Government Executive - Authors - Beth Dickey

Avoiding Injury

Beth Dickey — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 00:00:00 -0400

NASA's new software system neatly handles safety, health and security data.

In 15 months from 2003 to 2005, the number of workplace incidents reported at NASA facilities nationwide rose nearly 1,700 percent. An epidemic of sudden clumsiness was not the reason for the spike in accidents and close calls. It happened when the space agency switched from 33 separate safety information databases that languished on desktop computers to a single one that thrives on the Internet.

"If you have a browser, you can run it. That's the beauty of the whole thing," says Nathan Giles, president and CEO of Efficient Enterprise Engineering Inc., an up-and-coming Tempe, Ariz., firm doing business as Ex3. The sharable storehouse for safety statistics was the brainchild of Giles. He was an independent consultant in 1994 when he wrote software that helped Intel Corp. fulfill its obligations to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Within five years, the semiconductor giant had a $25 million reduction in workers' compensation costs and Giles had a new corporation, created specifically to do continued business with Intel. "We were so successful with the system that it expanded, expanded and expanded until we crossed all the environmental, health, safety and security, and productivity lines," Giles says. Intel won the National Safety Council's Green Cross for Safety Medal, and Giles parlayed the industry buzz about Ex3 into a government contract to do the same kind of thing for NASA.

The system, run on SQL or Oracle servers, consists of more than 30 integrated modules designed to handle every aspect of an organization's safety, health and security concerns. Only trained data entry specialists could use NASA's legacy system. Anyone familiar with Microsoft Office will know how to use Ex3's product. Data are entered just once. The information can be shared immediately across an organization on a need-to-know basis. It saves the cost of redundant databases and enhances data retrieval. It also makes quick work of the reports agencies are required to file periodically with OSHA.

NASA ran its old Incident Reporting Information System, or IRIS, on a clumsy mainframe. Only a few people at each of the agency's 10 field centers knew how to use it, and the likelihood of it breaking down during the initiation of a report was high. Each field center had its own method for tracking data. There was little participation in the collection of safety records, and NASA headquarters in Washington had little insight into the safety status. That was the impetus for the agency's search for newer technology that transcended organizational silos to upgrade and improve IRIS.

Knowledge is power, after all. "With safety, the more people you have involved in the process, the better job you do," says Giles. Now, for the first time, agency managers have a single place to go for an instant analysis of their safety situation. Lost-day case rates and other performance measures can be reported in seconds at the centers, within organizations, or across the agency. Contractor safety performance information also is available at a moment's notice. Having all this information at the proverbial fingertips can help the agency strengthen its prevention programs, because it can track accident trends and save money on workers' compensation claims.

NASA is the first federal agency to adopt the Web-based system for safety reporting. The system consolidated dozens of databases from 13 NASA facilities into a single user-friendly system for a fraction of the $9 million a year outlay Ex3 estimates the agency originally had. Initial implementation of the Web-based enhancement cost $1.5 million. Training and expanded functionality cost another $1.5 million.

Ex3 recently won a five-year contract renewal worth $5 million to $8 million and shared in a NASA Group Achievement Award. "Our ultimate goal was to establish and maintain a comprehensive mishap repository and data collection system for NASA that is efficient and can be used by safety managers for mishap analysis and prevention, and we believe we are seeing the positive outcomes we expected," says Jim Lloyd, NASA's deputy chief of safety and mission assurance.

NASA is the company's first agencywide implementation. Ex3's other government users are Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Hanford Spent Nuclear Fuel Project in Idaho. Last year, Hanford contractor Fluor Hanford Inc. reported an 87 percent reduction in injuries since 1996. It caught the attention of Pentagon officials who, in pursuit of a 50 percent to 60 percent reduction in workplace accidents, visited Hanford in Richland, Wash., to find out what makes its safety programs such a success. Ex3 also lists the Air Force, Army, Marines and Navy among its clients for Web-based hazard assessment and risk management training.

The experience at NASA convinced Giles that he could market to federal agencies with just as much need but much less money to invest. He set up a clearinghouse approach in which several agencies pay several hundred thousand dollars each to use the same database. They cannot see each other's data without permission. They get the same benefits as a large agency for a fraction of the cost. The Small Business Administration is the first to budget for and procure the service.

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Too Darn Hot

Beth Dickey — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Pressure is mounting on federal agencies to stop studying global warming and start doing something about it.

Soon after the projector starts rolling on An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore, former vice president and star of the global warming documentary, laments that he tried to tell this story for a long time but failed to get the message across. Later in the film, which is based on a slide show Gore delivers around the world, he takes a swipe at Congress for its long-standing indifference to the problem of climate change caused by human activities. Says Gore: "If the issue is not on the tips of their constituents' tongues, it's easy for them to ignore it."

Message received, judging from the spontaneous reactions of a dozen or so viewers who took in an afternoon matinee to escape the heat in the Orlando, Fla., suburb of Winter Park in late July. The big screen flickered with scene after scene of melting glaciers and evaporating lakes and more than a few fever charts of escalating temperatures and thickening greenhouse gases. But it was an animated graphic-showing how rising sea levels eventually will inundate most of the state of Florida if something isn't done to curb fossil fuel emissions soon-that took this crowd's collective breath.

"Wow." Gasps of fright drowned out the crackle of candy wrappers. "Whoa."

"Oh, my God!" went the impromptu soundtrack. "Jesus!"

Some members of Congress got religion, too, judging from the midsummer buzz on Capitol Hill. On July 20, the House Government Reform Committee held its first hearing on global warming in seven years. Chairman Tom Davis, R-Va., recognized the movie's role in pushing climate change "to the forefront of America's discourse" and said, "We've seen the deluge of attention to An Inconvenient Truth and its depiction of the potential disasters of global warming. We're here today to acknowledge that too many elected officials have for too long been missing in action on this issue."

Davis called the hearing to get an update on the current state of global warming science and to press key Bush administration officials to explain White House policies for addressing the climate change issues. What he and his colleagues heard from nine witnesses at the daylong meeting was a nearly unanimous plea to stop arguing about the problem and get busy solving it.

Temperatures Rising

The Bush administration boasts it is spending more than any other nation-$29 billion since 2001-to find ways to curb greenhouse gas emissions both at home and abroad through strategies that safeguard long-term economic growth. "The president is sustaining U.S. leadership begun by his father and carried out through the Clinton-Gore administration when it comes to practical actions to address this important issue," says James L. Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. "We're making accelerated progress," he says, adding, "This rate of progress domestically . . . is on par with what our counterparts are achieving internationally in the developed world."

But the administration's critics are quick to point out that it was President Bush who in 2001 pulled the United States out of the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement 20 years in the making among industrialized nations around the world to cut greenhouse gas emissions. "My biggest regret as an American is that the United States didn't take leader-ship in multilateral international negotiations to deal with climate change two decades ago and released its leadership role to other countries, so we ended up with something that our Congress didn't like and our country wasn't engaged in developing," Jay Gulledge, a senior research fellow with the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, said at the July 20 hearing. "Now we're just being left behind and we do not have a leadership role on one of the biggest issues in the world."

Some state governments are taking it upon themselves to fight global warming. About half have climate action plans and almost two dozen have renewable energy resource targets for utilities to meet. Not 10 days after the hearing, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and British Prime Minister Tony Blair sidestepped the Bush administration to strike a deal on a carbon trading program that could help them both reduce emissions.

Critics say the White House deliberately creates confusion about global warming in order to avoid making politically unpopular decisions to address it. The allegations by politicians and scientists alike run the gamut from bureaucratic ineffectiveness to unethical meddling to outright obfuscation. Earlier this year, James Hansen, the esteemed NASA climatologist, said the space agency's public affairs office was muzzling him for speaking the truth about rising temperatures. NASA revised its public affairs policy. Last year, Philip A. Cooney, a former petroleum industry lobbyist, was allowed to edit federal scientific reports, allegedly to downplay links between greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. Cooney quit his job as Connaughton's chief of staff after The New York Times revealed his handiwork in drafts of reports issued in 2002 and 2003. He immediately went to work for Exxon Mobil Corp.

"We need to stop letting the coal companies, the oil companies and the other special interests dictate our approach to global warming. Instead we need to start listening to the scientists," says Rep. Henry Waxman of California, the top Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee. At the hearing, Waxman and Davis announced that the committee was looking into the controversy surrounding Cooney's actions. They asked Connaughton to turn over by Aug. 11 volumes of correspondence and other documents relating to the scandal and told him that he can expect to be called to testify about it sometime soon.

Weather's Sizzling

The natural greenhouse effect is a real and essential component of the planet's climate process. Without greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, water vapor and methane in the atmosphere, the temperature on Earth would be too cold to support life as we know it. But some greenhouse gases are increasing-trapping heat from the sun that normally would escape back into space. The most abundant greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide. It has increased 35 percent in the past century, mostly due to increased burning of gasoline, oil, coal and forests. Global temperature has risen about 1 degree Fahrenheit in the same period.

Using climate-modeling supercomputers and other research tools, scientists have found a correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, rising temperatures, ocean warmth and extreme weather. "There's considerable confidence that the observed warming, especially since the 1970s, is mostly attributable to changes in atmospheric composition due to human influences. While there is considerable uncertainty about the rates of change that can be expected, it is clear these changes will be increasingly manifested in important and intangible ways," says Thomas R. Karl, director of the world's largest archive of weather and climate information, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.

Could ferocious hurricanes be one of those manifestations forecast by Karl? Scientists have been examining in earnest for the past few years a possible link between global warming and the increased frequency and intensity of hurricanes. Judith Curry, chairwoman of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, says two "very provocative, landmark studies by two reputable scientific groups" published evidence of a connection during last year's monster hurricane season. "They have been categorically ignored by NOAA," she says. A self-described global warming skeptic-turned-believer, Curry told lawmakers that she is puzzled about why some NOAA scientists insist in congressional testimony, media interviews and on the agency's Web site that there is no evidence of a connection. "I don't know what is driving this," she said. "[It] seems irresponsible to me because these statements by NOAA are by default the official government position on the subject."

There have been persistent disagreements over whether global warming itself is a reality, but a June report from the National Research Council essentially put an end to those. In Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years (National Academies, 2006), a panel of climate experts concluded that there is sufficient evidence from tree rings, soil and ice core samples, retreating glaciers and coral reefs around the world to say with "a high level of confidence" that the last few decades of the 20th century were the warmest of any in 400 years. Congress ordered the study after a controversial 1998 report concluded that the 1990s were the hottest decade in the millennium. The experts agreed the finding was plausible. They emphasized that temperature records since 1600 are not at all in doubt. Generally speaking, climate scientists accepted the report as solid proof that humans are adjusting nature's thermostat.

Raging Consensus

Consensus is not as simple on Capitol Hill and at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The House Government Reform Committee took pains to include a skeptical witness, John R. Christy, a National Research Council panelist. "We don't see the catastrophic direction of the climate system," Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, told the lawmakers. In an interview published July 6, President Bush told People.com, "I think we have a problem on global warming. I think there is a debate about whether it's caused by mankind or whether it's caused naturally, but it's a worthy debate." Bush continued, "It's a debate, actually, that I'm in the process of solving by advancing new technologies, burning coal cleanly in electric plants, or promoting hydrogen-powered automobiles, or advancing ethanol as an alternative to gasoline."

At the hearing, Connaughton initially had this to say about the climate change debate: It might be polarized at the top but on lower levels, where the science and policy groundwork are done, "the fair characterization is, there's actually a raging amount of consensus." Connaughton continued, "The president has made clear that climate is a serious issue, serious problem; humans are a big part of the problem and we need to just get on with it." Pressed later to explain the president's remarks to People.com, Connaughton told the lawmakers, "From the policy perspective, there's a lot of agreement-top-line-on warming, a lot of agreement on human contribution to the problem," but that debate persists on "lower-level" questions about how natural and human forces affect it.

Even Bush allies are complaining that the administration's actions do not match its rhetoric. For instance, Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., is particularly disappointed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's behavior regarding fuel economy standards for pickup trucks, sport utility vehicles and vans. NHTSA tightened the standards in March but not as much as it could have, given the available technology. The nonprofit organization Public Citizen in Washington calls the standards "lax." Shays scolded Connaughton at the hearing, saying the White House invites the criticism it gets. "If the administration was viewed as being pro-environment, some Republicans thought that was bad," he said. "I think that's why the administration is in the mess it is. A lot of the good steps it's taken it will not get credit for, because of that."

Connaughton said the administration's climate change policy is based on science, encourages research breakthroughs that lead to technological innovation, and takes advantage of the power of markets to bring into widespread use the technologies and practices necessary to curb emissions. The potential cost of implementing the Kyoto Protocol in the United States-a Government Accountability Office estimate puts it somewhere between $7 billion and $397 billion by 2010-was one reason the administration objected to the treaty. Connaughton said it sets emissions targets that are unfair and impossible for the United States to reach.

The administration's strategy encompasses everything from stricter vehicle gas mileage standards to nuclear power revival and development of zero-emissions coal-fired generating plants. Thirteen federal agencies sponsor research on global climate change. Their priorities, budgets and science work are integrated by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program in Washington. It was created in 2002 under a new cabinet-level organization designed to improve the governmentwide management of climate science and climate-related technology development. With annual expenditures of about $2 billion in 2006, the program combines the near-term focus of the Bush administration's 2001 Climate Change Research Initiative with long-term research elements of the U.S. Global Change Research Program established by Congress in 1990. Its threefold mission is to investigate natural and human-induced changes in Earth's global environmental system; monitor, understand and predict global change; and provide a sound scientific basis for decision-making.

The specific goal is to reduce the greenhouse gas intensity of the U.S. economy 18 percent by 2012. "Our objective is to first significantly slow the growth of emissions and, as the science continues to inform us, stop the growth of emissions and then reverse it," Connaughton said during the hearing. The goal represents an average annual improvement rate of about 1.96 percent. Connaughton said a preliminary estimate from the Energy Information Administration showed emissions intensity dropped 3.3 percent in 2005.

In pursuit of its goal, the administration is engaging in a range of partnerships, incentives and mandatory programs. By Connaughton's count, more than 60 federal programs are directed at and are developing and deploying cleaner, more efficient energy technologies, fuel conservation and carbon sequestration. Mandatory programs include a 15 percent improvement in fuel economy standards for new light trucks and large sport utility vehicles, a 7.5-billion-gallon renewable ethanol requirement, and 15 efficiency standards for new appliances. Incentives include $5 billion in tax credits for clean energy systems and highly efficient vehicles, provided by the 2005 Energy Policy Act, and $40 billion for farm bill conservation programs to help farmers and ranchers biologically sequester carbon on their lands. Partnerships include a major new effort, the Energy Department's Climate VISION program, which has commitments from 15 major industrial sectors and the Business Roundtable, an association of chief executive officers, to work with the Energy, Transportation and Agriculture departments and the Environmental Protection Agency to reduce greenhouse gases in the next decade; EPA's Climate Leaders, with nearly 100 leading companies setting aggressive greenhouse gas reduction goals; and EPA's SmartWay Transport Partnership, which targets diesel-fueled freight carriers that idle while parked overnight.

Empty Promise

Critics say 18 percent by 2012 is an empty goal because a promise to reduce the intensity of greenhouse gas emissions is not the same as simply reducing them. Emissions intensity is a ratio obtained by dividing emissions in a given year by economic output for that year. Changes in intensity depend on the rate of change in emissions and economic output. The Council on Environmental Quality does not dispute that the process actually will allow emissions to increase 14 percent over time.

The administration is under fire not just for what it is doing to address global warming, but also for how well it is managing what it is doing. The latter criticisms come mostly from a slew of Government Accountability Office reports, which note:

The Climate Change Science Program missed a November 2004 deadline to update the Clinton administration's 2000 global warming assessment of current research, environmental effects and major trends; the plan to publish 21 shorter reports on different topics between 2005 and 2007 will not be the most effective decision-making tool for Congress (GAO-05-338R).
Reports on climate change funding from the program and the Office of Management and Budget are unclear and incomplete, and it is difficult to compare funding by agency, because of continual changes in the format and content and categorization methods of the reports (GAO-05-461).
Neither the Energy Department nor EPA is doing enough to encourage progress by participants in Climate Leaders and Climate VISION; overlaps make it difficult to quantify reductions attributable to either program (GAO-06-97).

Now that the human involvement riddle is solved, scientific debate has moved on to the sensitivity of the atmosphere to greenhouse gases and the extent of climate change that will come. The urgent political question is what action to take.

In the absence of a strong policy on global warming, a growing number of companies are taking it upon themselves to reduce emissions. Some are asking the government to respond in kind with a mandatory cap and trade system for greenhouse gases and financial incentives to conserve. Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, is one that intends to reduce its carbon footprint by 20 percent in seven years by applying energy-saving technologies in its stores and favoring suppliers that don't pollute. "Wal-Mart believes that the U.S. should provide strong leader- ship on climate change," says Andrew Ruben, Wal-Mart's vice president of corporate strategy and sustainability.

Roger Pielke Jr., director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences Center for Science and Technology Policy at the University of Colorado, says the federal government focuses too much on long-term research to reduce uncertainties about global warming and not enough on developing technology to help society adapt. He reminded the lawmakers that because research agendas emphasize the long term, relatively little attention is paid to developing specific policy options or near-term technologies that might have both short- and long-term benefits. He noted that it is easy for policy- makers to shift the burden of finding solutions to the scientific community, effectively using research policies as a substitute for other types of action.

Until the government's climate science and technology enterprise is organized to focus on short-term policy options, he said, the global warming debate will remain gridlocked. Pielke admonished the lawmakers: "You've got a lot of good science . . . but you're not getting many options. I want to see you bringing the leaders of those programs and the executive branch here and saying, 'What are the options that are resulting from this multibillion-dollar investment?' "

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Vying for Energy

Beth Dickey — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Despite new competition to run labs, small business gets short shrift.

An Energy Department contracting model that Congress complained was too exclusive three years ago is under fire again, this time for suppressing small business.

Congressional auditors are criticizing the department's reliance on a handful of large companies and universities to manage its laboratories and other high-cost projects at the same time the Bush administration is trying to increase funding for science research and the revival of nuclear power.

The department buys more than $20 billion worth of goods and services each year, but an increasing share of those procurement dollars-80 percent in 2004 and 87 percent in 2005-goes to facility managers. Only a little more than 4 percent of prime contract money goes to small companies. The share spent on projects suited for them is shrinking. In an April report (GAO-06-501), the Government Accountability Office said Energy failed to meet its small business prime contracting goal in four of the past five years.

