Government Executive - Authors - David Gauvey Herbert

Former adviser gives Obama an 'A-' on defense policy

David Gauvey Herbert — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Before the faltering economy hijacked the 2008 presidential race, President Obama's campaign was largely defined by his bold defense promises. He differentiated himself from then-Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the primaries by his opposition to the Iraq War. Later, during the general election, he pledged to engage America's enemies, shutter the Guantanamo Bay prison facility, end enhanced interrogation techniques and establish a timeline to leave Iraq -- all of which earned him scorn on the right.

But following through on his promises to break with Bush administration policy hasn't proved easy either, and Obama has been criticized on his left as well. He pledged to ban torture and signed executive orders on detention and interrogation policies, yet he has also blocked the release of torture photographs. He promised to close the Guantanamo Bay prison and has ordered an Illinois prison to accept detainees, yet he hasn't secured funding and his pledge to close Gitmo within a year will go unfulfilled.

NationalJournal.com spoke with Lawrence Korb, a former assistant secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration who advised Obama during the campaign, to get his take on what the president is doing right -- and wrong -- on national security.

NJ: How involved were you with the formation of President Obama's defense platform during the campaign? How do you think he's done so far?

Korb: Let me tell you the areas I was involved in, which I think he's done a heck of a job [with]. We talked about withdrawal dates for the combat forces out of Iraq. We said 18 months, and after the [Iraqi] election was postponed and everything we said 20, so he did do that. He talked about two to three brigades for Afghanistan, which he did right away. But then the military came back and asked for more. When we did it during the campaign, Afghanistan had not deteriorated as much as it had. But the idea was that this is a war that is important, this is critical, and so therefore we gotta give it emphasis, whereas Iraq basically was a diversion from dealing with the threat from Al Qaeda.

So you know, he did those. And also, if you remember, [Obama said] if [former Pakistani President Pervez] Musharraf won't go after Al Qaeda, we will. And people were surprised about the stepped-up drone attacks, which obviously has also occurred. Now, we didn't talk about Yemen. Nobody did back then.

Then if you look at defense spending, he said he was going to take a look at all of the programs and cut the F-22 -- also took the missiles and radar out of Poland, which is something else we talked about in the campaign.

NJ: Speaking of defense cuts, will it be tougher the second time around to pursue defense cuts?

Korb: Well I think the real key thing is what happens with the [Quadrennial Defense Review]. Now I've written this.... I wrote an op-ed that said, "Hey, you ought to get your national security strategy out before you do the QDR and the [Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review] and whatever the heck Homeland Security is calling it."

NJ: How important is Defense Secretary Robert Gates in all this?

Korb: Well I think Gates has provided him a lot of political cover, particularly on the missiles and radar and the canceling of the F-22. I think had fill-in-the-blank been there, it would have been more difficult, but when Gates says, "Hey, you know, I was appointed by [George W.] Bush and I think we've got enough F-22s and I'm going to recommend the president veto it," you know, I think that was important. Same way on the missiles and radar because for Republicans that's almost a theological weapon. So I think he's been very important politically.

The real key question is, I must say, after [Obama] talked about 18 months I'm going to start a drawdown in Afghanistan, Gates, I don't know what he said in the meetings, but when he came out publicly he kind of undermined that.

NJ: Do you see Gates as a company man, or is there a fear he could contradict the president publicly?

Korb: I think he's the ultimate team player and it was very smart for Obama to keep him.

NJ: Does the White House think about its campaign promises, or is this obsessing over campaign rhetoric a media invention?

Korb: Oh I think they do. I think they do for two reasons. Number one, obviously if you promise something and people vote for you, your credibility is undermined [if you don't do it]. The other is, Obama was basically promising a new direction. For example, he got hammered for saying he would negotiate directly to Iran, which he has. He has reached out to them.

NJ: What about the promise to give the National Guard a spot on the Joint Chiefs of Staff?

Korb: That, like "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", would require legislation. Now [chief of the National Guard Bureau] Craig McKinley is a four-star [general]. And you know, I think that's a technical issue. [As president], you can talk to anybody you want. It's sorta like, are you a member or an adviser to the National Security Council? Well, if they invite you, you come.

NJ: The media is obsessed with giving this president grades, and we're no exception. How would you grade his first year in terms of defense policy.

Korb: I would say I'd give him an A-. I think they could have been a little bit more forceful on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," and they should have gotten a national security strategy out so that we would know which direction we're going and what weapons to buy and how the [Quadrennial Defense Review] should work.

