted by Frank James at 11:14 am CST

What does it mean to be an American?

It’s not an academic question. For many immigrants who become U.S. citizens, it has meant having to pass an exam given by immigration officials with softball questions like “What are the colors of our flag?” and “What was the name of the ship that brought the Pilgrims brought to America.?”

Posted by Frank James at 10:27 am CST

The Interior Department held a press conference this morning on a problem many people, myself included, haven't really given much thought to: the electrocution of birds on power lines.

The press conference was held in to highlight the release of the updated version of a conservation document, a 227-page publication titled "Suggested Practices for Avian Protection on Power Lines: The State of the Art in 2006," that resulted from federal and private sector cooperation.

The officials at the press conference indicated that while there are no good numbers on how many birds are electrocuted on power lines, with an estimate ranging anywhere from the tens of thousands to the hundreds of thousands.

But many of the birds killed are protected species, like eagles, condors, hawks and migratory birds.

Posted by Frank James at 6:04 pm CDT

Today has been a time to remember the dead and the injured of 9/11, and their families and friends, and all the lost possibilities.

(Former 9/11 Commission Vice chairman Lee Hamilton, right, and Thomas Kean, chairman, speak at the National Press Club in Washington on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

But in Washington, it was also a time to consider the nation’s response to the still mind-blowing tragedy. And that reaction, according to the two retired politicians who led the national self-examination into 9/11 remains significantly lacking.

Posted by William Neikirk at 1:15 p.m. CDT

It seemed like a simple piece of legislation. Sens. Barack Obama, Illinois Democrat, and Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, two men at opposite ends of the political spectrum, joined in sponsoring it. But it was difficult to pass.

All it would do is establish a federal, searchable computer database of $1 trillion in federal grants, contracts, loans, and "earmarks" or special spending advocated by individual members of Congress. (Earmarks usually go by another name--pork). You could type in "Halliburton" and all its contracts would come up. Similarly with "Planned Parenthood" or "Sierra Club."

Posted by Frank James at 9:39 am CDT

As people who've waited in Washington D.C. traffic jams over the years created when police create a cordon sanitaire for the motorcades of presidents, vice presidents and visiting dignitaries, many of us who work in Washington read with great interest a story in today's Washington Post about a traffic nightmare that was averted.

Before President Bush attended a Wednesday evening fundraiser for Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) of "Macaca" fame in a Washington D.C. suburb, the Secret Service had asked Virginia authorities to shut down "high occupancy vehicle" or HOV lanes so they could be used for the presidential motorcade to get to and from the fundraiser at the home of Ed Gillespie, former chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Posted by Frank James at 4:20 pm CDT

If the world made more sense, what David Walker said today would get a lot more attention than the doings of John Mark Karr, the strange little man arrested on suspicion of killing JonBenet Ramsey or whether Sen. Hillary Clinton will run for president or not.

Walker is comptroller general of the Government Accountability Office, an agency that acts a sort of a truth squad for Congress.

Posted by Cam Simpson at 3:15 pm CDT

Forget the unattractive promise of low pay, seersucker suits, speaking in circles with a French bureaucrat or muggy nights beneath mosquito netting in some Malaysian village.

Suddenly, being an American diplomat looks to be seductive.

Posted by Frank James at 5:25 pm CDT

So how did the problem with the locks on FEMA’s travel trailers that I mentioned in an earlier posting come to light?

John Philbin, FEMA’s communications director, told me the agency’s top officials learned of the problem Friday afternoon. They became aware after a FEMA trailer-park resident showed a Baton Rouge television station reporter how a key from one trailer unlocked the door on another’s entry door.

Posted by Frank James at 1:06 pm CDT

So what could be worse than having your home destroyed by a hurricane then having to live in a FEMA trailer? How about learning that the entry doors on the trailer you call home are insecure because the keys that open the doors of other trailers can also open yours?

That’s the situation for some of those dispossessed by Hurricane Katrina. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has issued a press release announcing the problem and offering to replace the locks for any worried trailer residents.

Good morning.

Here are a few Washington events of note for Wednesday, August 9, as collected by the Associated Press.

The National Transportation Safety Board concludes a two-day public hearing as part of its ongoing investigation into the cause of a Texas bus fire accident that occurred during the evacuation for Hurricane Rita last year. 8:30 a.m.

9 a.m. REMEMBERING HIROSHIMA — Hiroshima-Nagasaki Committee holds forum on ``Consequences of US Nuclear Policy: From Hiroshima to Iran.’’ Speakers include two survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings of 1945.
Location: Room 2200, Rayburn

Good morning.

Here are a few Washington events of note for Tuesday, August 8, as compiled by the Associated Press.

The Federal Reserve Board is deciding today whether to continue raising short-term interest rates.

The National Transportation Safety Board begins a two-day public hearing as part of its ongoing investigation into the cause of a Texas bus fire accident that occurred during the evacuation for Hurricane Rita last year. Location: NTSB headquarters, 490 L’Enfant Plaza SW.

Posted by John Crewdson at 2:49 pm CDT

Anybody remember April 1, 1997? The top-rated TV shows were ER and Seinfeld. Angela's Ashes headed the best-seller list. People were just starting to worry about Y2K. Movie-goers were anticipating the opening of "Titanic." Ellen DeGeneres was about to tell the world that she was gay. The Dow closed at 6,583 (really). And I wrote a letter to the Central Intelligence Agency.

"This is a request, under the Freedom of Information Act...", it began, and went on to ask for "copies of any and all records maintained by the Central Intelligence Agency" which contain information about eight non-profit charities. The letter closed with the standard boilerplate:

Posted by Frank James at 2:15 pm CDT

The National Journal, a publication closely read here in Washington, ran a story today by Alexis Simendinger on White House salaries.