The shortfall persists in spite of a 2003 congressional mandate to put lucrative, long-standing lab contracts up for bid for the first time in order to tighten oversight and pry open the market. New contracts already are in force at the Los Alamos, Lawrence Berkeley, Idaho and Thomas Jefferson labs. Argonne National Laboratory could be under new management by Oct. 1. Energy is taking offers to run the Ames and Fermi labs beginning Jan. 1, 2007. Contracts for the Lawrence Livermore and Pacific Northwest labs do not expire until Sept. 30, 2007, but already are in play.

Lawmakers targeted research facilities that have not had a management turnover in at least 50 years. In most cases so far, the original contractors or companies set up by them have won the competitions. For example, Livermore is one of three labs managed single-handedly by the University of California since their inception in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In late May, UC ended its run as the sole manager of Los Alamos when a partnership led by UC and Bechtel National assumed control of the lab. UC kept its job at Berkeley.

As tight as the market seems, it is not impenetrable. For example, a new Northrop Grumman-led joint venture broke through in April with a contract to run the Nevada Test Site. The company, National Security Technologies LLC, outbid the previous contractor, Bechtel Nevada Corp.

The department will benefit from at least two new Bush administration initiatives in the coming year. Appropriations bills making their way through Congress in July included about $4 billion for Energy's Office of Science under the American Competitiveness Initiative, which proposes to double funding for basic research by the Energy Department, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Congress also increased funding for a variety of clean energy technologies under the Advanced Energy Initiative, which seeks to develop alternatives to foreign oil supplies. Lawmakers were divided in their support for a key element of the initiative-one that would spark a comeback for nuclear power in the United States. The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership has a two-pronged purpose: to satiate the world's hunger for electricity while keeping nuclear material out of the hands of those who want to use it in bombs. Senate appropriators set aside $286 million for fiscal 2007 to begin development of a demonstration power plant that can burn recycled plutonium. Their counterparts in the House of Representatives offered significantly less than half that amount.

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Space Shuttle 2.0

Beth Dickey — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

NASA charts its next giant leap in space.

With only 16 or 17 flights left before the space shuttle fleet is retired in 2010, NASA is looking ahead to its next big adventure: returning to the moon in 2018.

A replacement for the winged orbiters that can make short hops to the international space station and long hikes to another planet is taking shape. In June, NASA divvied up work among 10 field centers for two rockets and a reusable space capsule at the heart of the new $104 billion Constellation Program. The agency has contracts with ATK's Thiokol propulsion division in Brigham City, Utah, and Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne in Canoga Park, Calif., for the rockets and rocket engines, and is expected to choose a builder for the capsule in August or September.

But the family of spacecraft that NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has called "Apollo on steroids" will not be ready to fly for six years, maybe eight. That means the U.S. government will be without its own way to put humans in space for as many as four years. To help bridge the gap-and this is a first for the 48-year-old agency-NASA will invest $500 million over the next five years to stimulate development of commercial services that can ferry astronauts and cargo to and from the space station after the shuttle stops flying.

More than 20 private space flight companies submitted proposals earlier this year, but only six hopefuls remained after an initial round of evaluations ended in May. Andrews Space Inc. (Seattle), Rocketplane Kistler (Oklahoma City), SpaceDev Inc. (Poway, Calif.), Spacehab Inc. (Webster, Texas), Space Exploration Technologies (El Segundo, Calif.) and Transformational Space Corp. (Reston, Va.) were undergoing further evaluation this summer. NASA anticipated signing up one or more of the finalists by September for funding for flight demonstrations in 2008 to 2010.

Unlike a typical NASA procurement, the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services Initiative is designed for maximum contractor flexibility and minimal government requirements and oversight. NASA's only interest is in development milestones. Participants can obtain parts and services from foreign suppliers to the extent U.S. laws and policy allow. They own the transportation systems they develop and can sell to customers other than NASA.

The agency has spent 18 months defining requirements for the new exploration vehicle with help from competing teams led by Lockheed Martin and a Northrop Grumman-Boeing partnership. One or the other will be tapped as prime contractor to provide the spacecraft-escape system, crew module, service module and adapter for the rocket. In July, the Government Accountability Office found NASA's acquisition approach at risk of cost and schedule overruns and deficient performance (GAO-06-817R).

NASA field centers got contractor work package assignments in keeping with their traditional roles. They include:

Johnson Space Center in Houston hosts the Constellation Program as well as capsule and mission operations.
Kennedy Space Center near Cape Canaveral, Fla., is responsible for all ground operations from preflight preparations through launch, landing and recovery.
Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages design and de-velopment of the crew and cargo launchers.
Stennis Space Center in Bay St. Louis, Miss., tests the rocket engines.
Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., share responsibility for engineering and integrating navigation software and avionics.
Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., is in charge of the capsule heat shield and an information technology system for safety, reliability and quality assurance.
Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, Calif., integrates and tests the crew escape system.
Glenn Research Center in Cleveland oversees development of the service module and adapter as well as systems for the crew launch vehicle.

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Turbulent Weather

Beth Dickey — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Forecasters to be ejected from air traffic control centers.

For 28 years, government air traffic controllers and meteorologists have worked elbow to elbow guiding planes safely in and around angry skies. It's a comfortable arrangement but by no means perfect, so the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Weather Service have undertaken separate and controversial efforts to change it.

Last September, FAA put NWS on notice that it wants to cut funding to the 21 Center Weather Service Units at its en route air traffic control centers by the end of this year. FAA pays NWS $10.6 million a year to staff and operate the service units with 84 meteorologists 16 hours a day, every day. It also told NWS it needs service around-the-clock.

FAA contracted with the Weather Service after the 1977 crash of a Southern Airways DC-9 near New Hope, Ga., killed 73 people. The airplane flew into a severe thunderstorm and was pelted with hail. Its windshield broke and its engines failed. The National Transportation Safety Board blamed the accident in large part on FAA's inability to provide the pilots with up-to-the-minute information about hazardous weather. According to a September 2005 letter from FAA's director of system operations, Michael J. Sammartino, to Weather Service Director D.L. Johnson, which was obtained by Government Executive, the aviation agency figures it can save about 20 percent, or $2 million, by consolidating or even eliminating on-site weather aid at the en route centers. It cannot eliminate the forecasts for safety reasons, but it would get them remotely-and maybe not from the Weather Service. On Capitol Hill and among members of the two agencies' employee unions, there is talk that FAA intends to hire a private company.

The agency is circumspect about its plans. FAA spokesman Paul Takemoto says only that the agency is "looking at ways to do remote weather briefings" with technologies "that are not dependent on involving anybody outside the FAA." The motive? "Nothing beyond our overall mandate to do things more efficiently and cost effectively," he says. "But that's a very important mandate, obviously."

What FAA pays is just more than one-tenth of 1 percent of its $8.4 billion operations budget, but the money is 10 times as important to the Weather Service, whose entire budget is $848 million in 2006. At the same time FAA is campaigning to cut costs across the board, NWS is crusading to please all its customers. A Weather Service employee team evaluated aviation-related products and services and made the case for change in a December report to management. "FAA is seeking efficiencies and is listening to other weather providers who are challenging NWS' long-standing position as the primary source for aviation weather products and services," the team said, noting that the likely outcome is loss of funding if the Weather Service does not meet FAA's requirements. The team concluded that management of aviation weather services was weak and fragmented at both agencies, and proposed consolidating the responsibilities of the en route center meteorologists and their counterparts in the 122 NWS local forecast offices nationwide.

By early September, NWS will conclude a six-week prototyping exercise designed to show how it can best provide the remote service FAA wants. The test involves the local forecast office for Washington in Sterling, Va., and the en route control center in Leesburg. Va., for airspace above the District of Columbia, most of Maryland and Virginia, Delaware and parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and North Carolina. Air traffic managers in Leesburg are getting their forecasts directly from Sterling during two eight-hour shifts each week. Aviation meteorologists in the service unit are standing by as backup.

The National Air Traffic Controllers Association and the National Weather Service Employees Organization have denounced FAA's consolidation proposal as misguided. By the end of June, more than 300 air traffic managers at 12 of the 21 en route centers had signed and sent letters of complaint to the NTSB. "It is our opinion that the elimination of CWSUs with NWS meteorologists would result in the degradation of our ability to obtain and relay vital weather information in a timely manner and would have an adverse effect on safety," the petitions state.

NWS deputy director, John Jones, insists the Weather Service would have undertaken its prototyping activity even without FAA's input. But he hints he's also uncomfortable with any plan that would trade his forecasters for ones in the private sector: "We believe that our mission to protect lives and property through forecasts and warnings is definitely inherently governmental."

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Report faults Weather Service training efforts

Beth Dickey — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 00:00:00 -0400

A new report from the Government Accountability Office also criticized a budding plan to restructure forecast operations nationwide, saying it lacks metrics for evaluating demonstrations planned in 2007 and 2008.

NWS plans to improve forecasting services with $315 million worth of upgrades to its information systems and technologies in the next five years and by developing training to enhance the performance of its meteorologists. GAO concluded that the agency is positioning itself appropriately but said, "It is not clear that the Weather Service is consistently choosing the best training courses to improve its performance because the training selection process does not rigorously review the training justifications."

In 2006, 25 NWS program teams identified 139 training courses needed. The agency funded 79 of the courses at a cost of $7.35 million. According to GAO, program officials justified 131 courses by linking them to weather forecasting performance measures -- even though some involved training on cardiopulmonary resuscitation, spill prevention, leadership, systems security and equal employment opportunity or diversity.

"The training process did not validate or question that these courses would improve tornado warning lead times or hurricane warning accuracy," the auditors wrote in the report (GAO-06-792). Although the courses were important for other reasons, GAO said, the justification was overused, undermined the credibility of the course selection process, and made it difficult to determine whether enough money was dedicated to courses that actually would improve forecasting.

Difficulty in training and developing employees on a constrained budget is one reason NWS is evaluating changes to its structure and operations. The Weather Service is developing a prototype of a new operating concept that spreads responsibilities among a cluster of geographically adjacent offices with similar weather patterns.

The offices would share forecasting duties. In times of severe weather, the office closest to the action could hand off its routine work to others in the cluster in order to focus on the crisis.

In September, an employee team is scheduled to unveil the prototype and select several weather offices to conduct the demonstration. Results are due in 2009. The implications of the restructuring on staffing, budget and forecasting are not known so early in the process.

But GAO concluded that NWS also does not have detailed plans, timelines or measures for assessing the prototype itself. As a result, the auditors wrote, NWS risks not gathering the information it needs to make an informed decision in moving forward with a new office operational structure.

"This is not consistent with the last time NWS undertook a major change to its concept of operations -- during its modernization in the 1990s," the report said. "During that effort, the agency developed a detailed process for identifying impacts and ensuring there would be no degradation of service."

GAO recommended that NWS management require training officials to validate the accuracy of training justifications; establish key activities, timelines and measures for evaluating the "clustered peer" office structure prototype before it begins; and ensure that plans for evaluating the prototype address the impact of any changes on budget, staffing and services. In a response to the GAO assessment, Deputy Commerce Secretary David A. Sampson said the Weather Service is revising its training process to ensure limited training resources continue to target improvements in performance. He also said the evaluation mechanisms GAO wants, including obtaining customer feedback, are under development and will be included in the operating prototype.

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Coming Clean

Beth Dickey — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 00:00:00 -0400

FAA goes from high risk to high profile with its financial makeover.

This is a new world for the Federal Aviation Administration. Five years ago, FAA had a budget office; today it has a chief financial officer. In 2001, its financial management made the Government Accountability Office's list of high-risk activities. This year, GAO held up FAA as an example for other federal agencies in reporting performance, budget and financial information to Congress.

"We are getting some recognition of the fact that we're starting to make change happen within the FAA," but that doesn't mean there are no challenges left, says CFO Ramesh Punwani, a veteran aviation and travel industry executive who Administrator Marion Blakey brought in to turn things around. "We have challenges," Punwani says, "big challenges which . . . overshadow some of these, you can call it, small improvements."

FAA runs the nation's multibillion-dollar air traffic control system, which served 739 million passengers and handled 39 billion revenue ton-miles of cargo in 2005. The system comprises more than 70,000 facilities and pieces of equipment, including 500 airport towers. FAA also is responsible for inspecting and certifying 220,000 aircraft and 610,000 pilots. It has about 45,700 employees nationwide.

When she interviewed Punwani for the job, Blakey told him she wanted her agency to operate like a business and to use the best practices of the private sector. Punwani-whose employment history includes top management positions at three airlines, a health care insurer, a travel dot-com and a hospitality services giant-took his private sector expertise public when he accepted the FAA post in March 2004. Since then, he has been working to instill fiscal discipline through a bureaucratic form of nickel-and-diming: building checks and balances into procurement, setting tough performance goals and frequently measuring progress, meticulously accounting for even the smallest expenditures and cutting costs wherever possible. During the past three years, the agency's air traffic organization has trimmed its nonsafety workforce by 10 percent, or 1,000 positions, and reduced executive staff positions by almost 20 percent. A recent ATO service area consolidation will save $450 million over 10 years. During contentious labor negotiations with air traffic controllers, FAA cut labor costs by an anticipated $1.9 billion over five years, which is 5 percent to 6 percent of the total payroll for the period. The payroll for controllers was $2.5 billion in 2005. Excellence in financial management is the best practice, says Punwani, and "trying to achieve [it], whether you're a government agency or a private organization, is a multiyear, long-term process."

Blakey challenged her new CFO to do three things: improve financial data, improve financial controls and improve cost efficiency. All three are works in progress. The early results, while not entirely traceable to Punwani, are evident. After adopting a complicated new financial management system and managing to score several consecutive clean audits in the process, FAA has gotten a reprieve from GAO and is gaining respect among its government and industry peers.

Tough Climb

GAO first designated FAA financial management as high risk in 1999. With serious weaknesses in its financial reporting, property and cost accounting systems, FAA lacked accountability for billions of dollars in assets and expenditures. In 2001, the agency had to make 850 adjustments totaling $41 billion to prepare financial statements for the fiscal year. It also could not account for $11.7 billion in property. Auditors with KPMG LLC rendered unqualified opinions on the agency's books in 2002 and 2003 but continued to express concerns about property and other internal controls. FAA used the Transportation Department's Delphi Financial Management System to prepare statements in 2004 and 2005 and got two more unqualified opinions from KPMG. Again, the auditors expressed several concerns, this time related to the new system.

GAO noted that FAA was making significant strides in addressing its financial management weaknesses by January 2003, largely because it was preparing to adopt Delphi. "FAA's progress in improving financial management overall since our January 2003 high-risk update has been sufficient for us to remove the high-risk designation," GAO said in its January 2005 high-risk series update (GAO-05-207).

Delphi was well under way when Punwani joined FAA. Transportation developed its suite of commercial, off-the-shelf software to integrate financial management and to save time and money across its 12 administrations. The Federal Railroad Administration was the first user in a 2000 pilot. Since then, all the agencies have converted to the system. But it hasn't been easy for FAA. It began processing payments on Delphi in November 2003. A year later, the agency implemented a Delphi general ledger system, which includes integrated property accounting. FAA tried to marry the general ledger system with a new purchasing system in 2004, and that made the adaptation of Delphi even more difficult. Since then, it has added a Delphi-compatible cost accounting system.

Although they gave FAA's financial statements a nod of approval last year, auditors accompanied their unqualified opinion with a slap on the wrist. So many errors were made entering data and assigning costs that FAA had to scramble to get its books ready for auditing at the end of the fiscal year. A November 2005 report from Transportation's inspector general noted that while FAA continued to refine its Delphi-related procedures and controls, it had difficulty processing transactions in a timely manner and reconciling accounts. FAA made more than $2 billion in adjustments to year-end balances to prepare complete and accurate financial statements. But they were not available until four weeks after the end of the fiscal year. "The numbers were right, eventually, is what our auditors said," Punwani recalls. "We did get a clean audit, meaning our financial statements are fair and accurate, but this took a while."

KPMG's 2005 audit report also flagged FAA's management and oversight of contracts, monitoring of grants, and information technology controls over third-party systems and applications. It revealed three instances of noncompliance and made 18 recommendations for corrective action. FAA concurred and committed to fix the problems this year.

By the Numbers

The road to good financial management is paved with good financial data. The trip down that road has been painful for almost everyone at FAA. Delphi is more complex than any financial management system the agency used before. It is designed to track every dime FAA spends by expense category, location, project and task. It enables FAA officials to analyze expenditures for decision-making. The tracking basis is so minute that accounting codes for various transactions are 30 digits long. It's easy to mix them up. "This is a clear, perfect example of 'garbage in, garbage out,' " says Punwani. "What it really comes down to is we need to improve the integrity of the data entering the accounting system. We need to improve the discipline in our user community, which is everyone in FAA, to make sure the data gets in right." He is developing a plan to use the comptrollers or their equivalents in each of FAA's service units to provide refresher training to program managers.

Data coming out of the general ledger system is synthesized into a fully allocated managerial cost accounting system, known as CAS. FAA takes direct cost data from Delphi and allocates direct, indirect and overhead costs to organizations, products and services. It helps FAA show clients what it costs to provide a service. FAA used CAS analyses in 2003 to undertake the largest nonmilitary outsourcing initiative in government-the A-76 outsourcing of 58 flight service stations to Lockheed Martin Corp., at an anticipated savings of $2.2 billion through 2015. CAS is used in FAA's air traffic and commercial space organizations, which account for more than 80 percent of the agency's budget. Two other lines of business, aviation safety and airports, are implementing it this year. Like the general ledger, the cost accounting system is being refined. For instance, officials told GAO analysts for a December report, "Managerial Cost Accounting Practices" (GAO-06-301R), that labor cost data related to maintenance of older air traffic control equipment were unreliable and would be corrected in a CAS upgrade expected in January.