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Homeland Security halts deportations to Haiti after earthquake

David Gauvey Herbert — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0500

The Homeland Security Department announced Wednesday afternoon that it will halt the deportation of illegal Haitian immigrants in the wake of a devastating 7.0 earthquake in that country. But some lawmakers and immigration advocates are lobbying President Obama go further and grant Haitians in the U.S. a safe haven through a controversial emergency program.

The program, called temporary protected status, is designed to shelter tourists, students and illegal immigrants in the U.S. in the event of natural disasters and political upheaval in their home countries, letting Homeland Security issue them 6- to 18-month visas.

Immigration advocates had been pressing for Haiti to be granted that status since a series of hurricanes and tropical storms ripped through the island nation in fall 2008, and they wasted no time in using Tuesday's earthquake to renew their call.

The aftershocks in Port-au-Prince hadn't yet died down Tuesday evening when Florida Republican Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Mario Diaz-Balart and Lincoln Diaz-Balart released a statement pressing the White House to grant Haiti TPS. On the Democratic side, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Reps. Alcee Hastings and Kendrick Meek of Florida have also taken to the airwaves and Internet to support granting TPS.

"If you look at what the law is written for, this is the perfect example," Mario Diaz-Balart told NationalJournal.com. "If there's any people that can't survive this, it's the poor Haitians. Horrible. Horrible."

For now, Homeland Security has halted the deportation of the more than 30,000 Haitians with final orders for removal, 160 of whom are currently in detention. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to a press release, "continues to closely monitor the situation."

Granting Haiti TPS would affect tens of thousands of Haitians living illegally in the U.S. A 2000 Immigration and Naturalization Service report estimated that there were 76,000 undocumented Haitians in the country, though that figure has almost certainly risen in the decade since.

But what some immigration experts argue has held up Haiti's TPS designation -- and may continue to be a barrier -- is that the program has become a de facto amnesty program.

More than 300,000 people from seven countries -- Burundi, El Salvador, Honduras, Liberia, Nicaragua, Somalia and Sudan -- are in the U.S. under temporary protected status. Some of the crises that prevented them from returning home have long since passed -- Hurricane Mitch passed through Honduras and Nicaragua in 1998, and El Salvador's massive back-to-back earthquakes took place in 2001. Yet administrations stretching back to President George H.W. Bush have continued to extend TPS in the face of intense lobbying from those communities, foreign governments and immigration rights advocates.

"It's the PPS -- permanent protected status," said Roy Beck, executive director of NumbersUSA, which advocates lower immigration levels, in March 2009. "It's a kind of backdoor refugee system."

Mario Diaz-Balart countered that while there may be countries that have outlived their need for TPS, the failure of previous administrations to take a politically uncomfortable stand on TPS doesn't detract from the current need to help.

"That doesn't negate the facts," said Diaz-Balart, who has roughly 10,000 Haitians in his district, according to the 2000 census. "If you're ever going to apply TPS, this is when you do it."

In the past, the Homeland Security has worried that granting TPS to Haiti might result in a flood of refugees hoping to gain legal status in the U.S. But Susana Barciela, the policy director for the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, insists there will be no such flood. The Coast Guard, she said, intercepted fewer would-be illegal immigrants from Haiti in the months after the 2008 hurricanes. The importance of TPS at this point is to allow Haitians in the U.S. to work and send remittances to families recovering from the earthquake.

Even some immigration foes acknowledge that the magnitude and devastation of this earthquake may necessitate TPS, despite the flaws in the program.

"It might well be a legitimate cause for TPS," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, who has taken a dim view of the program. "The question is, when things sort of get back to normal in a few months, do we end TPS, and I wouldn't hold my breath. The Haitians in Florida are certainly upset about this tragedy... but this is going to end up benefiting them immensely."

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Vetting vexes State Department

David Gauvey Herbert — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400

When Paul Farmer, the physician and globe-trotting Harvard professor celebrated for his work on public health in Haiti, pulled out of the running this month to lead the U.S. Agency for International Development, critics were quick to blame the vetting process.

"I still think the proper response is to throw the vetters overboard -- if a saint like Farmer can't get through, who can?" Nicholas Kristof wrote in his "On the Ground" blog for the New York Times.

Farmer had been mowed down by a security clearance process that requires applicants to list every place they've lived and name every foreign national they know -- a Herculean task for a man who's logged literally millions of miles flying around the world.

