Panetta Too Frank with Hollywood?

• By Charles S. Clark
• June 5, 2013
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Leon Panetta, back when he was CIA director in June 2011, may have gotten a bit too talkative at an awards ceremony out in Langley, Va., honoring the SEAL team that took out Osama bin Laden.

According to a draft Defense Department inspector general’s report obtained by the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight, Panetta -- who since that time moved on to run the Pentagon and then retired this February -- allowed Hollywood screenwriter Mark Boal, who wrote “The Hurt Locker” and later “Zero Dark Thirty,” to attend the ceremony.

Panetta then spoke the name of the commander of the operation, a classified piece of information, angering some military officers and some members of Seal Team Six.

The incident is reportedly included in a coming IG report that POGO suspects is being delayed. An IG spokeswoman told Government Executive the report is in the works but no release date has been set.

Management and the Romney Transition That Wasn't

• By Tom Shoop
• May 30, 2013
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This week, my colleague Charlie Clark told the story of the Romney transition that wasn't. The 2012 Republican contender's campaign, the first to operate under a 2010 law designed to smooth the presidential transition process by facilitating advance planning, had a remarkably robust operation. By late summer 2012, some 500 people were working on Romney transition plans, preparing a 200-day agenda for the start of the admininstration and a budget plan, among other things.

But the staff, under the leadership of former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, never got the opportunity to put their plans into operation. So they did the next-best thing: They compiled the story of the transition project into a lessons-learned book. It's an impressive volume, laying out in great detail the procedures and policies the team had in place to hit the ground running after the election.

I was struck, however, by one page in the appendix, showing the operation's organizational chart. It lists various units of the transtion team and the projected number of employees they would need. The Policy Development shop, for example, is projected at 243 employees. Presidential Appointments was slated for 135 employees, and Legislative Affairs was pegged at ...

A Bureaucrat With a Name and a Face

• By Charles S. Clark
• May 29, 2013
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A cri de coeur from a frustrated fed appeared in Wednesday’s Washington Post letters column. The letter came in response to law professor Jonathan Turley’s recent article claiming that the nation’s regulations are “crafted largely by thousands of unnamed, unreachable bureaucrats.”

Marc Hartstein, a Baltimorean with 23 years of government service, protested that he has “yet to meet another federal employee who does not have a name."

Hartsein continued: "If Mr. Turley were to check the beginning of regulations published in the Federal Register, he would see that these civil servants also have phone numbers where they can be reached. Not dissimilar to the charge in Mr. Turley’s commentary of being nameless, I was once called 'faceless' by a member of Congress in a teleconference with his constituents. Disproving that charge was difficult, as I was a disembodied voice on a speakerphone, but I did assure the audience that I do indeed have a face.”

The IRS Explains Itself

• By Charles S. Clark
• May 28, 2013
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While high-ups from the Internal Revenue Service have been publicly testifying -- or declining to testify -- this month before congressional panels probing the targeting of conservative groups' applications for tax-exempt status, the agency’s communications department has quietly posted a routine-sounding Q&A on its website.

Labeled “Questions and Answers on 501(c) Organizations,” the posting offers “some basics” on the issue that has caused the IRS “to receive a variety of questions related to the exempt organization issues.”

Echoing some of the agency bosses’ testimony, the answers note that reviewing applications for tax-exempt status is “part of the IRS’s responsibility,” adding that 501c(4) organizations—including the “Tea Party” and “Patriot” themed versions are at the heart of the controversy—“are not required to get IRS approval, but often seek it.”

The agency explains how it determines whether an applying organization engages in “political activity” and whether that activity is “limited.” The estimated 70,000 annual applications, it notes, are centralized “so they can be worked on in a consistent manner” at an office in Cincinnati staffed by fewer than 200 employees. These specialists “may consult with tax law specialists in Washington on how the law applies to their ...

The Union and the IRS Scandal

• By Charles S. Clark
• May 23, 2013
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Several, mostly conservative, news outlets have been publishing speculation about motives behind the decision of the Cincinnati-based Internal Revenue Service employees to group applications for tax-exempt status using politically fraught labels such as “tea party” and “patriot.”

Their mulling inevitably gravitated toward the 150,000-member National Treasury Employees Union, which represents many at the IRS. A Fox News analyst argued that Obama must go easy on the IRS to keep the union members happy, and the American Spectator saw a “smoking gun” in the fact that NTEU President Colleen Kelley visited the White House in 2010, the day before the targeting of conservative groups is said to have commenced.

Asked by Government Executive for a response, Kelley sent a statement saying that she “has had no discussions with the White House on this issue,” and that “no employee has asked NTEU to represent them in any disciplinary action at this point.”

She went on say that the Cincinnati employees, like all IRS workers, “perform vital work…without partisan bias or motive.” Noting the $1 billion in cuts to the IRS budget in the past two years, Kelley also pointed to “a serious detrimental impact on a variety of IRS activities ...