Government Executive - Authors - Eliza Newlin Carney

Oversight Insight

Eliza Newlin Carney — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Convinced that Democrats have gone way too easy on the Obama administration, House Republicans are planning a carnival of oversight when they officially seize the gavel in January.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., who will head the House Oversight and Government Reform committee, is said to be doubling his investigative staff and planning at least a hearing a day. His panel and other House committees will scrutinize everything from administration environmental regulations to health care costs and troop levels in Afghanistan. Incoming House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., envisions quarterly oversight reports, floor resolutions to trumpet oversight probes, and even solo investigations by individual GOP House members.

All this has Democrats in a panic. Launching a preemptive strike of sorts, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, has warned his colleagues that "wild and unsubstantiated charges" by Issa "threaten to turn the principal oversight committee of the House into a witch hunt." Kucinich is angling to be ranking Democrat on the Oversight panel, even though its current chairman -- Rep. Edolphus Towns, D-N.Y. -- is in line for that slot.

In an email response to National Journal, Towns said he "will lead a strong and unified resistance" against any "unjustified subpoenas and wasteful investigations." He's rounded up enough support to probably stay put as ranking member. In the meantime, White House officials are reportedly considering rounding up more lawyers for the Office of Legal Counsel, to gear up for pending oversight skirmishes.

Another signal that Democrats anticipate an avalanche of subpoenas was watchdog Melanie Sloan's recent announcement that, come January, she'll step down as executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington to join the law firm of veteran Democratic lawyer Lanny Davis, former White House counsel to President Clinton.

Republicans are "planning to use this as an opportunity to attack the administration in the hopes of winning the presidential [election] in 2012," said Sloan, a former assistant U.S. Attorney in D.C. and ex-Capitol Hill aide. Sloan added that she is "not leaving only to defend Democrats," but that her media and strategy skills will make her "a good private advocate on behalf of those with legal and political problems, including congressional investigations."

Democrats have good reason to fret. The last time Republicans took over the House, Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., spearheaded a $7 million investigation into Clinton fundraising abuses that featured more than 1,000 subpoenas of administration officials. Burton also launched an elaborate probe into the suicide of former Clinton deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster. Not to mention the GOP-led Clinton impeachment hearings.

But Democratic "witch hunt" warnings overlook the silver lining in all this stepped-up oversight, say officials at the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight, which actually gave Issa one of its Good Government awards earlier this year. POGO singled out Issa for sounding the alarm over problems at the Minerals Management Service, well before the Deepwater Horizon oil spill brought disastrous MMS practices into painful focus.

Issa has produced a 16-page agenda that spells out a dozen government problems that he says Democrats have ignored, including several on POGO's wish list for full scrutiny. These include examining failures at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that contributed to the fiscal crisis. Issa also wants to tackle food safety, Medicare fraud, and what he calls "wasteful" stimulus spending, among other areas.

"Democrats are girding themselves to prepare for oversight, as though really looking into these issues is bad for them," said POGO executive director Danielle Brian. "That's not good for the country, and I don't think it's good for their party."

To be sure, some of Issa's targets look purely partisan. He's pledged to dive into corruption and fundraising abuses at the controversial community group known as ACORN, a miniscule federal grant recipient that's no longer even in operation. The House Judiciary Committee's plans to rehash discrimination claims involving the Justice Department's handling of alleged voter intimidation by New Black Panther activists likewise threaten to miss the mark.

Still, even Issa's critics acknowledge that congressional oversight, which POGO argues has dwindled in recent years, is vital. Said Sloan: "I think oversight is overwhelmingly a good thing. I never think it's good when you have a party sitting out oversight altogether because their party is in the White House."

The trick for Issa and his fellow GOP committee chairs will be to make sure that politically-tinged investigations don't crowd out legitimate government management questions, yet again sweeping federal failures under the rug.

In a USA Today op-ed before the election, Issa set out to reassure frightened Democrats.

"Oversight is not and should not be used as a political weapon against the occupant of the Oval Office," Issa wrote. Rather, it should "force the bureaucracy to correct waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement." In a House increasingly poisoned by partisanship, one can only hope Issa's pledge doesn't ring hollow six months from now.

"My biggest message to the new Congress is not to succumb to the temptation to use oversight to advance their party," said Brian. "They have got to think about what's best for improving government."

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Targeted Spending

Eliza Newlin Carney — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

For American corporations testing their new freedom to spend money directly on campaigns, the backlash against donations by Target Corp. and Best Buy Co. sends a stark warning: Proceed at your own risk.

Target has borne the brunt of public outrage over six-figure contributions that both retailers made to a Minnesota political group backing an anti-gay gubernatorial candidate.

Since news of Target's $150,000 donation to the pro-business group MN Forward broke in late July, irate customers have staged some 1,200 store protests; close to 300,000 have signed onto MoveOn.org's Target boycott; more than 74,000 Facebook users have joined an anti-Target group; and a trio of investment firms has filed a shareholder resolution demanding that Target re-evaluate its political spending policies.

In a sign that the furor has yet to die down, Washington University in St. Louis last week canceled a planned back-to-school event with Target, which would have involved after-hours shopping, free transportation and prizes for incoming freshmen.

"Contributions have consequences," said Bruce Freed, president of the nonprofit Center for Political Accountability. "And this is a dramatic illustration of those consequences and how they can affect and hurt companies."

Best Buy, too, has faced consumer and shareholder wrath for the $100,000 it gave to MN Forward. Both Best Buy and Target had received high marks from progressive investors and advocacy groups for their gay-friendly employee policies. Yet Tom Emmer, the Republican gubernatorial candidate backed by MN Forward, is a vocal foe of gay rights and same-sex marriage.

Even MSNBC has been dragged into the controversy following its refusal to run a MoveOn.org ad calling for a Target boycott. The $35,000 ad buy violated MSNBC policy because it directly attacked an individual business, an MSNBC spokeswoman told AP. But leading watchdog groups have blasted network executives and written them urging MSNBC to reconsider. The network's policy "is outdated in the wake of Citizens United," said David Donnelly, national campaign director of the Public Campaign Action Fund, referring to the Supreme Court's landmark Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling, which lifted the longtime ban on direct corporate and union election spending.

It's too early to say whether that ruling will unleash a flood of new corporate campaign spending, as reform advocates predict. But public outrage over Citizens United and heightened media scrutiny of corporate money flowing through associations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have made some corporate political spending radioactive.

Both the Center for Political Accountability and New York City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio have launched corporate spending disclosure databases. De Blasio has called on companies to voluntarily reform their campaign spending policies, and some have complied. Goldman Sachs, for one, has pledged to refrain from spending treasury money on election ads. De Blasio has also launched an online campaign to pressure Google to fully disclose its political spending.

Shareholders are registering record-high levels of support for corporate political disclosure and accountability, said Freed, who has launched a letter-writing campaign asking companies to spell out their political spending policies. In conjunction with the Conference Board, a public-interest-oriented business association, Freed's group also will release a handbook in October outlining best practices for politically active corporations, including ramped-up board oversight, risk management and full disclosure. Corporate donations to outside groups and trade associations are not immune from controversy, Freed noted. Watchdogs say such indirect corporate spending is already escalating, in part because it can fly under the radar. But even corporate donations to 501(c)4 advocacy groups, which face virtually no legal reporting requirements, should be voluntarily disclosed, Freed argues. He noted that Goldman's pledge, for one, does not prevent it from giving political money to trade groups.

"Companies need to know what trade associations are doing," he said. "Companies need to spend much more time managing their relationships with trade associations, understanding what trade associations are doing, and what risks may follow from that."

Executives at Target and Best Buy have all but admitted they wish they'd known more about MN Forward before they forked over money to the state-based group. Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel has apologized to employees, saying Target's intent had been to promote jobs and economic growth. And Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn has blogged that employees and customers were "disappointed and confused," and that the company would review how it makes such donations.

But progressive groups and shareholders are not mollified. The Human Rights Campaign has announced that it will invest $150,000 in electing a "pro-equality" governor and legislature in Minnesota. Investors at Trillium Asset Management Corp. and two other investment companies are rounding up additional signatures for their shareholder resolutions.

"We want to know that senior executives are going to fully vet the [campaign donation] recipient, and take into account the reputation consequences of backing that recipient, and whether that person or campaign has a broader agenda that conflicts with the company's stated values," said Shelley Alpern, vice president at Boston-based Trillium. In the Internet era, she added, formerly obscure political contributions can generate "a huge backlash.... All the consequences have to be very [well] thought out. And a mistake is harder to hide."

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Even in face of public opposition, lawmakers defend earmarks

Eliza Newlin Carney — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., was so upset over GOP pressure to rein in earmarks that he took to the Senate floor this month to champion lawmakers' right to insert pet projects into appropriations bills. "I'm not willing to cede every spending decision to the executive branch," declared Cochran, the ranking Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Appropriations Chairman Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, has been equally candid in brushing off his colleagues' anti-earmarks crusade. He called the House Appropriations Committee's March 10 decision to ban earmarks directed at for-profit companies "quizzical" and nonsensical.

The danger for Democrats is that Republicans pre-empt them on ethics issues that increasingly resonate with swing voters.

House Republicans have gone the furthest to stamp out earmarks, but even they seem to be having second thoughts. Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, "plans to barrel through" the House GOP Conference's recent one-year moratorium on all earmark requests, the Anchorage Daily News reported on March 23. "We will be submitting requests as we always have," Young's spokeswoman told the paper.

Never mind that these lawmakers have a point: Earmarks represent a tiny fraction of the federal budget, and underwrite often valuable road improvement, social services, university research and military construction projects.

But the earmarks debate isn't about logic. It's about perception. And to voters fed up with special deals and corporate money in Washington, earmarks look bad.

They look particularly bad to anyone leafing through the thousands of pages of findings released last month by the independent Office of Congressional Ethics, which looked into earmarks requested by roughly a half-dozen House members who received campaign donations from the PMA Group, a now-defunct lobbying firm. The FBI is investigating the firm's earmarks-related dealings.

Among the OCE's supporting documents: an e-mail to the employees of one defense contractor from the company's PAC treasurer, bragging that the CEO's two-hour dinner with defense appropriator Peter Visclosky, D-Ind., and two of his top aides, "would not have been possible without your generous contributions to the member and the company's PAC."

In other documents released by the OCE, PMA clients discuss campaign contributions to Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Kan., in the same breath as earmarks that Tiahrt authored. One lobbyist's e-mail states: "Here's a PAC request for Cong. Tiahrt. We have an office in his district, Wichita, and he is interested in supporting our effort to upgrade the Navy C-130s' flight data acquisition systems."

Both Visclosky and Tiahrt have denied any wrongdoing, and the House ethics committee last month rejected the OCE's recommendation that it investigate the two lawmakers. The OCE had also dismissed PMA-related allegations leveled at five other lawmakers.

But when reporters started combing through the OCE's eye-opening exhibits, House Democrats sensed trouble. The Appropriations Committee announced that it would not approve earmarks aimed at for-profit companies, and called on the federal inspectors general to audit 5 percent of the earmarks that go to nonprofits, which have increasingly acted as pass-through organizations for companies receiving earmarks.

It's not enough, of course. Nonprofit earmarks abuses are expected to increase, given the for-profit ban. Colleges and universities, moreover, which received some 1,450 earmarks worth $1.6 billion in fiscal 2010, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, are still riding the earmarks gravy train. Most importantly, senators from both parties have resisted pressure to swear off earmarks -- meaning the action may simply shift.

"The money is just going to flow across the Capitol to the Senate," said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense.

And earmarks controversies aren't over. When appropriations bills start hitting the floor in late spring and early summer, Republicans are poised to challenge each and every nonprofit earmark that a Democrat requests. Republican leaders will (in theory, at least) be able to argue that the bills contain no GOP earmarks.

"They'll have to follow," said Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., the House's leading earmarks critic, of his Democratic colleagues. He added: "If the Democrats are forced to pull back, then I think you'll certainly see the Senate change its position."

President Obama, too, may face growing pressure to walk his own earmarks talk. Obama pledged to reform the earmarks process on the campaign trail, but last year signed what he admitted was an "imperfect" budget bill that contained thousands of earmarks. The danger for Democrats, both on Capitol Hill and in the White House, is that Republicans pre-empt them on ethics and good government issues that increasingly resonate with swing voters.

Nor is the PMA scandal going away. The FBI is still investigating, and Flake is still coming to the House floor with resolutions like the one he sought to push through without success on March 18, which called on the ethics committee to release details on all witnesses, subpoenas and documents in the panel's PMA investigation.

"There are some 200,000 pages of OCE documents," said Flake. "And once they're reviewed, you'll see there's a lot more to this story."

The more voters learn about earmarks, the harder it may become for lawmakers to vociferously defend them.

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Game On

Eliza Newlin Carney — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Nearly a year after President Obama launched his administration with sweeping new ethics and transparency rules, the war over lobbyists and their role in Washington is just beginning.

On the one hand, the administration has set a new standard for government openness and sparked a lively debate over just how aggressively lobbyists can and should be regulated.

On the other, Obama's new rules have angered many lobbyists and public interest advocates alike, and failed to address the root cause of ethics abuses -- namely, the campaign finance system that pumps special interest money into elections.

Obama's new ethics regime has also exposed flaws in the rules that define who is and is not a lobbyist. Too often, administration restrictions shut out registered lobbyists who disclose their activities but leave the door open to corporate executives and advocates who don't meet the technical definition of lobbyist.

Most troubling, the new rules may have fueled so-called deregistrations among lobbyists who now prefer to fly under the radar. This obviously hurts transparency rather than advancing it. At the same time, the debates over health care, energy and financial services have boosted business on K Street.

Many reform advocates and watchdog organizations have given the administration high marks. The president's "groundbreaking government integrity reforms" show that he "is serious about changing the rules of the game in Washington," declared five leading pro-reform advocacy groups in April, in a statement marking the administration's first 100 days.

A Dec. 1 Congressional Research Service report, moreover, concludes that the administration's restrictions "have already changed the relationship between lobbyists and covered executive branch officials."

Still, at every step of the way, White House ethics, lobbying and transparency directives have received mixed reviews. The controversies began Jan. 21, on Obama's first day in office, when he signed a series of executive orders and memoranda aimed at tightening ethics and hiring rules, and improving government disclosure.

The new rules ban presidential appointees from accepting gifts from lobbyists and impose the first-ever "reverse revolving door" restrictions on administration hires. The rules ban anyone who lobbied a particular agency during the preceding two years from being appointed to that agency. Presidential appointees are also banned from coming back to lobby the agencies where they worked for the duration of the administration.

Reform advocates hailed the new restrictions as unprecedented. But a half-dozen or so waivers granted to high-profile lobbyists quickly dominated news coverage. An uproar over former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's unpaid taxes and lucrative consulting work forced the South Dakota Democrat to step aside as a candidate to head the Department of Health and Human Services. (Daschle was not a lobbyist, but had worked as a health industry adviser.)

Former lobbyist William Lynn fared better, weathering a storm over his appointment as deputy secretary of Defense. But some wondered why a former Raytheon lobbyist was being handed a top DoD post, and accused the Obama administration of selectively enforcing the new hiring rules.

Next came disputes over administration restrictions on talks between government officials and lobbyists seeking bailout and stimulus funding. In late January, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner announced curbs on oral communications from lobbyists seeking Emergency Economic Stabilization Act funds. In March, the White House unveiled similar limits on lobbyists seeking funds under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

The Recovery Act limits, in particular, riled activists on both the right and left. The American Civil Liberties Union and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, among others, joined the American League of Lobbyists in opposing the limits on recovery money talks.

The administration's initial plan was to ban executive branch officials from talking directly with lobbyists about specific Recovery Act grants and to require that written communications be publicly posted. Critics said the curbs were unconstitutional and unfairly singled out lobbyists while allowing all others -- including industry CEOs -- to keep talking directly with agency officials.

The White House defused the controversy in late May, following a review period and meetings with disgruntled lobbyists, by expanding the ban to cover everyone "exerting influence" on the process -- not just lobbyists -- and by narrowing the window of time when the ban would apply.

But tensions flared again when the administration announced in September that it would ask agencies to ban lobbyists from serving on government advisory boards. Angry letters ensued, not just from the ALL but from the chairs of the 16 Industry Trade Advisory Committees, known as ITACs. The move would depopulate the committees, the ITAC chairs warned, and rob trade negotiations of invaluable expertise.

Administration officials counter that the policy will actually strengthen the ITACs and other government advisory boards by enlarging them and diversifying their membership. Lobbyists remain dissatisfied, but the administration isn't budging.

It's just one of many ongoing disputes between lobbyists and the White House. And in 2010, there will be plenty more to come. Reform advocates are gearing up to push yet again for public financing, not just of presidential campaigns but congressional races as well. There's also talk of strengthening the Lobbying Disclosure Act to broaden the definition of "lobbyist" and require more up-to-the-minute reporting. All this ensures that in the new year, the president's uneasy tug-of-war with K Street will only intensify.

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A Voting Victory

Eliza Newlin Carney — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0500

At a time when the rest of Washington can't seem to stop bickering, voting rights advocates have quietly scored a bipartisan victory to help military and overseas voters participate in elections.

With little fanfare last month, President Obama signed into law the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act as part of a larger defense authorization bill. The law will remove obstacles that have blocked as many as one-quarter of uniformed and overseas voters from successfully casting their absentee ballots.

The law's enactment is an object lesson in how framing an issue along non-ideological lines can transcend partisan splits so lawmakers actually get something done. It also offers a template for how to fix the bigger, systemic problems that plague U.S. elections, most notably the nation's error-riddled, paper-based registration system.

"It's possible to take the same performance-based approach that succeeded so well with military and overseas voting and turn it to voter registration," said Doug Chapin, director of election initiatives for the Pew Center on the States, which toiled tirelessly to rally lawmakers, voting rights advocates and military associations behind the MOVE bill.

The new law requires state election officials to send ballots to military and overseas voters no later than 45 days before an election. A January report by the Pew center titled "No Time To Vote" showed that 16 states and the District of Columbia routinely send ballots to military voters so late that they literally don't have time to fill them out and send them back before Election Day. Nine more cut it close or allow only enough time to vote by fax or e-mail.

Importantly, state election administrators must also now send registration forms and blank ballots to military and overseas voters electronically, instead of on paper. Those voters must also have access to backup, or "failsafe," absentee ballots in case their conventional ballots get lost in the mail or don't arrive on time. All this points to how existing technologies can improve efficiency and drive down costs, not just for military voters but systemwide, election experts say.

"In this 21st-century digital computerized world that we live in, it doesn't make any sense to retain the paper-based voting system that we had in the 1900s," said Adam Skaggs, counsel for the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's School of Law. The MOVE Act proves that automation "is possible, makes sense from a policy standpoint, and is something that folks on both sides of the aisle will embrace," he said.

The law's advocates overcame the partisan splits that typically bog down election reform by stepping back from disputes over voter rights versus voter fraud and taking what Chapin calls "the 90-degree walk around the problem."

Following a Pew summit last fall on "Democracy at a Distance," more than 30 organizations representing military and overseas advocacy groups, elected officials, students and voting rights advocates formed the Alliance for Military and Overseas Voting Rights to push for the bill. In the end, Sens. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., Robert Bennett, R-Utah, John Cornyn, R-Texas, and a diverse mix of 56 other senators cosponsored the bill.

A similar bipartisan coalition is now pushing for action to modernize the outdated voter registration system, which emerged as a leading problem plaguing the 2008 election. Led by Marc Elias, the general counsel for the 2004 Kerry-Edwards campaign, and Trevor Potter, the former Federal Election Commission chairman who advised the 2000 and 2008 McCain presidential campaigns, the bipartisan Committee to Modernize Voter Registration is promoting an automatic, paperless voter registration system.

"We're studying what a modernized voter registration system might look like and, like everyone else, we've got an eye on Capitol Hill to see what might happen there," Chapin said. Schumer has said he is considering a Senate voter registration bill, and in the House, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., has introduced the Voter Registration Modernization Act to promote the use of Internet registration by state officials.

Eight states have already embraced online voter registration, and a ninth is poised to follow suit. Washington state launched online voter registration in January 2008, and Kansas did the same in July, according to a recent Brennan Center report.

Colorado, Indiana, Louisiana and Oregon approved online registration in the past six months and expect it to be up and running by 2010. California has authorized its use once a state online voter registration database is complete. Noted Chapin: "We don't have to federalize to modernize."

In the meantime, military and overseas voters can look forward to casting ballots more easily in 2010. It's a long overdue fix: Fully 60 years ago, President Harry S. Truman asked Congress to fix the absentee voting problems that were blocking military voters from participating in democracy, the MOVE Act's backers note.

Given the sacrifices already made by American troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, the long delay in securing the basic right to vote for military personnel is nothing short of shocking. Still, the new law's enactment offers a ray of hope that given the chance, Congress is still capable of setting aside ideology and fixing at least one system that's broken.

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Identity Crisis

Eliza Newlin Carney — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400

DHS chief Janet Napolitano treads a fine line between security and privacy in the push to get federal ID programs off the ground.

When Janet Napolitano was awaiting confirmation as secretary of the Homeland Security Department, one of the senators she stopped in to visit on Capitol Hill was Republican George Voinovich of Ohio.

He had some blunt questions for the Arizona governor about the 2005 REAL ID Act, the controversial law that requires all American driver's licenses to meet federal anti-fraud standards. A former governor himself, Voinovich saw the $4 billion REAL ID program as a massive, unfunded mandate.

To his delight, Napolitano didn't raise a finger to defend the program, enacted under President Bush. On the contrary, she wholeheartedly agreed with the senator's complaints, Voinovich recalls. In fact, as governor she signed legislation barring her state from fully cooperating with REAL ID. "She gets it," he says.

Now Napolitano, who was sworn in as the head of DHS in January, is front and center in the federal ID wars, where security concerns also run smack in the face of privacy and civil liberties protections, and a host of stakeholders have drawn lines in the sand.