A month before Farmer withdrew, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's disdain for the system boiled over in a meeting with USAID staffers. "The process -- the clearance and vetting process -- is a nightmare," she said last month. "It takes far longer than any of us would want to see. It is frustrating beyond words."

But while the trials and tribulations of top-level appointees are well-documented, security clearance delays are much worse at the lowest rungs of the State Department. Half a dozen current and former interns complained to NationalJournal.com that start dates are routinely pushed back because of the slow pace of clearances. (Most asked to remain anonymous because they feared damaging their career prospects at the State Department down the line.)

One would-be intern, a graduate student at Tufts, came to Washington in May for a summer gig working on development issues. But he never got his security clearance and never started his internship. He drove home to New York last week after spending a frustrating summer spent calling his congressmen for help and wondering what happened.

"With the clearance process, as an applicant, you don't know anything," he said.

Intern woes aren't new. Two years ago, Natalia Buniewicz was set to begin an internship with the Bureau of International Information Programs in mid-May. But two weeks after her planned start date she still hadn't gotten clearance. With graduate school looming in August, she was nearly forced to scrap her internship plans altogether before her clearance came through at the last second.

"It requires constant checking up and babysitting," said Buniewicz, who recently graduated from Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies.

While the State Department doesn't keep statistics on how many of its 1,000 summer interns experience delays, the department certainly accounts for it. Laura Tischler, a State Department spokeswoman, said bureaus accept more interns than they need, expecting that some won't survive the process.

Contributing to the delay for some interns could be the time they've spent living and studying overseas, said Daniel Hirsch, co-founder of Concerned Foreign Service Officers, which lobbies for overhauling the clearance process. The Bureau of Diplomatic Security, which handles clearances, farms out most investigations to contractors, who are more efficient at processing applications than the bureau's agents, he said. But when an applicant has lived or traveled extensively overseas (as Ratliff, Buniewicz and others interviewed have), Diplomatic Security takes over.

"Most DS agents consider [personnel security background investigations] to be beneath them, and security clearance investigations are a very low priority item for most overseas DS agents, so they probably sit on the back burner for a while," Hirsch said. "There certainly are cases of clearances with an overseas component to them that can take many months. Some summer intern clearances certainly fall into that group."

Congress has tackled the issue of lengthy clearance wait times before: The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 mandated that agencies complete 90 percent of their clearance cases in 60 days. And the State Department, which processes 25,000 clearance cases a year, says it has responded. In the third quarter of this year, the Bureau of Diplomatic Security needed an average of 54 days to issue entry-level clearances, the kind most interns need. That's down from 64 days in 2008.

Looming in the background are charges of even more serious dysfunctions. Concerned Foreign Service Officers, which is made up of current and former State Department employees, alleges that investigators sometimes practice ethnic and religious profiling, robbing Foggy Bottom of applicants with critical language skills. And Hirsch argued that unlike the Office of Personnel Management and the Department of Defense, which conducted the majority of clearance applications, the Bureau of Diplomatic Security doesn't have enough checks against profiling.

"As a result, any personal bias and bigotry held by an individual agent can be freely acted upon, with no danger of being caught or corrected," he said. "And of course, that same agent can delay a clearance virtually indefinitely, or until Washington complains. For time-sensitive cases like interns, that means that the internship can effectively be sabotaged by an agent who might want to do so."

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Funding fight sparks debate on Peace Corps' future

David Gauvey Herbert — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400

As a candidate, Obama praised the program as a cornerstone of American soft power and pledged to double the number of volunteers by 2011. Online applications in the days surrounding Obama's inauguration tripled from the year before, and applications overall rose 12 percent in the first six months of 2009.

But as the Peace Corps nears its 50th anniversary, lawmakers, former volunteers and the agency's founding fathers are grappling over the budget and where President Kennedy's brainchild goes from here.

As president, Obama has requested just a 10 percent budget increase for the agency, from $340 million to $373 million. While that would still be the biggest boost since 1993, it won't come close to bankrolling the kind of rapid expansion Obama pledged during the campaign.

The House Appropriations Committee and Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., (who volunteered in the Dominican Republic in the late-1960s) want to allocate even more. But they've run up against Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who controls the purse strings as chairman of a key Senate Appropriations subcommittee and is balking at any further increase.

