Government Executive - Authors - Louis Jacobson

A Guide to Help You Keep Up With the Omicron Subvariants

Louis Jacobson, KFF Health News — Mon, 09 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

Two years into the coronavirus pandemic, Americans can be forgiven if they’ve lost track of the latest variants circulating nationally and around the world. We’ve heard of the alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and omicron variants, but a new Greek-letter variant hasn’t come onto the scene in almost half a year.

Instead, a seemingly endless stream of “subvariants” of omicron, the most recent Greek-letter variant, has emerged in the past few months.

How different are these subvariants from one another? Can infection by one subvariant protect someone from infection by another subvariant? And how well are the existing coronavirus vaccines — which were developed before omicron’s emergence — doing against the subvariants?

We asked medical and epidemiological experts these and other questions. Here’s a rundown.

Q: What are the subvariants? How much do they differ from one another?

The omicron subvariants seem like an alphabet soup of letters and numbers. The original omicron variant was called B.1.1.529. The initial omicron variant begat such subvariants as BA.1; BA.1.1; BA.2; BA.2.12.1; BA.3; and the most recent, BA.4 and BA.5.

“They all differ from each other by having different mutations in the spike protein,” which is the part of the virus that penetrates host cells and causes infection, said Dr. Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at the University of California-San Francisco.

The minor-to-modest mutations in these subvariants can make them marginally more transmissible from person to person. Generally, the higher the number following “BA” in the subvariant’s name, the more transmissible that subvariant is. For instance, BA.2 is thought to be about 30% to 60% more transmissible than previous subvariants.

These mutations have enabled subvariants to spread widely, only to be overtaken by a slightly more transmissible subvariant within a few weeks. Then the process repeats.

In the United States, for instance, BA.1.1 was dominant in late January, having overtaken the initial variant, B.1.1.529. But by mid-March, BA.1.1 began losing ground to BA.2, which became dominant by early April. By late April, another subvariant — BA.2.12.1 — was gaining steam, accounting for almost 29% of infections, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (The delta wave of late 2021 has been a non-factor during this time frame.)

Q: What about the severity of illness?

Fortunately, the illnesses caused by omicron have typically been less severe than those caused by previous variants — a pattern that seems to hold for all the subvariants studied so far. One analysis from Denmark showed that BA.2 doesn’t cause more hospitalizations than the BA.1 subvariant, Gandhi said.

Even the most recent subvariants that have been discovered, BA.4 and BA.5, show “no evidence to suggest that it is more worrisome than the original omicron, other than a potentially slight increase in transmissibility,” said Brooke Nichols, an infectious-disease mathematical modeler at Boston University.

Dennis Cunningham, the system medical director of infection control and prevention at Henry Ford Health in Detroit, told NBC News that the symptoms from the omicron subvariants “have been pretty consistent. There’s less incidence of people losing their sense of taste and smell. In a lot of ways, it’s a bad cold, a lot of respiratory symptoms, stuffy nose, coughing, body aches, and fatigue.”

Q: If you get infected by one subvariant, will you be protected against others?

So far, in all variants to date, the ability of the virus to evade existing immune protection “is only partial, much like it is for the seasonal flu,” said Colin Russell, a professor of applied evolutionary biology at the University of Amsterdam’s medical center.

While some people who had BA.1 have also gotten BA.2, the initial research suggests that infection with BA. 1 “provides strong protection against reinfection with BA.2,” the World Health Organization has said.

“This may explain why our BA.2 surge in the U.S. was not that large as the very large BA.1 surge over the winter,” Gandhi said.

The level of protection can vary depending on how sick you were, with mild cases boosting immunity for perhaps a month or two and recovery from a severe illness granting up to a year.

Q: How do existing covid-19 vaccines stack up against these subvariants?

Although the current vaccines and boosters aren’t quite as successful in protecting against omicron as they are against earlier variants, they will generally protect people from severe disease if they are infected by one of the new subvariants.

“We’re steady as she goes with the vaccines we’re using,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and health policy at Vanderbilt University. “I have not seen a single study from the field that shows a substantial distinction between the vaccine responses to omicron subvariants.”

The vaccines generate cells known as “memory B cells” and have been shown to recognize different variants as they emerge, Gandhi said. The vaccines also trigger the production of T cells, which protect against severe disease, she said.