One of her first moves has been to help draft a bill to replace REAL ID with a new law dubbed PASS ID (the Providing for Additional Security in States' Identification Act), which would give states more flexibility and federal funding. PASS ID "will enact the same strong security standards set out by REAL ID, [but] provides a workable way to get there," Napolitano told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in July. She noted that more than 26 states have opposed REAL ID, rendering the beleaguered program virtually dead on arrival.

The National Governors Association has applauded PASS ID, but the fight is far from over. The program is under fire from critics of all stripes. Privacy advocates say it differs little from REAL ID and still raises the specter of a national identity card. Others argue it weakens national security by loosening requirements for verifying "breeder" documents such as birth certificates.

The ongoing battle over REAL versus PASS ID is just one of several identity verification fights Napolitano has taken on as head of Homeland Security. Also brewing is a battle over E-Verify, another controversial program that allows employers to confirm their employees' eligibility to work by cross-checking their Social Security numbers against federal databases. Napolitano announced in July that DHS would finally implement a Bush-era order that requires all federal contractors to participate in the program, despite the objections of some business groups.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who's pushing to overhaul immigration laws, has called E-Verify "a half-hearted and flawed system." But his solution-a unique, biometric ID for all American workers-raises the stakes even further. A biometric ID has fans in some quarters, but alarms civil liberties defenders and could come with a huge price tag.

From cybersecurity to immigration and health care policy, a host of Obama administration priorities raise the same thorny question: How can the government verify that Americans are who they say they are without treading on their privacy or security?

"Addressing the issue of identity, and identity management, and identity authentication, is going to be critical to the success of these programs," says Kelli Emerick, executive director of the Secure ID Coalition, an advocacy group representing companies that make high-tech ID cards.

Emerick represents a growing industry whose players see substantial national security benefits-and healthy profits-in the much broader use of secure ID cards. Technologically sophisticated credentials, such as smart cards that contain biometric or other complex data on computer chips, they note, are increasingly used all over the world by foreign governments, commercial retailers and banks, to name a few.

But privacy and civil liberties activists insist that Americans are uniquely resistant to a national ID card. Centralizing identity information actually makes citizens less secure, they argue, by creating a dangerously valuable target for identity thieves. Skeptics point to security concerns dogging existing federal ID programs, including the Transportation Worker Identification Credential, or TWIC card, port workers use, and the patchwork of travel IDs required by the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative.

"Identity papers become a tool for arbitrary detention, for harassing people, they become a tool for tracking," says Christopher Calabrese, counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union's technology and liberty project. "Identification cards can be used for a lot of very bad things. And it's not at all clear that there is a commensurate security or societal benefit."

Easier Said Than Done

Caught in the middle is Napolitano, who championed public safety and homeland security issues as chairwoman of the National Governors Association, and who previously served as the Arizona attorney general. She has said point-blank that the department is not pursuing a national ID program and that PASS ID does not create one. But she also says PASS ID is needed to fulfill a key recommendation by the 9/11 commission: That the federal government set security standards for identifications such as driver's licenses. One of the commission's oft-repeated findings was that all but one of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers had obtained a driver's license or some other form of U.S. ID document, at least seven by fraud.

That call for secure licenses seemed simple enough when the commission issued it in 2004. But it has proved easier said than done. Governors rebelled against REAL ID, which required states to electronically verify birth certificates and other underlying documents against federal databases, some of which were not yet set up. The law also required states to electronically share motor vehicle data to ensure that no driver was licensed in more than one state. This would create a de facto national database loaded with sensitive personal information, privacy advocates warned.

According to Napolitano, PASS ID fixes these problems by still requiring state officials to validate underlying documents, but giving them the leeway to decide how to go about it. The program would not require states to share driver's license data and details an array of privacy protections. PASS ID also allows states to issue an alternative card: the enhanced driver's license, which includes a scannable radio frequency identity chip. Privacy proponents warn that such RFID cards are too easily hacked.

Napolitano "seems to be taking the national ID tar baby in a loving embrace," says Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute. He adds, "PASS ID is REAL ID with a new name, and a few of the sharpest corners taken off."

At the opposite extreme, critics such as Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., say PASS ID's weaker verification requirements will make it easy for forged birth certificates and other underlying documents to slip through. They also object that PASS ID would no longer require Americans boarding commercial airplanes to carry a federally compliant ID.

"The no-fly requirements are the teeth in REAL ID," Sensenbrenner says.

Napolitano says it's time to break the logjam that has blocked the 9/11 commission's long-overdue recommendations from being enacted. Though well-intentioned, the REAL ID Act "has caused a stalemate on an issue where we can't afford to wait any longer," she said during the Homeland Security panel's recent hearing.

More Bickering Ahead

The debate over E-Verify has proved no less contentious. As governor, Napolitano required all Arizona employers to use the E-Verify system, which compares information from an employee's I-9 (Employment Eligibility Verification) form with federal databases, including Social Security records. At DHS, Napolitano initially postponed action on a Bush executive order requiring all federal contractors to use E-Verify, in the face of pressure from business groups.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and allied groups, including the Associated Builders and Contractors Inc., have challenged the government's authority to require E-Verify for contractors in federal court. But Napolitano forged ahead, announcing on July 8 that the administration would fully implement the rule, which takes effect governmentwide on Sept. 8.

Napolitano's E-Verify plan has met with mixed reviews. Some on Capitol Hill say errors in federal databases threaten to bar millions of eligible employees from work. A 2006 report by the Social Security Administration's inspector general pointed to errors in 17.8 million records, affecting 12.7 million citizens. In addition, U.S. Chamber officials object that the administration's rule applies to subcontractors, as well as contractors, increasing risks to employers.

"There are always going to be flaws in this system," says Angelo Amador, executive director for immigration policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "So one of the things we've clearly asked for was to have protections for the workers, in case they get wrongly terminated, and protections for the employers, if they make the decisions in good faith."

Napolitano defends the program as "a smart, simple, effective tool" that's assisted more than 122,000 employers nationwide. The free Web-based program is available to employers on a voluntary basis as part of a federal pilot program. DHS has improved the program's accuracy, she says, by adding new database checks along with a photo screening tool.

Bold Visions, Big Challenges

Some say that the real problem with E-Verify is it doesn't go far enough. Schumer, for one, has proposed a biometric-based employer verification system as part of a broader immigration overhaul. He's not the only one calling for more wide-scale use of biometric identity cards.

Leaders in the secure ID industry maintain that federal ID requirements are scattered among disparate federal and state programs, with no coordination or consistent enforcement. Perhaps predictably, given the lucrative market it would create, they endorse a single, national card.

"We have what I call an identity crisis in the United States right now," says Neville Pattinson, vice president for government affairs at Gemalto Inc. and vice president of an educational nonprofit called the Smart Card Alliance. "And this will, I think, touch many programs-health care is one, cybersecurity, e-government programs, certainly [programs to combat] identity theft."

He sees the solution in "a federal credential that can help with your identity, both in the physical world and in the virtual world." Pattinson, who serves on a DHS advisory committee on data privacy and integrity, stressed that his views do not represent those of the panel.

It's a bold vision that goes beyond anything Napolitano is proposing. Yet administration officials acknowledge that federal ID policy raises big questions outside the scope of immediate controversies involving PASS ID and E-Verify.

Napolitano played a major role in the administration's 60-day cyberspace policy review, which outlines steps for securing the nation's digital and communications infrastructure. That review's near-term action plans include building "a cybersecurity-based management vision and strategy" that addresses privacy, civil liberties and security.

But Napolitano is learning firsthand how tough it is to translate ambitious ID policy visions into workable programs. Existing programs for travelers, port workers and even federal employees have consistently faced administrative, political and budgetary hurdles.

Take the TWIC card being issued to all U.S. port workers. The Transportation Security Administration bills the TWIC card as the most advanced, widely used, interoperable biometric card in the world.

But federal officials have barely started rolling out the biometric readers needed to verify the credentials of 1.3 million port workers enrolled in the TWIC program. Without the readers, the card is arguably no more secure than a commercial driver's license. But TSA officials say fraudulent cards are easily identifiable to the trained eye.

Similar problems have plagued efforts to outfit millions of federal workers and contractors with biometric, machine-readable ID cards required by a Bush administration directive in 2004. Five years later, some agencies are in the advanced stages of issuing ID cards to workers, while others are just beginning. And most agencies have barely begun to install biometric readers for the cards-something a Government Accountability Office report identified as a security weakness in 2008.

Security gaps also are undermining the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, critics say. In June, the program began requiring travelers entering the U.S. by land or sea to show an ID. The IDs already were required for air travelers. Approved IDs include the enhanced driver's license and the passport card, a smaller, cheaper alternative to the U.S. passport. Both use a scannable RFID chip.

Privacy experts and secure ID manufacturers deplore the RFID cards as unacceptably vulnerable to hackers, since they can be scanned at a distance of up to 30 feet by anyone with the right technology. Yet governors and Congress members from border states applaud the cards' ability to facilitate trade and allow travelers to cross borders quickly and conveniently-precisely because they can be scanned.

It's just one more example of the Catch-22 Napolitano faces as she labors to carve out a coherent federal ID policy. She's taken aggressive steps to strengthen and standardize travel document security, yet some stakeholders will invariably remain unsatisfied.

The lack of consensus on national ID standards actually could be a good sign, according to David Quam, federal relations director for the National Governors Association. With PASS ID, he said at the July Senate meeting, "to a degree, no one is completely satisfied. And in Washington, that means we probably have found the right solution."

Eliza Newlin Carney is a contributing editor for National Journal.

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Talking Points

Eliza Newlin Carney — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400

During the Clinton administration's health care battles 15 years ago, party leaders largely left the ad and lobbying offensive to insurance and business players. This time around, the political parties are weighing in -- not just with ads, but with aggressive grassroots organizing campaigns that include door-knocking, robo-calls, mass e-mails and tele-town halls.

The shift reflects not just the high political stakes of the health care debate, but party officials' growing eagerness to weigh in on policy issues as well as elections. The Republican National Committee has even filed suit to press for the right to spend unregulated money on issue campaigns as well as on non-federal races. That case, RNC v. FEC, will be argued in federal court later this month and will likely land in the lap of the Supreme Court.

In the meantime, both political parties have thrown themselves into the health care fray. The Democratic National Committee paid for two rounds of TV ads in July and recently announced a flight of radio ads that will air in August.

The DNC is also reaching out to activists with door-knocking, canvassing, phone banks, letter-writing and e-mails. It's a crucial test of Organizing for America, the grassroots group now housed at the DNC that inherited some 13 million e-mail addresses from President Obama's campaign.

In the wake of the presidential election, some industry lobbyists regarded that list with trepidation. But so far, Organizing for America has been has been slow to build a national infrastructure and has been overshadowed by raucous conservative activists. Though Democrats dismiss recent town hall theatrics as orchestrated, polls suggest voters are increasingly ambivalent about a proposed health care overhaul.

Also attempting to help Obama regain the offensive is the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which has mounted a month-long campaign aimed at more than two dozen Republican House members. It's part of what the DCCC calls its "Health Care ER" campaign, which includes radio ads in eight GOP districts, automated and live calls to 25 Republican House members, and 3 million e-mail messages.

"Democrats are going on offense," declared one party strategist, who added: "This is unprecedented for Democrats."

On the GOP side, the RNC has pledged to invest about $1 million in "aggressive activity that takes place over recess," said spokeswoman Gail Gitcho. The RNC launched TV ads in Nevada, North Dakota and Arkansas on July 20, and a week later unveiled a radio ad campaign targeting 60 congressional Democrats in 33 states.

The National Republican Congressional Committee also will hit the airwaves soon as part of its own multi-pronged health care campaign. "It will probably be a combination of TV, radio, phone calls and Web ads," said NRCC spokesman Paul Lindsay, who declined to elaborate.

"It's a sign of the political polarization that we face," said Darrell West, vice president and director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution. "Parties have jumped into issue advocacy as a way to distinguish themselves from the opposition."

Also driving the trend is the massive sums party committees continue to raise, notwithstanding the ban on soft, unregulated money ushered in with the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act in 2002. Despite predictions that the soft money ban would decimate the parties, they raised more collectively in the 2007-2008 cycle -- $1.6 billion, according to the Federal Election Commission -- than they did with the help of soft money in the 2001-2002 election.

The only difference is that, as a whole, Democrats are now raising more than Republicans. (In the first half of this year, the Democratic party committees pulled in $123.3 million, compared with $115.5 million collected by the GOP committees, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.)

That helps explain why the Republican Party, in its RNC v. FEC lawsuit, is challenging the soft money ban in federal court. In part, the RNC argues that it should be permitted to raise soft money for a "grassroots lobbying account," because its activities promoting policy issues are unrelated to federal elections.

The RNC challenge threatens to knock out one of the central pillars of the landmark 2002 law, campaign finance reform advocates warn. A three-judge federal panel will hear oral arguments in the case on August 27.

Its next likely stop will be the Supreme Court, which under Chief Justice John Roberts appears increasingly willing to reconsider -- and possibly throw out -- existing campaign finance rules. Should the RNC prevail, it would open the floodgates to even more political party issue ads. Either way, predicts West, the trend is likely to continue beyond the health care debate.

"I think what we're seeing on health care is the battle plan for the future," he said. "You could see the same thing on climate change, immigration reform and the federal budget deficit. Any issue that is of great interest to the public is ripe for an issue campaign."

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Down for the Count

Eliza Newlin Carney — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Shifting demographics coupled with a decade of budget and management woes have put the 2010 census on shaky ground.

It's easy to see why the Census Bureau's latest promotional video is getting rave reviews on Capitol Hill.

The three-minute presentation, A New Portrait of America, is "beautifully photographed, beautifully choreographed," gushed Sen. Thomas Carper, D-Del., at a recent Senate hearing. With soaring music and stirring images of Americans of all ethnic backgrounds at work in schools, hospitals and fields, the video declares that the 2010 census will determine the course of more than $300 billion in federal spending, and will be "the best-planned and most well-researched census ever."

But there's a disconnect between the real-life census and the video version. Not all Americans will want to be counted, Carper said at the May 15 nomination hearing for incoming Census Bureau Director Robert M. Groves. And the Census Bureau itself "has faced many operational and management challenges that have jeopardized its success," Carper warned.

The Census Bureau could have a harder time counting the nation's population in 2010 than at any point in its 107-year history. Mandated by the Constitution and conducted every 10 years since 1790, the national head count is at best a daunting operation. But this time around, big external and internal challenges put the census at high risk of failure, according to the Government Accountability Office.

The economic crisis, widespread unemployment and housing fore- closures, Hurricane Katrina, and an influx of immigrants, many illegal, all will make millions of Americans harder to count. Unconventional housing arrangements, from trailers to tent cities to families doubled up, are on the rise. Demographic and generational shifts, from changing household patterns to the growing use of cell phones and e-mail, also make Americans harder to find.

For the Census Bureau, the timing couldn't be worse. Budget shortfalls, leadership shake-ups, staff turnover, and management problems have made for a rocky decade. A costly technology contract that was supposed to modernize outmoded census-taking methods foundered. This cut short the bureau's dress rehearsal, meaning key elements of next year's census are untested. Cost estimates have soared to $14 billion or $15 billion-a record that translates into roughly a $100 per household to be counted.

Partisan census squabbles, in the meantime, are alive and well. Since the census will apportion seats in the House and in state legislatures and help draw district lines, political scrutiny is relentless. The Obama administration's awkward handling of census questions earlier this year fueled lingering disputes over statistical sampling. The controversial method of adjusting for undercounts involves comparing results from the main count and a large sample survey of the population.

Census Bureau officials have assured repeatedly that sampling, which Republicans suspect would boost the numbers for urban populations thought to favor Democrats, will not be used in 2010 or in the foreseeable future. Yet GOP lawmakers remain hyper-vigilant to any sign of Democratic meddling.

Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., Obama's initial nominee to head the Commerce Department, Census' parent agency, withdrew after a presidential press aide suggested that the White House would help directly oversee the census. The Obama administration quickly back- pedaled, but the flap delayed the installation of both Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Groves, who now steps in too late to make any substantive changes for the 2010 census. In early June, Senate Republicans held up Groves' confirmation.

Not all signs point to a census disaster. An extra $1 billion for the count in the economic stimulus package will fund additional public outreach and partnerships with state and local community groups. By all accounts, these partnerships vastly boosted responses from hard-to-count populations in 2000. Also, the economic pinch is making it easier for the bureau to hire its army of temporary workers.

Not all recent innovations have fallen flat. Success stories include a better mapping program, more multilingual outreach, and the elimination of the long form questionnaire, which asked a sample of households in detail about matters such as occupation and education. The long form now has been replaced by an ongoing American Community Survey, which is more up to date, and residents next year will receive one short census questionnaire only.

Still, problems remain. A troubling May report by the Commerce Department's inspector general warns that temporary workers hired this year to canvass addresses for three months were doing a questionable job. An incomplete address list means an inaccurate census, critics say. Drafts of ads promoting the census, produced under a multimillion-dollar communications contract, were panned in April by an advisory board. Top talent has left, and a wave of retirements is on the horizon.

One of the biggest hurdles is the Census Bureau has been slow to modernize, despite big investments. Contract woes in 2008 have forced the bureau to abandon plans to use a costly new handheld computer device to follow up with households that fail to mail their census questionnaires back. The handhelds were used this year for address canvassing only.

The upshot is the bureau is using essentially the same methods-forms mailed out and back, pencil-and-paper follow up-as it has since 1970.

"They have to update their communications systems, their computers, their databases," said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., who has authored legislation that would make the Census Bureau a stand-alone agency separate from the Commerce Department. "And they have to adjust to changes in our country-cell phones, transients, diverse populations. They have to adjust to what the 21st century really is like."

'There Is No Do-Over'

It's a tall order for an agency that operates in relative obscurity and in the Commerce Department's shadow most of the time, to be thrust onto the political hot seat once a decade. Considered the nation's largest peacetime mobilization, the census involves hiring some 860,000 temporary workers, opening 500 local census offices nationwide, and counting a population that in 2010 is expected to top 310 million, in 140 million households.

Adding to the challenge are fixed statutory deadlines-Census Day on April 1, delivery of the official population count on Dec. 31-that require specific steps to build in sequence.

During the past decade that sequence was disrupted. Budget stalemates interrupted the year-by-year funding ramp-up that normally precedes the census. Tensions between the Commerce Department and the Census Bureau helped fuel the departures in 2006 of well-respected bureau director Charles Louis Kincannon and his deputy, Hermann Habermann. Kincannon's replacement, Steve H. Murdock, won high marks, but he left after barely a year. Acting Director Thomas L. Mesenbourg has been in charge since then.

Some blame these and other senior-level departures for the problems that plagued the bureau's $600 million contract with Harris Corp. of Melbourne, Fla., to develop handheld computers and provide support services. When that contract ran aground amid technical and scheduling problems, some blamed lack of oversight by top managers.

The bureau's decision to revert to pencil and paper for the nonresponse follow-up portion of the census pushed up costs by $2 billion to $3 billion. It also curtailed the bureau's scheduled dress rehearsal, ringing alarm bells at GAO. The bureau's information technology systems have not been tested end to end, GAO has warned. Neither has its plans to send out a second mailing to certain households, or to fingerprint hundreds of thousands of temporary census workers, both for the first time.

"It's all high risk," says Robert Goldenkoff, director of GAO's strategic issues team. "There are these unresolved issues, unanswered questions, less than a year away." With the operation's fixed deadlines, Goldenkoff adds, "There is no do-over, there is no time out, there is no reset button. And so things are coming down to the wire, and we're concerned by what we're seeing."

The bureau has taken steps to recover and has been responsive to criticism, according to observers. Census has invited state officials to help fill in the blanks with missing addresses, which tend to be hardest to identify in urban areas, and has added training to help workers find unconventional housing units, such as basement and garage apartments and doubled-up housing units.

"Adjustments were made in technology, adjustments were made in management, money is pouring into the bureau," says Andrew Reamer, a fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. "They are well aware of the risks. No one is hiding that. And they are doing their best to adjust to those risks."

For all the uproar over the handhelds, which employ Global Positioning System technology, early reviews are not bad. While chatter on blog postings suggests there are still kinks-including bugs with a fingerprint scanner- temporary workers interviewed for this story did not report difficulties. One reason for this is that when problems do arise, workers using handhelds have access to a help desk crew-something GAO had recommended.

"Our first operation with the handhelds is to address canvassing, and we are well ahead of schedule," says Arnold A. Jackson, the bureau's associate director for decennial census. "We are almost done with the operation. The handhelds performed superbly."

Racing the Clock

The Commerce IG's report warns that the lightning pace of address canvassing might have proved problematic. Field observations and statements from temporary workers show that "listers are not consistently following certain key procedures," the report says, including knocking on doors and actually walking down rural roads to pinpoint addresses on GPS maps.

"We have received reports from Census field staff that they are under intense pressure to complete their assignments within a limited time frame and to minimize or avoid overtime," the report adds. Address canvassers have voiced similar complaints, both in blog postings and in recent interviews.

"There was great emphasis on getting the address canvassing done rapidly, and the emphasis on getting it done rapidly interfered a bit with getting it done correctly," says canvasser Reynolds Farley, a retired demographer from the University of Michigan who's relied on census data for his research and writings.

Laura Mansnerus, a former New York Times reporter who worked as a temporary crew leader during address canvassing in Philadelphia, agrees: "Everything was focused on speed at the cost of accuracy." Mansnerus complained that her crew of 19 was trained for one week to canvass a region that they were hurried through in two weeks.

The May report "almost jumped off the page at us," Carper told Groves at his nomination hearing. "I urge you to bear down on that right away." Census Bureau officials have sent an e-mail and scheduled a teleconference with regional directors, according to the IG.

Another red flag is the bureau's $212 million communications contract, which includes a much-touted paid advertising campaign. The bureau's Joint Advertising Advisory Review Panel gave early versions of the ads, which were produced by communications contractor DraftFCB, a vote of no confidence in April.