As an adviser to Kennedy, Harris Wofford helped craft and launch in the Peace Corps in the early 1960s. Now the former Democratic senator from Pennsylvania has come out swinging on the agency's behalf.

"The budget from the Senate committee is likely to mean no real expansion of the Peace Corps," says Wofford, who also advised Obama on his service policy during the campaign.

The funding tug-of-war has prompted the agency's critics to speak out as well. They say the Peace Corps needs to rechart its course before Congress commits millions more. More money for the Peace Corps means less money for other aid programs, and Leahy has rejected the House's and Dodd's calls for a $450 million outlay in part because he's not sure it gives the government the most bang for its buck abroad.

"At a time of intense pressures on a limited budget, each volunteer costs the U.S. government $50,000 a year," read a budget report from Leahy's Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs. "Each dose of vaccine for measles, which threatens hundreds of millions of children in poor countries and needlessly kills 200,000 children annually, costs a few dollars."

As Congress tries to run a cost-benefit analysis, a frequent knock on the program has resurfaced: that it parachutes inexperienced volunteers (average age: 27) into demanding jobs teaching English, boosting agricultural output and raising awareness about HIV/AIDS for which they may not be prepared. Robert Strauss, a former country director for Cameroon, has bemoaned that volunteers are often at best a "curiosity, an amusement" in their host villages. Before more volunteers are sent, he says, he wants better screening processes and more administrative support for existing field workers.

"At the end of the day, it comes down to the organization trying to do too much with too little personnel," he said.

Even some ardent Peace Corps supporters want to retool the agency's mission. Some observers believe that too many volunteers are sent to countries like Cape Verde, Vanuatu and Fiji, which have little strategic importance for the United States. Sen. Christopher (Kit) Bond, R-Mo., who has lobbied Leahy to support the House's $450 million budget line, envisions the Peace Corps as an arrow in America's "smart power" quiver and wants a bigger Peace Corps footprint in the Muslim world.

"Volunteers are needed in more strategic countries in the world, which is why I have urged for more volunteers in countries like Indonesia," Bond said.

But while a quarter of Peace Corps volunteers are serving in Muslim-majority countries, just two of those host nations (Jordan and Morocco) are in the Arab world. And the list of potential Middle Eastern countries where the Peace Corps could open up new franchises is short, given the region's politics and the agency's obsession with safety (volunteers in Uganda, for example, are forbidden from riding the ubiquitous motorcycle taxis).

Not everyone agrees with Bond's plan. Wofford said any conception of the Peace Corps as a vehicle for small-scale American diplomacy in geopolitical hot spots is a departure from Kennedy's vision.

"I know the 'smart power' idea is really appealing to members of Congress," he said. "But the warning Dean Rusk and Sargent Shriver and Kennedy made in various statements is that you don't want the Peace Corps to be seen as an instrument of American foreign policy."

The program and its 200,000 alums can get defensive when the agency comes under fire. When Strauss penned an op-ed titled "Too Many Innocents Abroad" in the New York Times that argued for a contraction, not an expansion, former volunteers deluged the paper with letters to the editor.

"There's a mythology around the Peace Corps, and some people have this idea that the program was an immaculate conception and that things should never change," he said. "No one from Peace Corps has ever solicited me for information or ideas, and I think I'm still viewed as an enemy of the organization."

One thing everyone agrees on is that strong leadership from Aaron Williams, who was confirmed last week as the new Peace Corps administrator, is badly needed. Williams, who served in the Dominican Republic in the late-1960s, has gotten positive reviews from lawmakers and Peace Corps boosters so far.

"I think Aaron Williams is going to be one of the great Peace Corps directors, in the mold of Shriver and Loret Ruppe," said Wofford, who still regrets that the agency never fulfilled Kennedy's dream of sending 100,000 volunteers a year overseas. "It's somewhat like a bicycle: If you're not moving, it's hard to change direction."

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Agencies struggle to make connections online

David Gauvey Herbert — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0500

When President Obama signed an executive order instructing federal agencies to disseminate more information online and open more channels for feedback, the media duly applauded while good-government groups breathed a sigh of relief. But agencies are already using social media; most just haven't been successful.

Bureaucratic inefficiency is partly to blame, as are a handful of outdated and inflexible laws. One of the most onerous and anachronistic, the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995, requires the Office of Management and Budget to approve any government survey of 10 or more people, meaning a simple online customer satisfaction poll must submit to a months-long review process.