“While B cells serve as memory banks to produce antibodies when needed, T cells amplify the body’s response to a virus and help recruit cells to attack the pathogen directly,” Gandhi said.

The end result is that a breakthrough infection for a vaccinated individual “should remain mild with the subvariants,” she said.

The wide spread in the U.S. of a relatively mild strain of the virus likely paid dividends by providing many Americans with some immunity, whether or not they had been vaccinated. Research shows that people who had been vaccinated and then were infected had even greater protection than people who had been vaccinated and not gotten covid.

“This family of omicron could indeed offer a bright side” in the course of the pandemic, Schaffner said.

Looking ahead, vaccine manufacturers are beginning to design vaccines that specifically target omicron, and some would combine a coronavirus vaccine with a seasonal influenza vaccine in one shot. But these vaccines are in their early stages, and Schaffner said he suspects they won’t be ready and approved by this fall’s flu vaccination season.

Whether such new vaccines represent the next step in the fight against covid will be up to the FDA and the CDC.

Q: Are any entirely new variants on the horizon?

Experts agreed that the only newcomers in recent weeks have been incremental subvariants — certainly nothing that seems as game changing as delta or omicron were when they first appeared.

“There’s nothing we know of that’s lurking yet, and the surveillance is pretty darn aggressive,” Schaffner said.

There are estimates that more than 60% of the world’s population has been exposed to omicron and over 65% of the world’s population has received at least one dose of the vaccine, Gandhi said, “so I am keeping my fingers crossed the development of new variants will slow with this degree of population immunity.”

Gandhi acknowledged some surprise at how quiet the horizon is right now, but she sees it as a positive development.

“We have now gone five months since hearing about a new variant, which I hope is reflective of increasing immunity in the world’s population,” she said.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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Charts Paint a Grim Picture 2 Years Into the Coronavirus Pandemic

Louis Jacobson, KFF Health News — Tue, 08 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0500

The coronavirus pandemic is now stretching into its third year, a grim milestone that calls for another look at the human toll of covid-19, and the unsteady progress in containing it.

The charts below tell various aspects of the story, from the deadly force of the disease and its disparate impact to the signs of political polarization and the United States’ struggle to marshal an effective response.

Covid rocketed up the list of leading killers in the U.S. like nothing in recent memory. The closest analogue was HIV and AIDS, which ranked among the top 10 causes of death from 1990 to 1996. But even HIV/AIDS never reached higher than eighth on that list.

By contrast, covid shot up to third in 2020, its first year of existence, covering only about nine months of the pandemic. Only heart disease and cancer killed more Americans that year.

“The leading causes of death are relatively stable over long periods of time, so this is a very striking result,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and health policy at Vanderbilt University.

Covid generally hit people of color harder, a pattern experts trace back to historical disparities in income, geography, medical access, and educational attainment.

“This tells us something about our society — it’s a kind report card,” Schaffner said. Studies have shown that illness and prevention are even more strongly correlated with educational background than with income.

“There was some effort to correct the disparities,” said Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine. “But these were band-aids on a system that remains broken.”

Older people tend to be more vulnerable to disease than younger people, because of weaker immune systems and underlying health problems. That’s been especially true with covid.

“Many other infections affect the very young and the very old disproportionately, but covid-19 stands out in being so age-dependent,” said Dr. Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at the University of California-San Francisco. “Children were remarkably spared from severe disease in the U.S., as they were worldwide.”

Deaths among older Americans, however, were especially widespread in the early days of the pandemic due to the close contact of seniors living in nursing homes.

“Some will argue that [the] old are frail anyway, but I find that morally repugnant,” Caplan said. The deaths of so many older people “makes me extremely sad.”

The good news, experts say, is that older Americans were the most likely to get vaccinated, with a 91% full vaccination rate for those between ages 65 and 74. This almost certainly prevented many deaths among older people as the pandemic ground on, Schaffner said.

Although the pandemic has had its peaks and valleys, due to largely seasonal factors and the emergence of new variants, it has continued to produce deaths at a fairly steady rate since its beginning two years ago.

The pandemic is “impressive in how it just keeps going,” Schaffner said.

The slow grind is “why we’re exhausted,” Caplan said. “It’s like we can’t make a significant dent, no matter what we do.”

There have been five distinct peaks: the initial one in April 2020, a summer spike in August 2020, a winter spike in January 2021, the initial outbreak of the delta variant in September 2021, and the omicron surge in January 2022.