Needless to say, the top people make pretty decent living though nowhere what they made when they were in the private sector or will make once they leave the White House.

The top salaries are $165,200 after a recent $4,200 cost-of-living increase, a little more than 2.5 percent boost. In Washington, given the cost of housing, you can burn through that kind of salary pretty easily.

Posted by William Neikirk at 3:30 p.m. CDT

Washington's status as the center of government suddenly appears to be in a state of flux. The president has decided to hold press conferences in other cities, beginning with Chicago. And he is on the road a lot these days. Members of Congress are spending as much time in their home districts as they are on Capitol Hill. They're now in a 4th of July recess, even though the fireworks stopped last Tuesday. Independence Day has become almost an Independence Fortnight for lawmakers.

Good morning.

Here are a few Washington events of note for Thursday, June 8, as collected by the Associated Press.

President Bush is speaking at the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast and then meeting with governors on the line item veto.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is holding a hearing on national emergency management with DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Thad Allen and others. 10 a.m.

The House Government Reform Committee is holding a hearing on data security breaches at federal agencies, with Deputy OMB Director Clay Johnson III, Comptroller General David Walker, VA Secretary Jim Nicholson and others. 10 a.m.

Posted by Frank James at 11:29 am CDT

Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho,) chair of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, said yesterday evening that his committee will hold hearings Thursday on the theft of a computer disk containing sensitive personal information of more than 26 million veterans.

In a short Senate speech, Craig made the critical point that many federal agencies possess personal data on millions of Americans. So while it’s the Veterans Affairs Department in the news today, it could just as easily be another agency tomorrow.

Posted by Frank James at 3:43 pm CDT

In one of those perfect Washington ironies, today was the first meeting of President Bush’s newly created Identity Theft Task Force.

With today’s report that a Veterans Administration employee may have just created the mother-of-all-identity-theft opportunities by losing a computer disk with the sensitive personal information of millions of veterans and their spouses, the task force may need to tackle the federal government’s problems first.

Posted by Frank James at 1:42 pm CDT

Today’s report that more than 26 million veterans and their spouses may now be exposed to identity theft because a federal employee violated government policy by taking home a computer disk with veterans’ personal information, a disk that was later stolen during a burglary of the employee’s home, threatens to be a headache for many people for a long time.

Perhaps the thief doesn’t realize what he has and has already tossed it and the veterans will dodge the danger of identity theft.

Good morning.

Here are a few Washington events of note for Tuesday, May 16, as gathered by the Associated Press.

President Bush meets with Australian Prime Minister John Howard and later has an official dinner with him.

Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta speaks on the launch of a new national policy initiative to reduce congestion in America. 11 a.m. National Press Club

The Partnership for a Drug-Free America holds a news conference to release its annual study on drug trends among teens. 10:30 a.m.

Posted by Frank James at 8:00 am CDT

President Ronald Reagan had his Cadillac-driving welfare queen, a handy target for his riffs against government handouts to the poor. That she didn't exist didn't stop Reagan from telling the story.

Now it turns out Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson has decided to not let the truth stand in the way of a good tale.

Posted by Mark Silva at 2:45 pm CST

The favorite ride of the president’s incoming chief of staff is a Harley Fat Boy, and to appreciate how much of an insider Joshua Bolten has become in the Bush administration, suffice it to say that Bolten keeps a spare hog at the president’s ranch.

Yet Bolten also is Washington, D.C-born, son of a career CIA man. And despite his credentials as one of the central strategists of the 2000 presidential campaign born in Austin, Tex., Bolten counts the liberal Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine of New Jersey among his fans - Corzine once competed with Bush in hiring Bolten.

“I’ve ridden motorcycles for a long time - it’s not just a midlife crisis,’’ Bolten told C-Span in an interview last year. “The one that I ride most now, the one that’s really close to my heart, is the Harley-Davidson Fat Boy, a 2003 anniversary edition.’’

Posted by Frank James at 4:09 pm CST

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, known as TRAC, released a new study that shows that the Internal Revenue Service conducts face-to-face audits on a smaller percentage of millionaires than low-income taxpayers.

While this is not a new trend, it is still interesting, especially as April 15 approaches.

Posted by Andrew Martin at 1:10 pm CST

It seems as if everyone in the dairy business is out to stop Hein Hettinga, a prosperous dairy farmer who just happens to sell about the cheapest milk in the nation.

First the U.S. Department of Agriculture passed regulations, effective April 1, that would effectively curtail Hettinga’s business. And now, Congress is considering a bill-called the Milk Regulatory Equity Act-which would do the same thing. It’s scheduled for a vote Tuesday in the House of Representatives, having already passed the Senate.

Posted by Frank James at 1:53 pm CST

A quick observation after today's just-ended Senate Armed Services Committee briefing on the controversial Dubai Ports World transaction is that 9/11 didn't change everything, at least not how the Executive Branch reviewed the pending takeover of certain U.S. port operations by the United Arab Emirates-owned company.

Under questioning by Sen. Hillary Clinton (D.-N.Y.), Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert Kimmitt, said Bush administration officials followed precedent set by prior administrations, Republican and Democratic, in how it interpreted the federal law that calls for the Executive Branch to review such transactions.

Posted by Frank James at 5:26 pm CST

In case anyone was wondering how much it costs for the United States Postal Service to maintain the hulk of the vacated main post office building that straddles the Eisenhower Expressway in downtown Chicago, it's $2 million a year.

That's the amount the General Accountability Office, Congress's investigative agency, gives as the postal service's "annual holding costs" for keeping that choice piece of real estate near the Sears Tower.