"A smart advertising campaign would try to use the economic crisis as a leveraging opportunity," but the DraftFCB ads failed to do that, says Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials and a member of the JAARP. (The paid DraftFCB ad campaign is unrelated to the in-house promotional video that so impressed Carper.)

Vargas concedes that DraftFCB "took our criticisms to heart," but he has yet to see revisions. Census officials have defended the ads, which are still in development.

Diminishing Returns

Groves has no illusions about the problems that await him. In a pre-hearing questionnaire he acknowledged the Census Bureau "is perhaps at one of its lowest ebbs in scientific talent," and 45 percent of its staff is eligible to retire within the year. He has pledged to brainstorm new technologies, recruit a more diverse staff, improve contract oversight and resign if politically pressured.

A noted specialist in survey response methods, Groves has won plaudits from colleagues, policy experts, activists and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. He most recently directed the University of Michigan Survey Research Center, and previously served as Census' associate director from 1990 to 1992.

"He knows the methodology, he knows the decennial census, he knows the issues, he knows the people both internally and externally," says Edward Spar, executive director of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics. "He's a wonderful choice."

Even Republicans on Capitol Hill, initially wary because Groves endorsed adjusting the count during his census tenure in the 1990s, have welcomed his reassurances. He has stated point-blank that statistical sampling is not on the table for 2010 or beyond.

The partisan tugs-of-war will continue, of course. Civil rights advocates remain concerned that African-American, Latino and low-income Americans will be undercounted. GOP anxiety over sampling remains high, despite arguments against it. The Supreme Court ruled sampling unconstitutional for apportionment in 2000, and Census has repeatedly rejected its use for enumeration.

Some argue sampling is a red herring that distracts from the real issue: How the Census Bureau will replenish its staff, modernize its operations and keep up with quickly changing demographics-all while containing mushrooming costs. The bureau invests more money and effort each decade to get essentially the same results, yet has been slow to embrace change, according to GAO's Goldenkoff.

The challenges in 2010 reflect society's increasing complexity, he says, but also "reluctance on the part of the bureau to fundamentally reexamine how it takes the census. The bureau has long passed the point of diminishing returns."

By 2020, demographers and statistical professionals note, the handheld computers Census spent so much to develop could be obsolete. The U.S. Postal Service as we know it might no longer exist. Already many Americans have cell phone numbers and e-mail addresses that follow them wherever they go. Yet the census "is still essentially a mail out-mail back survey," notes Spar of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics.

Groves should direct the 2020 staff to rethink that 50-year-old paradigm, say top demographers, and consider using the Internet to reduce costs. The bureau twice studied Internet use earlier in this decade, but concluded that it failed to boost response rates and raised privacy concerns.

The bureau also should consider using data such as birth, death, welfare and driver's license records to improve its address lists and target households, the National Academy of Sciences has recommended. Some even argue for a national identification system-something that's prevalent in other democracies but remains controversial in the United States.

"Until you get an administrative record system that's tied to a national ID system, you don't know who's being left out based on a certain set of characteristics," says Kenneth Prewitt, a professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. Prewitt directed Census from 1998 to 2001 and now is a consultant to the bureau.

For Groves and his colleagues the immediate challenge is getting next year's census back on track. At his nomination hearing, he told senators: "Problems will arise in the 2010 census. I guarantee this. It's too large an endeavor to go completely smoothly." For all the controversy swirling around the 2010 Census, that's one statement few would contest.

Eliza Newlin Carney is a contributing editor for National Journal.

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Watchdogs Won't Be Chained

Eliza Newlin Carney — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0400

"To spend that much money that quickly is inviting fraud and abuse," warned Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight. Her group is one of 30 that have banded together to form the Coalition for an Accountable Recovery. It's a diverse alliance of anti-tax activists, community organizers and government transparency watchdogs all tracking the $787 billion stimulus package.

The coalition of strange bedfellows brings together progressives, libertarians and conservatives, noted Gary D. Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, which co-chairs CAR with Good Jobs First, a policy center promoting accountability in economic development. Other coalition members include the Center for Cities and Schools, Public Citizen and Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Concerns over sloppy oversight of the first $300 billion in the Troubled Asset Relief Program -- Treasury paid too much for shares in faltering banks and the banks have failed to use the money to prevent foreclosures, according to the Congressional Oversight Panel supervising the bailout -- helped spur OMB Watch and its allies to form the coalition. OMB Watch has also helped spearhead another, smaller coalition dubbed Bailout Watch, which is bird-dogging the $700 billion financial stabilization plan.

CAR and Bailout Watch are part of a growing fiscal oversight craze both on and off Capitol Hill. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has called on committee chairs to develop plans for fiscal oversight hearings. House GOP Whip Eric Cantor, R-Va., has announced a "stimulus-watch program" that invites citizens and watchdog groups to report how contractors and agencies dole out the $787 billion. There's even a new "Stimulus Watch" wiki set up by a couple of senior research fellows at George Mason University that invites citizens to find, discuss and rate state and local projects receiving federal stimulus dollars.

All this comes on top of the Obama administration's own stepped-up oversight, which includes a Web site to disclose spending and performance data as well as monitoring by a chief performance officer and an oversight board. A Feb. 18 OMB memorandum for federal agency and department heads also requires that agencies summarize and publicly post any contract over $500,000, a step government watchdogs hailed.

But conspicuously missing is any requirement that agencies report information at the so-called subcontract level -- that is, which vendors are receiving the stimulus money from state and local governments. That's crucial, say CAR members, because state contracts have been magnets for fraud and abuse in recent years -- witness the controversies involving erstwhile Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who withdrew from consideration as Commerce secretary due to a pay-to-play inquiry.

"That's where the rubber hits the road, and that's where I see a gap right now," said Bass, of OMB Watch. A municipality, for example, may distribute federal bridge-building money to five separate vendors -- whose names need never be reported. Those names are crucial to track not only where the money went and for what purposes, but how many jobs were created and at what wage, Bass said.

"Taxpayers have a right to see where their money's going and what kind of bang they got for their buck," concurred Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First. LeRoy noted that new federal reporting requirements may open the way for states to improve their own often-spotty disclosure practices. While some states have improved transparency and disclosure in recent years, he said, state and municipal spending remains notoriously difficult to track.

"Right now we've got this kind of 'Tower of Babel' situation out there, with very incomplete, very fragmentary, very nonuniform reporting," said LeRoy. But he hopes the disclosure requirements attached to the stimulus package could help improve state reporting habits: "We want millions of eyeballs on that money."

That may not prove difficult, given growing concerns over the vast amounts of federal cash being thrown at the failing economy, coupled with sunset provisions that require it to be spent in record time. Indeed, organizers of CAR and Bailout Watch say they expect their coalitions to outlast the fiscal crisis.

As part of a longer-range reform, they're calling for an agency-by-agency overhaul of how the federal government discloses all budgetary and other data. Gone are the days when disclosure meant handing something over on a piece of paper, transparency advocates say. Today, disclosure has to mean making information available online in real time, in a sortable, searchable, downloadable format.

Some government agencies are sure to resist, particularly financial institutions like the Federal Reserve Bank, which has long cultivated a culture of secrecy. Bloomberg News filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Federal Reserve last year in a bid to find out more about loans to banks that it says totaled $1.5 trillion. As federal spending accelerates, however, the pressure for better budget disclosure will only increase. After all, few would dispute that lack of transparency helped create the economic mess to begin with.

Said Bass: "I think this coalition is going to be around for quite some time -- well beyond the recovery act -- to talk about building a national system that ties state and federal funding data together, so the public has a method for true accountability."

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Minnesota Is No Florida

Eliza Newlin Carney — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500

There have been ballots lost, ballots allegedly counted twice, absentee ballots rejected improperly and then tossed back into the recount. A state canvassing board appears poised to name Franken the winner by a narrow margin, but that won't end the story. Coleman has promised to go to court, and under Minnesota law the state can't certify a winner if the election is still legally contested.

That means the Senate will open for business this week with not one but two disputed seats. The other, of course, is the one vacated by President-elect Barack Obama, and that indicted Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich has appointed former state Attorney General Roland Burris to fill. Democratic leaders have pledged not to seat anyone tapped by the radioactive Blagojevich, who faces federal corruption charges, but their legal options remain unclear.

While the Burris controversy has dominated news coverage, the dispute over Minnesota's still-vacant Senate seat could turn out to be more disruptive. Coleman and his GOP allies have complained bitterly over alleged irregularities, comparing the Minnesota recount to the controversial 2004 gubernatorial recount in Washington state that installed Democrat Christine Gregoire based on a margin of 129 votes.

Should Senate Democrats intervene and install Franken provisionally, as some have suggested, it could get the session off to an acrimonious start. A Coleman challenge could even work its way to the Supreme Court, reviving disputes over whether the high court's landmark Bush v. Gore ruling, which installed President Bush in 2000, should set legal precedent.

For all that, the Minnesota recount is hardly a voting rights fiasco. While Republicans are fomenting talk of a stolen election, the process in Minnesota thus far has been transparent, orderly and far less chaotic than it might have been. Indeed, Minnesota statutes that clearly spell out recount rules every step of the way have spared the state many a headache.

Minnesota law, for example, automatically triggers a recount when the margin between two candidates is less than one-half of 1 percent. That meant that when Coleman led Franken by 215 votes out of 2.9 million on Election Day, there was no question how the state should proceed. Election officials wondering how to interpret ambiguous ballots also could rely on Minnesota statute, which spells out guidelines for determining voters' intent, complete with more than a dozen hypothetical examples such as how to handle an "X" that's out of place.

Another godsend for Minnesota has been its paper ballot requirement, which made the hand recount possible to begin with, said Secretary of State Mark Ritchie (D). "You cannot recount computerized touch-screen voting," he noted.

The state constitution, moreover, provides for the automatic establishment of a five-member canvassing board when an election's outcome is questioned. Ritchie sits on the politically mixed board and appointed the four other members. The canvassing board represents the Democratic-Farm-Labor party -- Minnesota's arm of the national Democratic Party -- as well as the GOP and the Independence Party; that hasn't ended charges of partisanship, but it makes them less plausible.

Ritchie acknowledges that the hand recount, the largest in the state's history, has pointed up ways Minnesota can improve its election process. The most troubling glitches have been the disappearance of 133 ballots in the city of Minneapolis; the Coleman camp's allegations that 100 or more ballots were double-counted; and disputes over absentee ballots. As many as 1,600 absentee ballots were improperly rejected, and were ultimately reopened.

"I've been most surprised by the wrongly rejected absentee ballots," said Kathryn Pearson, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota. Nationally, experts say, absentee ballots in the 2008 election were rejected at a much higher rate than ballots cast via in-person early voting. Absentee voting doubled in Minnesota between 2006 and 2008, said Ritchie, who added: "Our internal systems were not able to handle that increase in some instances."

Still, Pearson and others give Minnesota high marks for its deliberate, transparent recount process. The state even released streaming video of the canvassing board at work, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune printed copies of actual questioned ballots so that readers could draw their own conclusions.

"Minnesota is known for clean elections and competent election management," said Pearson. "And despite these ups and downs, and despite the drama of this recount, I actually think that most Minnesotans would argue that the process has been transparent, well managed by the secretary of state's office, and well explained."

Bill Flanigan, a political science professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota, gave some of the credit to Minnesota's exhaustive recount rules. "I really doubt if most states have a recount law as explicit as ours," he said. "And I think the procedures have worked well. So I think other states might consider copying the law."

Time will tell whether Minnesota's reputation for election integrity survives this grueling and politically charged recount. Any election this close inevitably exposes the voting system's weakest points. Minnesota, at least, appears to be making the best of a bad situation.

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War on pork-barrel spending moves to Obama era

Eliza Newlin Carney — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Popular Vote

Eliza Newlin Carney — Fri, 15 Oct 2004 00:00:00 -0400

The first Election Assistance Commissionchief turns on political charm to clear his biggest hurdle-lack of funding.

When DeForest Soaries Jr. stepped in to chair the first-ever federal agency devoted to fixing the nation's problem-plagued election system, he felt as though he'd "been asked to make bricks without straw." It's easy to see why. The Election Assistance Commission, created by the 2002 Help America Vote Act, was installed 10 months behind schedule with a paltry budget of $1.2 million for this fiscal year.

He and his fellow commissioners were floored when they learned how little money they'd have. After all, the law had authorized as much as $10 million for the commission, which serves as a clearinghouse for election information and guidelines. The commission's most important jobs are setting voting machine standards and doling out federal grants to the states. As the first chairman, Soaries, 53, faced some immediate, practical hurdles. The first was that fully half the agency's starting budget was eaten up by the salaries of the four commissioners-two Republicans and two Democrats. (Soaries is a Republican.)

That left the commission with an awkward choice between renting office space and hiring staff. Not to mention the commission is required to publish in the Federal Register the election administration plans that states submit for federal grants. "We could have taken all the money that we had left after we paid our salaries, published the states' plans, and had no money left for anything," Soaries recalls.

He convinced the General Services Administration to waive the rent and to foot the bill for publishing the states' plans in the Federal Register. He also arranged to borrow temporary staff from other agencies. Even now, the commission is functioning with only a handful of stalwarts; it just hired a general counsel in late August and still is hunting for a communications director. By all accounts, it's been a bumpy start. "I wouldn't have been a bit surprised to see some of them in jeans and painting the walls once they got the office space," says Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services, a political consulting firm that's helping the commission gather voting information.

Soaries, who served as New Jersey's secretary of state from 1999 to 2002, has smoothed over the rough edges with charm, good humor and a gift for oratory. As senior pastor of a 7,000-member Baptist church in New Jersey, he managed a budget larger than the commission's, and championed a host of low-income housing, foster-care and adoption initiatives. "I think the chairman is just absolutely the right person at the right time to serve as chairman this first year," says Commissioner Gracia Hillman, a Democrat, who was president and chief executive officer of the WorldSpace Foundation, now First Voice International, a Washington- based nonprofit that uses satellite technology to deliver multimedia education programs to Africa and Asia.

Ironically, Soaries and his colleagues find themselves in the same tight spot as the cash-strapped state and county officials who are struggling to manage the nation's dilapidated, decentralized election system. The contested 2000 presidential election, with its notorious hanging chads in Florida, brought to light myriad problems with the nation's neglected voting system. "Very few people, I think, before Florida, really understood how patchwork the system is," says Soaries. "And, in fact, there is no system. There is no national system for voting. Even in states, you have tremendous diversity."

The law that created the commission was supposed to fix all that with $3.9 billion over three years to help states replace outmoded voting machines, clean up error-ridden voter registration databases, train and recruit poll workers, and ease ballot access. But partisan disputes on Capitol Hill postponed enactment until a full two years after the chaotic 2000 election. And though it set a February 2003 deadline for the commission's installation, officials at the White House and in Congress failed to do so until December 2003-10 months behind schedule and with precious little time to make an impact before this year's Nov. 2 elections. Soaries has responded with initiatives that he argues could make a big difference on Election Day and are basically cost-free. His first move was to woo the news media and to elevate the commission's profile by using it as a bully pulpit.

In one instance, this backfired. Soaries stirred up a ruckus over terrorism and voting. He wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and to congressional leaders in July, raising questions about the nation's voting plans in the event of a terrorist attack. Democrats accused him of a partisan bid to scare voters, and editorial writers were quick to pile on. Soaries hurriedly issued a statement saying, "There are no circumstances that could justify the postponement or cancellation of a presidential election in the United States." But he now charges: "We were sandbagged." Those who know Soaries say that far from being partisan, he has set a collegial and nonpolitical tone.

In addition, Soaries has championed a National Poll Worker Initiative to help states cope with a staffing shortage that has reached crisis proportions. He has called on corporate CEOs to release employees to work the polls on Election Day, much as they do for jury duty. He also has recruited poll workers on campuses and among public employees. "The media is primarily interested in the voting device," he noted at a Sept. 13 commission meeting. "But somebody's got to get up at four o'clock in the morning on Election Day and get to the polling place if the device is going to be used."

Soaries has put together a "Best Practices Tool Kit" for state and local officials that offers tips and common-sense recommendations on running elections. "It begins to create a culture of uniformity-uniformity not so much in practice, but in expectations," he says.

In response to growing concerns about the security of touch-screen voting machines, Soaries convinced voting machine vendors to register their software at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Should accusations of hacking or tampering arise, a machine's software can be checked against a "clean" copy of its technological footprint at NIST. "This is a good example of something that we've done that didn't really cost money, but increased security and reliability, nationally," Soaries says.

He has traveled around the country meeting with state and local election officials and giving speeches that tend to leave a lasting impression. "He certainly uses his experience in the pulpit to get people's attention, and to uplift people," says Denise Lamb, president of the National Association of State Election Directors.

Of course, high-profile public statements and flashy education programs can only go so far. Soaries acknowledges that one of the panel's most important mandates-to establish national standards for voting machines-will take time, research and money. In partnership with NIST, the commission has begun the process. But though it looks like lawmakers might cough up as much as $10 million for the EAC's operating budget in fiscal 2005, the outlook is not good for the additional $10 million in research money Soaries and other officials requested.

Commissioners already are feeling strapped, given that a continuing appropriations resolution approved on Capitol Hill included only $1 million to carry the EAC from Oct. 1 through Nov. 20. Commissioners had said they would need far more to operate effectively during that period. "You can fudge a public hearing," says Soaries. "You can use the bully pulpit to inspire people to do things. You can use the news media to help spread the word. But to do research costs money, flat out."

Given his limited resources, Soaries has made a surprising impact in just a few months. But to help states run elections more smoothly, he'll need better materials. Bricks without straw don't hold up in the long run.

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Calm In The Storm

Eliza Newlin Carney — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 00:00:00 -0400

David Mader brought a low-key but high-intensity style to the massive effort to overhaul the IRS.

or much of the past decade, the nation's most vilified government agency, the Internal Revenue Service, has been enmeshed in turmoil. So David Mader, who recently retired as one of the agency's top executives, might be expected to say that he left one tough job behind.

On the contrary, Mader looks back on the agency's recent years as by far the most exciting and gratifying phase of his 33-year government career. Mader can even pinpoint his single most thrilling day in government service: Oct. 1, 2000. That was when the IRS officially discarded its old, geographically based management structure and "stood up" a brand new system built around four divisions serving distinct taxpayer groups.

"It was exhilarating," recalls Mader, 55. "To be part of that process and to be part of that team was just an incredible experience. I couldn't think of perhaps a better way to end my federal service than to be part of that effort."

Mader's upbeat assessment of what was, by all accounts, a grueling and exhausting period for IRS officials is typical of his steady, indefatigable work style, say colleagues. The last few years of Mader's three decades at the IRS-which included excoriating public hearings, legislation mandating a top-to-bottom reorganization and massive personnel changes-were some of the most tumultuous at any government agency.

Through it all, Mader remained calm and unflappable, toiling long hours to turn the sometimes-vague directives of Congress and the administration into practical policies. As the agency's assistant deputy commissioner, he was one of a small group of top executives working closely with then-Commissioner Charles O. Rossotti to completely redefine both the agency's priorities and its day-to-day operations.

Now a management consultant advising government agencies, Mader stresses that he was part of a team and claims no solo credit for any single change at the IRS. Certainly many top executives helped steer the agency through the first phase of its massive reorganization, including Deputy Commissioner Bob Wenzel, who also is retiring this year.

There's no question, though, that Mader played a crucial, early role in what is turning out to be one of the most far-reaching agency overhauls in federal government history. As an IRS veteran who'd held a wide range of jobs within the agency, Mader was prized as an internal expert with a long institutional memory. His cool head also made him a key negotiator with IRS stakeholders, particularly labor leaders.

"Dave knew the ropes," says Rossotti, now a senior adviser with the Carlyle Group, a prominent Washington-based equity firm. "He knew what the obstacles were because he had been involved in a lot of previous [reorganization] efforts. So he was a key resource in making a lot of those changes happen."

A GROWING PORTFOLIO

A native of Jersey City, N.J., Mader joined the IRS in 1972 as a management analyst in New York, having started his government career in 1970 with an 18-month stint at the General Services Administration. He earned his bachelor's degree in political science from Mount St. Mary's College in Emmitsburg, Md., and also took graduate courses at Maxwell School of Public Administration at Syracuse University.

Mader worked his way up the ranks, joining the IRS Executive Development Program in 1986. He went on to serve as assistant director in the agency's Detroit Computing Center, and later as assistant director of its New Jersey District. Invited to take a job at IRS headquarters 13 years ago, Mader jumped at the chance. "I'm one of the few people that actually wanted to come to Washington," he says. Mader's jobs before becoming assistant deputy commissioner included assistant commissioner for human resources and chief of management and finance.

He eventually assumed responsibility for the day-to-day operation of much of the agency's personnel system and physical infrastructure. He was in charge of recruitment, training, workforce development, labor/employee relations, payroll processing, office equipment, facilities and security, among other areas. When Rossotti became commissioner in 1997, he made Mader a member of his inner circle. Rossotti valued Mader as a veteran of earlier attempts at reorganization, including the tax systems modernization effort rolled out in 1990. That program ran aground amid budget and morale problems.

Mader had weathered his share of political turbulence at the IRS. Under pressure to improve its collection efforts, the IRS in 1994 declared tax compliance a priority. But horror stories of tax collection abuses created a backlash. In 1996, Congress created the National Commission on Restructuring the IRS to consider major reforms. The following year, the Senate Finance Committee began public hearings attacking the IRS. The politically charged messages and public pressure left many executives reeling.

"You were just in the middle of this perfect storm," says Michael Dolan, who was acting commissioner at the time of the 1997 hearings and who eventually stepped down. "So your chore was to know it's happening, and know it's got to happen, and try to steer those who are in the driver's seat to solutions that will be good for the population at large and good for the tax system, and won't savage employees."