The on-off nature of the pandemic “has led to a lot of the confusion and grumpiness,” Schaffner said. Caplan compared it to the exhaustion of the American public when hearing body counts during the Vietnam War.

Once a natural disaster like a hurricane or a tornado has passed, Schaffner added, it’s gone and people can rebuild. With covid, it’s just been a matter of time before the next wave arrives. The coronavirus also affected the whole world, unlike a localized disaster.

Such factors “stretched the capacity of the public health system and our governance,” Schaffner said.

Not surprisingly, the number of deaths in each state was heavily dependent on the size of the state’s population. California and Texas each lost more than 80,000 people to covid, while Vermont lost 546.

But once you adjust for population, distinct differences emerge in how various states fared during the pandemic.

The seven states with the worst death rates include densely populated New Jersey, an affluent, educated Northeast state, and Arizona, a fairly diverse Southwestern state. The other five are Southern states that rank among the 11 states with the lowest levels of educational attainment and median income: Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, and West Virginia.

Among the states with the lowest death rates, Hawaii and Alaska (and, to an extent, Vermont and Maine) are isolated and may have had an easier time keeping the virus out.

“For all the grumbling you hear about federal mandates and enforcement, you can’t help but look at this list and see that the pandemic has been handled state by state,” Caplan said.

The world’s performance in battling covid is analogous to the United States’: Some places did it well, and others did not.

And in the international context, the United States’ record was not so hot.

When comparing death rates around the world, it’s clear how much worse the U.S. has fared than other wealthy industrialized nations.

The countries that have a higher death rate than the U.S. are largely medium-size and middle-income. The industrialized Western nations that are the United States’ closest peers all managed to do better, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and Canada.

Meanwhile, other affluent countries did far better than the U.S. did, including Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan (which have more experience with airborne diseases and greater public tolerance for masking), and two island nations: Australia and New Zealand.

In general, Schaffner said, countries that performed better than the U.S. tended to have “sustained, single-source, science-based communication. They communicated well with their populations and explained and justified why they were doing what they were doing.”

It’s impossible to look at the United States’ response to covid without factoring in the extent to which it became politicized. Almost from the beginning, basic communications about the severity of the disease and how to combat its spread broke down along partisan lines. The way Americans responded also followed a partisan pattern.

Most states that voted for Joe Biden for president in 2020 had above-average vaccination rates. Most states that voted for Donald Trump in 2020 had below-average rates.

Among the outliers in that pattern were Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, and Georgia, which supported Biden but had below-average vaccination rates. All four had very tight races in 2020; and Trump won three of them in 2016. The outliers on the other side were Florida and Utah, which supported Trump but had higher-than-average vaccination rates.

Efforts to promote vaccination as advancing the common good “got beaten back by arguments about autonomy and individual freedom,” Caplan said.

The rejection of vaccines by many Americans helped bring down U.S. vaccination rates compared with other countries as well.

The U.S. full-vaccination rate of just under 66% was higher than the world average of about 54%, but not especially impressive considering the United States’ wealth and the fact it was producing many of the key vaccines in the first place. Essentially every other high-income country has vaccinated a higher share of its residents than the U.S. has.

The fact that the United States has both a lower rate of full vaccination and a higher death rate than other high-income countries “makes me wonder how we might have done as a country if our pandemic response had not been so politicized and polarized,” said Brooke Nichols, an infectious-disease mathematical modeler at Boston University.

at Boston University.

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One Year In: How COVID-19's Toll Compares With Other Causes of Death

Louis Jacobson, KFF Health News — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 11:00:00 -0500

Now that the coronavirus has been in the United States for roughly a year, new numbers are revealing the scale of COVID-19’s impact on American health: COVID-19 has become the country’s third-leading cause of death, and could be on its way to outpacing cancer.

As of Wednesday afternoon, 528,603 Americans had died of the coronavirus, according to Johns Hopkins University data. And a closely watched model from researchers at the University of Washington projects that this number will rise past 575,000 by June 1.

“The toll of death is simply staggering — worse than I would have predicted,” said Arthur Caplan, founding head of the division of medical ethics at the New York University School of Medicine. “COVID has been nothing short of the worst failure of public policy in modern memory.”

With a year’s worth of data, it’s possible to look more precisely at how the coronavirus compares with the more routine causes of death in the U.S.