Accurate data from the new general ledger and cost accounting systems would help officials make vital decisions about how to overhaul the aviation trust fund, created in 1970 to help pay for airports, airways and other capital improvements. Increasingly, the agency is forced to draw from the fund, which resides with the Treasury Department, to pay operating expenses-more than $4.8 billion, or 44 percent of the fund, last year. Trust fund revenues-$10.8 billion in 2005-come from excise taxes levied on airline tickets, passenger and cargo flights, aviation fuel and international departures and arrivals. Revenues have not kept pace with funding commitments in recent years, and the trust fund's shrinking uncommitted balance-$1.9 billion in 2005, down from $7.3 billion in 2001-has been used to close the gap. It is a controversial plan, but FAA is working with the Office of Management and Budget on proposed legislation that would base trust fund revenues on a combination of user fees and fuel taxes starting in 2008. To do that, it will need a reliable way to figure out what users are costing the system and what to charge them for using it.

The Long Haul

The methods and techniques Punwani is putting in place are designed to last. "These are not one-time fixes," he says. "These are fixes that will stay within the agency and ensure that financial discipline stays here forever."

For instance, FAA has made major strides in building checks and balances into its financial controls. A committee of senior executives called the Joint Re-source Council reviews every major project. FAA has broken many projects into manageable segments to avoid committing to long-term expenditures in the millions or billions of dollars. Punwani has decreed that every contract over $10 million must receive the CFO's personal approval. Not that he knows better than a program manager, but it gives him an opportunity to ask about things the IG has criticized FAA for in the past: Was this contract competitively bid? Is there a lower labor rate available from another vendor within the agency? Is it a fixed-price or a cost-plus contract?

The agency also is addressing complaints from Transportation's inspector general about programs coming in late and over budget. FAA's strategic plan for 2006 requires 85 percent of major acquisitions to be on schedule and within 10 percent of cost, and the agency is beating that target. Some notable programs are having budget and schedule difficulties but "the important thing is, we're measuring it," Punwani says. One of the disciplines he hopes to instill is earned value management. Planned expenditures and target dates for major projects are laid out, and an analytical technique provides warning signals when they get off track, so corrections can be made quickly.

FAA is meeting the challenge of cost-effectiveness largely through consolidation. The initiative to outsource flight service stations was just one of many designed to put change back in the agency's pockets. Punwani has begun consolidating hundreds of different servers and almost 100 help desks. As extras are eliminated, so go the help desks. FAA is standardizing IT equipment, servers and processes. Along the same lines, the agency has centralized its many Web pages under its public affairs organization. They now have a uniform appearance and the Web site is easier to navigate, at a savings measured in the tens of thousands of dollars. Punwani also centralized oversight of real estate and other real property to better track inventory and get rid of unneeded equipment and office space. When FAA's Eastern Region accounting office moved to Oklahoma recently, it moved its nearby safety office into the vacated building and canceled a $200,000-a-year lease. "I'm not bashful. I'll take that," Punwani says. It wasn't a lot of money, but it paid his salary and then some.

Flawed Fixes

The Eastern Region accounting office moved to Oklahoma City as part of a two-year program to consolidate eight such offices nationwide for an anticipated savings of $3 million to $5 million a year. The objectives are to standardize accounting practices and improve financial data, and maybe save a little money in the process. In July, the agency finished moving its routine transactions to the Enterprise Service Center it manages for the Transportation Department in Oklahoma City. The center operates and maintains the department's Delphi financial management system and provides accounting services to all of Transportation's agencies. It provides the same services to two other federal agencies, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, through its Office of Management and Budget center of excellence designation. Not all is well with the plan.

During its audit of the agency's 2005 financial statements, KPMG identified several concerns with the consolidation of FAA's accounting operations. The criticisms dealt with the CFO's lack of internal and budgetary controls and unclear authority over policies and procedures. They also touched on the service center's inconsistent performance agreements with the Transportation Department administrations and the lack of metrics to measure the accuracy and completeness of transactions.

On these deficiencies, Punwani was the whistleblower. "The whole investigation began with my raising the red flag about the fact that I didn't have control over all the accounting budgets," he says. Agency documents show that some of the problems were corrected immediately. All of KPMG's concerns will have been addressed by the start of fiscal 2007, when Punwani takes budgetary control, he says.

The service center operates from a franchise fund that emulates private sector business functions. Congress allows FAA to try to reduce its fixed costs by selling financial management information system services to other federal agencies and storing the profits in the franchise fund. The idea is to gain efficiencies by operating like a business. Because the franchise fund is exempt from some restrictions of the federal budgeting process, FAA can carry the collections from year to year and build up as much as a 4 percent operating reserve. Last year, for the first time, KPMG looked at franchise fund balance as part of its routine examination of FAA's financial statements. Auditors expressed concern that the franchise fund was not collecting advances on the work it did for other agencies. They issued an unqualified opinion but made 17 recommendations for corrective action.

One Dollar at a Time

Savings of $3 million to $5 million isn't much compared with FAA's $14 billion budget. But take three here, 10 there, throw in a consolidation of some sort, and the money begins to add up. "I come from an environment in the airline world where there were no billion-dollar savings opportunities waiting to be had. We had to scrape," Punwani says. "But if you did it systematically and intelligently, you were able to build that into a significant impact for the organization." He forces every department in the agency to come up with creative ways to save, and keeps progress reports on every initiative in a quarter-inch-thick folder.

One of his proudest-and shrewdest- achievements is a plan to save the agency $10 million without spending a dime. FAA contracted with the management consulting firm A.T. Kearney to negotiate cut-rate contracts with its vendors. The agreement covers office supplies and equipment, printing and mailing, and information technology hardware and software. A.T. Kearney gets a small but undisclosed percentage of the savings after the supplies are bought and the savings are quantified. Here's the catch: A.T. Kearney specializes in reverse auctions in which bidders see competitors' prices online and lower theirs to increase their chances of winning the contract. "It's ruthless, but it's clever," says Punwani. "We're going to get what we believe is the best price for the level of service that we're looking for." If reverse auctions work with office supplies, FAA could decide to try them in more complex procurement categories.

Punwani says the KPMG auditors are pleased with the changes at FAA and the extent of its financial controls. "Our auditors told us that they thought that working with the FAA is like a dream compared to some of the other federal agencies: 'We think that you guys are more progressive and proactive than any other federal agency that we've worked with.' "

In a March report, "FAA Case Study Shows How Agency Performance, Budgeting and Financial Information Could Enhance Oversight" (GAO-06-378), congressional auditors took a positive view of FAA's strategic plan, with its long-term, outcome-oriented goals, and performance and accountability report, which charts progress and allows lawmakers to monitor performance. "Agencies' understanding of Congress' information needs is often limited," the report said, adding that FAA gets it right.

Another sign that FAA gets it right is its Certificate of Excellence in Accountability Reporting from the Association of Government Accountants for the third consecutive year. The award is the highest recognition for management reporting in the federal sector.

But high praise does not equal zero worries. Sometimes Punwani is unnerved by the glacial pace of change. "It's not easily done because we're talking about an organization that has existed . . . since 1958, and a lot of people are set in their ways," he says. "The challenge is not just to come up with new systems but to demonstrate to people that new systems, new processes, are good for you and for the agency, and that takes time."

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Shopping List

Beth Dickey — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Industry group pushes legislative goals to streamline federal purchasing.

Industry's Acquisition Reform Working Group was counting its blessings in June. A few of its 18 legislative proposals to streamline business processes and instill commercial best practices in government contracting had found their way into House and Senate versions of the Defense authorization for 2007.

Among the most notable inclusions were ARWG's proposal to let state and local governments use General Services Administration schedules for terrorism prevention and disaster recovery purchases in the House version, and a one-year extension of the Defense Department's closeout authority for certain contracts in the Senate version. Proposals to curb the proliferation of government-unique requirements, strengthen protections for trade secrets, clarify the definition of commercial items and modernize export controls didn't appeal to lawmakers on the Armed Services committees, but Cathy Garman, senior vice president of public policy with the Contract Services Association, wasn't owning up to any disappointment. "All in all, we're pretty satisfied," says Garman, also speaking for the working group.

Garman's association is the nation's oldest and largest of government service contractors. It and nine other ARWG member organizations represent the defense, aerospace, information technology, electronics and professional services industries. The working group's goals are to reduce costs, enhance efficiencies and promote quality management as the government expands its use of commercial practices and acquires more goods and services from the private sector.

"Every year [members of Congress] pick up one or two of our suggestions. We have some slightly farther-reaching and more controversial issues we keep talking about," Garman says. "One of these days, the climate will be right for them." A controversial proposal to permit sole-source awards of time and material and labor-hour contracts went nowhere.

One important objective in the working group's dealings with Congress this year was to limit Berry Amendment rules requiring Defense procurements to come from domestic sources. ARWG says some "Buy American" acquisition policies are unnecessary. Earlier this year, Defense changed its interpretation of the law and began expanding enforcement to fasteners and other tiny mass-produced items whose manufacturing origins are impossible to document. ARWG wants exemptions for commercial products and other items valued at less than $100,000. It also wants companies that use the same items in commercial and defense applications to be able to "commingle" supplies and merely prove they bought a sufficient percentage of American products under Berry Amendment rules.

"Shipments of items as large as aircraft have been delayed because of tiny components that cost less than $2," says Matt Grimison, a spokesman for the Aerospace Industries Association, an ARWG member. "We are in crisis mode." Specialty metals such as titanium and nickel are particularly at issue in the Defense authorization.

The Senate version would apply domestic resource requirements to them, but exhorts the Defense Department to stop insisting that "every nut, bolt, screw and wire were made in the United States out of domestic materials" because it is holding up the delivery of major weapons systems to warfighters. The House version would extend Berry restrictions to all specialty metals at any level of the supply chain, without commercial exemptions, and establish the Strategic Materials Protection Board to identify other items and services that must be American-made because of their importance to national security. The aerospace association leads another legislative reform group that was pleading with senators in June to "fix" the bill with an amendment.

In a May 11 statement, the Bush administration said provisions in the House version would restrict U.S. suppliers' access to foreign markets in allied and friendly countries, decrease competition, increase costs to U.S. taxpayers and add red tape to the procurement process. "Unwillingness to rely on such dependable foreign sources would undermine future efforts to build coalitions," the statement said, adding that if such a bill were sent to the White House, the president's advisers would recommend a veto.

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Winds of Change

Beth Dickey — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Weather Service plan shifts work to quieter offices to free up staffs where storms hit.

Not just for conventional meteorology anymore: That's the National Weather Service's outlook for itself in 2015. In the estimation of an employee team that developed a new operating concept late last year, the Weather Service will become "the organization that makes the difference when it matters most" to government decision-makers and people in harm's way.

NWS is reworking itself to play a bigger role in events not caused by weather, but for which weather information is critical to support response-such as natural disasters and terrorist attacks. The evolution from an inward-looking agency to one that sees itself as integral to a much larger enterprise will take almost a decade but promises some immediate benefits. "This is an idea to more effectively use the workforce," says NWS Director David L. Johnson.

There are identical weather offices in 122 locales across the country. They coordinate by telephone, e-mail and computer chats around-the-clock with 12 regional river forecast centers, nine national environmental prediction centers and 21 aviation weather service units, among others, to generate predictions in a range of formats. When severe weather hits, the local office works overtime to carry out its regular duties and the crisis response. If a storm knocks out one office, another one in the region takes over temporarily under a continuity of operations plan. That happened during Hurricane Katrina last year. Weather notices for the New Orleans area were issued from Mobile, Ala., for 22 days while the local office in suburban Slidell, La., was offline.

The system appears to work well; by all accounts, NWS performed superbly in Katrina and its aftermath. But according to the National Weather Service Corporate Board, which wrote the employee team's charter, the system is "fundamentally flawed" because it is not in step with the digital age, and increasing budgetary pressures exacerbate the problem.

Say a local office in the Midwest is in the path of tornado-spawning thunderstorms. "I would like to allow the entirety of that office to focus on the high-impact weather event that's approaching and shed some of the more routine workload to other offices that are less busy or not directly in the line of fire," says Johnson. The new design focuses resources on high-impact weather events and optimizes information technology to deliver routine services through deep collaboration. While it does not call for major structural changes, it will require a significant cultural shift from coordination to interdependence.

All NWS facilities will be organized into a dozen or more groups whose members generally share the same weather patterns, climatology and forecast responsibilities. Offices that can take advantage of nearby resources-university and government research centers, for example-to support others in the group could be eligible for additional people, equipment and funds. This "clustered peer" approach could make it possible for some local offices to operate less than 24/7 on occasion. The stated purpose is to allow time for training or to rest after a big event.

But the thought of letting any office close when it's not absolutely incapacitated makes the union representing 4,000 forecasters, technicians and support workers uneasy. "That would be the equivalent of them shutting down the fire station near your house to do training. You don't do that," says Dan Sobien, president of the National Weather Service Employees Organization. He helped to develop the interdependent working model and says it's a good plan except for that.

Implementation is in the early stages. NWS will conduct several years of prototyping and field-testing activities before it decides whether to adopt the operating concept. Changes in the wind at the Weather Service are part of the evolving mission of its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "There's an opportunity for our weather forecast offices to better tell the whole NOAA story," says Johnson.

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Too Small To Grasp

Beth Dickey — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 00:00:00 -0400

The risky business of nanotechnology is growing faster than government can keep up.

What do scratch-resistant paints, clothes that never stain and longer-lasting tennis balls have in common with sun-blocking lotions, car bumpers and stadium JumboTrons? They are but a handful of products-among hundreds on the market-that claim to benefit from the unique properties of matter controlled at the nanoscale. That is as small as one-billionth of a meter, or one-100,000th the width of a human hair. About 60 percent of those products are made in the United States, where the government is under increasing pressure to regulate their manufacture and sale and to fund more research on the risks of exposure to them.

Nanotechnology is a convergence of emerging capabilities from the physical, chemical and biological sciences that offers opportunities to exploit the chemical properties of single atoms and molecules. It is the reengineering of familiar substances to create materials with novel properties and functions. It is as revolutionary a way of making things as the assembly line was at the turn of the 20th century. "It's really a broad, enabling technology that's going to affect a lot of different industries," says analyst Michael Holman of Lux Research Inc., a New York consulting firm that specializes in nanotechnology commercialization.

It's also a double-edged sword. "The whole reason we're in it and people are excited about it is that we can create novel properties never seen before. That's going to make some people exceedingly rich and we're going to have some incredible benefits for society," says David Rejeski, director of the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. "But it's planned disruption. It's not a technology you want to be smug about."

What may have been the world's first health-related recall of a nano-engineered product happened in Germany in March. An aerosol bathroom cleaner called Magic Nano was pulled from store shelves after 97 users suffered respiratory distress. Six were hospitalized for treatment of fluid on the lungs.

The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment said it couldn't determine whether nanoparticles in the very fine spray or chemicals in the cleaner caused the illnesses because it couldn't get a complete list of ingredients from product distributors. In an April 12 statement, institute President Andreas Hensel said the incident "demonstrated that the introduction of new technologies in consumer products must be coupled with an assessment of the possible risks arising from their use," and held the science community responsible for spelling out the dangers to consumers in the future.

"Clearly, there is reason for concern," says Holman, who was authoring a new study on the environmental, health and safety (EHS) implications of nanotechnology in May. "Almost everyone in industry we talk to is very much aware of EHS concerns and very much doing everything they can to address them. But because it is a new technology, there isn't always as much information as you would like." Holman and Rejeski are on the same side in the nanotechnology debate, which ignited after the European recall. "Something is going right-products are being commercialized-but clearly, things can go wrong if we fail to provide the adequate oversight," Rejeski said in testimony before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee on May 4. Shockingly little is known about the possible health and environmental implications of nanotechnology, and the federal government is only beginning to develop regulatory approaches to deal with the science and its applications.

Nanotechnology has its naysayers. Among the most notable is Great Britain's Prince Charles. But windows that clean themselves, roof shingles that soak up affordable solar energy and medical devices that cruise the bloodstream to keep us healthy from the inside are ideas the majority of the public generally finds appealing. Still, more than half of Americans do not know that nanotechnology promises to enable futuristic cures and conveniences like these nor do they even know what nanotechnology is, according to a 2004 study funded by the National Science Foundation and conducted by the Wilson Center Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies. "Most people were stunned by the fact that government is spending billions of dollars a year on this technology and they've never heard about it," says Rejeski. For a second study in 2005, also funded by NSF, the project fed facts about nanotechnology to focus groups. Ninety-five percent of the participants doubted that government and industry can manage any risks effectively, but 76 percent were against banning new products until the risks are studied further.

A Matter of Control

Nanotechnology takes advantage of the fact that the smaller a particle of matter is, the higher its surface-area-to-mass ratio. Because their surface area is greater, common substances like aluminum, gold and carbon tend to be more chemically reactive when they are handled as clumps of nanoparticles. The results are bizarre. Aluminum can explode. Gold can turn red or blue. Pencil lead can behave like a semiconductor. The techniques for transforming materials with nanotechnology are numerous, diverse and very high tech-ranging from electron-beam litho-graphy to vapor deposition. Whatever the method, the process is to rearrange atoms like tiny building blocks-combining familiar substances to create new ones. Eventually, this will be done by sub-microscopic machines. Some machines will assemble atoms and molecules; others will assemble more machines. Trillions of machines working in concert will be invisible to the naked eye. Here's what's already possible:

The world's smallest car. It's slightly wider than a strand of DNA. Built by scientists at Rice University in Houston, it has an organic chemical chassis with pivoting suspension, freely rotating axles and four wheels of pure carbon.
A battery that recharges an electric vehicle in the time it takes to fill a gas tank. Developed by Altair Nano-technologies Inc. of Reno, Nev., the battery has a range of 200 miles.
Cultured diamonds. Apollo Diamond Inc. of Boston claims its stones are larger and purer than the finest taken from the earth-good not only as gems, but also offering promise as a cost-effective semiconductor.
The highest density electronically addressable computer memory reported to date. The demonstration circuit developed by HP Labs in Palo Alto is a 64-bit memory using molecules as switches. More than a thousand of them could fit on the end of a single strand of hair.
Combat uniforms that sense danger. The Army-funded Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology is developing an explosives-sniffing, laser-detecting fabric weave.
Tumor terminators. Back in Houston, Nanospectra Biosciences Inc. anticipates human trials this year of a medical device that can be injected into the bloodstream to seek out and destroy tumors. It's not a drug; it's a nanoshell-a teeny-tiny glass bead covered with gold. Shine a laser on a bunch of these beads from the outside and they heat up, melting the deadly mass inside.