Caught in the fray, Mader developed a reputation as a straight shooter and an impartial professional who could get things done. He became a key liaison with various IRS stakeholders, including officials in the Office of Management and Budget, the Treasury Department, the General Accounting Office, congressional committees and the National Treasury Employees Union. Mader was "almost an ambassador-at-large," recalls Dolan, who's now national director of IRS policies and dispute resolution at KPMG LLP.

One of Mader's critical relationships was with the Treasury employees' union, according to Rossotti, who had made it his policy to work with labor leaders. Mader "had a great deal of knowledge and a considerable amount of credibility," says Rossotti, coupled with "a real understanding of all sides of the issue."

According to Robert M. Tobias, who was president of NTEU at the time, the IRS and the NTEU were the first agency and union in the federal government "to move away from more adversarial to more collaborative relationships. And that was important both to the union and the Internal Revenue Service." Mader helped make that happen on the management side, says Tobias, who is now a professor in the Department of Public Administration at American University in Washington.

Mader began discussions with union leaders and other stakeholders about reorganizing IRS operations even before the 1998 IRS Restructuring and Reform Act required the agency to embark on an overhaul of its operations. This enabled him to anticipate problems and even help steer legislators away from potential land mines.

"In part because I had worked in so many different parts of the organization over my years, I was in a very good position to be able to describe to people how the current operation was performing," Mader says. Even more importantly, he adds, he was in the right spot "to try to understand what the interests and intentions [of IRS stakeholders] were, and then . . . bring that back to the rest of the organization to help influence the actions that we would subsequently take."

In the subsequent reorganization, the agency set out to replace its 50-year-old structure of regions, districts and service centers with four new "customer-oriented" operating divisions. It also adopted flexible personnel policies, cut layers of management by half and redefined top jobs. More fundamentally, the agency shifted its emphasis from collections and compliance to informing, educating and serving customers.

Amidst all this, IRS officials had to keep up the day-to-day work of collecting some $2 trillion in taxes and processing 228 million tax returns a year, managing a workforce of 100,000 employees, and keeping track of a $9 billion-plus budget. "Some of us referred to it as similar to flying a 747 in the air . . . but at the same time changing out . . . all the engines and all the parts of that plane, and creating a new plane in the process," says Wenzel.

ENJOYING THE WILD RIDE

Mader's human relations background thrust him into the thick of what became a key element of the reorganization: a completely new set of rules for hiring, training, evaluating, rewarding and compensating employees. The flexible personnel rules that Mader helped put in place at the IRS have become a model for other federal agencies, says Hal G. Rainey, a professor at the University of Georgia's School of Public and International Affairs.

Rainey singles out Mader's work on the so-called "critical pay" program, which authorized the IRS to hire up to 40 outside experts at salaries up to that of the vice president, as being particularly significant. The challenge was to integrate a cadre of private sector executives into the IRS top ranks while avoiding any appearance of impropriety, something that Rainey argues the agency did well.

"That was Dave's baby," says Rainey. "He stewarded that program very carefully to make sure it worked. And that was a very important part of the effort."

Mader also helped launch the IRS' new pay-banding system, which gives agency managers more flexibility in setting salaries and makes raises contingent on performance, not longevity. "Some of it was really new territory, uncharted, and Dave was really instrumental in leading that," says Wenzel. "It was a dramatic change, and this affected all the IRS senior executives, of which we had 240 at the time."

Mader spent hours talking with and listening to IRS managers, explaining the new rules, and reassuring them about what lay ahead. It was a thankless job. Among other changes, managers were called on to compete for redefined positions in the new organization. Many of the new personnel rules were controversial and caused resentment. "It was difficult in the early stages, when we were beginning to design a new organization," Mader concedes. "There were concepts that we were working with that weren't necessarily cast in stone. And it made, I think, some employees nervous when we couldn't tell them what the final answer was going to be."

One of the key lessons he learned, Mader says, is, "You can't communicate enough." An important part of his job, he adds, was to "explain to people what was going to happen, how it was going to happen and what their rights were, what their responsibilities were, and how critical they were going to be to our success."

Another lesson from Mader's tenure, though not one that he articulates, is simply: Work hard. Mader's unusual work ethic helps explain why he won so many awards during his three decades at the IRS. He won the agency's top honor, the Commissioner's Award, seven times. He also received the Meritorious Presidential Rank Award and the Distinguished Presidential Rank Award, and was the first IRS career employee to win the Treasury Secretary's Honor Award.

"He was just a very, very hard worker," Wenzel says. "He took his responsibility very seriously." Mader also took a fair amount of ribbing for his nonstop use of the voice mail system. A message from Mader was as likely to have come in at 4 a.m. as at 4 p.m., his colleagues say. Rossotti remembers many an occasion, in the weeks leading up to the Oct. 1, 2000, deadline for unveiling the agency's new management structure, when Mader's elbow grease kept the team focused.

"We had this whole incredibly elaborate planning process to plan the actual cut-over from the old organization to the new organization during the year 2000," recalls Rossotti. "But there were innumerable occasions when people would come in and say, 'The sky is falling, we're going to have to postpone this!' And Dave was always the point person who said: 'Let's get together first thing [tomorrow] and figure out a way to work this.' "

As Rossotti tells it, Mader would then invariably arrive at 5 a.m. and have a couple of meetings to brainstorm ideas before the rest of the team got in two or three hours later.

"People would roundly kid him about whether he had a life outside the job," says Dolan. As it happens, Mader is married with a grown son. He's an avid runner, and likes to hop on his Harley Davidson motorcycle and zip around the Virginia countryside. (He and his wife live in the Northern Virginia suburb of Centreville.)

Part of what helped Mader survive and even enjoy his wild ride at the IRS was his singular dedication to the agency, which he says engenders a certain esprit de corps among employees. "I think those of us who have made tax administration our lives basically recognize that collecting taxes is critical to the democracy," he says. "We don't have a country if we can't fund it."

Far from complaining about the many upheavals that marked his IRS career, Mader seems to delight in them. "I have to say, in the last five years, there were no low points," he insists. "It was an exhilarating, sometimes tiring experience. But it was the highlight of my 30-plus years."

Mader is one of several members of Rossotti's team to leave the IRS this year, including Wenzel, who retires in October. Mader is proud of what he accomplished as part of that team, but he acknowledges that the agency has a long way to go.

New IRS Commissioner Mark Everson, confirmed by the Senate in May, has shifted some of the agency's focus back to collections, declaring war on tax shelters and making tax law enforcement a priority. It's one of many areas that are still badly in need of improvement at the IRS, which has seen collections drop dramatically in recent years. The other big challenges ahead are reengineering the agency's business processes and bringing its technology infrastructure up to date, Mader says. But he adds that efforts to make the IRS more efficient and effective will never really be complete.

"I think if we do our job right, we're never going to be done," Mader says. "I think one of the lessons learned is that an organization needs to be constantly assessing and reassessing how it's performing its essential activities, and making adjustments."

Mader has become a spokesman, of sorts, for the IRS experience, something that he will continue in his new job in the Washington office of Purchase, N.Y.-based Sirota Consulting. He is leading a newly created public sector practice aimed at teaching federal, state and local government agencies how to use employee and customer attitude surveys to improve organizational performance, an effort he spearheaded at the IRS.

In the meantime, Mader has the following advice for his government colleagues: "Don't get comfortable. . . . Agencies shouldn't wait for a set of bad hearings to make the kind of improvements that can be made, and should be made."

Eliza Newlin Carney is a contributing editor for National Journal.

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Leap of Faith

Eliza Newlin Carney — Sun, 01 Jun 2003 00:00:00 -0400

No one knows how good faith-based organizations are at delivering social services, but the Bush administration is pushing agencies to grant them more money anyway.

hen Jim Towey signed on as director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives 16 months ago, he had a few basic questions. "I came in and I said: Well, how many faith-based organizations even get federal money?" Towey recalls asking. "How much money do they get? Which programs are they involved in? Do they do a good job or not?" Nobody could tell him a thing. As Towey describes it, the response he got was: "We don't know any of those answers. We couldn't tell you." Towey, who formerly headed Florida's health and social services agency, was dumbfounded. "How can you measure the success of any initiative if you don't have basic data?"

Towey, like many administration officials working on President Bush's faith-based initiative, has discovered that doling out federal money to faith-based groups is more complicated than it sounds. Two and a half years after President Bush announced it as an urgent priority, the initiative to federally fund faith-based and community groups has proved controversial, ambitious-and surprisingly difficult to administer.

The theory seems simple enough. Convinced that faith-based groups, in particular, have been unfairly excluded from the federal grants system, Bush has launched a multi-part effort to level the playing field. He announced the creation of the first-ever White House Office for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives during his first week in office. He pushed hard for legislation to ease federal restrictions on faith-based groups. He issued executive orders establishing new federal rules for faith-based charities and launching centers for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives at seven government agencies.

But in practice, bringing more faith-based groups under the federal umbrella has proved problematic at best. The White House office got off to a rocky start, and was publicly excoriated for valuing politics over policy by its first director, political scientist John DiIulio Jr. DiIulio later publicly apologized for telling Esquire magazine in a January 2002 article that "everything" in the White House was "being run by the political arm." Legislation to help faith-based groups has foundered on Capitol Hill, leaving the administration to forge ahead with only lukewarm support in Congress.

Agency officials implementing the plan have stumbled into numerous gray areas and political land mines. Many lack even a clear definition of what constitutes a faith-based organization. Federal agencies rely on states, localities and intermediaries to distribute grants, but that often leaves them several steps removed from the grantees. Agencies, moreover, have no additional money to hand out to new groups; they will simply be dividing the existing pie into smaller slices.

Lack of knowledge about faith-based groups is a major stumbling block. Bush and his allies have collected many a heartwarming anecdote to trumpet the success of faith-based charities. But scholars have yet to produce reliable data on the actual performance of such organizations. The disparate nature of faith-based and community groups, their frequently small size, volunteer staffs and mission-driven management style have made them hard to study.

Those same factors will make it especially hard for federal officials to track, monitor and assess the performance of these organizations. "When you federalize a program like this, it presents major problems in terms of monitoring," says Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution who wrote a report on the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Baylor University professor Gaynord Yancey concurs. "Government traditionally has been used to working with the bigger umbrella organizations," says Yancey. "To get down to those who are in urban neighborhoods, who are beneath the radar screen . . . is going to be the major, major challenge for government."

OLD FRIENDS, NEW FRIENDS

To be sure, the federal government has publicly funded some types of faith-based organizations for decades. National organizations such as Catholic Charities USA, United Jewish Communities and the Salvation Army long have been partners with an array of agencies to deliver social services. Catholic Charities, for example, gets more than half of its funding from government grants.

But the president's faith-based initiative is breaking significant new ground. In the past, religious organizations were required to secularize their social service activities, so they were separate in time and place from their religious activities, in order to get public funds. This practice dated to as early as the 1970s,when Supreme Court rulings barred faith-based groups from receiving direct government support for inherently religious activities. Often this meant that a sponsoring religious institution had to incorporate as a separate tax-exempt group, or charitable arm, to carry out its social services.

That began to change in 1996, when President Clinton signed sweeping welfare reform legislation that included "charitable choice" provisions allowing religious groups to seek federal funding for some programs without having to change their religious character or governance. Under charitable choice, a faith-based group receiving federal welfare grants no longer must set up a separate charitable arm to deliver social services. The new charitable choice welfare rules also allow social service providers to maintain a religious environment at their facilities-displaying crosses or retaining a religious name, for example. In addition, entities that receive federal contracts may consider religious beliefs in their hiring and firing decisions.

Bush now has applied the charitable choice model to all federal agencies. While the administration has taken pains to include community groups in its initiative, there's little doubt that Bush's real interest is in the healing power of religion to help people overcome poverty, addiction and other social ills. "Faith-based charities work daily miracles because they have idealistic volunteers," Bush declared in a Philadelphia speech in December announcing his two most recent executive orders implementing the initiative. "They're guided by moral principles. They know the problems of their own communities, and above all, they recognize the dignity of every citizen and the possibilities of every life."

The first executive order issued in Philadelphia established centers for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives at the Agriculture Department and the Agency for International Development. Such centers had been created by an executive order issued Jan. 29, 2001, at the departments of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Education, Justice and Labor. The second Philadelphia order imposed charitable choice provisions on the full spectrum of federal social service programs. It specified, for example, that faith-based groups should be able to compete for grants "on a level playing field" with nonreligious providers without having to change their religious character.

The president's faith-based rhetoric has alarmed critics, who warn that the new rules will breach the constitutional wall dividing church and state. They object to religious congregations receiving direct federal funding. Even more controversial is the provision to allow groups to hire and fire on the basis of religion, which reverses part of an executive order issued by President Johnson in 1965 prohibiting discrimination by entities that have federal procurement contracts.

Constitutional concerns helped derail faith-based legislation on Capitol Hill.

In 2001, the House approved a bill to essentially codify Bush's faith-based initiative, but it died in the Senate. In April, the Senate approved the Charity, Aid, Recovery and Empowerment (CARE) Act, but only after its sponsors abandoned all substantive faith-based provisions, including one that would have allowed religious charities to compete for federal grants without altering their religious character. The legislation was stripped down to a tax bill that encourages charitable donations.

At the same time, some social scientists, academics and social service providers embrace the Bush initiative as a logical next step in delivering social services. The administration's effort has tapped a well of growing interest in forming innovative new partnerships between government and community and religious groups. "The faith-based debate fits into that larger question about how can government be more agile, be more creative in working with other institutions," says Luis Lugo, director of the Religion Program at the Pew Charitable Trusts, a Philadelphia-based organization that provides grants for nonprofit activities. Faith-based and community groups are potential government partners "on the ground, that are trusted by the people they are trying to serve, and that generate significant resources," Lugo notes.

The faith-based initiative raises serious performance and accountability questions for people on both sides of the constitutional debate. The initiative could steer billions of federal dollars to an array of unknown, untested groups that have no experience working with the government. It spans multiple agencies and literally hundreds of programs, making funding available for everything from after-school tutoring to soup kitchens, drug treatment, homeless shelters, job training and transitional help for ex-convicts.

What is a faith-based organization? A basic problem for agency officials is that there's no simple answer. A faith-based organization could be a religious program housed in a congregation. It could be a nonprofit affiliated with a religious group. It could be a nonreligious program staffed by people of faith. It could be a partnership between religious and secular groups. The permutations are endless, and administrative questions vary with the nature of the group.

"Lack of clarity in our vocabulary on this subject creates problems for studying, funding and making policies regarding social service and educational entities with a connection to religion," concludes a recent report by the Working Group on Human Needs and Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, a coalition of policy experts, activists and religious leaders. The working group is coordinated by the Search for Common Ground USA, a Washington-based nonprofit devoted to conflict prevention and resolution. The hazy distinction between religious congregations and faith-based groups has landed the Housing and Urban Development Department in an emotional controversy. HUD has proposed regulations that would allow an organization to use federal funds to renovate facilities that are sometimes used for worship and sometimes for social services. Civil liberties groups and some on Capitol Hill have criticized the regulations.

Concern about the potential ill effects of federal support has led some conservatives and religious leaders to reject the Bush model. What makes religious programs so effective, some argue, is that they are free from government intrusion and red tape. "Officials in faith-based charities may end up spending more time reading the Federal Register than the Bible," warns Michael Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, in a March 2001 critique of the Bush initiative dubbed "Corrupting Charity."

An administrative challenge for the faith-based initiative is that federal agencies do not, in most cases, directly fund faith-based and community groups and therefore rely on state and local officials or intermediary organizations to collect data necessary to ensure accountability and assess results. Most of the money goes through block grants or formula grants to the states. It could then pass through local governments or intermediaries, on whom federal officials rely heavily to help smaller groups navigate the system.

For example, last year, the Labor Department gave out $17.5 million in grants to states and to intermediaries to encourage them to reach out to faith-based and community groups. Labor asked the intermediaries, in particular, to propose how to link smaller, grassroots organizations with the 1998 Workforce Investment Act system, which runs federal job training programs. The theory is that larger umbrella groups (an example would be Catholic Charities) can take administrative and reporting burdens off smaller ones. "You really need more experienced organizations who can serve as the administrative body for some of the smaller ones," says Brent Orrell, director of the Labor Department's Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. "It just doesn't make sense to go around building administrative capacity in all of these smaller organizations. They need the economies of scale, which all of the intermediaries bring."

But some intermediaries have come under fire. Last year, the Health and Human Services Department drew criticism when it awarded a $500,000 grant to Operation Blessing International, an organization led by controversial religious leader Pat Robertson, who repeatedly has been criticized for disparaging gays and lesbians, feminists and Jews. Operation Blessing was one of several intermediaries asked to distribute sub-grants to smaller faith-based and community groups to help them build capacity and manage their programs more effectively. The money came from the HHS Compassion Capital Fund, which aims to give faith-based and community groups the technical training they need to apply for and meet the requirements of federal grants. The fund doled out 21 grants totaling $24.5 million for such training in fiscal 2002. Some $35 million has been appropriated for the fund in fiscal 2003, and Bush wants to increase that to $100 million in the coming fiscal year.

Relying on intermediaries can make federal money harder to track, skeptics warn. "It's not clear at this point who's getting the money and what they're doing with it [and] what kinds of results they're getting," says Kay Guinane, counsel and manager of community education at OMB Watch, a Washington-based watchdog group focusing on government accountability and civic participation. Using intermediaries raises questions about "what kind of financial and programmatic accountability system will be put in place," she adds. Such problems can be avoided, Towey maintains, "if you make it clear that the intermediaries are as accountable for the sub-award activity as they are for their own activity." He and other administration officials stress that the standards for performance, certification and accountability are the same for faith-based and community groups as they are for any federal grantees.

"I don't think that the issue of accountability and management of grants going to faith-based groups is really any different than the management of grants going to other social service providers, who aren't faith-based," says Towey.

Indeed, faith-based and community groups have no guarantee they will receive federal grants under the initiative. The administration has set aside no significant new money for such organizations. HHS' Compassion Capital Fund does introduce some seed money, but it underwrites training and recruitment, not direct services. Some investments are associated with the initiative, including $600 million for drug treatment vouchers. But the initiative largely calls on agencies to encourage new grantees within existing budgets.

The absence of special faith-based funding creates its own challenges. Agency officials will not have the money to underwrite new grassroots organizations, as Bush has directed them to do, unless they cut the funding for current grantees. In some cases this may mean abandoning a larger, well-known charity with a proven track record in order to take a risk on an unfamiliar, less-experienced organization. This has alarmed some well-established social service providers, who worry about unfair competition. "The concern is that the agenda here is to prefer particular groups . . . that preference flies in the face of equal standards, equal opportunity," says Diana Aviv, president of Independent Sector, a coalition of national voluntary and philanthropic organizations.

Some social service providers also protest that there's a drastic mismatch between what Bush calls the "armies of compassion" and the available funding. The CARE Act includes a $1.3 billion increase in social service block grant funding to states, but Bush objects to that feature of the bill. Yet White House and agency officials continue to host standing-room-only forums in major cities to encourage faith-based and community groups to apply for federal grants. "Without additional funding, it's a cruel hoax to run around the country encouraging people to apply for funds that aren't there," said Mary Nelson, president of Bethel New Life, a faith-based community development corporation in Chicago. Nelson spoke at an April conference in Washington on harnessing the power of faith-based and community groups.

"The cruel hoax is when you're stiff-armed from being able to even apply for federal funds, and when the same old organizations get funded year after year, without any regard to the effectiveness of their service delivery," Towey retorts. One purpose of the initiative is to involve more providers in offering federally funded social services. "Right now there's a limited group that's willing to work with the federal government," Towey notes. "We hope that changes." At the Education Department, the faith-based initiative dovetails nicely with an effort that was already under way to diversify the pool of grantees, says John Porter, director of the department's Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. The faith-based initiative "was very well received here within the department," he adds.

Orrell, at the Labor Department, also reports positive responses among rank-and-file federal employees to the faith-based initiative. "I certainly expected a lot more resistance from the career bureaucracy of the Department of Labor on this issue," he admits. "And the biggest and most pleasant surprise to me has been the level of receptiveness to what we're trying to achieve."

Of course, if any government employees were unhappy with the initiative, they would be unlikely to speak out. Bush has made it clear that he expects federal officials to get with the program. "Every person in every government agency will know where the president stands," he pledged in Philadelphia last year. The White House has kept a tight rein on agency officials involved in the initiative. None agreed to be interviewed for this story without White House approval, for example.

DO THEY WORK?

The biggest challenge for administration officials still lies ahead. To win over his critics, Bush will have to furnish more than anecdotes to show that faith-based groups really can deliver on their promises. "I think the question ultimately will be: Do these faith- and community-based groups do it better than" other organizations, says Aviv. "And if they don't, then why are we spending all this money and energy on them?"

The administration has challenged universities and foundations to help it conduct research to evaluate faith-based and community groups, and many have stepped up to the plate. The most ambitious effort under way is a national research project at the State University of New York's Rockefeller Institute of Government. Dubbed the Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy, the project is funded by a $6.3 million grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Researchers do not have an easy task. Faith-based groups often are more interested in serving God than in evaluating outcomes, social scientists say. Their volunteer-driven structure can make it hard to track even how many hours they spend serving clients. Their small budgets make it hard for them to spend time on accounting and paperwork. "The state of literature around faith-based organizations and their effectiveness is in its infant stage, and is being designed as we speak," says Fred DeJong, a research and statistics professor at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich. "In other words, the political agenda got ahead of us."

Bush administration officials are taking steps to fill in the blanks. Government conferences held to invite faith-based and community groups to apply for funding also furnish basic information on accountability, standards and compliance. The president's initiative also includes money to train and build the capacity of such groups, and to study their outcomes.

This year, federal agencies finally started collecting data about which grantees actually qualify as faith-based and community groups-a step toward answering some of Towey's initial, basic questions. But to ensure that faith-based and community groups aren't afforded special treatment, administration officials making grant decisions will not be privy to the data. Towey acknowledges that it may be a while before the questions he posed when first starting his job are fully answered: "This is going to take years, to evaluate what is being undertaken today."

