$100 Million a Year to Dead Retirees?

• By Tom Shoop
• 4:19 PM ET
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You might think that Brandon Doherty, a GOP candidate for Congress in Rhode Island, was engaging in a bit of hyperbole when he claimed that the federal government had spent more than $600 million in the past five years in improper annuity payments to federal retirees who are not among the living.

But PolitiFact Rhode Island reports that Doherty is right. His claim is based on a study of wasteful spending  issued by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., which in turn relies on an Office of Personnel Management inspector general's report on payments to deceased annuitants. And that report states it plainly: "the amount of post-death improper payments is consistently $100-$150 million annually."

Some of that money goes to fraudsters who are gaming the federal retirement system. But part of it also simply gets deposited electronically into bank accounts that are no longer active.

What Doherty didn't note is that OPM has been working since 2005 to try to address the issue. To date, agency officials reported in February, they have recovered $500 million in improper payments to dead retirees.

(Image via easyshutter  /Shutterstock.com)

The Washington Bubble

• By Charles S. Clark
• May 22, 2012
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The nation’s capital has long been known as recession-proof. But conservative writer Andrew Ferguson goes a bit further with the charge that Washingtonians live in a “bubble" in a piece in the May 28 issue of Time magazine (subscription required).

“The new affluence flooding the nation’s capital sets it a world apart from the country it governs,” he writes, pointing to flourishing new limousine services and thriving restaurants.

Ferguson is particularly tough on federal contractors. "It’s estimated that, thanks to massive outsourcing over the past 20 years by the Clinton and Bush administrations, there are two government contractors for every worker directly employed by the government," he writes. "Federal contracting is the region’s great growth industry. A government contractor can even hire contractors for help in getting more government contracts. You could call those guys ­government-contract contractors."

One Little Letter, a World of Difference

• By Tom Shoop
• May 21, 2012
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I would venture to guess that just about everyone in the business of writing and publishing information about government and public policy has at least come close to making this mistake: The program for the graduation ceremonies this weekend at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin was printed and distributed with one rather important letter missing from the word "public."

It's just one of those cases where a spellcheck program isn't enough. The school is reprinting the program and sending the corrected version to all graduates. The embarrassed contrition shown by administrators is somewhat ironic, given LBJ's penchant for salty language. 

On Not Noticing What Government Does Well

• By Tom Shoop
• May 16, 2012
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Marc Ambinder, an erstwhile colleague here at Atlantic Media (parent company of Government Executive), has a post on GQ.com  reflecting on what he's learned in a decade of covering politics and policy in Washington. (He's off to Los Angeles.) One item on his list stuck out to me:

I am not the first person to notice the huge gap between what we think government does and what it actually does. But it seems to be enormous today, and its absence is noticed everywhere in the city. The theory is that we have no idea where our tax money goes; it is so widely distributed, or distributed to other people that we many of us perceive government to be off doing something else, probably something wasteful. We only notice government when it inhibits us; when a small business confronts a new regulation. Most of us don't notice (because it's invisible) when government programs allow us to sleep well at night. We never really worry that airplanes are going to crash, or that trucks with hazardous materials that trundle by each morning are going to explode; or whether the electricity is going to be on today, or ...

White House ‘Footnotes’ to History

• By Charles S. Clark
• May 16, 2012
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It’s a fact of Washington life that current occupants of the White House get to control its website. But after the Obama team on Monday touched up some past presidential bios with current-day “footnotes,” Republicans cried foul.

As noticed first by the Heritage Foundation (and then picked up by Commentary magazine and ABC News) the official Web biographies of Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt were supplemented with a coda under the heading “Did you know?”

In the Roosevelt bio’s treatment of Social Security, the editors added a statement that “today, the Obama administration continues to protect seniors and ensure Social Security will be there for future generations.”

On the Reagan bio’s treatment of the 1986 tax reform law, the editors added a statement that “in a June 28, 1985, speech Reagan called for a fairer tax code, one where a multi-millionaire did not have a lower tax rate than his secretary. Today, President Obama is calling for the same with the Buffett Rule. “

The Republican National Committee quickly took to Tumblr  with a feature titled, “Obama in History: World Changing Events You Didn’t Even Know Obama Played a Part in.”