There do seem to be risks. Scientists are learning that some things designed with nanotechnology to have unique functions also may have unique health effects. A few early experiments in the field have produced some curious, if not unpleasant, surprises. In November, the House Science Committee heard testimony about rats that developed unusual cell masses and tissue scarring after their lungs were exposed to a type of carbon nanoparticle; about 20 different nano-materials that damaged the liver, spleen, kidney and other organs in tests of their ability to target and kill tumor cells; and how it appears that inhaled nanomaterials can migrate from the lungs into the bloodstream and find their way to our brains. These are short-term effects on lab animals. Whether humans would suffer the same effects isn't clear. And to date, there have been no investigations of long-term effects such as cancer and birth defects. The situation begs a question: What might happen when discarded products incorporating nanotechnology start decomposing in landfills?

Until recently the domain of just a few physicists and chemists, nanotechnology suddenly is a worldwide scientific and industrial enterprise. The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies issued the first public, online inventory of "nano" consumer products in March. At least 230 items in 15 countries are on the list, which the Wilson Center says is far from comprehensive. In 2004, according to Lux Research, $13 billion worth of products incorporating nanotechnology were available for purchase. By 2014, the supply will total $2.6 trillion. It will account for one-sixth of global manufacturing output and involve 10 million jobs, or 11 percent of the workforce. Public and private sector investments in nanotechnology amount to about $9 billion a year. About a third of that is invested in the United States, and a third of U.S. investment is by the government. Federal agencies spent more than $4 billion on nano R&D between 2001 and 2005. They will spend $1.1 billion this year and plan to spend $1.3 billion in 2007.

With the market poised to explode, E. Clayton Teague, director of the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office, is getting an earful. From the public: "It runs the gamut," he says, "from the real, genuine concerns about safety for the environment and public health [to] the long-ranging ones of superhumans and little machines taking over the world. We engage at all levels." From public outreach managers in two technical endeavors-nuclear power and bioengineered food-that are beleaguered by negative public opinion: "They've warned us that there's a lot of ways that things can go wrong, so we are looking at this very carefully to make sure we do it appropriately." He's also hearing from industrialists, environmentalists, investors, insurers, scientists, politicians and experts such as Holman and Rejeski. Most agree: Commercialization of the technology is outpacing the development of sound policies to assess and guard against adverse consequences. "We've managed this as though it was a large science project for years now, and the dynamics are changing," says Rejeski. "People radically underestimate the speed at which innovation is taking place. It's not a science project any more. It is a much bigger governance project."

Federal research and development agencies have been collaborating on nano-technology since at least 1997, three years before the Clinton administration kicked off the National Nanotechnology Initiative. The 21st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act, signed by President Bush in December 2003, culminated a ground-up effort by the Defense Department, the National Institutes of Health and other agencies. The act identified nanotechnology as one of the administration's top research and development priorities, authorizing funding for four years through 2009 and putting into law the programs and activities supported by the initiative.

As of May, 25 agencies had joined the initiative. Thirteen have research and development budgets dedicated to the use of nanotechnology. The other 12 participate because nanotechnology is important to their missions or their regulatory responsibilities. The two newest participants are the Labor and Education departments. They joined earlier this year to help ensure that the nation's workforce is prepared to deal with nanotechnology.

Getting It Right

This year, initiative agencies will spend less than $40 million on projects whose primary purpose is to understand and address the environmental, health and safety implications of nanotechnology. The funding is concentrated within the National Science Foundation, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and in the National Institutes of Health. The Environmental Protection Agency is a minor player. The funding represents less than 4 percent of the agencies' combined annual budgets for nano R&D-an amount Rep. Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., the ranking member of the House Science Committee, decries as "anemic." Industrialists and environmentalists together are recommending a budget two to four times larger than that for toxicology studies and other scientific analyses of possible risks. They say the only way for commercialization to proceed rapidly while ensuring that the necessary studies have been performed is for the government to fund them.

Teague says the $40 million figure is deceiving because it only covers research on risks as strictly defined by the Office of Management and Budget. The development of tools that are needed to measure and characterize nanomaterials in toxicity and exposure studies is funded elsewhere as is work on basic interactions between nanoscale materials and biological systems, which is performed in cancer research. "If you take some of the parts [that] are highly relevant to understanding the implications, the number would probably be far in excess of $100 million," he says. While acknowledging that many questions remain unanswered and more research is needed, Teague insists that the administration's 2007 budget request is adequate.

He backs up his argument with the initiative's first report card from the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. The initiative got marks for advancing basic knowledge, promoting nanotechnology transfer and taking steps to address societal concerns. The council's May 2005 report, "The National Nanotechnology Initiative at Five Years: Assessment and Recommendations of the National Nano-technology Advisory Panel," also concluded that U.S. funding in the field is money well spent. But is it money well managed?

Rejeski has a plaque that reads, "U.S. Department of Unintended Consequences: We fail so you don't have to." He had it made up as a joke, but when he shows it off at speaking engagements, it gets his message across: "It doesn't matter whether a hurricane hits New Orleans or there's a terrorist attack. You want a bunch of people who have thought through what could go wrong, and played that over again and again, and failed, and figured out what to do to reduce the potential for failure." He feels the same way about nanotechnology, but says he sees no evidence that the government is anti-cipating and rehearsing misuse or accident scenarios. He believes that traditional stovepiping and inadequate resources are keeping the government from understanding and managing nanotechnology's big unknowns as efficiently or effectively as it could.

Many industries have sturdy risk-analysis frameworks, built on decades of lessons learned in coping with new materials. But Holman says they need two things from government before they can begin applying those frameworks to nano-technology: a solid toxicological database and clear and unambiguous statements from agencies such as EPA and the Consumer Product Safety Commission about how they plan to approach regulation. Holman points to EPA as a telling case because it is relying on a working group to suggest voluntary guidelines and the group has been slow to reach decisions.

As if to jump-start the process, on May 16, the Washington-based International Center for Technology Assessment and a coalition of consumer, health and environmental groups formally petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to address risks associated with untested and un-labeled nanomaterials in consumer products. The first-of-its-kind legal action was coordinated with the release of Washington-based Friends of the Earth's exposé detailing the unregulated use of nanomaterials in 116 sunscreens, cosmetics and personal care products. The filing targets sunscreens but demands that FDA clarify its stance on all products within its purview that are made with nanotechnology.

"I think everybody agrees that the regulatory framework is going to have to evolve in some way," says Holman. The Wilson Center project is backing the idea of starting over with a clean slate. Its January report, "Managing the Effects of Nanotechnology," outlines three major weaknesses in the federal regulatory structure: gaps in statutory authority, inadequate resources, and a poor fit between some of the regulatory programs and the characteristics of the science. The statutory gaps are obvious when it comes to cosmetics and consumer products, two of the most common uses of nanomaterials. In both cases, the report says, there is a large potential for human exposure but no authority to require health and safety protections. In addition to the statutory gaps, the report details major resource problems that could hinder government action. It makes an example of CPSC, whose staff of just over 400 is half what it was in 1980.

The report was prepared by J. Clarence Davies, one of the nation's foremost authorities on environmental research and policy. Davies co-authored the plan that created EPA in 1970 and served an assistant administrator at the agency during the first Bush administration. He wrote the original version of the Toxic Substances Control Act. In February testimony to the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, Davies suggested that lawmakers start thinking about a new law because the existing framework cannot protect the public or offer a predictable marketplace. "No amount of coordination or patching will fix this problem," he said.

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NASA admits mistake in blocking access to scientist

Beth Dickey — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 00:00:00 -0400

"An internal inquiry has revealed that one recent media request to interview Dr. James Hansen, of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was inappropriately declined," wrote Brian Chase, NASA's assistant administrator for legislative affairs, in June 6 letters to Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn.

Collins is the chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and Lieberman is the ranking member. In the letter, Chase said preventing Hansen from being interviewed earlier this year was "contrary to NASA policy" and reiterated the agency's commitment to "fully and transparently communicate" with the public. He also said several allegations of inappropriate editing of scientific materials, if true, are "unacceptable." Collins and Lieberman raised concerns about NASA's alleged censorship of scientific views in February, after media reports that Hansen, chief of the New York-based Goddard Institute, was muzzled because his opinions on global warming differ from those of the Bush administration.

The senators issued a joint statement Friday.

"We rely on NASA and other federally funded research to make critical public policy decisions affecting our health and our environment," Collins said. "Concerted efforts to incorrectly portray scientific data and findings are unacceptable. While this incident is disturbing, I am pleased that NASA is taking steps to prevent similar incidences in the future."

Lieberman noted that charges of suppressing science have arisen recently at four federal agencies -- NASA, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Forest Service. "It is time for the White House to stop suppressing important climate change information that the public has a right to know and needs to know," he said.

Hansen could not be reached for comment.

After the Hansen incident, NASA revised its policy on releasing information to the news media. The policy, made public March 30, clarifies what NASA public affairs officers may and may not do. It also guarantees that NASA scientists may communicate their conclusions to the media, but requires them to distinguish clearly between scientific results and their own opinions.

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Collision Course

Beth Dickey — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 00:00:00 -0400

FAA and unions deadlock over plan to rein in controller salaries.

The nation's 15,000 air traffic controllers are among the highest paid civil servants, some earning more than the $165,200 brought in by most members of Congress. A campaign to bring down sky-high operating costs has left the Federal Aviation Administration at odds with the controllers' union and the 7,000 unionized workers who maintain and inspect the high-tech tools controllers use.

Contract disputes with the National Air Traffic Controllers Association and Professional Airways Systems Specialists have grounded FAA's effort to equalize pay guidelines across the agency, at least temporarily. "What we're trying to do is bring our costs for our workforce in line with other federal salaries," Administrator Marion Blakey has said repeatedly in the past 11 months. "We cannot and will not sign a contract we cannot afford." Her reference is to deadlocked talks with NATCA, but both unions have accused FAA of rushing the bargaining process in order to impose its contract terms on employees. "It was obvious to the PASS negotiating team that the agency intended to drive the negotiations to impasse, where it could follow its preferred approach," said an April 21 statement posted on PASS' Web site.

FAA has a rare privilege among federal agencies. It is one of the few permitted by law to bargain with employees over their compensation. The 1996 Air Traffic Management System Performance Act also designates Congress as the final authority in FAA's labor disputes if contract negotiations reach an impasse.

That happened April 5. After nine months of contentious and sometimes hostile talks, FAA sent its dispute with NATCA to Congress for a resolution. By law, the House and Senate had until June 5 to arbitrate a settlement. After that, FAA can impose a contract-one it says will preserve the salaries of current controllers but save taxpayers almost $1.9 billion over five years by reducing base pay for new hires and eliminating two cash premiums. Even with a mediator's help, the two sides were $600 million apart when the talks broke down. NATCA argued FAA's plan would prompt 4,000 veteran controllers to retire en masse. The union offered $1.4 billion in concessions, but FAA dismissed it as a "status quo" proposal with all the savings loaded into the first years.

Talks with PASS resumed in February after a two-year hiatus for federal court action, and they were just as strained. PASS had sued to force the Federal Service Impasses Panel to intervene in contract negotiations that stalled in 2003. The U.S. District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld a ruling in the government's favor. On March 30, PASS President Tom Brantley announced that he was putting FAA's proposal to his union for a vote after two less-than-productive bargaining sessions. The 90-day ratification process precludes an impasse call that could kick off arbitration in Congress. "I am confident that PASS members will vote down the contract offer, which will send PASS and the FAA back to the bargaining table. Hopefully, the FAA will learn a lesson," Brantley said. FAA lodged an unfair labor practice complaint with the Federal Labor Relations Authority in retaliation.

Congress had three choices in early May: It could settle the NATCA dispute, do nothing and let FAA impose its contract, or adopt a pair of bills known as the 2006 FAA Fair Labor Management Dispute Resolution Act. The proposed legislation would bump all disputes into binding arbitration with a third party if Congress failed to act. "To micromanage the FAA . . . is not a good use of Congress' time," said the sponsor of the Senate bill, Barak Obama, D-Ill. But Rep. Joe Knollenberg, R-Mich., chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees FAA, said it would be "irresponsible" for Congress to abdicate its authority.

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Eyes on The Storm

Beth Dickey — Mon, 15 May 2006 00:00:00 -0400

The National Weather Service rides a tide of praise into the 2006 Atlantic hurricane season.

An urgent message from the National Weather Service office in Slidell, La., issued 20 hours before Hurricane Katrina made landfall last August, provided an eerily accurate description of the future of New Orleans: "Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks-perhaps longer. At least one-half of well-constructed homes will have roof and wall failure. . . . The majority of industrial buildings will become nonfunctional. . . . High-rise office and apartment buildings will sway dangerously-a few to the point of total collapse. . . . Airborne debris will be widespread-and may include heavy items such as household appliances and even light vehicles. . . . Power outages will last for weeks. . . . The vast majority of native trees will be snapped or uprooted."

Also jarringly precise was the National Hurricane Center's prediction. Around 9 the night before, the center's director, Max Mayfield, had telephoned the governors of Louisiana and Mississippi, the mayor of New Orleans and the emergency operations chief of Alabama to brief them personally about the hurricane's magnitude and potential for destruction. Mayfield had made such a call only once before in his 36-year career-in 2002, when Hurricane Lili was threatening Louisiana with 143-mph winds. "I just wanted to be able to go to sleep that night knowing that I did all I could do," Mayfield said in congressional testimony a few weeks after Katrina went ashore at Buras, La. The hurricane's storm surge flooded 80 percent of New Orleans and many neighboring parishes with as much as 20 feet of water. Katrina was the third major hurricane of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season and possibly the largest Category 3 storm on record. It devastated communities as far as 100 miles from its center.

Multiple investigations in the aftermath of the storm produced nothing but kudos for the center and the Weather Service, its parent organization. They "passed Katrina's test with flying colors," noted the Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina in its February report, "A Failure of Initiative." Arguably one of the best-managed federal agencies, NWS is held up as one of two examples-the other being the Coast Guard-of what little went right during Katrina.

The government's hurricane specialists nailed it. Storm track projections published 56 hours before Katrina made landfall were off by only 15 miles, and the predicted strength published two days in advance of landfall was off by only 10 mph. But basking in the glow of a virtually perfect performance hasn't been enough for the 45 civil servants who staff the hurricane center on the Florida International University campus in Miami. In the weeks following the storm, reports of low morale surfaced. The psychological wounds have been slow to heal. "From a technical standpoint," says Edward N. Rappaport, NHC deputy director, "we did our job well in Katrina. But none of us is happy. More than a thousand people died."

Can it happen in 2006? The Weather Service's forecast for the six-month Atlantic hurricane season that begins June 1 isn't due until later in May. But noted hurricane researchers Philip J. Klotzbach and William M. Gray of Colorado State University say forecasters will have their hands full again this year with 17 named storms; the 1950-2000 average is 9.6. Nine of those will develop into hurricanes, and five will be intense, according to Klotzbach and Gray. They say there's an 81 percent chance that some portion of the U.S. coastline will be hit; that figure has averaged 52 percent over the last century. The 2006 probability is 64 percent along the East Coast and 47 percent along the Gulf Coast.

The National Hurricane Center is ready. It's flush with staff and money, for now. Four junior-grade hurricane specialists were hired during the off-season, boosting the agency's total to 10. Their salaries come from a year-end supplemental appropriation that's also paying for targeted research on intensity prediction, NHC's toughest scientific challenge. The specialists still are scratching their heads about Katrina and another hurricane named Wilma. Both emerged in the Caribbean and grew to Category 5 status in very little time. They weakened before making landfall. But Wilma, which struck south Florida in October, set a record for rapid intensification. It strengthened from a tropical storm to a Category 5 in less than 24 hours. A second measure of intensity is central pressure. Wilma's dropped to the lowest on record in the Atlantic basin in about 12 hours. "We don't understand fully the mechanisms that trigger or sustain that kind of explosive development," says D. L. Johnson, a retired Air Force brigadier general now directing NWS.

Managing Expectations

All the intensity questions aren't likely to be answered this year, or anytime soon. It took years of applied research for NHC staffers to get track forecasts right. As eager as they are to understand the science, they have a more pressing operational challenge-managing expectations. "To some extent, we've become a victim of our own successes in that people tend to take our forecast track verbatim and for granted. Rarely is a forecast going to be perfect. We need to emphasize to them that there is uncertainty involved," says Rappaport, who went to work at the hurricane center right out of weather school in the late 1980s. "On the other hand," he says, "our stakeholders approach us about whether we met our [1993] Government Performance and Results Act goal for this year. 'What new products are you bringing online? Did you set any records with your forecasts this year?' There are two different sets of important interests that we have to provide cautious and appropriate information to."

Hurricane forecasting has come a long way in the last half-century. Government aircraft have gathered location and intensity information since 1944. The advent of weather satellites in 1960 opened forecasters' eyes to vast expanses of ocean that airplanes couldn't reach, so no tropical disturbance goes undetected. Coastal Doppler radars have added copious data about winds and rainfall to help meteorologists understand the structure and evolution of a hurricane's inner core, the bands of thunderstorms and heavy rain spiraling inward to the calm center known as the eye. Hourly wind and wave measurements are gathered by increasing numbers of buoys strategically placed in the Atlantic, Pacific, Gulf and Caribbean waters where observations once were scarce. All these tools pump larger and larger streams of data into ever faster computers that assimilate the information that specialists use to create multiday forecasts of tropical cyclones.

Most of the forecasting progress in the past few decades has come from tremendous advances in operational numerical weather prediction, or computer modeling. It's especially true for track forecasts. The lead time for a landfall prediction has increased from less than a day in 1979 to three days or even five days today. Five-day track forecasts for Hurricane Katrina were almost as accurate as the typical three-day track forecast was in the early 1990s, according to the center. "We've reduced our errors by about 50 percent over the last generation, and we attribute essentially all that to improved model guidance that we receive," says Rappaport. Two-day track forecasts have gotten so good that the National Weather Service is tightening its GPRA goal by almost 17 percent.

This year, NHC specialists will be challenged to pinpoint landfalls within 127 statute miles on average. They did so within 108 to 114 miles in the past two seasons, but those were populated by relatively well-behaved storms. Most of them weren't loopers like Ophelia, the eighth Atlantic hurricane of 2005. That Category 1 storm meandered off the East Coast for 17 days in September, confounding forecasters with its slow, erratic motion. Its unusually large eye remained offshore, but Florida, North Carolina, Massachusetts and Canada felt its effects.