Eliza Newlin Carney is a contributing editor for National Journal.

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Turning Point

Eliza Newlin Carney — Sat, 01 Mar 2003 00:00:00 -0500

CDC Director Julie Gerberding is under pressure to bring her agency back from years of neglect to take a lead role in the war against bioterrorism.

t first glance, it's hard to tell whether the main campus of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta is a factory, an office park or a construction site. Two squat, white smokestacks belch steam into the air; low-slung brick buildings stand cheek-by-jowl with sleek, cast concrete office towers; mounds of dirt rise between thickets of yellow cranes, while hard-hatted construction workers mill about. The whine and buzz of drills and heavy equipment is incessant.

The CDC's buildings themselves bespeak an agency in transition. The CDC has worn many hats since its inception 57 years ago-tracking malaria, hunting global viruses, preventing workplace injuries, measuring environmental toxins, combating chronic disease. Now the agency is struggling to master its toughest role yet as one of the lead players in the nation's war on bioterror.

It's a tall order for an agency that has been neglected as long and as badly as the CDC. Out of sight in Atlanta, the CDC often escapes the notice of Washington policy-makers. It has suffered chronic funding shortfalls and a decaying physical plant. In some of its labs, plastic tarps are jury-rigged to protect costly equipment from ceiling leaks. And crumbling labs aren't the CDC's only problem. The 2001 anthrax attacks revealed serious gaps in the agency's crisis preparedness. Officials were faulted for failing to communicate quickly and clearly with state and local public health providers, CDC's main constituents. The agency also took heat for public communications gaffes-though the Health and Human Services Department also shouldered the blame for muzzling top CDC scientists.

The CDC also bumped heads with law enforcement officials. In at least one case, the Federal Bureau of Investigation withheld crucial evidence from the CDC. The anthrax episode left the agency embarrassed and demoralized, particularly after the departure last March of popular CDC Director Jeffrey Koplan, a Clinton administration holdover who had headed the agency for three and a half years.

Since then, the CDC has received kudos for responding decisively to last summer's outbreak of West Nile virus. Much of the credit goes to new CDC Director Julie Gerberding, an agency insider and infectious disease expert who was HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson's top choice. Gerberding has acted swiftly to patch up relations with state and local health providers, ramp up the agency's communications and emergency response capacity, and win over influential allies in Washington.

Gerberding is convinced that the CDC's twin challenges-preparing for bioterror attacks while shoring up the nation's public health system-are synergistic. "We wouldn't have a good bioterrorism response system without that infrastructure," she says. "And at the same time, our terrorism preparedness response is enhancing our overall capacity." But the CDC still faces a rocky road.Some public health providers warn that the war against bioterrorism is robbing resources needed to research other urgent health threats. The CDC's expanded role also subjects it to fresh scrutiny and criticism. In addition to its state and local public health partners, the CDC must answer to a whole new set of national security and law enforcement constituents. The new Homeland Security Department may help by improving coordination between agencies and clearing up muddled lines of communication. Or it may cause confusion and duplication, as some analysts warn.

As it shoulders homeland security responsibilities, the CDC faces a host of other pressing challenges. Global travel has made Americans newly vulnerable to infectious diseases such as West Nile and malaria. Drug-resistant and hospital-borne infections are a growing problem. And the CDC is preparing to face its biggest test ever: inoculating up to 10 million emergency responders against smallpox.

"It's really an agency that, five years from now, could be a lot worse, or it could be a lot better," says Paul C. Light, director of the Brookings Institution's Center for Public Service. "It's really at a crossroads."

BEGGAR AT THE GATES

This is not the first time the CDC has had to reinvent itself. When it first opened as the Communicable Disease Center in 1946, its mandate was to track malaria in troops returning from World War II. In the 1950s it opened its Epidemic Intelligence Service, launching its global reputation as a crack hunter of diseases such as the Ebola and Hanta viruses. In recent decades the CDC has broadened its mandate to include promoting occupational safety and seat belt use, and fighting child abuse, smoking and chronic illnesses such as heart disease.

Through it all, the CDC has been asked to do much with little. Its budget in 1950 was a mere $7.4 million. Between 1980 and 1990, a time of fast expansion at the CDC, the budget jumped from $273.5 million to $1.1 billion. By 2001, it had grown to about $5 billion, thanks in part to Koplan's skillful lobbying on Capitol Hill. In fiscal 2002, following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, CDC got its biggest budget increase ever, to $7.6 billion. But the CDC budget remains paltry compared with some fellow health care agencies. The National Institutes of Health's fiscal 2002 budget, for example, was a whopping $23.6 billion. Unlike the CDC, NIH is right under the noses of Washington policy-makers. NIH also has powerful allies among a broad range of health care advocacy and industry groups-something the CDC has lacked.

In part, the CDC has suffered because the public is more interested in finding miracle cures than in preventing illness. The CDC's prevention mandate, along with its unique relationship with state and local public health providers, set it apart from other health-related federal agencies. But prevention, by definition, tends to be invisible. "Unfortunately, when they are successful in preventing episodes and nothing happens, of course there's nothing to mark [their success]," notes former HHS Secretary Dr. Louis Sullivan. Sullivan blames the agency's problems not on its staff and leaders but on a lack of funding. "They have been working, frankly, with one hand tied behind their back," he says.

That is beginning to change. President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have visited the CDC, the first sitting president and vice president to do so. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson visits the CDC more often than any previous health secretary. Gerberding also parks herself at her HHS office in Washington one to two days a week. Her agency is in the throes of an ambitious, $1.4 billion, five-year master plan to build new labs and facilities, something only the federal government has deep enough pockets to fund. The idea is to consolidate the CDC's scattered Atlanta operations into two main campuses that will boast new research labs, the state-of-the-art Emergency Operations Center, and the Global Communications and Training Facility.

"CDC right now has over 20 different locations in Atlanta where our scientists are housed," says David Fleming, the agency's deputy director of science and public health. "It's very, very difficult to coordinate program lines across scientists, between laboratories and epidemiologists and public health professionals, when everybody is in different places."

A visit to the CDC's Chamblee campus on Atlanta's outskirts reveals just how decrepit its facilities are. "Occasionally when I give a tour, the termites will actually swarm," says Dr. Jim Pirkle, deputy director for science at CDC's National Center for Environmental Health. At Chamblee, located some 10 miles from CDC headquarters, scientists work in old army barracks never intended for scientific research. The pipes leak, the power goes out, halls are cluttered, and lab workers leave food out for stray cats to control the vermin.

But right next door in a building opened in July 2002, Pirkle proudly shows off a brand-new environmental toxicology lab where ceiling filters keep the air so pure that visitors must clean their shoes before entering. "If you look up at the ceiling, there's no water dripping in," Pirkle marvels. "The air conditioning works. And we have power. The power works every day, and it works all night." It's one of two shiny new labs recently opened at the CDC. However, the vision for a new CDC exists largely on paper. Handsome site plans and architectural drawings hang on bulletin boards throughout CDC buildings. But so far, the master plan is only about one-third done. By the agency's own admission, the majority of its scientists are working in substandard space.

Moreover, the funding to complete the master plan on time is in jeopardy. To stay on schedule, the agency must receive some $250 million a year between now and 2005. The money came through for fiscal 2002, but for the coming fiscal year, Bush has requested only $110 million for the master plan. CDC allies in Congress are lobbying for the full $250 million. But with Republicans now in charge of both chambers, the president is likely to prevail.

AWKWARD DANCE PARTNERS

The CDC's state and local public health counterparts are in even more dire straits. State and local hospitals don't have enough beds to handle day-to-day emergencies, let alone to absorb additional patients in a crisis. Regional laboratories lack basic equipment, and there are too few public health professionals trained in public health, let alone in bioterrorism response. All this makes the CDC's efforts to repair the broken state and local public health system just that much harder. Along with HHS, the CDC has been working closely with states to administer a $1 billion federal grant, approved by Congress after the terrorist attacks, to help them improve their public health emergency preparedness.

But even as public health providers snap up federal dollars, many face sudden state budget shortfalls. Some fear they will end up treading water-adding health workers in one department, only to ax them in another. Inoculating health care and emergency workers against smallpox will stretch health departments still further. "If you add more things onto a foundation that's not very strong, you risk the whole thing kind of crumbling," warns Dr. Jo Ivey Boufford, a professor of health policy and public service at New York University's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. She recently co-wrote a report on the future of American public health. "While the bioterrorism money is very important and helpful, it doesn't deal with the entire infrastructure need," it said.

Compounding budget problems is lingering confusion over the historically rocky state-federal health care partnership. The anthrax episode revealed vastly differing expectations of the CDC from state to state, says Dr. Elin A. Gursky, a senior fellow at the ANSER Institute for Homeland Security in Arlington, Va. Gursky recently completed an analysis of CDC's anthrax performance. She found that while some state officials were happy to let the CDC take over, others felt a need to protect their turf.

Gerberding is sensitive to such criticisms. One of her first moves as CDC chief was to spend several weeks visiting local health departments, experts and constituent groups, trying to get a sense of how outsiders regard the agency. "We must have a customer service mentality here," says Gerberding. "We're here to serve people, we're here to serve health departments, we're here to serve the health delivery system. If we don't have accurate information about what those individuals or groups need, we can't possibly address their needs."

Gerberding has taken steps to improve coordination within the CDC. She tapped immunization expert Joseph Henderson to be the agency's point man for bioterror matters. His title is associate director for terrorism, preparedness and response, a new position. In January, Gerberding tapped five top CDC officials to serve on a new executive leadership team to help her better manage the agency. Gerberding also revamped the agency's PR structure and instituted a new emergency communications plan.

A major CDC goal is to close what has become a yawning gap between public health officials on the one hand, and medical practitioners, such as family doctors, pediatricians and hospital workers, on the other. During the anthrax crisis, many doctors relied on the news media to stay abreast of events. The CDC has set up an emergency telephone hot line and is making better use of its Internet Health Alert Network, which sends daily e-mails to health care providers. During the West Nile crisis, the hot line received some 700 calls a day.

"We want [practitioners] to know how to reach their public health counterparts, and we want their public health counterparts to be responsive when they are reached," says James Hughes, who directs CDC's National Center for Infectious Diseases. In the event of an outbreak of disease, whether from terrorism or natural causes, he notes, it's clinicians in the field who are in a position to first spot unusual symptoms.

The CDC has set out to patch up relations with law enforcement officials, with whom it clashed repeatedly during the anthrax episode. When an anthrax-filled letter was sent to the office of then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., for example, the FBI sent samples collected from the letter to Army labs at Fort Detrick, Md., for analysis-not to the CDC. As a result, CDC scientists were not in a position to observe firsthand that the anthrax was of a fine, military grade that could spread easily. For public health officials in Maryland, the home of two postal workers who died from anthrax inhalation, that was a crucial-yet missing-piece of information.

"It would have been very helpful to know that the particle size of the anthrax was such that it could cause inhalation anthrax," says Georges Benjamin, Maryland secretary of health at the time, and now executive director of the American Public Health Association. "Nobody clearly said that."

Gerberding admits that the public health and law enforcement sectors "have different cultures. We have different traditions of sharing information. Public health's very open; law enforcement is naturally more contained with their information, because they don't want to jeopardize those criminal prosecutions. We have had very little opportunity to work together."

That strained relationship will be put to the test as the Homeland Security Department opens its doors. The new department will take over the CDC National Pharmaceutical Stockpile, and it will set priorities for CDC scientists working on bioterror. Some critics fear that the CDC's medical expertise will be lost in the shuffle, particularly given that the new department's anti-terror mandate is essentially one of law enforcement.

The administration's controversial new bioterror surveillance network also is thrusting new law enforcement responsibilities onto the CDC. The computer network reportedly will track and monitor patients' health data in eight major cities in a bid to spot disease outbreaks. The health monitoring network began at the Defense Department but was moved to the CDC after critics raised medical privacy concerns.

DANGER AHEAD

CDC's efforts to smooth lines of communication and authority already are paying off, say state public health secretaries. During the West Nile outbreak, Gerberding activated the CDC's Emergency Operations Center, now housed in an interim facility, as a sort of dry run for a future catastrophe. The CDC moved swiftly to get factual information out to the states and calm public fears, say state health officials. In contrast with the anthrax crisis, state officials were able to track the investigation as it unfolded, and there were no mixed signals from federal agencies. "Not only has communication improved," says Florida Health Secretary Dr. John O. Agwunobi, but the CDC "has begun to speak for and on behalf of states in Washington."

But one complaint lingers regarding the CDC and West Nile: The agency could only react to the crisis, not prevent it. Some public health experts warn that the CDC has not been aggressive enough in asking what the next outbreak will be, where it will take place, and how to prevent it. A significant risk of the war against bioterrorism is that it will distract the CDC from fighting global diseases and chronic, day-to-day health threats. "It's very important to keep these acute threats to our security and well-being in balance with the daily killers," said Koplan, now vice president for academic and health affairs at Atlanta's Emory University.

Nothing illustrates this tension more than the administration's controversial new smallpox vaccination plan. The CDC is working closely with states to implement President Bush's goal that 1 million service members and health care workers get the vaccine.

The next phase-offering the vaccine to up to 10 million firefighters, police officers and other emergency responders-could stretch state and local public health departments to the breaking point. Many state and local health officials already have used up much of the bioterrorism preparedness money released last year. Some have warned that the added cost of smallpox inoculations, which as of yet have not been accompanied by any additional federal dollars, will force them to cut basic services.

To make matters worse, many hospitals have refused to participate in the smallpox plan, concerned that the vaccine's risks outweigh its benefits. Some union leaders even have called on the administration to halt the plan until better safeguards are in place. The CDC is scrambling to respond with educational videos, brochures, satellite training courses and information sheets for health care professionals at all levels.

But the controversy underscores the management and communications nightmare that CDC would face in an emergency requiring mass vaccination for all Americans in the event of an emergency. The vaccine is unusually dangerous and risky. The last time the CDC attempted to direct a mass inoculation-during the swine flu epidemic of 1976-the public backlash was so great that the then-CDC director was forced to resign.

"You can't tell [people] to line up and get vaccinated . . . unless there's a level of trust, that supports that kind of initiative," says Gursky, of the ANSER Institute. "So people have to trust government. And I think we have to regain some ground"

At CDC headquarters, the steel beams and concrete skeletons of laboratories under construction furnish solid evidence that the agency is on the road to repair. The only question is whether the CDC's grand improvements will be complete in time for the next emergency.

Eliza Newlin Carney is a contributing editor for National Journal.

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CDC chief puts agency in overdrive

Eliza Newlin Carney — Thu, 10 Oct 2002 00:00:00 -0400

Although a snazzy digital wall clock records the time in zones around the world, and a dozen or so health experts bustled about on a recent day tracking the West Nile virus, the place has an unmistakably thrown-together feel. In the single open workroom, computers are plunked down on tables, blackboards adorn one wall, and directional signs are printed out on office paper.

It's little wonder that Gerberding's first move after taking over as CDC director in July was to speed up the construction of a more modern operations center. Within two years, Gerberding wants to open the doors to a permanent, cutting-edge command center for emergencies. In the meantime, she's hustling to get the CDC's staff into an interim operations center by Oct. 31. The interim center, to be housed in a sub-basement, will boast some $4 million worth of satellite phones, videoconference equipment and other high-tech devices.

Gerberding is so eager to speed things along that she authorized construction crews to work on the interim center 24 hours a day, seven days a week. "24/7 construction is not something you do lightly," acknowledged Gerberding during a recent interview with National Journal at the CDC's Atlanta headquarters. But Gerberding hasn't been taking anything lightly during her three months as CDC director. As the first woman to head the nation's leading public health organization, she has been on overdrive since day one.

For Gerberding, 47, directing the $6.8 billion agency, with its 8,600 employees in 11 institutes and divisions, swamps any other challenge she has faced during more than two decades as a doctor, research scientist, and infectious-disease expert, including four years at the CDC. She steps in at a time when the CDC, an agency of the Health and Human Services Department, is under greater public scrutiny than at any other point in its 56-year history. After being long neglected by policy makers in Washington, the CDC is now a lead player in national defense.

It's a new and somewhat uncomfortable role for the CDC. Established in 1946 to track malaria in troops returning from World War II, the agency made its reputation hunting down natural killers such as smallpox, Legionnaires' disease, and the Ebola virus. More recently, the CDC has turned its attention to chronic illnesses such as heart disease, and to preventing injury and exposure to environmental toxins.

But thrust onto the front lines of the war on terrorism, the agency has stumbled. Last year's anthrax attacks exposed alarming weaknesses in the nation's public health system and at the CDC. The agency was faulted for responding too slowly, and for failing to communicate effectively with medical providers and the public. Gerberding's task is to pick up the pieces and essentially reinvent the agency from the ground up.

At the same time, the war on terrorism could distract the CDC from other, equally urgent threats. Insidious new germs are spreading domestically, spurred in part by global travel. Drug-resistant bacteria are emerging more quickly than scientists can develop medications to fight them. The AIDS virus infects 14,000 new people a day worldwide. And obesity and diabetes are becoming national epidemics.

The CDC faces these multiple challenges at a time when its physical plant is literally falling apart. The agency recently unveiled two gleaming new laboratories to research infectious diseases and environmental pathogens. But most of its labs remain inadequate. In some, plastic tarps protect equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from ceiling leaks. Other labs are infested with rats, mice, or termites.

Gerberding has no illusions about the magnitude of the challenge she faces. On the eve of the October 4 anniversary that marks one year since the CDC confirmed that anthrax had been unleashed in the U.S. mail, Gerberding is in a race against the clock. Her agency is better prepared than it was a year ago, but it is still not ready. Asked to describe her reaction to being tapped by President Bush to head the agency, Gerberding replied, "I was honored, and thrilled-and a little intimidated."

An Unlikely Warrior?

Gerberding is a somewhat surprising choice to head the CDC. She was less well-known than some other candidates, including Dr. Robert Redfield, a former Army physician and controversial AIDS vaccine researcher. Nor is she a particularly forceful or flashy leader. Outwardly low-key, approachable, and even soft-spoken, Gerberding has a reputation as a "people" person-the kind of doctor who would give a frightened patient a hug.

But Gerberding is also known for being cool and decisive under pressure. She impressed HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson during last year's anthrax crisis when she quietly assumed a central role in coordinating the CDC's response. As acting deputy director of the CDC's National Center for Infectious Diseases, Gerberding emerged as an unflappable spokeswoman at a time of near-chaos.

"She was up all the time," said Dr. Tanja Popovic, chief of the CDC's new epidemiological investigations lab, who worked closely with Gerberding during the anthrax investigation. "She was always available. You could call her at any time of the day. I actually never saw her lose her cool."

When then-CDC Director Jeffrey Koplan abruptly stepped down on March 31, Thompson installed Gerberding as one of four acting principal deputy directors to keep the agency afloat. Then he began lobbying the White House to put her in charge. It was not an easy sell, said Kevin Keane, assistant HHS secretary for public affairs. "They obviously didn't know much about Julie at the White House," Keane said. "So he had a great deal of work to do to educate them as to what her talents were, and why she would fit."

But Thompson was persistent. He had been burned before in his efforts to fill numerous vacancies throughout HHS. His No. 1 choice to head the Food and Drug Administration, food-safety expert Lester Crawford, was made deputy commissioner, but was never installed as chief.

Gerberding's gender may have had something to do with her selection. All of the other heads of health agencies under Bush are men. Her big selling point, however, appears to have been her skills as a communicator. Those who know her say that Gerberding has a knack for explaining complicated scientific concepts in plain language, and for getting along with multiple department heads and constituent groups.

The medical community greeted her appointment with a sigh of relief. Some had feared that Bush would pick a CDC head with a background in politics, not science. One possible candidate, for example, was former Rep. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., a socially conservative obstetrician. But Gerberding, who is married with one stepdaughter, is a scientist to the core. She's so apolitical that she declined to tell NJ her party affiliation.

Raised in Estelline, S.D., the daughter of a teacher and a law enforcement officer, Gerberding knew at age 4 that she wanted to be a doctor. She went on to earn her B.A. in chemistry and biology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. She did an internship in internal medicine at the University of California (San Francisco) and served as chief medical resident at San Francisco General Hospital.

Her hospital work in San Francisco in the 1980s ended up shaping her career. The AIDS epidemic was just coming on the scene, and Gerberding developed a passion for fighting infectious disease, particularly HIV. She gained prominence for being among the first to help write guidelines to protect hospital workers from contracting the virus.

She also became the first woman to receive tenure in her department at the University of California, where she ultimately headed the university's Prevention Epicenter, a multidisciplinary program to prevent hospital infections. On joining the CDC in 1998 as director of its Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion, she continued her focus on hospital safety, tackling areas such as drug-resistant infections and medical errors.

She took over the CDC at a difficult time. Morale had suffered after the departure of Koplan, who was tremendously popular. Speculation was rampant that Koplan had left because of fallout from the anthrax crisis, or because of clashes with Thompson. In an interview, Koplan denied the rumors, saying simply that it was "time to move on." Koplan was a holdover from the Clinton administration and had served just over three years in the position.

Gerberding has big shoes to fill, but she has been warmly received so far. "She's very, very smart-and that's probably one of the most important characteristics that a CDC director needs," said Dr. David Fleming, the agency's deputy director of science and public health. "But she is a quick study and articulate as well, and that doesn't always go with being smart," he said.

Good News, Bad News

Gerberding's communications skills may be the medicine that the CDC needs most. At the time of the anthrax crisis last fall, the agency was excoriated for a host of communications failures. State and local medical professionals were unsure of whom to turn to for solid medical information. Agencies at various levels didn't coordinate messages, prompting citizens to wonder who was in charge.

Notwithstanding the professional performance of Gerberding and many others on the CDC staff, agency officials were faulted for being inaccessible to the news media and for giving out conflicting information. For their part, some at the CDC were frustrated that Thompson had seized the microphone and was funneling press queries through his office.