Still, the biggest problem facing most agencies isn't the trap of outdated regulations but the failure to attract an audience. Take the Commerce Department, which spent months negotiating a special end-user license agreement with YouTube and became one of the first federal agencies on the site last year.

It was an achievement for the department to make it to YouTube, but its videos haven't taken off: Its channel has 14 videos and three subscribers. Its most popular? A seven-minute clip of then-Secretary Carlos Gutierrez speaking to the Manufacturing Council in July, with just over 100 hits. (Compare that with the roughly 500 views garnered by an amateur slide show about Oakland Technical High School's junior-varsity baseball team in California set to Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline.") Content experts suggest Commerce instead post how-to videos to help Americans apply for government loans or learn about helpful programs.

The Commerce Department has made considerable gains online and come up with other ways to interact with users, but even it isn't immune to the idea that the Internet is a dumping ground for existing content, no matter how ill-suited it might be for the Web.

"It doesn't make sense to be using Web 2.0 tools for the sake of using Web 2.0 tools," says Sheila Campbell, co-chair of the Federal Web Managers Council, which advises government techies on Web outreach. Of the Commerce Department's YouTube struggle, she adds, "that's something that agencies need to look at -- to make sure they're developing compelling videos that resonate with their target audiences."

Too many agencies using the micro-blogging site Twitter treat it like a "glorified RSS feed," says Mark Drapeau, a research fellow at the National Defense University and a government 2.0 consultant. By providing links to blog posts and press releases instead of developing a dialogue with the users "following" them, Web managers aren't grasping the difference between "new media" and "social media." The State Department may have more than 900 Twitter followers, but since it doesn't track anyone itself, there's no back-and-forth.

"Any of them can point to the numbers and say, 'We have 326 people following us, and that's 326 more than we had before,'" Drapeau argues. "You might as well not use the tools if you're not going to be social, because it can backfire on you if people think you don't get it."

Federal agencies are still struggling with outmoded tech bureaucracies, experts say, which need to be realigned to recognize that the Web is no longer a fun afterthought, but a critical component for public interaction.

It's difficult to improve government Web sites when they're viewed "as an IT project rather than as a core business function," reads a white paper [PDF] written in November for the Obama-Biden transition team by the Federal Web Managers Council.

The white paper also says the government maintains too many Web sites -- estimated at 24,000, though "no one knows the exact number" -- and that too few of those sites have a dedicated budget or editors in chief who focus on improving content. Changing all that will take money and time -- more time, government technology gurus say, than the 120 days that OMB and the administration's still-unnamed chief technology officer are given under Obama's order to formulate a federal Web strategy.

In the meantime, the General Services Administration's Office of Citizen Services and Communications is trying to bring federal, state and local Web managers up to speed with workshops on topics ranging from managing blog comments to crisis communication online.

Some agencies, like the Transportation Security Administration, are figuring out the Web on their own. Most Americans feel about as warmly toward airport screeners as they do the Internal Revenue Service, but the security agency is helping lead the way in public outreach online. The agency launched its Evolution of Security blog last January to explain the byzantine airport security system and offer tips for travelers.

"The day we launched, we had Blogger set up to e-mail our BlackBerries every time someone posted a comment," said TSA spokesman Christopher White. "We had 800 comments in the first 24 hours. We had to turn it off."

The TSA blog covers everything from the reasoning behind liquid bans to whether holiday travelers can transport pies (they can). Posts average 3,000 pageviews and 100 comments, according to the agency. Not surprisingly, many posters use the blog to vent ("Why is pie exempt from liquid and gel restrictions?... Is it because barring pies from flights would be pointless, stupid, and do nothing to make anyone safer? Neither do TSA's other liquid policies.") But simply having a valve for passenger angst can help dispel the image of a faceless -- and heartless -- bureaucracy.

The agency has also rolled out an internal Web site where employees submit ideas to improve security and customer service that are then voted on, with the most popular submitted to the TSA brass. A number of submissions from the "Idea Factory" have been pressed into service, White said, like an idea for a special basket to help urns go through X-ray machines.

Since most citizen-government interactions occur in the real world, half the battle for online success is offline. So government offices are expanding their real-world efforts to bring in Web visitors. The TSA advertises its blog at airport security lines with stickers that read "Got Feedback?" The District of Columbia lets homeowners apply for building permits online, but it's also set up computer terminals at Home Depot to reach the right people at the right time.

Not every agency should expect to attract sizable audiences, given the specialization of most government offices, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, says Micah Sifry, co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum and the blog TechPresident.