Despite the improvements in hurricane forecasting, some experts think it still has a long way to go. "Hurricanes, by nature, are notoriously difficult to predict," says Keith Blackwell, a hurricane specialist at the Coastal Weather Research Center of the University of South Alabama. The Mobile scholar-scientist testified before the Disaster Prevention and Prediction Subcommittee of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee in September 2005. "There are many aspects of hurricane forecasting in which we display little skill," he told lawmakers.

As he spoke, Tropical Storm Rita was churning up to hurricane strength about 100 miles southeast of Key West. Rita became the fourth most intense hurricane on record in the Atlantic Basin. It reached Category 5, with top sustained winds of 180 mph, over the central Gulf of Mexico, but weakened before making landfall in extreme southwestern Louisiana, near the Texas border, as a 115-mph Category 3 storm on Sept. 24.

Blackwell took issue with the accuracy of the National Hurricane Center's five-day forecasts and the dependability of the Saffir-Simpson scale that Western Hemisphere meteorologists use to gauge the ferocity of tropical storms. The scale, a 1-to-5 rating based on intensity, is used to estimate potential property damage and flooding expected with landfall. Wind speed is the determining factor. But Blackwell argued the scale doesn't represent the true impact because it doesn't estimate the size of a hurricane or its associated storm surge and rainfall.

He also expressed concern that five-day track forecasts, which aren't as accurate as the government would like them to be, can lead to cynicism, mistrust and even inaction on the public's part. "Theoretically, with these longer range forecasts, communities and the public have greater lead time in order to begin preparing," Blackwell said. "However, I'm not so sure that the vast majority of the public has the confidence necessary in these multiday forecasts to motivate them to begin early preparations."

The Hot Wash

Johnson disagrees: "The U.S. Navy seems pretty happy with it." NHC introduced five-day forecasts in 2003. They were developed a year or two earlier for the Navy, which wanted an extra couple of days' notice to move its ships when bad weather was approaching, and NWS officials thought their accuracy had improved enough to take them public. The forecasts resulted from an annual review that Johnson calls a "hot wash." It plays out in a series of meetings at the end of each Atlantic season. "We have a built-in process for continual improvement," he says. A conference for experts within the Weather Service's parent organization, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is followed by an interdepartmental hurricane conference that brings together NOAA and all its federal partners.

That is followed by a weeklong gathering of all the countries in World Meteorological Organization Region IV, the National Hurricane Center's main area of responsibility. On a map, that's a rough rectangle stretching from the equator to the northernmost reaches of Canada and from the Pacific Ocean east of Hawaii to the Atlantic coast of Africa. In the next hurricane season, NHC will take a crack at many of the ideas and suggestions presented in these sessions and other forums.

Five-day forecasts were a substantial change, but most others are small. "We're looking at evolutionary changes and tweaking what we consider to be a pretty good job and what others consider to be a pretty good job," says Johnson.

In 2004, NHC emphasized the uncertainty in forecasts. Forecasters repeatedly urged people in a hurricane's path to ignore the "skinny black line" on track maps and focus instead on the teardrop shape showing the much broader potential strike zone.

Last year, NHC dabbled in probabilities. Forecasters used an experimental computer program to determine the chances of landfall in a given area and to let Web site users see the likelihood of their own homes experiencing winds of tropical storm or hurricane force in the next five days. The tool was so well received that it will not carry the experimental designation this season. It's the first product of the U.S. Weather Research Program's Joint Hurricane Testbed, a multiagency federal effort designed to speed the transfer of promising hurricane research into forecast operations.

Also new for 2006 are staff and equipment upgrades. A venerable computer model for track forecasts is being improved, and a new one is being tested. NOAA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency regularly host workshops for local emergency managers in the off-season; this year, they trained the trainers in hopes of spreading faster the word about hurricanes, forecast products and associated preparedness and response activities.

NHC's four new hurricane specialists will augment operations during the season, expand off-season outreach and participate in hurricane testbed activities. NOAA has three hurricane-hunting research airplanes, but most of the airborne observing that ends up in a forecast is done for the agency by the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, an Air Force Reserve unit at Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi. The Hurricane Hunters' fleet of propeller-driven WC-130 Hercules aircraft flies through tropical storms and hurricanes to take meteorological measurements in the vortex. Toward the end of the 2006 season, the squadron will begin outfitting the fleet with a new sensor developed aboard NOAA's planes to take highly accurate measurements of surface wind speeds.

Changes on the horizon include a possible replacement of the Saffir-Simpson scale that Blackwell dislikes. There was so much criticism of it after Katrina that the center has begun evaluating different approaches that might better describe the destructive potential of hurricanes.

Storm Warning

The most serious challenge to hurricane forecasting is one Max Mayfield and D. L. Johnson can do nothing about. Neither is a member of the executive committee of federal officials overseeing development of the technologically troubled National Polar-Orbiting Environmental Satellite System.

NPOESS is a constellation of six satellites designed to gather more accurate atmospheric and oceanographic data with the promise of vast improvements in long-range forecasting for hurricanes and other severe weather. Targeted for launch in early 2012, NPOESS would replace two aging, independently operated military and civilian weather satellite systems, thus eliminating duplication of effort. In January, the program breached a cost growth threshold of 25 percent set by the 1982 Nunn-McCurdy Act. That triggered a review that could lead to the program's cancellation after the results are presented in June.

NPOESS is three years behind schedule, and costs are running more than $3 billion over original estimates of $6.5 billion. Prime contractor Northrop Grumman lays most of the blame on continuing problems with the development of two instruments in a suite of 13 advanced sensors each satellite is to carry. But the Government Accountability Office also blamed poor contractor performance and program management in an assessment (GAO-06-391) made public in March.

The fact that the first operational model will be orbited later than hoped is heightening concerns about a potential three-year gap in weather observations. The last of NOAA's older polar satellites is set for launch in December 2007. It was dropped and damaged during tests at a Lockheed Martin factory in 2003. The mishap might have increased the satellite's chance of failure, according to NOAA. If it does quit once delivered to orbit, meteorologists could be confronted with insufficient satellite coverage as early as 2011. Polar-orbiting platforms provide more than 90 percent of the raw data used in civilian and military digital weather prediction models.

For now, the hurricane center and the Weather Service are focused on extracting as much as possible from the resources they have. Johnson acknowledges that "budget realities" have challenged the agencies to maintain current levels of research and observations and to infuse that science into forecasting. "We did a great job in 2005. You hear people say, 'You don't need more money; you're at the top of your game.' But any coach will tell you, you're only as good as your last game," he says. "We're only as good as our last forecast."

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Rethinking TSA

Beth Dickey — Mon, 01 May 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Transportation security critics turn up the volume on calls for an overhaul.

It's long past sunset for the Transportation Security Administration, but the agency formed to safeguard aviation and other modes of travel in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks trundles on. It has outlived by almost 18 months a clause in its enabling legislation, the 2001 Aviation and Transportation Security Act, which permits its termination after November 2004. That's in spite of belittling by the public, the media, government watchdogs and members of Congress who say TSA has become sluggish and obstinate.

They make their case with examples of overdue initiatives such as biometric identification cards for transportation workers, skimpy funding for important screening technologies and the disparity among security approaches for air, surface and maritime transportation modes. The revelation that Government Accountability Office investigators managed to sneak bomb components through security checkpoints at 21 airports late last year helped to reinforce the image of an ineffective bureaucracy.

"TSA's still unbalanced. It continues to focus almost exclusively on one mode of transportation," Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Ky., complained at a February hearing on TSA's $6.3 billion budget request for 2007. "TSA's still inefficient. It continues to be wholly dependent on airport screeners and dated technologies," said Rogers, chairman of the House Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee. He scolded the agency for disregarding congressional direction and failing to meet statutory deadlines, and went on lecturing Edmund "Kip" Hawley, TSA's fourth administrator in four years. "A flat budget may not be sufficient," Rogers said.

Two legislative proposals aim to chip away at the monolith. Dismantling TSA isn't in the plans, but the bills promise radical changes in the way the agency operates. Both seek ways to streamline costly and labor-intensive aviation passenger and baggage screening, which have kept TSA from spending more than about 0.5 percent of its annual allotment on transit, rail, port and highway security.

The Transportation Security Improvement Act, introduced a year ago by a bipartisan group of senators, would require the Homeland Security and Transportation departments to give more management attention and funding to surface and maritime modes. The act was awaiting consideration by the full Senate in April.

In March, the House Homeland Security Economic Security, Infrastructure Protection and Cybersecurity Subcommittee finished work on H.R. 4439, the Transportation Security Administration Reorganization Act. It would create a new airport screening organization to manage day-to-day passenger and baggage security operations at airports with federal screeners. A new executive-a chief operating officer reporting to Hawley-would run the organization, develop a cost accounting system and set performance goals.

"This bill will move the agency toward a businesslike approach [to] operations while encouraging the implementation of state-of-the-art transportation security initiatives," H.R. 4439's sponsor, Rep. Daniel E. Lungren, R-Calif., said at a markup session March 9. It also could help solve long-standing concerns about TSA's dual-some say conflicting-roles as a provider and regulator of security services. "By underscoring the need for serious reform, the bill provides a starting point for fixing the very real problems afflicting airport screening," says Robert W. Poole Jr., an analyst with the Reason Foundation, a Los Angeles think tank.

Hawley, who reportedly originated the concept spelled out in H.R. 4439, wasn't available to comment for this article. In a February hearing before Lungren's subcommittee, Hawley noted that headquarters operations already have been restructured to provide a strategic focus and serve as an information resource for each transportation mode. January saw the formation of a new TSA unit to coordinate risk management and threat assessment across the modes.

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Exporting E-Junk

Beth Dickey — Sat, 15 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Discarded government computers land in countries looking for high-tech hand-me-downs.

Memo to a former World Bank employee in Washington: Someone found your old computer in a dump in Nigeria and read the contents of its hard drive.

Your curriculum vitae from Harvard University, where you studied for a master's degree in public policy; the address and phone number of the place you house-sat during your summer in the nation's capital in 1998; templates of World Bank documents and situation reports on Thailand and other developing nations; and the 139 private, sometimes explicit, e-mails you sent to friends and family back home in Australia. It's all there.

And some of it shows up in "Digital Dump: Exporting Re-use and Abuse to Africa," an October 2005 report by the Basel Action Network in Seattle. Accompanying your correspondence-fortunately for you, the juicy details are redacted-is this understatement: "One can learn a lot about her and other people."

Author and BAN activist Jim Puckett says the data-snooping exercise was less about privacy and more about exposing which governments are looking the other way as the industrialized world exports tons of discarded electronics to poor countries with lax environmental regulations and a hunger for higher technology. The World Bank is under U.S. management. "Every part of the world I've been to so far, I've found U.S. government [ID] tags," Puckett says.

BAN takes its name from the 1989 Basel Convention, a United Nations treaty that aims to control international movements and disposal of hazardous waste. The environmental group works with nongovernmental organizations around the globe in a campaign against what it calls the "toxic trade" of electronic waste.

"In Africa, it was all about finding equipment they could reuse and repair and get secondhand entry into the information age," says Puckett. He spent 10 days last August and September poking around warehouses and unregulated dumps in the Nigerian port of Lagos, taking pictures of identifying labels called asset tags and salvaging hard drives. Puckett did this previously in China, where he says he found an Internal Revenue Service tag and "a huge pile" of computers belonging to the Defense Logistics Agency. In Lagos, five of the 88 items he examined were identifiable as federal property. The report lists three pieces from unnamed agencies and a computer and monitor from the Army Corps of Engineers headquarters in Washington. The Army didn't respond to a request for information about its computer disposal process.

Importation of hand-me-down equipment fuels much of the IT sector growth in poor countries. According to BAN, Nigeria receives 400,000 scrapped computers and monitors every month from brokers and businesses. Almost half the shipments are from the United States, the only industrialized nation that hasn't ratified the Basel treaty. As much as 75 percent of the equipment hasn't been stripped of lead and other metals, making it illegal to export under the Basel Convention.

"Digital Dump" caught the attention of the Government Accountability Office. It's quoted in a November report (GAO-06-47) echoing BAN's complaint that the United States is passing the toxic buck. The report details economic and regulatory factors that discourage electronics recycling among consumers and notes that even government agencies have little incentive because participation is not required. The Environmental Protection Agency's Federal Electronics Challenge is designed to leverage government purchasing power to obtain computers and monitors that last longer and contain less toxic substances, making them cheaper to recycle. But according to GAO, only 61 of the thousands of agencies are participating, and only five are meeting the product management criteria. The only participant to document cost savings: the Bonneville Power Administration. The report observes, "This falls short of EPA's goal that the federal government 'lead by example.' "

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Fear Factor

Beth Dickey — Sat, 15 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0400

The Energy Department has to figure out how to reassure Americans before it rolls 77,000 tons of nuclear waste through cities and towns across the country.

With more than 1.8 million residents and a tourist population approaching 40 million a year, Clark County, Nev., is one of the fastest-growing areas in the United States. More than 5,000 newcomers per month have adopted an address there since the early 1990s, for an average annual growth rate of 6.27 percent. The average visitor stays 3.4 nights, spends $282.20 on one of 130,482 hotel or motel rooms, and gambles away $480. About 31 percent of Clark County's 846,100-member workforce labors to keep the $34 billion economic engine known as Las Vegas humming, according to Clark County figures.

The county figures it stands to lose 5,393 jobs, $4.7 billion in disposable income, $5.6 billion in spending and 11,924 residents if the Energy Department carries out a plan to haul more than 77,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste to a permanent storage facility deep beneath Yucca Mountain, a 1,200-foot ridge about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. That's assuming there's no trouble on the way to the dump. Nevada is at the narrow end of the waste funnel.

In the event of an accident involving a radiological release, Clark County anticipates bidding goodbye to 54,429 jobs, $42.1 billion in disposable income, $68.1 billion in spending and 90,718 residents over the 24-year life of the transportation program. The data comes from an assessment prepared for the Clark County Comprehensive Planning Department by the Scottsdale, Ariz., consulting firm Urban Environmental Research LLC. It was based in part on surveys of gaming industry executives, business people, residents and tourists in 2000 and 2001.

Despite Clark County's concerns, the federal government says the health and safety risks associated with transporting waste to Yucca Mountain will be negligible. And experts from the National Research Council of the National Academies agree, for the most part, in a study published in February.

But as the county's assessment reveals, the perception of danger is everything. Twenty-five percent of tourists surveyed said the mere presence of irradiated shipments would affect their decision to visit Las Vegas in the future. Thirty-seven percent said even a minor accident would cause them to think twice about visiting, and 49 percent of those said they wouldn't visit Las Vegas again.

Radiation is scary. Its history is entangled with the development of nuclear weapons, and its cultural impact can be seen in comic books and fantastic movies about monsters and mutant superheroes. The federal plan for transporting nuclear waste across the country by rail to Nevada is stirring controversy and opposition-and that's why allaying fears as well as addressing safety are part of the management challenge in crafting the plan.

"When [a fear] is that deep, there's usually a reason for it, and the reason in this case appears to be the invisible nature of the threat, the longtime lag associated with exposure before it becomes evident in the health damage, and the involuntary nature of the risk," says Hank C. Jenkins-Smith, a public policy professor at Texas A&M University's George Bush School of Government and Public Service. "People don't seek out nuclear waste transportation routes to live by." He was a member of the National Research Council study panel, the Committee on Nuclear Waste Transportation, that produced "Going the Distance: The Safe Transport of Spent Nuclear Fuel and High-Level Radioactive Waste in the United States" (National Academies Press, 2006).

The underlying theme of the report is that when contemplating the movement of tons of nuclear waste, federal managers can't disregard how frightening the stuff is.

Coming to Your City

National policy calls for all nuclear waste to be disposed of eventually in a single underground repository licensed, built and operated by the federal government. Yucca Mountain has been designated for this purpose. The project to develop the mountain is about 20 years behind schedule, and almost all of its storage space already is spoken for. The government has spent $9 billion on the promised dump so far and faces about $50 billion in damage claims from utilities that haven't had access to it.

The federal nuclear waste transportation plan is incomplete, but parts of it are detailed in the Energy Department's environmental impact statements for Yucca Mountain. In the final statement, issued in July 2005, Energy said it plans to transport large-scale shipments mostly on dedicated trains using commercial railroads and a 319-mile rail spur to be constructed in Nevada. Dumping the legal limit of 77,161 tons beneath the mountain would require 9,600 rail shipments and 1,100 highway shipments over 24 years. That is 20 times the amount of commercial spent fuel that has been shipped in the United States since 1964, and 18 times the number of rail shipments, according to the Committee on Transportation of Radioactive Waste. Most of the shipments would pass through one or more major metropolitan centers on their way to Yucca Mountain.

In addition to building the rail spur, the Energy Department will need to procure a fleet of rail packages and rail cars and possibly provide other rail access at commercial nuclear sites. If the department doesn't do these things before the repository opens, it will face pressure to establish an interim shipping program using trucks. It has legal and contractual obligations to accept spent fuel. The department didn't designate routes for the shipments in the environmental impact statements. It plans to stake them out about five years before the repository opens-unlikely before 2012-and will need to make any necessary infrastructure improvements before any shipments can be made.

"Going the Distance" found no fundamental technical obstacles to the plan, but it did outline a variety of social risks. They range from increased anxiety and reduced property values in communities along transportation routes to a lack of coordination on everything from security and contingency operations to emergency response.

The report says the government hasn't paid enough attention to shaping public perceptions about transportation of nuclear waste or to preparing emergency responders. It recommends moving the transportation program out of the Yucca Mountain Project and finding an organization other than the Energy Department's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management to run it, giving planners more authority, flexibility and budgetary control. The report also urges Energy to identify and publicize proposed routes as soon as possible so state, tribal and local governments have plenty of time to prepare.

Mountain of Waste

Spent nuclear fuel and high-level radio-active waste are byproducts of commercial nuclear power generation, scientific research and defense programs. More than 66,207 tons of the stuff has accumulated at 100 sites in 39 states. The amount of spent fuel generated in the United States to date would cover a football field to a depth of 5 feet, according to the Energy Department. Most of it is commercial, stored at power plants and regularly transported on the nation's road and rail systems. Power plants had 59,525 tons of spent fuel at the end of 2005; 103 operating reactors were spitting out 2,425 tons a year. The government's inventory of spent fuel last year included at least 2,347 tons from defense reactors. All of it was stored in four locations, all with direct rail access, near Hanford, Wash.; Idaho Falls, Idaho; Aiken, S.C.; and Platteville, Colo. The Washington, Idaho and South Carolina sites also held 386,000 cubic meters of unprocessed high-level waste associated with weapons production.