"I'm proud to say we learned many lessons," said Gerberding of the anthrax investigation. "One very critical lesson was communication. We needed to prepare people for the fact that we didn't have all the answers. We're used to having all the answers; at least our scientists want to have all the answers before they go forward with public information. And in a time of crisis, that doesn't work."

The CDC's new modus operandi, said Gerberding, will be to admit it up front when the story is incomplete. "We have to prepare people for the expectation that ... we'll tell them everything we can tell them today, and we'll make the recommendations based on that knowledge today," she said. "But tomorrow it may be different."

To combat confusion within the CDC, Gerberding has tapped immunization expert Joseph M. Henderson to fill a new position: associate director for terrorism, preparedness, and response. Henderson, whose previous experience includes 10 years tackling nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare with the Air Force, will coordinate all CDC terrorism response activities.

Gerberding herself has given numerous interviews and has started holding press conferences at CDC headquarters in Atlanta, a new practice for the agency. The press conferences follow a "telebriefing" format that enables reporters nationwide to watch and ask questions, as in a telephone conference call.

Gerberding has also gotten Thompson to sign off on an emergency communications plan for the CDC, making it less likely that her agency and the HHS will veer off in different directions. She has expanded her communications staff, which has set out to improve service to a broad audience that includes medical clinicians and policy makers.

A major hurdle Gerberding faces is the CDC's physical isolation. "You have a geographic divide that's very real," said HHS's Keane. "They're in Atlanta, and we're in Washington. So you can't just walk across the street, and sit down at a table, and work on issues in the same way that the FBI and the Department of Justice could, for example." Gerberding has handled that problem by spending one to two days a week in her office at HHS. "Her presence makes a difference," Keane noted.

Such tactics also help explain why she has kept the peace with officials at HHS and other agencies-a difficult task with so many players on the bioterrorism field. "She manifests a nice balance between having very good leadership abilities as well as being a team player," noted Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Gerberding has also made herself visible on Capitol Hill. "Just as soon as she received her appointment, she didn't waste any time," said Rep. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga. "She came to the Hill and set up meetings with critical members of the [Georgia] delegation and critical members of Congress."

To get a better sense of how the CDC looks from the outside, Gerberding has visited local health departments, medical experts, and constituent groups. The news from the field has been good and bad, she conceded. States have expressed appreciation for the CDC's willingness to deploy personnel locally. But Gerberding said she has also learned that the CDC needs to be "more proactive in providing information and tools for the front-line clinicians, who are very often the first line of public health."

Public health experts agree that the CDC must build better relationships with health experts in the private sector and with practicing physicians, as well as with academic medical institutions. The field of public health and the day-to-day practice of medicine have become too segregated, argued Gail Cassell, vice president for scientific affairs at Eli Lilly, a Gerberding ally who lobbied for her appointment. "It's a necessity that they be better integrated, starting today," Cassell said.

Still, some observers see progress in the CDC's handling this summer of the West Nile virus. Gerberding seized on the outbreak, the worst ever nationally, as an opportunity to practice the procedures that would take effect in the event of a terrorist attack. The CDC is implementing its emergency communications plan during the outbreak. The emergency operations center, underequipped though it is, is also in full swing.

"We've chosen to use this as an example of the kind of event that CDC needs to be planning for," Fleming explained. "So in essence, [we're] practicing on West Nile for a larger infectious disease threat, [a] bioterrorism threat."

Also paying dividends is a grant program of close to $1 billion, authorized by Congress earlier this year, to improve emergency response at state and local public health departments. CDC and HHS officials have toiled to get the money out as swiftly as possible.

"One good sign is, during the West Nile outbreak, how quickly state after state was able to identify those cases and take action," said Mohammad Akhter, executive director of the American Public Health Association. "If it wasn't for September 11, and if it wasn't for the CDC's preparedness, we probably would have missed some of those cases. This is a very good sign that the nation is better prepared than it was a year ago."

Not There Yet

Still, big problems loom for the CDC. A major open question is how a Homeland Security Department will work with the agency. In theory, at least, scientists studying terrorist biological or chemical agents would remain at the CDC, but Homeland Security Department officials would set their priorities.

"The Homeland Security Department is not taking on essential public health services," Gerberding said. "They are taking on the role of coordinating the intelligence, coordinating the large-scale response community."

But Gerberding has also repeatedly emphasized that the war on terrorism and on other public health threats are inextricably linked. Her philosophy as director is that the anti-terrorism effort must be built on a strong public health infrastructure-and that fighting terrorism, in turn, will better prepare the CDC to combat other health threats. Establishing a new department undercuts this dual approach, some public health experts warn.

"It's extremely difficult to separate out the skill set and people who would do a bioterrorism event from those who would do a naturally occurring outbreak," Koplan noted.

A larger danger for the CDC may be that its consuming focus on terrorism will distract it from other illnesses, and from its long-term prevention mandate. "CDC is at great risk of having their portfolio knocked out of balance by the tremendous energies now being placed on terrorism," said Louis Z. Cooper, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics. "And that's a real concern to many of us."

Even as government leaders scrambled this year to stockpile the smallpox vaccine, for example, the CDC contended with an alarming shortage of routine childhood vaccines for diphtheria, measles, mumps, pertussis, rubella, and tetanus, among others. The crisis has largely abated, but CDC officials can't guarantee that it won't recur. The problem is that not enough drug manufacturers are making the vaccines, which are not lucrative to produce.

In the meantime, according to Cooper, the CDC's focus on terrorism made it harder to come up with a short-term solution. "Here we were, trying to create recommendations so that states and private doctors could ration existing vaccines, yet many of the people who could have helped in that process were pulled off to work on issues around terrorism," he said.

Gerberding insisted that the agency remains true to its long-term mission. "CDC is not focused on bioterrorism," she declared. "CDC is focused on public health. And detecting and responding to emerging public health threats is our core business. That is what we were founded on; that is what we have been doing for decades. And so biological terrorism, or chemical terrorism, or nuclear terrorism are just examples of one more public health threat that we need to identify and respond to."

Government resources, however, can stretch only so far. The budget squeeze on the CDC will only intensify in the event of continued economic recession or war. And when it comes to fighting over the budget pie in Washington, the CDC has historically lost out.

Nothing illustrates that better than a visit in the outskirts of Atlanta to the CDC's Chamblee campus, which houses the agency's National Center for Environmental Health, where scientists perform measurements on environmental toxins, such as lead in blood. At Chamblee, dilapidated, military barracks-style buildings, built after World War II, stand alongside a new laboratory that houses some of the cleanest, most antiseptically sealed research stations in the United States.

In the old buildings, which were built without central air conditioning, engineers have installed portable AC units in the ceilings. The trouble is, condensation from the units forced CDC workers to rig up complicated drip systems that include gutters from Home Depot and plastic tarps. Under this hodgepodge stand some of the best instruments in the world for making precise measurements. But because the air conditioning doesn't work properly, scientists need to cool one of the machines, which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, with a $19 fan. A while back, the lab lost a $340,000 instrument when a pipe broke.

"If I was trying to attract a very advanced, top-notch scientist to do the threshold advance work we do, and he ... or she came in here and saw that, you can imagine that would not be very attractive," said Dr. Jim Pirkle, deputy director for science of the CDC's National Center for Environmental Health. "And it would not really matter what I said about what kind of support we get from the CDC."

On the other hand, the immaculate and gleaming lab next door might make a chemist drool. Here, visitors must clean and cover their shoes before entering, and filters on the ceilings purify the air. Light pours in from plate glass windows, and outside, a marble fountain splashes water into a kidney-shaped pool. "Moving 100 people into this building has been just fabulous for morale," noted Pirkle. Unfortunately, another 150 scientists at Chamblee are still working in the old labs.

At Chamblee and at the CDC's main campus in Atlanta, construction workers are toiling to remedy that disparity. The agency's ambitious, $1.4 billion master plan includes more new labs, a global communications and training facility that will act as a public gateway for the CDC, and a new emergency operations center.

But even in a best-case scenario, the master plan won't be completed until 2005. The plan initially extended over 10 years, but has been accelerated to a five-year time frame. To stay on schedule, however, Congress must appropriate $250 million a year for new buildings and improvements. The money came through in 2002, but for fiscal 2003, Bush has requested only $110 million for the master plan.

"I thought it was unconscionable for the administration to cut CDC [construction] funding by two-thirds," said Sen. Max Cleland, D-Ga., who is still negotiating on Capitol Hill for a higher amount. "That doesn't make any sense."

The CDC does receive some support from the private sector. The money to outfit the interim emergency operations center that Gerberding is so eager to open came from Atlanta philanthropist Bernie Marcus, Home Depot's co-founder. Marcus donated $3.9 million for state-of-the-art equipment after seeing the emergency command center that the CDC had slapped together in an auditorium during the anthrax outbreak.

Marcus and other Atlanta business leaders have set up a group dubbed the Friends of the CDC to lobby on the agency's behalf. A congressionally authorized nonprofit called the CDC Foundation is also raising money to help the agency and will administer Marcus's $3.9 million contribution.

Such efforts, however, will never fully fund the CDC's master plan. Ultimately, it will fall to Gerberding to convince policy makers that the CDC needs new buildings-now. Her own office offers something of a lesson in crisis management. While the outer vestibule has tastefully hung gold-framed prints of Grecian urns, the walls of her office are bare. It's hard to see how Gerberding will have the leisure to decorate them anytime soon.

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Rough Rider

Eliza Newlin Carney — Tue, 01 Oct 2002 00:00:00 -0400

Outspoken anti-bureaucrat Tommy Thompson regroups after a bumpy start as chief of Health and Human Services-the very agency he used to criticize.

x-Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson likes to regale audiences with a tale about his humbling first day in Washington as Health and Human Services secretary. As Thompson tells it, he walked over to admire the grandeur and solemnity of the Capitol building and happened to see Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., walking toward him.

"I extended my hand, and he extended his, and when I tried to shake his hand he pressed some car keys into my palm and said: 'It's the black Mercedes out in front there,'" Thompson said in a speech earlier this year. "Now when Ted Kennedy thinks you're his driver, you know you've really come onto the scene."

The Mercedes story is apocryphal, of course. Kennedy never mistook Thompson for his driver. But Thompson's fondness for telling the story speaks volumes about how he perceives his new job as HHS secretary. No longer "King Tommy," as he was known for his record 14 years as Wisconsin's chief executive, Thompson now casts himself as a lackey to the big wheels at the White House and on Capitol Hill.

By Thompson's own account, it's been a bumpy ride. In Wisconsin, he won national acclaim for his innovative welfare, health care and education reforms. But Thompson, now 60, has struggled to stay on course since taking the helm of HHS in February 2001. The anthrax crisis, a host of volatile social issues and the sheer politics of life inside the Beltway seem to have caught him off guard. Thompson has won praise for his refreshing candor and take-charge attitude-he rides a Harley in his spare time and boasts that he abhors the status quo. But he's also been dogged by controversy.

Thompson's public statements following last fall's anthrax attacks were widely criticized as clumsy and contradictory. His attempts to impose a top-down management style on the department's sprawling bureaucracy have met with mixed reviews. He's clashed with the White House on issues ranging from stem cells to tobacco regulation. He's struggled to fill top political posts throughout his department. And he's peddling a welfare reform plan-approved in the House but stalled in the Senate-that leaves many governors cold.

Thompson would have a tough job under the best of circumstances. With more than 65,000 employees and a budget of $489 billion, HHS is among the world's largest government entities. Its 300 programs run the gamut from scientific research to food safety, family violence and drug abuse. Each one of its dozen major operating divisions-including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health-is a bear to administer.

Running the department is "perhaps the consummate management challenge in the federal government," says Robert Moffit, who directs domestic policy studies at the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based think tank, and who served as a deputy assistant secretary at HHS in the Reagan administration.

For Thompson, that challenge became nightmarish last fall, when the World Trade Center and anthrax attacks thrust bioterrorism front and center. Thompson has largely recovered from his anthrax miscues, installing across the hall from his office a round-the-clock war room to handle bioterrorism. But his task-rebuilding the nation's crumbling and long-neglected public health system-is overwhelming.

Even before Sept. 11, Thompson's hands were full. He took over HHS when virtually every element of the nation's health care system seemed to be reeling toward crisis. Medical costs are soaring; the Medicare system, soon to be overwhelmed by retiring baby boomers, is headed for bankruptcy; and more than 40 million Americans are uninsured. Yet partisan disputes have stalled action on health policy indefinitely.

"Find me somebody that's happy with health care in America right now," says Dr. Richard Roberts, who chairs the American Academy of Family Physicians. "Everybody's frustrated. The cost, the hassle, the questionable quality. It seems we've kind of lost our way in terms of priorities." What Thompson can do, Roberts adds, "is help us begin a national conversation around what it is that we truly need, want and value when it comes to health care."

It's a conversation that may not come naturally to Thompson. The job wasn't even his first choice for a Cabinet post. A former chairman of Amtrak, Thompson had his eye on the Transportation Department. He's developed quite a spiel, in fact, for what a letdown Washington has been. In speeches he describes how as governor, he could come up with an idea in the morning and have people working on it by the afternoon.

In Washington, Thompson's standard preamble goes, an idea has to be vetted by the entire department, then by the "Supergod"-his term for the office of Management and Budget-and by the "young Turks" at the White House. If they approve, it goes to the president, and if the president approves it goes to Congress-at which point, Thompson tells his audiences, "It's time to retire."

It's little wonder that speculation has been rampant that Thompson is not long for this administration. Earlier this year, rumor had it that Thompson had submitted his resignation, and that President Bush had refused to accept it. Predictions of an early departure also were made of Thompson's friend and predecessor, Donna Shalala, who also hailed from Wisconsin. Yet Shalala stuck out the entire Clinton administration and served longer than any HHS secretary.

Recently, Thompson has issued mixed signals on how long he will stick around. At a public appearance in August, he said he had made no commitment to serve more than two years and had received private sector job offers. After the news media picked up on those remarks, Thompson hastily clarified in September that he would stay on through President Bush's four-year term.

Aides say Thompson is content in the position and isn't going anywhere. Thompson told Government Executive: "There's no question that in the first year, I had a very difficult time adjusting. But I've learned to live with the bureaucracy, and I've made a difference, and I'm enjoying it. And I'm going to stay for a while."

A CRITIC TAKES CHARGE

One argument for not stepping down is Thompson's reputation as a fighter. He grew up in small town Wisconsin, polishing eggs and earning a quarter an hour from his father, who ran a grocery store and gas station. Thompson worked his way through college and law school, and at age 24 toppled an incumbent to win a seat in the legislature.

As governor, Thompson was so popular that people called him "Governor for Life." His work-driven welfare reforms reduced caseloads by 90 percent and became a national model. He went on to overhaul the state's health care system with a "BadgerCare" program that made low-income working families eligible for health insurance. If a particular program didn't work, Hefty says, Thompson would simply scrap it and start again.

It's an approach that's been hard to duplicate at HHS. Indeed, much of Thompson's success in Wisconsin was built on throwing out federal rules. He asked for more waivers from federal regulations than any other governor, and chafed at how slowly HHS granted them. In his book Power to the People: An American State at Work (HarperCollins, 1996), he disparaged Washington as "Disneyland East."

Now he's been put in charge of the very agency that used to exasperate him. His instincts as a governor have both helped and hurt. His public speaking skills and his passion for helping people have won praise. He's gone on a diet and challenged all department employees to lose weight. He's embraced prevention as the key to controlling health care costs, launching celebrity and media campaigns to warn Americans about diabetes, smoking and obesity. He's thrown himself into promoting organ donation and fighting breast cancer.

Thompson strikes many as the antithesis of a bureaucrat. "The reaction to him is that he is very open and he's a quick study," says Dick Davidson, president of the American Hospital Association. "He understands very complex issues. And he likes to listen."

But his tendency to micromanage has ruffled feathers. Thompson set out to practically reinvent HHS, telling senior managers bluntly that "if they are not living on the edge, they are taking up too much room." His first target was the agency known until recently as the Health Care Financing Administration, which manages Medicare, Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program. According to Thomas Scully, the agency's administrator, Thompson told him bluntly on arriving at HHS: "I hate HCFA."

Thompson renamed HCFA the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and reorganized it to respond better to beneficiaries and providers. The response time for a written inquiry has been slashed from 80 days to less than 20 days, he brags, and he wants it down to 10 days.

CMS also has rolled out a simpler enrollment form for doctors and has invited providers to a roundtable once a month to hash out ways to ease regulatory burdens. The agency is handing out waivers at a rapid rate, encouraging states to experiment and find ways to cover prescription drugs for Medicare recipients-even as lawmakers on Capitol Hill continue to argue over a federal drug benefit.

But Thompson's "one department" initiative, which will centralize many HHS functions now handled by individual divisions, has been controversial. All public affairs and legislative affairs activities, for example, are being brought under Thompson's watchful eye. The initiative reflects Thompson's sense that HHS was a department verging on managerial chaos when he took over. As he describes it, e-mail systems were separated by floor, hundreds of press and public affairs personnel were scattered from Atlanta to Baltimore, and HHS had no fewer than 2,000 Web sites totaling about a billion pages.

"My top management objective is to build an integrated department-one computer system, one bookkeeping system, and to build an integrated approach to handling the operations of the 300-plus programs to be administered," he told Government Executive.

But some on Capitol Hill fear that consolidating communications and press operations, in particular, will backfire and create bottlenecks.

"I'm concerned about whether or not this will add an additional layer of review by the secretary's office," said Sen. Max Cleland, D-Ga., during an April hearing by the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. Centralizing communications, Cleland warned, might slow the flow of information from federal health experts to their state and local counterparts-a major problem during the anthrax episode.

Some wonder whether the top-down management style that worked for Thompson as governor is even adaptable to HHS. In contrast to Shalala, whose natural instinct as former chancellor of the University of Wisconsin was to delegate authority, Thompson has "made a lot of moves to get control of things," observes ex-Surgeon General David Satcher. Yet it may not be possible to administer an agency as far-flung as HHS in quite that way, some observers say.

Thompson's instinct for seizing the microphone served him poorly during the anthrax crisis. He overstated U.S. preparedness and speculated that the first anthrax victim may have contracted the illness by drinking from a stream. Members of Congress have since given Thompson an earful on the need to let credible, knowledgeable health officials speak during a crisis.

Thompson, to be sure, has received kudos for setting up an Office of Public Health Preparedness to coordinate and oversee bioterrorism response. Its first director was smallpox vaccine pioneer Dr. D.A. Henderson, who agreed to serve for six months. Thompson later named Jerome Hauer, his adviser for national security and emergency management, to succeed Henderson. Hauer now has been elevated to acting assistant secretary for public health emergency preparedness.

Even Thompson's harshest critics have been impressed with how quickly he's moved federal dollars into the hands of state public health officials. The administration has set aside $1.1 billion to help states respond to terrorism and has asked for another $4.3 billion for fiscal 2003, a 45 percent increase. HHS gave states 20 percent of the initial outlay right away, asking state officials to submit comprehensive plans for how they would strengthen and unify their public health systems. HHS approved those plans in June and will now distribute the remaining 80 percent of the funds.

"I think this is the fastest that money has ever gone from the federal government to the states," says Muhammad Akhter, executive director of the American Public Health Association. Akhter's group has faulted the administration on several fronts, including its failure to fill top HHS vacancies. But Akhter has high praise for Thompson: "He's done more for building public health infrastructure in his first year and a half than many people have done in their entire term."

MISSING PLAYERS

Even Thompson acknowledges, however, that the nation is underprepared for a bioterrorist attack. At the April hearing, Chairman Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., asked Thompson to rate national preparedness for a bioterror attack on a scale of one to 10. "Once the money is out, I would say we're at six, going on seven," Thompson replied.

The public health system has been neglected for so long that even the administration's substantial investments are a down payment at best, experts say. The nation's hospitals, front-line responders in disasters, remain understaffed and overcrowded. Just equipping hospitals to handle nuclear, biological and chemical emergencies would cost more than $11 billion, according to the American Hospital Association.

Thompson also is hampered by a lack of coordination at the federal level. He is in regular contact with Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge (a fellow former governor) and with the Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation. But tensions over who's in charge remain unresolved. It's unclear whether President Bush's plan for a Homeland Security Department, which would absorb some HHS activities, would correct these problems.

Thompson doesn't even have a full team to back him up. The Bush administration entered its second year with no one to lead the CDC, FDA, NIH, or the Health Resources and Services Administration. Dr. Jeffrey Koplan resigned as head of the CDC in March, some speculated because of fallout over the anthrax attacks. And Satcher's term as surgeon general ended on Feb. 13.

Bush has since nominated Arizona trauma surgeon Richard Carmona to replace Satcher, and the Senate recently confirmed Johns Hopkins University radiologist Elias Zerhouni to head NIH. In July, Thompson appointed infectious disease expert Dr. Julie Gerberding to head the CDC. She had been in charge of the agency's counterterrorism efforts.

But Thompson has complained openly about the slow pace of filling vacancies, saying it would never be tolerated in the private sector. Thompson has attempted to move the process along. Last fall he recommended that the White House appoint Lester Crawford, a veterinarian with a doctorate in pharmacology, to be FDA commissioner. But the administration has named Crawford deputy commissioner to run the agency until a permanent FDA chief is found.

Some speculate that the problem lies with ideological litmus tests imposed by the White House, which has waded into one controversy after another, from stem cells to cloning to contraceptives. The selection of who will head top HHS agencies "is clearly not his call," says one health care lobbyist of Thompson.

The vacancies might also be a failure of recruitment. After leaving HHS, Shalala reflected that one of the key lessons she learned about managing a large bureaucracy was the importance of recruiting agency heads who are both team players and world experts in their fields.

"Everyone has trouble appointing people if you don't get most of it done in the first couple of months," she told Government Executive. "You also need to recruit, not wait to see who's interested. We decided who the best people were, and went after them."