"We don't really know what the effect is of reaching a couple hundred people if it's the right couple hundred people," he says. "If the government makes it easier to find obscure information, but the only 200 people in the country who need the information find it, that's good."

The federal government still has a long way to go, but given the steps it's taken so far -- and the growing demand for online civic interaction -- Sifry is optimistic.

"Right now you can point to some failures of some interesting experiments, but six months to a year from now things will be very different," he said. "And it's about time."

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Obama promises oversight, quick spending

David Gauvey Herbert — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Obama, who has tried, unsuccessfully thus far, to woo Republican support for the plan, said he understood concerns about the package.

"I know that some are skeptical about the size and scale of this recovery plan," he said. "I understand that skepticism, which is why this recovery plan will include unprecedented measures that will allow the American people to hold my administration accountable."

Most of the money will go right back out the door, Obama added, reiterating his pledge to spend three-quarters of the funds by the start of 2011. Critics have scrutinized that contention in recent days, following the release of a Congressional Budget Office report that says just 64 percent of the $825 billion package will be spent by the end of next year.

Obama also announced that would-be auditors will be able to track stimulus spending on the new Web site Recovery.gov. (The site is more or less treating the package as a fait accompli, reading, "Check back after the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to see how and where your tax dollars are spent.")

Obama said his administration was putting up the Web site "because I firmly believe with Justice [Louis] Brandeis that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and I know that restoring transparency is not only the surest way to achieve results, but also to earn back that trust in government without which we cannot deliver the changes the American people sent us here to make."

Check out the blog Lost in Transition, a joint effort of Government Executive and National Journal.

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Amid tensions, Obama offers NASA spot in parade

David Gauvey Herbert — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0500

The Presidential Inaugural Committee announced on Wednesday that NASA will participate in the Jan. 20 inaugural parade.

The announcement, which comes just days after the Orlando Sentinel reported icy relations between the transition team and the space agency, could signal a thawing of sorts. NASA says it needs billions more in funding to smooth the transition to a new generation of space shuttles, but so far President-elect Barack Obama has equivocated on the multibillion-dollar price tag.

"The inclusion of NASA in the inaugural parade speaks volumes about President-elect Obama's long-standing admiration and appreciation of America's space program," said Shin Inouye, a spokesman for the Presidential Inaugural Committee. "These astronauts represent the best of our country, and their accomplishments continue to inspire Americans of all ages."

The Endeavor crew, which spent 16 days in space last month installing new equipment on the International Space Station, will march in the parade. Joining the crew will be a small pressurized lunar rover like the one that will be used when NASA hopes to return to the moon in 2020.

This won't the first inaugural parade for NASA, Inouye said. President Bush had a model NASA shuttle from Houston in his 2001 parade, and Jimmy Carter's 1977 celebration included a NASA float. The Apollo 8 astronauts and members of their NASA team attended Richard Nixon's 1969 inauguration. His parade also included a full-size model of the lunar landing craft.

Check out the blog Lost in Transition, a joint effort of Government Executive and National Journal.

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Obama bundlers contributing to transition costs

David Gauvey Herbert — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0500

The bundlers who helped President-elect Barack Obama shatter campaign fundraising records aren't finished helping their man yet -- at least 48 of these boosters have donated more than $200,000 of the $1.17 million raised through Nov. 15 to cover his transition expenses, according to data compiled by the consumer advocacy nonprofit Public Citizen.

At least 41 of those bundlers -- supporters who raised anywhere from $50,000 to $500,000 for Obama's general election campaign -- donated $5,000, which Obama has set as the limit for individual transition-related contributions. More than half of the $1.17 million already raised has come from 131 boosters donating the maximum amount.

The emphasis on deep-pocketed donors represents a shift from the general election, when Obama openly boasted about the millions of "regular people" chipping in $200 or less to his campaign, a group that accounted for roughly a quarter of his total contributions. Obama has repeatedly appealed to this same group for funds since Nov. 4, e-mailing supporters as recently as this morning about his national security team and asking for donations. But those who have written checks of $200 or less for his transition expenses account for just 8 percent of the total contributions through Nov. 15.

Minus the $5.2 million in federal funds he will receive, Obama is barely on pace to cover his $12 million transition price tag.

At the same time, the president-elect is also passing the hat around for his inauguration, for which he will likely need to raise even more than the $42.8 million President Bush collected for his 2005 festivities.

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