Also piling up in Aiken and several other sites are tons of irradiated trash-clothing, tools, rags, residue, debris and the like-that is contaminated with plutonium. This solid, or transuranic, waste is being hauled, gradually, to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant that Energy opened in Carlsbad, N.M., in 1999. By the end of last year, 3,600 cubic meters, about 600 shipments, had gone from Aiken to permanent underground storage there. Shipments from Hanford are to begin late next year.

With Yucca Mountain decades behind schedule, a consortium of private nuclear power utilities, known as Private Fuel Storage LLC, offered in March to sell the government space in a temporary dump it plans to build on a Goshute Indian reservation in Skull Valley, Utah, 50 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. The consortium won its license to build and operate the dump from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Feb. 21, but construction isn't guaranteed. Private Fuel Storage still has to line up funding and obtain necessary permits from other federal agencies.

Routing Radiation

The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act requires the Energy Department to provide technical support and funding to help train state, tribal and local governments in routine transportation procedures and emergency response. The department plans to begin such assistance once it identifies the shipping routes. Not only hasn't it publicized its plan for selecting routes, but it also hasn't determined the role of its program management contractors in selecting routes or specific plans for collaborating with the affected states and other parties along the routes.

Other items on Energy's to-do list: setting safety and security procedures, arranging for state inspection of shipments and planning other contractor operations-those could include communications and tracking, emergency responder training and contingency handling.

There have been accidents involving spent fuel in transit, but none resulted in a release exceeding regulatory limits, according to "Going the Distance." It credits rigorous international safety standards and U.S. regulations, full-scale crash testing, increasingly sophisticated analytical studies and continuing reconstructions of severe accidents that didn't involve spent fuel to assess how nuclear waste transport containers would have performed in a crisis.

Transport containers are designed to prevent or limit radiological releases in accidents and to hold the radiation on their exteriors to acceptable levels. The typical container is an airtight, hollow cylinder made of multiple layers of steel, lead, concrete and other heavy shielding materials. The ends are capped with rubber- like seals and steel lids and cushioned with wood, foam or metal honeycomb. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires the cylinders to be designed with a substantial margin of safety and manufactured using an approved quality assurance program. Regulators license a container based on the ability of its design to survive being dropped, punctured, engulfed in 1,475-degree flames and submerged in 50 feet of water without a radiological release that is outside regulatory limits. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission permits computer simulations and scale-model testing to meet the requirements. It does not mandate full-scale testing of spent fuel packages because of the expense involved-large truck and rail containers cost more than $1 million each-and the lack of U.S. facilities capable of handling them.

"Going the Distance" characterizes the containers as 99 percent effective in shielding more than 99 percent of radiation emitted by the spent fuel or high-level waste inside them. But it makes one important exception: an accident involving a fire that burns uncontrolled for hours or days. In July 2001, a fire in a Baltimore railroad tunnel with limited access gave locals and first responders a fright. A train carrying 28,600 gallons of liquid tripropylene derailed. The National Institute of Standards and Technology estimated that the fire lasted three to 12 hours, with temperatures peaking around 1,832 degrees. There was no radioactive material aboard the train, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is using the accident conditions to re-examine the performance of some transport containers it previously certified.

Because the casks don't block the radiation completely, people along the shipping routes risk getting small doses when loaded containers pass by. According to Energy's final environmental impact statement for Yucca Mountain, with maximum incident-free exposure, the lifetime risk of developing and dying of cancer might increase by 1 in 10,000 for someone who lives along a rail route. It estimates the radiological impact on populations within half a mile of any rail route, assuming no accidents, to be one cancer fatality in 16.4 million people over the 24-year life of the program. A rail accident might raise the number to five. About 3.8 million members of that population can expect to die of unrelated cancers in the same period. While Energy characterizes the health and safety risks as barely discernible and "exceedingly small," the Committee on Nuclear Waste Transportation report acknowledges that even minor releases might have important social implications.

"Going the Distance" drew its strongest criticism from the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, a nonprofit group in Takoma Park, Md., for citizens and environmental activists. Nuclear waste specialist Kevin Kamps accused the committee of whitewashing the dangers. "Instead of recommending that wastes be safeguarded and secured against accident and attack where they currently are, [the National Academies] now advises that the wastes be rushed onto our roads, rails and waterways," Kamps said in a statement issued Feb. 14, a few days after the release of the report. "The prospect of 'Mobile Chernobyls' speeding at 60 mph down roads and rails through hundreds of cities introduces new risks not faced by stationary on-site storage at reactors."

The report didn't surprise Judy Treichel, a tireless anti-Yucca Mountain crusader who heads the Nevada Nuclear Task Force Inc. "It says that we are capable of shipping nuclear waste and other hazardous materials in this country, but there needs to be very strict regulations and they need to be scrupulously followed," says Treichel. "It also says [the Energy Department] is not the entity to do this," she adds.

Paul Golan, acting director of Energy's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, didn't disagree that the structure of his organization could be improved. In fact, he says he's begun augmenting his nuclear waste transportation program with a handful of security professionals from other parts of the department. But in late March, he was resisting the report's recommendation to separate the transportation and repository programs. "The job the [Energy] secretary gave me was to move the Yucca Mountain Project forward," Golan says. "We think it's best integrated."

"Going the Distance" says certain characteristics of the transport program make it exceptionally challenging: It's decentralized, involving numerous government agencies and private sector entities; it has to operate consistently and reliably; it faces schedule pressure because of spent fuel acceptance deadlines set by law; it's subject to the Energy Department's budgetary ups and downs and the annual congressional appropriations process; and it spans more than two decades. All that makes it difficult to plan for, procure and construct the needed infrastructure. "The committee felt that the program wasn't getting enough management attention and wasn't getting enough funding to be able to do its job, says study director Kevin Crowley. "The committee recommended raising its visibility, either within [the Energy Department] or by turning it into another type of an organization." Options include establishing a quasi-governmental corporation or a wholly private entity. Whatever structure results, the report says, the government should pay attention to safety and people's fears.

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Muzzled or Misunderstood?

Beth Dickey — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0400

The appointee, junior spokesman George Deutsch, 24, resigned in February, and Hansen's name and face were ubiquitous in newspapers and on TV news for weeks afterward. There's even a new term for what can happen to federal scientists when nonscientists jump into the fray: They risk getting Hansenized.

Political appointees at the top of NASA's public affairs organization say there's no stifling of scientists. "This is just a big, bureaucratic misunderstanding, but we are clarifying our policies to make sure we have clear and open communications at NASA," says the assistant administrator for public affairs, David Mould, a former reporter and editor for United Press International.

According to Mould, who's been trying to streamline procedures for news releases and infuse them with Associated Press style since joining NASA in June 2005, the recent confusion and discomfort stemmed from NASA's "cumbersome" editing and approval process. "There are just too many cooks in the kitchen," he says.

Mould vehemently denies any White House interference. Nevertheless, a committee of senior executives is revising NASA's public affairs rule book, which did not specifically prohibit political interference in the handling of news and science information. "We're looking to see if there are any other such instances," the administrator says.

Soon there came "a series of phone calls from NASA . . . demanding restrictions on my communications with the media," Hansen says. "The restrictions on me, I now realize, were illegal." According to internal memos the scientist provided to Government Executive, political appointees running NASA's public affairs organization in Washington reacted to the speech and subsequent TV appearances by directing staff to monitor Hansen's speaking schedule, news interviews, scientific papers and Web postings. Hansen says they threatened "dire consequences" if he didn't stop voicing his contrarian ideas.

Instead of zipping his lips, Hansen talked to the press. The 39-year NASA veteran told reporters he's been the target of Bush administration censors at least since October 2004. Days before the presidential election that year, in a speech at his alma mater, Iowa State University, Hansen said he would vote for John Kerry because the Democratic challenger understood global warming issues better than the incumbent president did. His comments sparked a controversy that simmered quietly until January 2006, when Hansen accused Deutsch of limiting reporters' access to him.

Deutsch went to NASA from a position on the Bush reelection campaign. News accounts detailed multiple missteps in NASA's Science Mission Directorate: Deutsch instructed a NASA Web site contractor to insert the word "theory" after every reference to the Big Bang. Mould notes the AP Stylebook does the same. Deutsch also is reported to have told a colleague that his job at the space agency was "to make the president look good."

Bad move, says Torie Clarke, author of Lipstick on a Pig: Winning in the No-Spin Era by Someone Who Knows the Game (Free Press, February 2006). "If you work for an agency as a political appointee, you work for the entire country and for all people. So you should be, I believe, in your behavior at work, completely nonpartisan," says Clarke, who served as assistant secretary of Defense for public affairs under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

"There's no censorship here," Deutsch said during a lengthy interview. "They're out to get Republicans, they're out to get Christians, they're out to get people who are helping Bush - anybody they perceive as not sharing their agenda, they're out to get." In a March 8 e-mail, Hansen dismissed the claims as "nonsense."

Federal lawmakers have heard similar complaints from scientists at those agencies and others, including the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency. "The idea that the problem began and ended with George Deutsch, that's not our position," says David Goldston, chief of staff for the House Science Committee. In the quest for scientific transparency, Goldston told reporters in February, "We're hoping that [NASA will] be the model agency."

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Muzzled or Misunderstood?

Beth Dickey — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0500

A public relations scandal rocks the space agency.

James Hansen was just a highly regarded climatologist until he warned last December that Earth could become a "different planet" if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced significantly in the next 10 years. Today, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York is something of a folk hero for speaking his mind about global warming and tangling with a White House appointee who tried to shut him up.

"It is not appropriate for scientists at a . . . federal executive agency to be required to adjust, spin, alter, frame, the tone of their scientific work to fit any particular political agenda," says NASA Administrator Michael Griffin. "And by the way," he told reporters after a hearing before the House Science Committee on Feb. 16, "we don't think NASA's doing that." Political appointees at the top of NASA's public affairs organization say there's no stifling of scientists. "This is just a big, bureaucratic misunderstanding, but we are clarifying our policies to make sure we have clear and open communications at NASA," says the assistant administrator for public affairs, David Mould, a former reporter and editor for United Press International. According to Mould, who's been trying to streamline procedures for news releases and infuse them with Associated Press style since joining NASA in June 2005, the recent confusion and discomfort stemmed from NASA's "cumbersome" editing and approval process. "There are just too many cooks in the kitchen," he says.

The hubbub started with a lecture Hansen gave to the American Geophysical Union's 2005 fall meeting in San Francisco. "Humans now control global climate, for better or worse," he said in prepared remarks that accompanied data showing 2005 tied with 1998 as the warmest year on record. Soon there came "a series of phone calls from NASA . . . demanding restrictions on my communications with the media," Hansen says. "The restrictions on me, I now realize, were illegal." According to internal memos the scientist provided to Government Executive, political appointees running NASA's public affairs organization in Washington reacted to the speech and subsequent TV appearances by directing staff to monitor Hansen's speaking schedule, news interviews, scientific papers and Web postings. Hansen says they threatened "dire consequences" if he didn't stop voicing his contrarian ideas.

Deutsch admitted to news-talk radio WTAW-AM in College Station, Texas, on Feb. 9 that he lied on his résumé about getting a journalism degree from Texas A&M University in 2003. He also complained that scientists such as Hansen were pushing a "sky-is-falling" partisan agenda. "There's no censorship here," Deutsch said during a lengthy interview. "They're out to get Republicans, they're out to get Christians, they're out to get people who are helping Bush-anybody they perceive as not sharing their agenda, they're out to get." In a March 8 e-mail, Hansen dismissed the claims as "nonsense."

The climatologist says Deutsch wasn't the "principal player" in the controversy. What's more, NASA isn't the only agency beset by allegations of scientific censorship. In surveys by the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Mass., more than a third of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration respondents and almost half of Fish and Wildlife Service respondents reported political interference in scientific determinations. Federal lawmakers have heard similar complaints from scientists at those agencies and others, including the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency. "The idea that the problem began and ended with George Deutsch, that's not our position," says David Goldston, chief of staff for the House Science Committee. In the quest for scientific transparency, Goldston told reporters in February, "We're hoping that [NASA will] be the model agency."

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Getting to Liftoff

Beth Dickey — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0500

NASA's mission management team puts a new philosophy on the flight line for Discovery.

Wayne Hale's nightmare came true on a midsummer Wednesday last year in Houston. Then deputy manager of NASA's space shuttle program, he didn't notice the time exactly, but he knew it was pretty late. After all, the stars were out. And a shuttle was up there among them-finally. It was July 27, 2005, 30 difficult months after the orbiter Columbia disintegrated in a re-entry catastrophe that claimed seven astronauts' lives.

Now it was showtime for Discovery, which had launched the previous morning and completed a couple dozen orbits of Earth. Seven astronauts soon would awaken to their third day on board, one featuring a tricky rendezvous with the international space station and the first shuttle visit to the U.S.-led outpost in almost three years.

Outside Mission Control, Hale had revved up the old Suburban and pointed its headlights toward home. NASA's most experienced flight manager was alone with his thoughts: two-and-a-half years . . . one-and-a-half billion dollars . . . hundreds of engineering tests, designs and redesigns . . . calculations, recalculations . . . analysis . . . work, rework . . . brought in the best minds . . . best technical thinking . . . reduced the potential for fuel tank insulation to fly off and strike the orbiter . . . convinced ourselves . . . Hale's phone jangled. It was the shuttle engineering and integration chief, John Muratore. "Wayne, we've got this imagery that, when you enhance it, you can see the foam hit the wing," he said, and Hale just about drove off the road. It was the lowest of the low points he'd seen in his 27 years as a flight controller, with the exception of the two shuttle accidents.

What a roller coaster of emotion the past 36 hours had been for Hale, the 27 senior government and contractor engineers on his mission management team, and some 500 technical specialists. From euphoric heights upon Discovery's launch, they sank to the depths of despair soon after liftoff. Video replays proved that NASA and its external fuel tank contractor, Lockheed Martin Corp., had failed in their efforts to comply with the foremost recommendation of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board.

A tiny TV camera mounted on the 154-foot propellant silo told the graphic truth: Between 129 and 149 seconds into Discovery's climb to orbit, several chunks of insulating foam shook loose from the tank. The biggest debris was a yard long, a foot wide, and about half the mass of a 1.67-pound chunk that struck and doomed Columbia in 2003. The accident investigators told NASA to eliminate debris shedding entirely to spare the remaining three orbiters a similar fate. The composition of the foam made that an impractical challenge, so NASA worked hard to guarantee that nothing heavier than about half an ounce would break free.

"We were wrong," Hale's boss told the news media that afternoon. The strained admission from then-space shuttle program manager Bill Parsons (now deputy director at Kennedy Space Center) hung like icicles in the air-conditioned auditorium at Johnson Space Center. "We have more work to do."

Hale, an avuncular, church-going guy, had a penchant for philosophical pep talks distributed in memo form. But in an e-mail to space, he got right to the point. "I'm absolutely mortified," Hale told Discovery's crew. "And we're not going to fly again until we fix it."

The foam hit was caught by a Sony XC-999 "lipstick cam" mounted on the fuel tank's exterior, near two struts where the orbiter is attached. Analysts had missed it in the live transmission beamed to the ground at 30 frames per second during the first two or three minutes of the shuttle's climb. Twenty seconds after the biggest chunk of insulation got loose, three smaller pieces popped off a nearby spot on the fuel tank. One small piece seemed to ricochet off Discovery's starboard wing. Columbia's hit also was on a wing.

Discovery was the most photographed shuttle so far, thanks to a beefed-up suite of imagers NASA employed to make sure it could obtain three useful views of the launch-another accident board requirement. The agency increased still, video and motion picture film camera coverage by 25 percent. A total of 113 government cameras were pointed at Discovery during ascent, including six on the shuttle. To look for falling debris, NASA added radars several miles north, south and east of the launchpad and positioned two high-flying WB-57 research planes with color and infrared cameras in nose-mounted ball turrets.

Talk about drinking from a fire hose. Mission managers had more information about the shuttle's physical condition than ever, and they had a deadline for getting it analyzed. Three days was the plan. On Day 4, the astronauts would use a laser camera system attached to Discovery's robot arm to make focused, 3-D inspections of problem areas that showed up in the analysis. That would leave roughly 10 days to try repairs and to come up with other remedies, if necessary, before the shuttle came home.

Getting the Picture

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board had drawn a bull's-eye around the mission management team (MMT), blaming it for "missed opportunities" to gather spy satellite pictures and other information it might have used to save Columbia's crew. The board prescribed a cultural makeover for NASA. For Discovery, Hale put his team at the point of the dart, requiring the members to meet regularly to deal with cooked-up crises under the tutelage of organizational behavior experts. Occasionally he integrated the simulations, synching up about a dozen NASA field installations, federal laboratories and contractor offices from California to Canada to Connecticut in a closed-circuit teleconference.

They met like this for several hours every afternoon during the mission. The daily MMT was supposed to demonstrate a cultural shift in the same way the image assets were supposed to verify the technical changes. Hale directed the proceedings from a networked command center he personally designed to invite discussion and accommodate dissent. The table is round-no head, no power center-and nobody is permitted to sit in the same place twice. The 1 o'clock sessions were all about communicating the results of analyses mostly done while the mission mana-gers were sleeping.

Coordinating a support team numbering at least 200 to analyze imaging at three field installations was Muratore's responsibility. When everything was being put in place ahead of the first big sim in early 2004, he realized he needed help. "We weren't ready," he says. "We didn't see how we were going to keep the activity in all three imagery labs and the inspection teams coordinated."

Terri Murphy's timing couldn't have been better. She walked into Muratore's office one day to deliver a report on the laser boom and walked out with the brand-new title of imagery integration manager. The 40-something computer scientist was an old hand at flight operations. Early in her career, she wrote code for Mission Control's data processing systems. She controlled onboard computers from the center for 10 years before the Columbia mission. Image analysis wasn't anything close to a real-time operation in the past, but that's what would be needed for the Discovery mission. The plan for converting visual inspection data into useful information for the mission management team was driven by the clock. Murphy sorted out how the assets would be used, how the data would flow between the labs and how their analyses would feed into on-orbit surveys for damage.