Like Shalala, Thompson has learned that much of federal health and welfare policy comes out of the White House. The Clinton administration left Shalala out of its sweeping-and ultimately unsuccessful-health care reforms. But Thompson does manage to get his oar in. "Watching him in meetings, he is very quick to express the view of those at HHS who advise him, and his own views," says Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn.

Still, plenty of White House heavyweights are working on health care and welfare policy. They include Ron Haskins, a senior adviser to Bush for welfare policy and a former welfare expert with the House Ways and Means Committee-not to mention OMB Director Mitch Daniels, with whom Thompson has reportedly clashed over budgetary constraints.

That might explain why some administration proposals issued with Thompson's signature in Washington differ markedly from the programs he championed in Wisconsin. Known as an independent-minded, "Main Street" Republican, Thompson invested heavily in social programs as governor. He candidly told his fellow governors that it would take extra money to properly reform the welfare system.

But in Washington, the money isn't there. Thompson is working with a flat budget at best. On the health care front, the administration has stressed tax credits that would allow individuals to buy their own insurance coverage. In the welfare arena, the administration wants to boost work requirements from 30 hours to 40 hours per week, but failed at the outset to offer states more child-care funding. The welfare bill recently approved by the House does boost child-care spending somewhat, but some governors remain unsatisfied. They complain that the plan undercuts state flexibility, something Thompson embraced as governor.

"My guess is that left on his own, he might very well pursue a different collection of strategies," says Don Kettl, a professor of public affairs and political science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. "But now he is part of an administration where it is clear that the prime decisions are going to be made by the White House and OMB."

Democrats, in particular, grouse that higher-ups in the administration don't listen to Thompson as much as they should. "I wish he would lead on the subject of health care policy," says Rep. Fortney "Pete" Stark, D-Calif., the ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee. "And I think the administration would end up serving the needs of certain seniors better. They should let Gov. Thompson be Tommy, and then we'd get something done."

At a recent Ways and Means Committee hearing, Stark ribbed Thompson about a recent poll that some Wisconsin Republicans commissioned to see how the former governor would do if he quit the Cabinet and came back to vie for his old job again.

Thompson disavowed the poll. But Wisconsin has no term limit for governors. Noted Kettl: "He could come back and still be 'Governor for Life.'" In the meantime, Thompson is likely to keep up his quips about life in Washington. The only question will be how seriously to take them.

Eliza Newlin Carney is a contributing editor for National Journal. ]]>

IRS to police tax-exempt groups as part of campaign finance reform

Eliza Newlin Carney — Fri, 17 May 2002 00:00:00 -0400

The Federal Election Commission isn't the only agency put on the spot by the new campaign finance law. Also wading into uncharted territory is the Internal Revenue Service, which will be called on to police a new generation of politically active tax-exempt groups.

Such groups are expected to proliferate after November 5, when the national political parties may no longer raise and spend soft money. Experts predict that lawmakers and donors will be tempted to steer huge amounts of soft money into charitable organizations that have a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status, or social welfare organizations with a 501(c)(4) status. Also expected to mushroom are political committees that are tax-exempt under Section 527 of the Internal Revenue Code.

"I expect to see more activity by nonprofit organizations," says Michael J. Malbin, executive director of the Campaign Finance Institute, a nonpartisan research group affiliated with George Washington University.

The soft-money ban's impact on such groups, in fact, will generate more controversy and debate than any other aspect of the new campaign finance regime, predicts Frances R. Hill, a University of Miami law professor. "That will be the burning issue: the disclosure of the sources and uses of the money" by tax-exempt organizations, says Hill, who warns that elected officials in particular will try to turn nonprofits into conduits for political money.

By law, 501(c)(3) charities can't engage in political campaign activities, but 501(c)(4) groups may do so as long as political campaigning is not their primary activity. But the rules that define political activity are ambiguous, and political players have a history of exploiting nonprofits.

Tax-exempt charities and social welfare organizations, for example, engage in voter mobilization, and "issue advertising." Many might be tempted to skirt ever closer to the line of helping or hurting a candidate, especially because these tax-exempt organizations, unlike the so-called 527 groups, are subject to few disclosure rules.

Some campaign finance watchdogs say the IRS already is doing a dismal job of regulating politically active nonprofits. A year after Congress passed tough new disclosure rules for 527 groups, the IRS has failed to furnish even basic information about these organizations, charged a recent study by the nonprofit group Public Citizen.

Political committees that are tax free under Section 527 are, by definition, set up to influence elections. Many 527 groups, such as party committees, simply report to the FEC. But a new breed of 527s claim to be exempt from FEC rules, saying they are engaged in "issues," not elections. These groups must at least report to the IRS.

"There is a clear and present danger that 527 groups will become surrogates for outlawed soft money," Public Citizen President Joan Claybrook said at the April press conference to release the study. The report charged that organizations often can't be found on the IRS Web site because its database is not searchable and the agency has mangled more than a few names. Dozens of groups file late, incomplete reports, according to Public Citizen, and many do not file at all. But the IRS has yet to take a single enforcement action against a 527 group.

Some of the report's findings were comical. In one case, an unidentified group repeatedly wrote "does not apply" on its disclosure form, prompting the IRS to create in its database a phantom organization dubbed "Does Not Apply."

IRS officials declined to comment on the Public Citizen report. On May 2, however, the agency announced steps to bolster disclosure and enhance enforcement. The agency will waive taxes, penalties, and interest for late-filing 527 groups if they submit required forms by July 15. A senior IRS official, citing "some confusion" among political committees about filing requirements for 527s, said the new voluntary compliance program will help make records available before the election.

Tax law experts predicted as early as a year ago that the IRS would have trouble enforcing the new disclosure rules. Unlike the FEC, the IRS does not have the experience or the infrastructure to function as a public-disclosure agency. If anything, the culture of the IRS has been one of guarding taxpayers' privacy.

"It's disclosure in name only," Malbin said of the IRS's Web site for 527s. "If you do not know the name of the organization you want, you cannot find it." Malbin's institute is preparing recommendations for improving disclosure by 527 groups. Options include making the FEC and IRS political-money databases compatible and making information available through a single government portal.

Congress, too, is considering revisions to its 527 disclosure law--revisions that might actually do more harm than good. Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, and Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., have authored a bill that would encourage electronic filing by 527s, among other improvements. But because the bill would also relieve some local groups from reporting to the IRS if they already disclose at the state level, some watchdog organizations warn that this could create a new loophole for groups that want to operate in secret.

Experts say that the IRS will have its hands full tracking all the politically active nonprofits: 527s, 501(c)(3)s, and 501(c)(4)s. The tax agency's challenge will be to prevent abuses of the new election law while also protecting the constitutional right of citizens to organize in private. "It is extraordinarily difficult to be a federal agency with the task of oversight in this area," Hill said.

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Clinton and Congress: It could get even nastier

Eliza Newlin Carney and Alexis Simendinger — Mon, 09 Nov 1998 00:00:00 -0500

It's tempting to see the recent election as a sign that Washington may be ready to stop squabbling and finally get something done. Chastened Republicans will be under huge pressure to dispatch an impeachment inquiry the voters have overwhelmingly rejected. President Clinton, boosted by his party's surprisingly strong showing on Election Day, is primed to cooperate with congressional Democrats-and he is driven by a personal imperative: to be judged a major figure flawed by minor scandal, rather than the reverse. And the issues on the table-Social Security, education, fiscal policy-are ones that both parties claim to champion.

But don't expect sweetness, light and substantive legislation in 1999. If anything, the 106th Congress may be nastier and (if such a thing is possible) less productive than the one that just ended. Republicans now barely control the House (and the Republican leadership barely controls its own infuriated members), which guarantees frequent clashes with the minority. Filibusters will continue to bog down the Senate, and President Clinton remains a lame duck. Even if Republicans wrap up the impeachment inquiry as early as January, other investigations will drag on. Unfinished campaign finance probes, for one, will continue to feed Congress's well-established addiction to scandal politics.

Former White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta predicts that the election results will actually make Republicans more combative: "I suspect that rather than less trench warfare, trench warfare is probably going to continue, with both sides maybe using different grenades."

And then there looms the 2000 election, with its inevitable attendant pressure toward polarized politics. Most in Washington agree that Congress will have, at best, until next August to get any work done before presidential politics take over completely. "This is a Congress that has to squeeze two years into eight months," noted Ed Gillespie, president of the Washington public affairs firm Policy Impact Communications and a former House GOP and Republican National Committee aide.

And this Congress will be behind before it begins. Normally, congressional leaders spend the weeks following an election hammering out their agendas and laying the ground work for coming policy battles. This year, that crucial window will be closed by 1) Republican internecine warfare and 2)the impeachment inquiry.

Centrism or Civil War?

To be sure, some observers predict significant achievements from the 106th Congress. The great GOP hope-a substantial tax cut-is now more critical to embattled Republican leaders than ever. A slow-growth economy could give ambitious GOP tax relief the popular boost it clearly needs. Other bills that came within an inch of passing this year, including patient protection legislation and a banking system overhaul, could go over the top in 1999. There may also be room for middle-ground achievement on education.

"With close majorities in the Congress, that might be an incentive for Congress to be more like the country and have the center be stronger," said Al From, president of the Democratic Leadership Council, who touted the strong Election Day showing by centrist Democrats. "That might make for bipartisan compromises on issues like Social Security reform."

But the 1998 election hinged on each side's turnout of core voters, and this both underscores and heightens the degree to which the two parties are defined by the need to appeal to their ideological activists. That does not bode well for bipartisan legislative achievement. Moreover, practical and political obstacles will make it hard for either party to achieve its policy goals.

For one thing, the dominant issues are, in themselves, polarizing. The Republicans' desire for a tax cut runs smack up against Clinton's call to "save" the budget surplus for Social Security. The two parties remain far apart on how to rescue the retirement system from going broke, and political risks on both sides could paralyze the process. Republicans reasonably fear that if they push for privatization, Clinton will accuse them of robbing old people's pensions; Democrats reasonably fear that blocking tax cuts in the name of saving Social Security will stick them with the "big-spender" label.

Nor does either party enjoy unanimity. Republicans, in particular, enter the postelection era a divided party-even on the defining issue of tax cuts. Will it be an across-the-board income tax rate reduction, as House Budget Committee Chairman (and presidential hopeful) John R. Kasich, R-Ohio, urges? Or will social conservatives get their wish for an end to the marriage penalty tax? It's anybody's guess.

"The continuous battle cry for tax cuts remains little more than a rhetorical flourish, completely unbacked by any specific hammering out of policy details," complained Lawrence Kudlow, chief economist for Shelton (Conn.)-based American Skandia Life Assurance Co., and a former Office of Management and Budget official under President Reagan. "And that rhetorical flourish masks the fact that within the caucus, the Republicans are divided."

At bottom, Republicans are still adjusting to life in the majority. Their disastrous face-off with President Clinton in the previous Congress, which led to government shutdowns, for which Republicans were blamed, has left GOP leaders gun-shy and tentative in their dealings with the White House.

"Forty years out of power can have an enormous amount of impact on the ability of a party to take up the governing reins," said Richard F. Fenno Jr., a political science professor at the University of Rochester. "They're just incredibly inexperienced."

Clinton's Last Chance

Continued GOP flailing, in fact, seems likely to put the ball back in Clinton's court. The Republicans may be the majority party, but Clinton is right when he says that Democrats are driving the issues agenda-because now that Clinton has co-opted the more popular aspects of Republicanism and moved his party to the right, the Democratic agenda is the agenda of the middle, where moderates of both parties say they're comfortable. The election results this week reconfirmed what sells in America when times are good. "In a way, the momentum is back in the White House after four years of essentially being in Congress; the Republicans are now on the defensive," said University of Pittsburgh political scientist Bert A. Rockman.

Nothing significant will change about the issues platform Clinton and the Democrats laid out for 1998; it was crafted for unity and poll-tested for public appeal. Social Security solvency, education, health care and children's issues worked for the president before anyone heard of Monica Lewinsky, and the agenda buoyed him after the public said it had had enough of the intern scandal.

"We know what we want to do," said a White House official. "And obviously there will be a big push on for new ideas for next year."

The question in the White House after Election Tuesday was not how the president would proceed but where Republicans were heading.

If Clinton can help keep the economy humming, maintain an activist presidency and keep his job-approval numbers up, he has some inherent advantages over congressional Republicans. First, as he has done in the past, Clinton will be able to exploit the Republicans' mistakes. "The man is clearly a master of taking the lay of the land as given him, and making something positive out of it," said Democratic Leadership Council Policy Director Ed Kilgore.

Second, the president gets a head start. He has the bully pulpit and more than two months until Congress gets down to legislative business. That's a lot of time to occupy the policy mainstream and to shape public sentiment. Democrats and the White House will want to rack up a quick legislative win early in the new year, and the best candidate may be the managed care patients' bill of rights legislation that bogged down in 1998.

Third, Clinton and the Democrats are relatively united. He will have fewer problems, at least for the moment, with the fringes of his own party than the Republicans will have with theirs.

And fourth, Clinton wants to legislate in 1999 because he needs to. He must show more for his second term than white-knuckle survival and the permanent campaign. After tossing away his sixth year on scandal, the president desperately needs a few legislative achievements to give the historians something else to chew on.

"He wants to be at least a near-great President, and if, in the next couple years, he can get something done in the face of the pressures from the liberals, and the need for Republican support," Clinton might succeed, said University of Wisconsin political scientist Charles O. Jones.

But first, there's the little matter of impeachment. "That will be the first important skirmish in the battle for control of the Republican caucus," said Democratic pollster Mark S. Mellman.

The election results and exit polling would suggest that the GOP should search for the quickest conclusion of the impeachment debate. For the president, there is no better moment to tiptoe toward some compromise sanction, but even his friends worry that he'll read the Nov. 3 results as an excuse to stand and fight. White House aides say they've been talking quietly to lawmakers of both parties for six weeks about a plea bargain, and the last thing they want now is a Clinton newly emboldened to gamble on a winner-take-all victory.

Even if a deal is worked out, the bitter battle that would precede it would be a bad way to start the 106th Congress. Without Republican determination to cooperate, Clinton's last two years of governing will not be remembered for major legislative accomplishments. Yet that cooperation may be harder to achieve than ever.

The Election Begins

What is more, Democratic unity behind a New Democratic legislative agenda may be short-lived. Party liberals-from labor unions to African-American and women voters-who delivered key victories on Election Day, are likely to regard 1999 as payback time. And no matter how quickly Republicans move on impeachment, Clinton must continue to rely on his party's left flank for political cover in the near term.

In the run-up to 2000, the White House may also resist any but the most liberal-friendly policies, for fear of turning the Democratic base against Vice President Al Gore as he seeks the presidential nomination. This dynamic will intensify if House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt, D-Mo., throws his hat into the ring.

"Watching the House Democrats is going to be like watching a good soap opera: It's nasty, but interesting," said John J. Pitney Jr., associate professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. "Obviously the infighting is going to increase. Gore and Gephardt are going to try to pull one-upmanship on one another. And eventually, the criticism is going to break out into the open."

That is, unless Gephardt decides, as some already suggest he will, that he has a better chance at winning the speaker's seat in 2000's Democratic-majority House than at unhorsing heir-apparent Gore.

As the 106th Congress unfolds, skirmishing will intensify. On the one hand, both Republicans and Democrats will want to be able to point to concrete achievements as evidence of their worthiness to occupy the White House. On the other hand, with no fewer than eight potential presidential contenders in both chambers, petty squabbles and popularity contests are inevitable.

Ultimately though, the presidential contest will only emphasize the diminishing importance of what happens inside the Beltway. Republicans are already pointing to their governors as the party's next standard-bearers. As the presumed GOP presidential front-runner, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, who won re-election with 69 percent of the vote, epitomizes the pragmatic, centrist style that many Republicans think their party now needs.

Already there is sniping between Republican governors and their counterparts on Capitol Hill, and that sort of thing is bound to continue in the spree of blame-mongering that Republicans were deep into within hours of the polls closing on Tuesday. Gingrich, gamely, declared his joy at the opportunity to learn leadership from his brethren in the hinterlands. "We will be working very closely with the Republican governors," he said in a conference call on the day after the election. "And the model they show of reforming government and cutting taxes is the model for effective Republicanism."

Of course, in the end, a do-nothing 106th Congress may be exactly what voters want. More than anything, the recent election signaled public satisfaction with the status quo. "We live in a time that's marked by murky centrism; but given peace and prosperity, there's no great protest," observed Marshall Wittmann, director of congressional relations at the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation. "It's a formula that's worked for both Clinton and Republican governors."

The next two years will be, one way or another, eventful. Historic impeachment proceedings, GOP leadership struggles and a contest over the future of the Democratic Party will ensure, if nothing else, at least plenty of noise and heat. But for light, and for meaningful changes in public policy, wait until 2001.

Julie Kosterlitz contributed to this story.

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Counterdevolution

Eliza Newlin Carney — Mon, 13 Apr 1998 00:00:00 -0400

For four years in a row, the Indiana legislature has tackled the emotionally charged issue of drunk driving, haggling over whether to reduce the legal blood alcohol limit from 0.10 to 0.08 per cent. So far, opponents of the change have prevailed. But state officials may have debated the issue for the last time. That's because Congress may decide it for them.

Last month, the Senate voted to withhold transportation funding from states that fail to lower their blood alcohol limits to 0.08 per cent. House members have thus far resisted the lower limit, but sponsors vow to push for it in House-Senate negotiations. Even for the Indiana officials who support tough new drunk-driving rules, the Senate vote came as a shock.

"You wonder, then, why did the legislature bother to debate it four years in a row?" said Paul Helmke, the mayor of Fort Wayne, Ind., and president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. "The problem is that when we decide these things at a national level, we're adopting a one-size-fits-all approach that might not make sense everyplace."

Helmke's argument should ring a bell with Republicans on Capitol Hill. Not too long ago, they were singing a very similar tune. Remember devolution? That was the Republicans' battle cry when they seized control of Congress four years ago. The GOP majority's "New Federalism"--handed down from President Reagan and from President Nixon before him--was supposed to banish bureaucracy and waste by devolving power back to the states.

Republicans would deliver "a smaller government financed by lower taxes that engages the American people with greater respect and greater freedom to conduct their own affairs," declared House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey, R-Texas, at the time of the GOP takeover.

That was the theory, at least. In practice, the devolution revolution has largely fizzled. Except for passing welfare reform in 1996 and a bill a year earlier that banned "unfunded" federal mandates on the states, congressional Republicans have given up little federal power. This year, in fact, they're poised to usurp state authority on several fronts, from juvenile crime to electric utility deregulation to property rights.

"It's very disappointing to hear a lot of high-flown talk about devolution and then not see the reality," said Lucy Allen, the mayor of Louisburg, N.C. She's one of dozens of mayors, state legislators and governors alarmed by Congress's growing penchant for preempting their power.

The "counterdevolution" trend, as local officials call it, has particularly stung GOP governors, who also swept to a majority in 1994. Two years ago, they stood shoulder to shoulder with Republicans in Congress to usher through welfare reform. Now, the alliance between Republican leaders and their counterparts outside the Beltway is crumbling.

"The [federal] mandate has given way to the preemption," said Gov. Mike Leavitt, R-Utah. "Both have the effect of stifling local government and state government. And I honestly believe that that is contrary to the wishes of the people."

If national Democrats once burdened the states with rigid social-welfare directives, governors complain, the Republicans now want to be the nation's zoning and tax commissioner. They're telling states what they can't do--restrict local development, for example, or tax the booming Internet industry.

To some degree, Republicans at the federal level just can't resist doing things their way. As James Madison observed, the natural tendency of government is "to throw all power into the legislative vortex." After all, said Washington lawyer and devolution expert Charles J. Cooper, "federalism is a principle of convenience."

Congressional Republicans, moreover, owe divided allegiances. Their cozy relationship with big business increasingly trumps their romance with devolution. Corporate interests would rather follow one set of federal rules, not multiple state and local guidelines--making them the natural enemies of federalism. And they've got the big campaign dollars that GOP leaders crave. Most of the bills in Congress that are causing an uproar in city halls today are pro-business measures.

Observed Carl Tubbesing, deputy executive director in Washington for the Denver-based National Conference of State Legislatures: "A proposal like telecommunications reform [or] like electricity deregulation, whether the sponsor intended it or not, attracts all sorts of campaign money."

Mixed Messages

Federalism still has its cheerleaders, of course. The Republican-sponsored 1996 law replacing the social welfare bureaucracy with block grants to the states has been a huge success, said Richard P. Nathan, director of the Rockefeller Institute of Government at the State University of New York (Albany). "I've never seen a period of so much state and local innovation and activism."

And some GOP members of Congress are still fighting the good fight. Rep. Thomas J. Bliley Jr., R-Va., for one, has proposed letting states introduce amendments to the Constitution. Bliley's measure would significantly shift the constitutional balance of power toward the states, its proponents argue.

Sens. Fred D. Thompson, R-Tenn., and Carl Levin, D-Mich., are backing a regulatory reform bill that would make it easier for state and local officials to influence the federal rule-making process. Thompson called the bill "the next step" to toughen the 1995 unfunded mandates law, which, according to a recent General Accounting Office report, has had little effect on how agencies write their regulations.

Governors welcome Thompson's effort; plenty of Clinton Administration proposals have made their hackles rise. (One example is the Administration's plan to push organ-transplant centers to share donated organs nationally, rather than regionally.) But Thompson's bill would do nothing to rein in what many city officials see as the real source of their headaches: Congress. Even Thompson acknowledged that congressional Republicans' record on states' rights has been "a very mixed bag."

"It's much easier to devolve when somebody else is in power," said Thompson, a staunch states' rights advocate. "When you've got the ball, the temptation is to replace those bad, old regulations with your good, new regulations, instead of sending it back to the states."

This has been a banner year, in fact, for congressional proposals that rankle state and local officials. Among those moving through the House and Senate are:

A juvenile crime bill that offers states millions in federal grant money, but only if they agree to prosecute serious youth offenders as adults. Other mandates involve increased record-keeping, more drug testing and minimum jail times for juveniles. The National District Attorneys Association opposes the bill, as do state law enforcement officials represented by the National Criminal Justice Association.
A bill that would bar state and local governments from taxing any form of Internet commerce for the next three to six years. Many governors and municipal officials warn that the moratorium would cost them millions of dollars in sales tax revenues. Gov. Leavitt calls the Internet tax fight "the most important federalism issue that we've had in decades."
Private-property rights legislation that would allow landowners to bypass state courts and go directly to federal court when they disagree with local zoning decisions. The bill is "an attack on the fundamental rights of local governments when it comes to zoning and local land use issues," said Reginald N. Todd, legislative affairs director of the National Association of Counties (NACo).
A bill that would deregulate the electric utility industry, requiring states to restructure electricity services by the end of 2000. The bill has "tremendous potential tax consequences," said William D. Steinmeier, national chairman of the Jefferson City (Mo.)-based Electric Utility Shareholders Alliance. Many communities rely on property taxes from electric utilities for the bulk of their revenue, Steinmeier pointed out, but that money will be in jeopardy if utilities go out of business because of competition.

Not to mention the preemptive laws already on the books. In 1996, Congress made it a federal crime to possess a gun within 1,000 feet of a school--despite a 1995 Supreme Court ruling that struck down an earlier version of the law, on the grounds that federal meddling wasn't justified. "Now we've got the FBI going into the little red school houses on gun cases," said Thompson. "That's not the way the FBI is supposed to be used."

Local government officials are still smarting over the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which gave broadcasters and telephone companies wide latitude in deciding where to put up mammoth digital television and cellular phone towers, regardless of whether citizens agreed. Vermont Sens. Patrick J. Leahy, a Democrat, and James M. Jeffords, a Republican, have introduced a bill that would make it easier for citizens to have the final say over tower sitings. Leahy voted against the 1996 law, he said, "because it wiped out all local control."

Add to that Congress's first act this year: a bill to rename Washington National Airport after former President Reagan. State and local officials strenuously objected, citing cost and potential confusion to tourists. The irony of the name change, said Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va., whose district includes the airport, was that Reagan signed into law the bill that transferred control of the airport from the federal government to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority. Reagan "never would have wanted this, I'm sure," Moran said. "It's wholly contrary to his philosophy."

David v. Goliath

State and local government groups, galvanized by what they say is an unprecedented federal power grab, are fighting back. Last month, the National League of Cities declared that "preserving municipal authority" is its highest federal priority for 1998.

"It's a tough time for local governments," said Brian J. O'Neill, a Philadelphia councilman and president of the league. "We're not being brought into the loop. We're not being asked: How would this affect you? Industry writes the bill, industry pressures the Congress and Congress produces the bill. It's a big change from what we've seen for the past couple of hundred years."

The league and other like-minded organizations--including the mayors' conference, the State Legislatures' Conference, NACo and the National Governors' Association--are working together more closely than ever. They're also spending a lot more time in Washington these days.

Federal preemption "is going to be a principal focus of our organizations over the next several years," said NACo's Todd. "If you don't have authority to run your governments, then what else do you really have?"

But local officials are vastly outgunned when it comes to battles over land use, zoning and taxes. Take the pending Property Rights Implementation Act, known as the "takings" bill because it aims to enforce the constitutional ban on the government's taking of private property without just compensation.

The nation's developers, led by the National Association of Home Builders, have waged an aggressive lobbying campaign for the bill, which has passed the House and awaits Senate action. The Home Builders' political action committee gave $594,250 in campaign contributions last year alone. It also doled out $90,000 in "soft money" to the political parties. Developers argue that property owners who disagree with local zoning decisions now languish in state court for years without recourse and should be allowed to go straight to federal court.

Municipal officials, however, say that citizens know best whether a mega-mall belongs in a residential neighborhood, or an adult movie house near a school. Zoning disputes, in fact, go to the heart of what local governance is all about, municipal officials say. They argue that developers who win the power to sue in federal court may be ill-inclined to negotiate with local citizens.

"Faced with the prospect of a costly and time-consuming federal court lawsuit, local officials inevitably would feel pressure to approve land use proposals to avoid litigation, even if the proposed use might harm neighboring property owners and the community at large," warned the Justice Department in a February memo to Leahy, who opposes the bill.

City officials in Hudson, Ohio, know about costly lawsuits with developers. They've spent close to $400,000 since July 1996 on a legal battle with developers who objected to a city growth-management ordinance, enacted in May of that year. The suit, spearheaded by the Home Builders Association of Greater Akron, eventually ended in Hudson's favor. But it cost the city time and money that would have been better spent on traffic, road and sewer improvements, said city manager James C. Smith.

The takings bill is unlikely to become law. Leahy, who says the measure "would have just totally trampled any local control," has threatened a filibuster, and the White House has promised a veto.

More likely to win approval this year is the Internet Tax Freedom Act, introduced by Rep. C. Christopher Cox, R-Calif., and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. The legislation pits state and local officials against an even more formidable foe than the nation's developers: the telecommunications industry.

Despite some key differences, both the Cox and Wyden bills aim to shield the Internet from burdensome new state and local taxes. They would place a moratorium on new Internet taxes until tax rules can be updated to fit the new technology. President Clinton, long a friend of Silicon Valley, has endorsed the legislation.

Though some governors--those from states with booming communications sectors--support the bill, most have reacted with panic. State and local governments depend on sales taxes and excise taxes for up to 50 per cent of their revenue. A tax-free Internet will attract more and more product sales, governors fear, gutting their tax base. Some see nothing less than the future of local government at stake.

"We're defining right now, I believe, the shape of government in the future," said Leavitt, who has helped spearhead the fight against the bill and warns that a general, national sales tax may be in the offing.

Who collects taxes is a key question that defines the state-federal relationship, foes of the moratorium agree. "It's always kind of a slippery slope," said Sen. Byron L. Dorgan, D-N.D., a bill opponent. "I worry that if we do something that dramatically reduces the state and local tax base, it's going to have long-term ramifications for how we construct tax revenue systems at both the state and federal level."

A complication for governors is that catalogue merchants--unless they have a physical presence in the states where they sell products--are not now subject to sales taxes. Governors are working with Cox on a compromise that would revamp catalogue and Internet sales-tax rules in one fell swoop. But the measure's future is uncertain, and Wyden is resistant.

Wyden's got plenty of powerful allies. The Internet tax bill is backed by a heavy-hitting coalition that includes America Online, International Business Machines Corp., MCI Communications Corp. and Microsoft Corp. Altogether, communications and electronics interests gave out a whopping $24 million in contributions to candidates and political parties in the 1996 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington nonprofit group.

"I sometimes feel like we're a fifth-grade football team taking on NFL teams," said Frank H. Shafroth, director of policy and federal relations at the National League of Cities.

Free Markets or Federalism?

Shafroth and other champions of state and local authority, however, acknowledge that larger economic forces--not just campaign contributions--are driving the anti-federalist movement.

A high-technology global economy demands uniform standards, and is not sensitive to state and local boundaries. And international trade treaties invariably preempt state environmental and health rules. "The American economy is changing very, very fast," Shafroth said. "And money and goods can now move around the world. It makes the concept of borders, whether it's between cities, between states or between countries, harder and harder to find."

Defending federalism, moreover, is tricky business. While the Constitution's 10th Amendment protects states' right to self-governance, the commerce clause gives the national government authority to wipe out state-imposed trade barriers. Many business-related policy issues, such as electricity deregulation, arguably relate to interstate commerce. The Constitution also protects property rights, as advocates of the takings bill like to point out.

"Republicans, in principle, certainly libertarian Republicans, don't stand any more for local tyranny than we do for federal tyranny," said Roger Pilon, director of the libertarian Cato Institute's Center for Constitutional Studies. "We're against tyranny, wherever it comes from."

Still, Pilon deplores what he called congressional Republicans' "rank hypocrisy" in areas like the gun-free schools law. GOP leaders "are responding to the maelstrom of political pressures, without any constitutional compass to guide them through the thicket," Pilon complained.

Even when members of Congress see a constitutional reason to meddle in state affairs, some federalism experts argue, they should proceed with caution. "It's very hard to say that Congress doesn't have the raw power, and it's legitimate that that power be exercised" in areas such as interstate commerce, said Cooper, a partner with the Washington law firm of Cooper, Carvin & Rosenthal. "At the same time, a Congress genuinely devoted to respecting the rights of the states would exercise that power very carefully, and very grudgingly."

Mayors, state legislators and governors, in fact, may have more sway on Capitol Hill than they realize. They represent local constituents with the power to vote members of Congress in and out of office.

When 3,000 mayors and city officials descended on Washington for the National League of Cities' legislative conference last month, a delegation of them dropped in on Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss. Before the league members went home, Lott made them a public promise on the Internet tax bill: "We will not have any action in the Senate until we have worked out an agreement that you are comfortable with and you think is right for your people."

House leaders, too, are beginning to voice concerns about slapping new drunk-driving rules on states. They may beat back the Senate's lower blood alcohol limit in the upcoming House-Senate conference to finalize this year's transportation spending bill.

That should come as a relief to Wisconsin GOP Gov. Tommy G. Thompson, who called the Senate's use of transportation dollars to dictate state drunk-driving policy "a bad, bad precedent." Fortunately for Thompson, the fight over drunk-driving laws is one that, for once, places governors on the same side as an influential business lobby: the alcoholic beverage industry.

Increasingly, however, GOP members of Congress face a choice between satisfying their friends in big business and pleasing their friends in the statehouses. It may be impossible for them to consistently do both.

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GOP Seeks to Cure Its `Woman Problem'

Eliza Newlin Carney — Mon, 12 Aug 1996 00:00:00 -0400

Alarmed by a gender gap that seriously threatens the Republican ticket, GOP leaders are handing women a celebrity role at this week's convention.

But podium appearances by an impressive roster of prominent Republican women--including a keynote address tomorrow by Rep. Susan Molinari, R-N.Y.--may do little to offset what has become a big ``woman problem'' for the GOP.

Polls indicate that Republican challenger Robert Dole trails President Clinton by as much as 27 percentage points among women voters. While women have tilted toward the Demo- crats for as long as 15 years, never has the gender gap yawned this wide in a presidential race.

``If this gap continues, it could very well be that women are the deciding factor in this election,'' Debbie Walsh, acting director of Rutgers University's Center for the American Woman and Politics, said.

Leaders from both parties are aggressively wooing women voters, but for Republicans, the courtship has taken on special urgency. GOP officials have set out to ensure that this week's convention, in particular, conveys a message that's appealing to women. Besides choosing Molinari as their keynoter, convention organizers have assigned plum speaking roles to Rep. Jennifer B. Dunn, R-Wash., Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, Rep. Deborah Pryce, R-Ohio, and New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, among others.

Hutchison and Dunn also are spearheading a nationwide effort to identify 1.5 million new women voters by November and urge them to vote Republican. They are national chairwoman and co- chairwoman, respectively, of a drive (dubbed ``Fighting Back to Close the Gap'') organized by the National Federation of Republican Women (NFRW), an affiliate of the Republican National Committee.

Republicans point out that the gender gap cuts both ways. President Clinton trails Dole among male voters, for example, by an estimated 10 per cent. Conservatives also insist that the party's hard-line anti-abortion stance (the platform calls for a constitutional amendment outlawing abortions in all circumstances) is not what's driving women away.

``My opinion of the gender gap is that it is real, but it has nothing to do with abortion,'' Phyllis Schlafly, president of the conservative Eagle Forum, said. ``Republicans mishandled [the] medicare [issue], and there are a lot of very senior women who are very nervous about medicare.'' Schlafly also noted that polls show support for abortion rights is actually stronger among men than among women.

Polls also indicate that abortion ranks far behind the economy, education, crime and health care in its importance to women voters. A bigger problem for Republicans may be that women appear to link Dole with a Republican-controlled 104th Congress that they perceive as too eager to dismantle the government safety net.

``I think women feel economically insecure, even in times of good economic forecasts,'' said Walsh, of the Center for the American Woman and Politics. ``I think that women feel personally closer to the edge of economic insecurity than men. And I think the talk about withdrawing economic security nets strikes closer to home [for women], and they are uneasy about it.''

In San Diego, many moderate Republican women also complain that their party has been taken over by social conservatives. ``John and Jane Republican are really frightened by the ideological rigidity of the extreme Right,'' said Anne Findlay Patton, co-chairwoman of the Republican Task Force of the San Diego Women's Political Caucus, an affiliate of the Washington- based, nonpartisan National Women's Political Caucus.

But while abortion may not be the biggest issue hurting Dole among women, it has escalated into a serious problem. To Patton and other moderates, the prime example of conservatives' hold on the GOP is the victory by abortion opponents in last week's Platform Committee debate.

Dole's handling of the issue alienated women on both sides of the debate. He initially insisted on platform language stating the party's tolerance of diverse views on abortion. But, under pressure from social conservatives, he backed down. Instead the platform will include only an appendix of defeated amendments on various issues, including abortion.

The gender gap ``was already a smoldering fire,'' said Republican pollster Kellyanne Fitzpatrick. ``But the oil that was thrown on top of it was the abortion issue.'' The flare-up could have been avoided, Fitzpatrick thinks, if Dole's stance had been firmer. ``Had he not misstepped on articulating his position on abortion and on finessing the platform language, all of this would have been a two-day story.''

The problem ``is not that Republicans want to restrict abortions,'' argues Candy L. Strait, a Republican delegate from New Jersey and a founder of the WISH List (Women in the Senate and House), a political action committee that supports Republican women who favor abortion rights. ``It's that you have Bob Dole, who opposes abortion except in cases of rape, incest and the life of the mother, running on a platform that wants to make abortions illegal in every instance. By changing his position on abortion, [Dole] magnifies the problem for himself.''

Republican strategists hope that Dole's new message of tax relief and economic growth will prove more compelling to women than do differences over abortion. ``We feel that if women understand that the women's issue is more than just the `Big A' question, that we'll be able to close that gap,'' NFRW president Marilyn R. Thayer said. ``And that's our mission.''

Even if this week's convention succeeds in giving Dole a bounce among women, however, the GOP's woman problem won't going away anytime soon. ``I think that the gender gap is a permanent feature of our politics,'' said analyst Karlyn H. Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. ``It's going to be a difficult problem for the Republicans.''

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Cheers and Some Fears on Capitol Hill

Eliza Newlin Carney and National Journal — Sat, 10 Aug 1996 00:00:00 -0400

On the one hand, Republicans who took control of the House and Senate last year have defined the agenda for the party and, some would argue, for the nation. Their stated goals--reining in the federal government, balancing the budget, reforming welfare and defending traditional family values--form the core of Dole's campaign. Even Clinton--rhetorically at least--has backed key parts of the GOP agenda.

On the other hand, Capitol Hill Republicans are plagued by charges of extremism that have frayed their relations with Dole and given Democrats a shot at winning back the House. The House Republican Contract With America, which made such a splash early in the 104th Congress, was quickly overshadowed by GOP lawmakers' role in the budget stalemate and the ensuing government shutdown.

House Republicans, in particular, have discovered the perils of reaching too far, too fast. Their commander in chief, Speaker Gingrich, is hugely unpopular in the polls. The architects of the contract badly overestimated the electorate's appetite for change, some political analysts say. A June Washington Post poll suggested that key swing groups, including senior citizens and white Catholics, are fleeing from the House Republicans.

``There has been a fundamental flip-flop here in the [voters'] views of the Republican Party and of Congress,'' Stuart Rothenberg, a political analyst and publisher of The Rothenberg Political Report, said.

Many voters, he added, view congressional Republicans as ``too partisan, too ideological, too intolerant and too conservative. Maybe that's not fair. Maybe that's a caricature of the Republicans. But that's what the voters think.''

So what happened to the GOP revolution? Many Capitol Hill Republicans argue that their agenda, as articulated in the contract, is as popular as ever. ``Nobody's going to run away from the Contract With America,'' a Republican congressional leadership aide promised.

Many Republicans acknowledge, though, that while their message may have been popular, it was badly delivered. "I think what the congressional Republicans have done has exceeded any reasonable expectation. We have won the debate on substance,'' Rep. Sherwood L. Boehlert of New York, a leading GOP moderate, said. ``We have been edged out on style.''

Republicans both on and off Capitol Hill have set out to tone down their rhetoric and put a human face on GOP leaders and issues. At the party's convention, in an aggressive television advertising campaign and on Capitol Hill, Republican officials will make a self-conscious effort to highlight how GOP policies help average Americans.

It's an open question whether efforts to polish the congressional Republicans' image will work their magic by November. While party leaders remain confident that they'll increase their majority in both the House and the Senate, Democrats have been adept at exploiting Republican weaknesses.

Despite a whirlwind of votes on the contract and some major legislative accomplishments, including dramatic changes in farm policy, telecommunications law and welfare reform, Republicans have taken many lumps for their performance during the 104th Congress.

Having claimed Capitol Hill as the new center of governance, they took the blame when the budget stalemate shut down the government. The Republicans' austere budget, their talk of a revolution and their assault on environmental programs scared many voters, political observers say.

More than anything, the GOP's attempts to curb the growth of medicare have created damaging fallout. ``They took on the growth of medicare when the groundwork had not really been laid to do so,'' William Kristol, editor and publisher of the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, said in an interview.

``The Republicans were acting out of good motives. They wanted to balance the budget. But it was probably a mistake to allow that to become the central issue of American politics by September of 1995, '' Kristol added.

Now panic has set in among vulnerable Capitol Hill Republicans, and it is compounded by some GOP lawmakers' lack of confidence in Dole. Dole has distanced himself from his former colleagues, some House Members complain. And they contend that he has failed to embrace a congressional agenda that they claim still enjoys wide public support.

``Bob Dole is at the moment not running on the Republican congressional agenda,'' said Rep. John Shadegg, R-Ariz., a leading freshman advocate of a balanced budget. ``He's simply not doing it. Now, if you ask what he is running on, I have to candidly say, I don't know.'' On some issues, he added, Dole ``is running against the congressional agenda. And I think that's a grave mistake.''

Dole's getting an earful of advice from Republicans on Capitol Hill. RNC chairman Barbour and Dole campaign officials meet regularly with House and Senate Members to map out strategy and to craft a coherent GOP message. Congressional leaders have been key architects of the tax cut plan that's emerging as a centerpiece of Dole's campaign.

Even as the presidential campaign heats up, some argue that it's the congressional wing that controls the party's destiny this fall. ``Just as the victory in '94 defined the successes of 1995, the failures of '95 have now carried over into '96,'' Kristol said. ``Dole may be a weak candidate. . . but it is very much the triumph and tragedy of Gingrich and his colleagues that is the dominant political story.''

That could hurt Dole this fall, though Capitol Hill Republicans forcefully deny it. They blame a favorite target--the national news media--for GOP lawmakers' perceived troubles. ``Without question, the majority of our [freshman] class always had support at home for what we were doing,'' said Rep. Sue Myrick, R-N.C., a liaison between the freshmen and the GOP leadership. ``So the only time we felt we were doing a lousy job was when we were inside the Beltway.''

Republicans also blame the AFL-CIO's $35 million pro-Democrat advertising and political mobilization campaign, along with the Democratic National Committee's ``issue'' ads linking Dole with Gingrich.

The slippage in GOP poll numbers ``was a product not of the contract but of Clinton and his advertising arms giving out false information on a massive level regarding what our medicare proposal was,'' Gingrich's spokesman Tony Blankley said.

As for the Speaker, Blankley said that ``Newt is a special case.'' While acknowledging that Gingrich has been bruised by a barrage of Democratic ethics complaints, Blankley said, ``Back home he's doing very well.''

The same is true for dozens of House and Senate Republicans, who may suffer in the polls as a group but remain popular in their districts.

There's little question, though, that winning broad, national support for Capitol Hill Republicans' agenda has proved tougher than many lawmakers expected. In part, that's because the Congress is so diverse that Republicans there rarely speak with one voice, particularly at election time. Also, attempting to govern the nation from Capitol Hill, as Gingrich set out to do, may be a losing battle.

``The House and the Senate are not created to lead,'' said James Thurber, director of the American University's Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies. ``They are created to represent.''

``I think the Republicans lost the budget debate because they overplayed their hand,'' said William F. Connelly, a politics professor at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. ``And they overplayed their hand because they were convinced that following the '94 election, they had created congressional government for the first time in a century--and that the center of government was not only the Congress but the House of Representatives.''

For all their influence in steering the GOP course, Capitol Hill Republicans will have a low profile at the party's national convention except for Rep. Molinari, a moderate. ``Cigar-smoking, middle-aged blue suits are not going to be featured front and center,'' a GOP leadership aide said.

But Members are helping the GOP ticket in other ways. Lawmakers with solid support back home, such as Rep. Jennifer B. Dunn, R-Wash., are planning get-out-the-vote drives on behalf of Dole. ``There are certain states where we will need help from the presidential campaign. There are other states where we will give help to the presidential campaign,'' Dunn said.

Republicans on Capitol Hill have also donated unprecedented sums to party campaign committees. Connie Mack III of Florida is one of several Senators who have donated generously from their own campaign funds to the party. Mack gave $250,000.

Gingrich is one of at least three House leaders who have given $250,000 to the RNC, as part of a massive House drive to raise money for ads touting congressional Republicans' successes. The $8 million campaign, run by the National Republican Congressional Committee in conjunction with the RNC and state party committees, will help the whole GOP ticket, said NRCC chairman Bill Paxon of New York.

House and Senate Republicans have become convinced that their agenda won't fly without a strong presidential candidate. ``At the end of the day, you can't lead the nation from the Congress,'' Shadegg said. ``I think it's extremely important for us to hold the Congress because there's immediate authority here to initiate and to act. But I think to lead the nation, you have to have the presidency.''

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