Months later, she remembers Discovery as the most rewarding assignment of her career. At the time, the traditional friction between NASA's operations and engineering divisions made it incredibly frustrating. The two mix about as easily as oil and water. They're always at odds about whether an answer is good enough. Operators need answers on time. Engineers like to answer questions whenever they're done studying them. Murphy often heard the protest, "We'll just continue to do it the way we've always done it. It's always worked in the past." Even after what happened to Columbia, she says, "I don't think that everybody recognized that maybe it didn't always work in the past."

Some thought the simulations were a nuisance. Others insisted on prolonging intercenter rivalries dating back decades. A few old-timers made it clear they weren't interested in taking directions from a woman. Her elaborate imaging network had a couple of holes she couldn't plug in time for Discovery's launch, but that's why there were three labs. If one lab didn't want to play, the other two could take up the slack.

Finding a Fix

A big loss of foam and something hitting the wing were the two "Oh, shit!" events Murphy was looking for. To her relief, a closer check of the time-coded images showed the debris shedding at high altitudes where aerodynamic forces are negligible. It was hard to say whether the small piece hit, but if it did, it didn't do serious damage. Poring over the images with Hale and Muratore in the Johnson lab that night in July, Murphy wondered to herself, "What else are we missing?"

She found out in a matter of hours. As Discovery closed within 600 feet of the space station, Commander Eileen Collins put the orbiter through an unprecedented perilous maneuver-a 360-degree back flip to show its nose and belly to residents on the outpost. They pressed 400 and 800 mm lenses against two windows and snapped away while the shuttle slowly spun. The rendezvous photography revealed two problems. Two spacers were sticking out of Discovery's tile heat shield like whiskers on a chin. Up by the commander's windshield, on the left side of the nose, a thermal blanket was torn and puffed out.

Hale's first inclination was to dismiss them as mere maintenance issues, just stuff to fix after Discovery returned to Earth. He says most of the mission management team felt the same way. And he acknowledges without being prompted that is the same red flag raised by the Columbia investigation. But this is the new NASA, Hale says. In the old days, "We would have relied a lot more on . . . wishful thinking."

Environmentally speaking, space is an uninviting place. Temperatures swing from 200 degrees Fahrenheit to minus 200 every 90 minutes as the shuttle travels in and out of Earth's shadow at a speed of 17,500 mph. Coming home from a visit to space is extremely unpleasant. Friction ignites a 3,000-degree inferno around the shuttle when it plunges into the planet's ever-thickening atmosphere. Inflate a bicycle tire with a hand pump. The pump gets hot as it pushes air. Reentry is the same concept, faster and hotter.

To protect its aluminum airframe and critical systems from heating extremes, the orbiter is covered with glass. The black belly is an intricate mosaic of 23,000 featherweight silica tiles so strong they could be dropped into cold water immediately after baking in a 2,200-degree oven without breaking. The upper fuselage consists of 2,300 white silica fiber quilts, each one custom sewn by a high-tech tailor. Thermal protection system technicians go to great lengths to make sure the heat shield is smooth. No tile can rest more than one-tenth of an inch taller than another, and gaps wider than two-tenths of inch must be filled with strips of ceramic fiber. Measurements are checked with lasers.

The tiles tend to chatter on the way uphill, so gap fillers shaking loose was no surprise. Technicians have noted hundreds of charred or missing in post-flight inspections over the years, but the first time they counted them in space was during the Discovery mission. As soon as Chuck Campbell saw two protruding, he put his 100-strong orbiter entry aero heating panel in crisis mode. One of NASA's most knowledgeable aerodynamicists, Campbell knew the history of this problem.

A rough surface disturbs air flow on the shuttle's underside. The resulting turbulence can make the surface hotter and the shuttle trickier to fly. The air churns itself up naturally when the shuttle descends. It happens at eight or 10 times the speed of sound if all goes well. Say something makes it happen earlier. Gap fillers have done this at Mach 18 twice in 25 years. Two shuttles landed with scorched and melted tiles in need of repair.

Discovery's spacers stuck out as much as an inch. Campbell's team couldn't guarantee the heat-up wouldn't happen too early and trigger another re-entry disaster. The mission management team had a lot to learn. Campbell told them, "Anything we do beyond Mach 18 is extrapolation or, at best, applying a theoretical understanding to something that you don't have any real data on." It took three days of computational analysis and a lot of explaining to make the managers understand the difference between comfort and conjecture.

Crisis Averted

Six days into the mission, the MMT decided an astronaut should try to remove the gap fillers during a spacewalk. Until now, the orbiter's belly had been a forbidden zone. It wasn't visible from the cockpit-a safety concern-and folks believed the myth that the tiles were too fragile to touch. A team of 200 contingency specialists back on Earth came up with the plan. On his ninth day in space, the flight engineer would ride the robot arm to the site, talking all the way. If he couldn't be seen, at least he'd be heard. The pressure-suited astronaut would pull the gap fillers out or cut them off. He kludged together a hacksaw with duct tape and a blade from the cockpit just in case. In the end, the only tools he needed were his gloved thumb and forefinger. Crisis averted.

Not so fast. What about that loose blanket?

A thermal analysis already showed that Discovery could land without any heating concerns even if the blanket came off. "But if it comes off, where will it go?" Justin Kerr piped up with that question on Day 6 when the mission management team was too busy with gap fillers to pay much attention. Kerr led the foam impact tests that pinpointed the cause of the Columbia disaster. He led the debris transport analysis team for the Discovery mission.

He and 80 colleagues burned the midnight oil computing an answer to his question and shooting pieces of blanket at samples of tile to see what would happen. Two days later, the 35-year-old put on a crisp white shirt and a striped tie and went to brief a group of noticeably agitated senior officials about the dire possibilities. They didn't think the blanket would come off, but if it did, and Discovery was traveling Mach 6 or slower, it was big enough-20 inches long, 4 inches wide-to cause grievous harm to the shuttle's tail and one of its two maneuvering engines.

The options were few: leave it alone, fix it in a spacewalk, or tell the crew to abandon ship and take shelter on the space station until they could be rescued. The safe haven concept meant risking another shuttle and crew. Spacewalking was an ugly option, too. The blanket batting is nothing but needles of glass. When the contingency specialists tried working with it, the fibers went everywhere. If they were uncontrollable in normal gravity, they could wreak havoc in zero-G.

Hale had an idea. Take a blanket, put it in a wind tunnel, and "buffet the wazoo out of it," he told the team. "If we'd kicked [it] off days ago, we probably could have accomplished [it]," Kerr replied. It was Aug. 2. Discovery was due to land in six days.

"You have posed a mortal threat to the vehicle," Hale said, leaning forward on the conference table and looking over the top of his thick eyeglasses. "People should not sleep, or take days off, till we get an answer to this problem. Is that clear?"

It takes weeks, more often months, to plan and execute even a simple test in a wind tunnel. Doing it in 48 hours is unheard of. But that is what Kerr's team did. They yanked blankets off a sister ship at Kennedy Space Center in Florida and built three test articles. They got stereo images of Discovery's blanket and damaged the test articles until they looked alike. They jetted them across the continent in a NASA Gulfstream 2 on Aug. 3. While the plane was in the air, mission managers rejected the test plan. It raised more questions than it answered. They revised the plan within an hour, before the plane landed at Ames Research Center in California. They completed a confidence-building run in Ames' Mach 6 wind tunnel about an hour before the management team convened on Aug. 4. The test articles remained intact.

Discovery landed without incident at Edwards Air Force Base in California on Aug. 9, after a one-day weather delay. NASA gave one of the gap fillers to the Smithsonian Institution. The damaged blanket and the identical test article are being mounted on a plaque to hang in Mission Control. Wayne Hale now manages the space shuttle program. He won't have a seat at the mission management team table when the next shuttle flies, but he'll be at the ready, like hundreds of others, with sage advice and support.

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Riding Herd

Beth Dickey — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Government is turning to industry not just to round up players for huge projects, but to honcho them, too.

One of the most memorable Super Bowl commercials is an ad for a technology services company featuring men on horseback trying to drive squalling cats across an open plain. "Anybody can herd cattle," drawls a chiseled rider in a black hat. "Holding together 10,000 half-wild shorthairs? That's another thing altogether." Managing a big, complicated government program is like that. Just ask the catpokes in an increasingly popular kind of roundup known as system-of-systems integration.

Federal agencies are turning to industry to tame projects they don't have the acquisition, scientific and engineering wherewithal to handle themselves. They pay companies called lead systems integrators-usually large firms already selling to government-to lasso large numbers of independently developed technical and organizational components and corral them in a networked engineering enterprise whose sum is intended to be greater than its parts.

"Whether you're building satellites or ships, there are thousands of suppliers and thousands of people working on the team," says Sidney Fuchs, a former CIA officer who presides over a lead systems integrator-the civilian agencies group at Northrop Grumman IT in Herndon, Va. "How you structure the team and build the integrated schedules," says Fuchs, "now, that's an art."

Industry-led integration on a grand scale isn't a new concept. NASA has done it for years, to a limited degree, in the space shuttle and international space station programs. The Missile Defense Agency pays Chicago-based Boeing to oversee development of its Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system. But the agency credited with launching the current trend-shifting responsibility not only for schedules and costs, but also for procurement-is the Army. In 2002, it tapped Boeing and key subcontractor Science Applications International Corp., based in San Diego, to hire and manage hundreds of companies designing and developing the 18 separate components of its multiyear, multibillion-dollar Future Combat Systems program.

Lead systems integrators are prime contractors on steroids. They generally have more program management responsibilities than do primes, including greater involvement in requirements development, design and source selection of major system and subsystem contractors, according to a March 2005 Government Accountability Office report on Future Combat Systems (GAO-05-442T).

The Army needs a major infusion of expertise to deal with FCS, according to GAO, which describes it as the greatest technology integration challenge the Army has ever undertaken. The operating systems have 34 million lines of software code. At least 53 new technologies are considered crucial to FCS performance. The 18 major weapons systems must be designed and integrated simultaneously within strict size and weight limitations, and synchronized with 157 complementary systems. FCS will require a first-of-its-kind communications network with unprecedented mobile and high-speed voice, data and video transmission capabilities. The Army told GAO it didn't have the resources or flexibility to field 15 FCS-equipped brigades by 2032-which was the original plan-using a traditional acquisition process.

Because of FCS in particular, the growing practice of using lead system integrators has caught the skeptical eye of lawmakers and watchdogs worried that the government isn't saving any money and might be surrendering too much control. "The government has done integration quite well in some instances," says Philip Coyle, a Clinton administration assistant defense secretary now advising the Washington-based Center for Defense Information. "Private industry has said to the government, 'We can do it better and cheaper.' I think it's debatable as to whether that's really turned out to be the case."

Mastering a Megasystem

Anticipated costs for FCS have risen steadily, and the completion date has slid four years. The 2006 Defense Authorization Act requires the Pentagon to report this year on how its use of lead systems integrators can be improved. "LSI has got some bad press, I think, based on a lack of understanding more than anything else," says Daniel Zanini, a retired Army lieutenant general now managing the FCS program at SAIC.

Zanini commanded the 8th Army in Korea, overseeing a workforce of 55,000 U.S. and Korean civilians and military personnel and supporting infrastructure at 91 installations. In the 1990s, he worked as a concept developer in the Army digitization effort that followed the first Persian Gulf War. That experience made clear that integrating troops and their armor after the fact wasn't going to work, and it helped drive the Army to try the lead system integrator approach. "Soldiers will tell you they aren't integrated," says Zanini. An Abrams tank traveling at 40 mph can see and destroy a target from a distance of two or three miles. It's a capability like no other "but it goes nowhere beyond the tank," the former three-star adds. "Their buddy, sitting right next to them in another tank, has no knowledge about what they just shot at unless they're looking at it themselves through their own sight."

The Army wants this information shared instantly-not just between tanks, but also among infantry carriers, airplanes, trucks, radars and other sensors, troops and leaders on and off the battlefield. With estimated research, development and production costs as high as $157 billion through 2022, the FCS megasystem would replace current systems such as the M-1 Abrams tank and the M-2 Bradley infantry vehicle with a new family of lighter, rapidly deployable ones. It includes unattended intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance sensors; guided missiles and smart bombs; four classes of unmanned aerial vehicles; three classes of robotic ground vehicles; eight types of manned ground vehicles; and the soldiers and their personal gear. An advanced communications network is the rope that ties everything-and everyone-together.

Facing the same shortage of qualified acquisition specialists and technical experts that is plaguing other agencies, the Army decided that the complexity of such a system required a special kind of management approach. Instead of writing a requirements document, soliciting bids and selecting a prime contractor in the usual way, the Army offered Boeing and SAIC a nontraditional, $21 billion cost reimbursement contract that wasn't subject to federal acquisition regulations. Officials negotiating terms and conditions had considerable flexibility. The Army maintains oversight by participating in integrated product teams that make coordinated decisions about requirements, design and source selection.

Counting suppliers hired by the two leads and 17 top subcontractors, the total number of FCS participants is 535. Tying them all together is a sophisticated information system offering a database full of designs and specifications for every FCS component, common management tools and the ability to analyze any team member's cost and schedule performance on any piece of work. "In the early days, it was like herding cats, but today, it's anything but that," says Zanini. "Today, it operates as a very well-oiled machine." And he estimates the team is fielding equipment at least 30 percent faster than it could under a traditional contract. The chief executives of Boeing, SAIC and the subcontractors meet quarterly to assess progress with the Army secretary, chief acquisition executive and chief of Training and Doctrine Command. A Government Accountability Office representative usually sits in. Program decisions are made in concert with Army shoppers and operators.

In 2004, the service restructured FCS to strengthen program management and speed delivery of certain components to the battlefield as early as 2008. The re-scoping also stretched the schedule for full combat capability to 2014 and increased its cost by 35 percent. The service considers 18 of its critical technologies to be at a technical readiness level of six or higher, meaning a model or prototype has been tested in a relevant environment. GAO sees things differently. In another March 2005 report (GAO-05-428T), it assessed the technical and managerial challenges confronting the Army with FCS. Two years in, with $4.6 billion already spent, GAO reported, program requirements weren't firm and only one of more than 50 technologies was mature. The congressional auditors predicted that slow progress on the network, software and requirements would lead to costly problems and "dire" consequences later. They questioned whether FCS is "doable" at all, let alone within a set schedule and budget.

Matching Wits

Interest in the use of industry integrators for big, complicated projects is growing because government missions are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and federal managers-given the oversight demands-prefer not to deal with multiple companies for technology development, program schedules, on-site personnel and end-user support. "What they want is an organization that can deliver all those things under one umbrella," says Fuchs. He counts himself among thousands who left government and took their expertise with them after fiscal belt-tightening by the Clinton administration left the Defense budget and others at post-Cold War lows. Many of the departed spent their federal careers on single programs and knew the systems inside and out. When they left, an agency had two choices to keep a mission going: Bring in a contractor with similar experience or hire a civil servant with fewer skills. "The logical step was to have the contractors do it," Fuchs says.

Under contract to NASA last year, his company explored concepts for a proposed space shuttle replacement that can leave Earth orbit. Northrop Grumman IT hoped to get a piece of the management business, but NASA Administrator Michael Griffin defied logic. He pulled the integration responsibilities back in-house in an effort to rebuild technical capabilities the space agency has lost. "As a taxpayer, I think it's the right thing to do-if he can get the right people to do it," says Fuchs. "I've always said that a skillful customer increases everybody's chances for success."

No matter who's in charge, collaboration still requires government and industry to match wits, and that's not easy.

At the same time as the government has lost civil servants with the necessary skills and experience to go head-to-head with LSIs, the process of defining technical requirements for complex systems has changed-and not necessarily for the better. The design of highly complex, mature multiyear programs such as the space shuttle used to determine their acquisition and management structure. Today, technical approaches have become less powerful, and program management is more independent. "People aren't seeing the cause and effect. These days, you see organizational statements and decisions being made by the program offices that are not necessarily consistent with a strong top-level technical design," says John Thomas, chief engineer with Booz Allen Hamilton in McLean, Va. He blames the change on a loss of institutional memory. A trusted process can become a troubled process if an organization forgets why it was instituted in the first place, he says, and he sees it happening in industry just as much as in government.

In addition, government is going horizontal. Missions are getting combined among agencies-Homeland Security, the intelligence community and the Defense Department, for example. There's something appealing about a contractor that promises to eliminate stovepipes because it serves all three realms.

These currents of change add up to considerable confusion for program managers on either side of the equation. The line demarcating what is or isn't an inherently governmental responsibility is getting fuzzier. "That line of responsibility needs to be more clear," says Fuchs. "I think that's the cause of some of the issues today."

One agency that doesn't outsource management is the Army Corps of Engineers. It contracts for as much as 75 percent of its engineering services and almost all of its construction work. But it keeps a firm grip on integration of mammoth projects such as the New Orleans Hurricane Protection System, which includes hundreds of miles of levees stretching through a jumble of local, state and federal jurisdictions. The Corps builds the levees, but others approve the designs or own and maintain the finished structures. That's part of what makes it such a complex system.

"The Corps takes its inherent governmental oversight responsibility extremely seriously. Always has. And always will. That is the overarching rationale," says Thomas Waters, chief of civil works policy and policy compliance. In the Corps' case, control breeds consistency. Keeping the integration work in-house allowed the agency to establish business practices and quality standards that contractors have come to appreciate. "I think they like working for us," says Waters, "and the primary reason is that they know what to expect."

He says the practice helps the Corps ensure that it is maximizing economic development and enhancing the environment by including project sponsors, environmental regulators and stakeholders, and other federal, state and local agencies in the decision making on every project. "This is an inherently governmental role," he says.

Since Hurricane Katrina thrust the Corps of Engineers into the global spotlight, government critics are keen to use New Orleans' breached levees as an example of integration gone wrong. Waters isn't ready to agree with them-yet. He defends the Corps' quality control and quality assurance procedures as "very, very conscientious and systematic and deliberate." The Corps has launched parallel independent investigations with the National Research Council, the American Society of Civil Engineers and the National Association of Flood and Storm Managers. The probes will consider the storm's force and its effect on the levees as well as the engineering of the structures and all planning and policy decisions that might have affected them. Both reports are due June 1, the first day of the Atlantic hurricane season. "What we do know is that this was an extraordinarily overwhelming, intense storm. That really, at this point, is the only conclusion that we're able to say," Waters says. "As a responsible government agency," he adds, "we've acknowledged that even with the best of processes and practices and intentions that errors and omissions occur. And more important is what you learn and how you apply that knowledge."

Devilish Details

Developing a system that compensates for errors and omissions of suppliers and subsystem contractors is the lead integrator's biggest challenge. The LSI can't assume that a team member will do everything poorly, or it will end up duplicating effort. But it must set up the appropriate review processes and oversight, as an independent review of the Missile Defense Agency's Boeing-led Ground-Based Midcourse Defense program cautioned in March 2005.

Designed to shoot down attacking missiles or warheads in flight, GMD is the most complex and visible portion of the Bush administration's plan for a layered defense against intercontinental-range ballistic missiles. The review's authors compared GMD's rapid deployment and development to the Manhattan Project that produced the atomic bomb. Total costs for GMD are unknown, but the Congressional Budget Office recently projected that overall annual missile defense spending will nearly double, to $19 billion, by 2013. As many as 20 GMD interceptor missiles have been placed in silos in Alaska and California already, despite the fact that there hasn't been a successful flight test since 2002. The reviewers said the program's flight readiness certification process lacks rigor and its systems engineering function is weak.

"The devil is in the details," says Coyle, who was the Pentagon's longest-serving director of operational testing and evaluation. He didn't participate in the GMD review, but notes the authors tackled two of what he considers to be the top characteristics of a good integration effort. Good integrators test "early and often" under conditions as realistic as they can possibly make them, Coyle says. They also understand their systems right down to how the individual components work together, and they aren't afraid to halt the process when they see problems on the horizon.

According to Fuchs, industry integrators add significant value with their commitment to invest in research and development, familiarity or similarity with their government customers, and corps of experienced program managers with good organizational skills. "It's not about technology," he says, "it's about herding the cats-getting together the integrated schedule and integrated budgets." He readily acknow-ledges that cost savings is not a potential value of outsourcing project management. For that, he blames the constant struggle to manage the government's ever-changing requirements. "I believe the contractors can do it effectively. I don't know if they can do it cheaper," Fuchs says.

Industry leaders argue that, despite its shortcomings, the LSI approach has produced new management tools that can benefit any number of organizations looking for consistent output from a variety of providers in numerous areas. The practice is bound to spread to nondefense operations as the responsible agencies become more dependent on integrated networks, according to Zanini. Judging from the bollixed response to Hurricane Katrina, disaster relief is a good candidate. "Having an integrated tool kit that allows you to understand where ice is, where sandbags are, where lumber is, where doctors are located, how you get a communications network linked back together again and being able to do that in a dispersed, integrated way," Zanini says, "an LSI could end up pulling that together and managing it."

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Cosmic Downers

Beth Dickey — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Columbia on Nov. 28, 1996. Perplexed flight managers called off two spacewalks that would have advanced development of the U.S.-led international space station. Columbia skulked home with a primary mission objective unfulfilled. Later, engineers dismantled the hatch handle and found an errant screw.

The incident tops the list of life's most embarrassing moments for Jones, but it wasn't the biggest disappointment of his 11 years in the government's astronaut corps. That distinction is reserved for what he calls "inexplicable" management decisions that damaged morale, ruined careers and made shuttle flying more risky. "They were the most talented people I'll ever work with," the four-flight veteran says of his fellow astronauts, "and yet they were treated in almost a medieval, feudal way."

Jones, who left the corps in 2001 to become a full-time author, co-wrote The Complete Idiot's Guide to NASA (Alpha Books, 2002). He vents his frustrations about the thwarted spacewalks, NASA's management culture and the future of exploration in Skywalking: An Astronaut's Memoir (Collins, 2006).

Sprinkled among the recollections, diary excerpts and photographs of Jones' journey from Air Force pilot and CIA scientist to NASA mission specialist are the details of his firsthand exposure to some of the chronic organizational ills that contributed to shuttle catastrophes in 1986 and 2003, which claimed the lives of 14 astronauts.

The book offers the first insider's account of how politics in the astronaut office added risk to an early space station construction mission in 2001. It was Jones' last flight. The U.S. laboratory Destiny would be connected to the station and Jones and a crew mate, Mark Lee, would take three spacewalks to activate the science module. They had been training together for more than two years when Lee was replaced only nine months before the original launch date. In space program terms, it was a last-minute switch - usually avoided for safety reasons.

According to Jones, Johnson Space Center managers cited only vague dissatisfaction with Lee's performance and didn't comply with federal civil service procedures in documenting their concerns. Lee suspected it was punishment for a personal matter. Jones writes that officials made it clear that if he and the rest of the crew objected, they would be replaced, too. Managers "treated me fairly for the most part," Jones says. "In other cases, they disappointed me greatly."

The book devotes several chapters to the early days of the U.S. partnership with Russia in the international space station. Jones headed the space station operations branch of the astronaut office in 1997 and 1998. NASA was concluding a series of missions that sent American astronauts to live aboard the crumbling Russian space station Mir, and an American was training with cosmonauts in Russia for the first joint mission aboard the fledgling international outpost. Jones writes about Russia's inability to deliver training and flight hardware on time and on NASA's unwillingness to prod Russia to live up to its agreements. The book reveals how a lack of top-level support affected U.S. astronauts working in Russia.

Skywalking benefits from hindsight. Columbia disintegrated on the way home from space in February 2003. The accident resulted from a fuel tank debris problem that shuttle managers ignored. NASA has gotten a cultural makeover since then, and the shuttle's mission in July and August was successful in spite of related debris crises.

Once the shock of Columbia's demise wears off and managers have moved into bigger and better jobs, Jones expects the communications failures to reappear. "When they get into the management sphere," he says, "you don't hear bad messages, and then you ignore catastrophic consequences that could have been prevented."

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Cosmic Downers

Beth Dickey — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Astronaut's memoir reminds technology program managers that they can't ignore the human element.

News reports portrayed it as a letdown of cosmic proportions for two NASA astronauts: On top of the world and readier than ever to take a walk outside their space shuttle, they were stuck inside when the orbiter's hatch wouldn't open. It happened to Tom Jones and a colleague aboard the shuttle Columbia on Nov. 28, 1996. Perplexed flight managers called off two spacewalks that would have advanced development of the U.S.-led international space station. Columbia skulked home with a primary mission objective unfulfilled. Later, engineers dismantled the hatch handle and found an errant screw.

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Stake Your Claim

Beth Dickey — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Real estate speculators set their sights on lunar homesteads.

Ten percent of the land area of the United States was claimed and settled under the 1862 Homestead Act. Before the law expired in 1986, it gave hopeful settlers title to 270 million acres of America's once-public domain. The price for a 160-acre homestead was $18 and five years of hard work farming or developing the property. Could private citizens get a similar bargain on the moon?

"The most valuable real estate in the solar system . . . for the next 100 years . . . are the North and South poles of the moon," says Klaus P. Heiss, director of High Frontier Inc., a think tank that helped develop the framework for President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative in the 1980s. The Alexandria, Va.-based company still advocates a strong U.S. response to the ballistic missile threat, but these days it makes more frequent headlines promoting space exploration and moon base applications.

U.S. space policy calls for a return to the lunar surface by 2020 with the ultimate goal of establishing an extended human presence there. Not merely a strategic high ground, the moon is a convenient launching pad for expeditions to Mars and a distortion-free perch for astronomical observatories. It's also rich in natural resources that the government and private sector want to exploit as soon as transportation is available.

NASA's two-year effort to launch an Apollo redux half a century after the first landing has revived one of the most enduring debates of the Space Age. "Can I own that 'back forty' on the moon?'" asks Washington-based attorney James E. Dunstan, one of only a handful of practicing space lawyers in America. Not if he landed there today. "The fact is," says Dunstan, "there are no property rights in space." It's a fact that could spell trouble for the Bush administration's moon program, which will rely in part on commercial initiatives.

A nascent NASA plan to offer a multimillion-dollar prize for a privately developed "lander analog" that can probe the surface is just one among a host of federal activities that are boosting private sector buzz about opportunities on the moon. What rights could a company claim if it beats the government to the goal?

Two international treaties prohibit ownership of the moon and other celestial bodies. At a late October seminar on space settlement, presented by science and technology policy fellows at the National Academies, Dunstan and Heiss argued for a change in the rules. They might disagree on how it ought to be structured, but both say a legal framework for staking claims is necessary to attract private investment in space exploration. "Our noblest challenge over the next decade is to make sure that there's a place for the private sector in the private economy," says Dunstan, author of the lease that authorized Holland-based MirCorp to try to operate the Russian space station Mir commercially several years ago. It didn't work partly because Mir was deorbited under U.S. pressure.

Heiss, an Austrian-born economist who conducted the feasibility study for NASA's space shuttle in 1971, would adapt the terrestrial principles of homesteading and offshore oil and gas bidding to commercial development of the moon. He is proposing a "futures market" involving all civilian and military federal agencies with space responsibilities, space agencies from other governments, and global industry. The market could auction property rights or dole out parcels, depending on how it was set up.

Heiss also is promoting a colonization approach based on the business venture that led to the settlement of Jamestown, Va. In 1606, King James I of England chartered a joint stock corporation, the Virginia Company of London, to find gold and a water route to the Orient. The company landed in the Chesapeake region in April 1607, empowered to appoint a government for the first permanent English settlement in America.

Heiss would structure the legal framework for a moon base around the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights. It inspired the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence and became the basis for the Bill of Rights. According to Heiss' interpretation, the pursuit of property is its central theme.

Dunstan suggests a less U.S.-centric approach. He would apply the United Nations' registration convention for objects launched into space. By the convention, the International Telecommunications Union of the UN assigns operating slots to orbiting satellites, which must be registered using specific coordinates and country of origin. A registrant has exclusive domain over a particular spot for the length of the registration. The $10 billion satellite industry grew out of this system-and thrives without real property rights. Similarly, by Dunstan's plan, the slot for an object landed or built on the moon would be bounded by the coordinates of its corners. "It looks and sounds an awful lot like a property claim," he says, "and I think this is, in fact, a viable way to go forward."

If anyone ever does decide to homestead or otherwise settle the moon, he or she might have to strike a deal with entrepreneurs who already have tried to stake claims on lunar territory through loopholes in the multilateral treaties governing activities off the planet. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty voids claims of national sovereignty on the moon but doesn't specifically prohibit ownership by private individuals. The 1979 Moon Treaty aimed to fix that problem by declaring the moon the heritage and property of all mankind, but the United States never signed it.

All that gave businessman Dennis Hope reason to believe that he could claim the solar system as his own. He filed legal documents to do so in 1980 and began selling deeds to lunar land for about $20 per one-acre parcel. His Nevada company, Lunar Embassy, boasts some 2.5 million happy customers in 80 countries. Not one of them is China, despite that nation's lunar ambitions. On Nov. 7, the government-run Xinhua News Service reported that authorities in Beijing shut down a two-month-old Lunar Embassy franchise for violating Chinese laws against speculation and profiteering.

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Workin' on the Railroad

Beth Dickey — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Huge operating losses, poor on-time performance and a maintenance backlog sets Amtrak on an alternate route.

It's been an awful autumn for Amtrak. Since September, America's only intercity passenger rail system has been scolded for mismanaging its money, ordered to give up its most profitable route, and relieved of its popular president.

David Gunn, who challenged a Bush administration plan to end federal subsidies for Amtrak, was fired Nov. 9 in the wake of a bleak and blunt Government Accountability Office assessment of the railroad's prospects. Six days earlier, GAO predicted Amtrak's $1 billion annual operating loss would increase by 40 percent in the next four years. The auditing agency made its report public several weeks after Amtrak's politically appointed board of directors voted in secret to let a wholly owned subsidiary take control of railroad infrastructure along the busy Northeast Corridor.

After a two-year investigation, GAO identified financial reporting and management weaknesses, the absence of a meaningful strategic plan, lackadaisical or limited oversight by Amtrak's board of directors and the Federal Railroad Administration, and other "systemic" problems. Amtrak recently has cut some costs, but GAO noted that revenues are declining faster than spending and the taxpayer-supported company doesn't have an effective strategy for curtailing the losses. They exceed $400 per passenger on some trains, more than the cost of an equivalent airline ticket.

GAO's uncomplimentary evaluation prompted Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta to strengthen his department's oversight of the quasi-public company. In a series of statements, the secretary characterized the report as "unusual, if not unprecedented, in the scope of its review and the severity of its indictment," adding, "I hope this . . . will be a turning point for Amtrak."

Joseph Vranich, author of End of the Line: The Failure of Amtrak Reform and the Future of America's Passenger Trains (AEI Press, 2004), isn't as hopeful. He was Amtrak's earliest spokesman before becoming one of its fiercest critics. Rising costs, a rigid route structure and management's reluctance to abandon unprofitable routes, Vranich says, have doomed the railroad company he helped create. "I see Amtrak's direst days ahead," he says.

The GAO probe was ordered by the chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, who promptly appointed a bipartisan working group of committee members to determine whether a formal congressional task force to dig even deeper is warranted. The group, which is looking at the GAO findings and additional information from Amtrak and Transportation Department inspectors general, will report in February.

"In light of the heavy federal subsidy used to keep Amtrak solvent, I am specifically interested in allegations of wasteful spending, poor business practices, inadequate record-keeping and the lack of a comprehensive strategic plan," Young said in a statement on Nov. 3. "The GAO report has raised very serious questions about the planning, acquisition procedures, cost controls and financial management at Amtrak."

Amtrak is in the Bush administration's cross hairs because it hasn't turned a profit in 34 years. Established by Congress in 1971 to bail out failing private passenger lines, the rail company consumes almost $2 billion a year in federal and state funds and carries $35 billion in long-term debt. Servicing that debt costs about $300 million a year. The White House has proposed zeroing funding for Amtrak, giving states control over rail service and schedules, splitting infrastructure investments 50-50 with the states, and opening operations up to private competition.

Members of Congress are fighting the administration's attempts to derail Amtrak. The conflict crosses party lines. Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., for instance, lamented Gunn's firing as "a step backward" for the railroad. In November, the House and Senate appeared ready to keep the trains chugging for as long as five more years, despite GAO's doubtful forecast.

The two chambers were preparing for conference on bills demanding certain reforms in return for funding the railroad's capital and operating needs. They were $280 million apart on appropriations for 2006. The House-approved subsidy was on the low side of last year's $1.2 billion; the Senate's was on the high side. An authorization bill was awaiting consideration in the House; the Senate companion would shrink subsidies 40 percent over time, but establish an 80 percent federal match for capital projects.

GAO's appraisal came on the heels of a stunning decision by Amtrak's board of directors to spin off the railroad's busiest route, the Northeast Corridor. Stretching from Washington to Boston, the line carries two-thirds of Amtrak's 25 million annual ridership. It is one of only two profitable Amtrak routes. Earnings were $51.3 million in 2001. The Northeast Corridor also serves trains operated by seven freight rail companies and eight commuter rail systems. A resolution quietly adopted on Sept. 22 calls for a separate company to take title to Amtrak's infrastructure-tracks, bridges, tunnels, rights of way, signals and stations-along the 450-mile line as early as January. Amtrak would own the company and continue to own and operate the intercity trains.

After news of the board's decision leaked to a trade newsletter in mid-October, Chairman David Laney explained that creating a company to manage infrastructure would help Amtrak isolate costs associated with running trains in the corridor before it asks eight states and the District of Columbia to increase their subsidies for badly needed repairs and maintenance. The backlog is about $4 billion. "We are ultimately headed toward an environment in which states will end up covering some portion of state [rail] operations," Laney told the Associated Press.

Critics of the move see it differently. "It's transparent that they [couldn't] care less whether any trains run or not," says Ross B. Capon, executive director of the National Association of Rail Passengers, which lobbies Congress for more Amtrak funding. His organization argues that spinning the Northeast Corridor off to a subsidiary would be the beginning of dismantling Amtrak. Critics littered Laney's mailbox with letters of complaint.

Former Amtrak board member Tom Carper, now a Democratic senator from Delaware, scolded, "This is the first step in a major structural reform that should not be attempted without the involvement of stakeholders and policymakers. Certainly, it should not be something that those of us in Congress . . . first learn about from the press."

Spinoff proponents say it's prudent to make Amtrak's finances transparent and let the people who run most of the trains own the track. But even Transportation Department Inspector General Kenneth Mead is skeptical. "It is unlikely competition will become a viable option until the passenger rail system is restored to a state of good repair," Mead told lawmakers in September.

That the spinoff decision was made behind closed doors sparked conspiracy talk. That it came one day after Brown's subcommittee held a hearing on Amtrak's future-and heard no mention of the pending vote-added fuel to the fire of controversy.

At the hearing, Laney said returning Northeast Corridor infrastructure to a state of good repair and operational reliability was one of four essential objectives in Amtrak's strategic reform initiative. All users gradually would assume greater financial responsibility for their share of corridor operating and capital requirements. He alluded to the need for a competitive marketplace and more efficient rail service alternatives, and called on Congress to help address impediments, including access rights to rail infrastructure and labor and retirement reforms, with legislation. "Some of the legislative decisions in this area will be difficult and will encounter predictable resistance from entrenched interests. Yet," Laney said, "I believe it is a debate worth having."

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FAA brings in mediator to assist contract negotiations

Beth Dickey — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 00:00:00 -0500

In a news briefing, Blakey said talks with the National Air Traffic Controllers Association have stalled. "NATCA isn't moving on issues that are at the heart of negotiations," she told reporters.

The FAA and NATCA entered discussions about a new contract in mid-July. These are the first such negotiations since 1998.

Blakey said she called for mediation because the union has refused to budge on a proposal that would drive average controller compensation up 5.6 percent to $200,000 in the next six years.

She added that the union's contract proposal is "out of touch" with the current fiscal environment for FAA and the air transportation services it regulates. "At a time when the industry can least afford it," Blakey said, "NATCA wants more money."

The union denounced Blakey's news conference as a publicity stunt that does not reflect the actual status of contract negotiations. "This call for a mediator is quite a mystery, because the parties have been making progress of late," NATCA spokesman Doug Church told Government Executive.

Church also disputed Blakey's representation of the terms of NATCA's proposal. "The simple fact is, we proposed the current pay table - meaning the status quo would be maintained throughout the agreement…with no new investment…and an annual pay raise at the discretion of Congress," he said. "I don't know where the FAA gets its numbers."

Church said the two sides are scheduled to begin a two-week bargaining session in Northern Virginia on Tuesday.

The FAA would like to reach an agreement with the union before Christmas, Blakey said. Agency officials believe a mediator will help to achieve that goal, she said.

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