The chart below compares the coronavirus death figure (in red) over the past year or so, with the 10 leading causes of death in 2019, the last year for which full data is available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The takeaway is that the coronavirus killed more Americans in the past year than any cause of death in 2019, other than heart disease and cancer. And if the University of Washington model proves accurate, then by June, the 15-month toll from the coronavirus will be close to matching the annual number of deaths from cancer.

All other causes of death pale in comparison to the coronavirus death toll. So far, the coronavirus has killed roughly three times as many people as accidents, lung ailments, stroke or Alzheimer’s disease did in 2019. And the coronavirus has outpaced the number of deaths from diabetes, kidney disease, pneumonia and suicide by even larger multiples.

Caution is warranted when comparing these causes of death. Most of the 10 leading causes of death are not primarily driven by infections, whereas the coronavirus is. So it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which any of the other causes could spike the way coronavirus did.

Another way to look at the toll of the coronavirus pandemic is by considering “excess deaths,” a statistic tracked by the CDC. This data takes the number of actual deaths in a given period and subtracts the average number of deaths from all causes during the comparable period in recent years.

The CDC data shows how excess deaths have risen with spikes in COVID-19 infections. In some weeks over the past year, there were as many as 22,000 excess deaths.

The weekly excess deaths add up to 559,887 additional deaths since the pandemic began.

That’s a bit higher than the 502,005 coronavirus deaths officially recorded. However, the additional 58,000 deaths could reflect a combination of coronavirus deaths that didn’t get recorded as such; deaths caused by people unwilling or unable to go to the hospital for other serious illnesses during the pandemic; or from overdoses or suicides stemming from increased social isolation during the pandemic. (Because of reporting lags, the death certificates used to determine excess deaths tend to understate recent weeks’ totals and are expected to increase in future weeks as more data rolls in.)

“There is nothing like these abstract statistics to illustrate the ‘psychic numbing’ we experience when dealing with large-scale loss of life,” said David Ropeik, author of the book “How Risky Is it, Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts.”

“It’s unlikely that, as stark as these figures are, that they will evoke nearly as much emotion as the personal story of any one of these victims,” Ropeik said. “A risk depicted as a face, or a name — that is, ‘personified’ — is one we can imagine happening to ourselves. Statistics are inhuman and far less moving.”

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Former Medicare chief soldiers on in wake of ethics investigations

Peter H. Stone and Louis Jacobson — Fri, 09 Apr 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Scully is under investigation for threatening to fire Medicare's top actuary if the actuary revealed internal cost projections on the massive Medicare reform bill that were higher than the $400 billion that the Bush administration suggested the bill would cost. Critics also charge that at the same time Scully was negotiating with Congress over the details of the reform legislation, he was talking about a job with law and lobbying firms, some of whose health care clients stood to benefit from the bill. And Scully has been embarrassed by the publication of a series of intemperate e-mails he fired off to his critics when he was at the Medicare agency.

Yet none of this appears to have hampered Scully's ability to attract deep-pocketed clients. When he left the Health and Human Services Department, Scully inked deals with the law and lobbying firm Alston & Bird and the private equity-investment firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe. In the past three months, according to sources, he has signed up such big-name clients as Abbott Laboratories, Caremark, US Oncology, the Alliance for Quality Nursing Home Care, and the American Association for Homecare.

By law, Scully may not approach HHS on behalf of clients until after a yearlong cooling-off period, but he may lobby Congress and other executive agencies on many matters right away, and he is free to provide "strategic advice" to clients. In addition, sources say, Scully has been tapped to join the boards of two medical companies that are Welsh, Carson clients: Ardent Health Services and Select Medical Corp.

Even by Washington standards, it's unusual for a prominent figure to be signing up so many clients at the same time he is taking a public beating. But various people who have followed Scully's career say they are not surprised that he has become a lightning rod. Scully is known for pushing the envelope to get what he wants and for surviving flaps that would have sidelined others.

"He's considered a cat with nine lives," said one health care lobbyist. "A lot of incidents have popped up, but he always gets through them with his boyish charm."

In a town of one-note partisans, sluggish bureaucrats, and cautious lawyers, Scully is anything but colorless. Friends and foes alike call him hard-edged but likable, whip-smart and meticulously prepared, but often overbearing. He is seen as a high achiever who often ignores convention. Several colleagues summed Scully up in one word: "operator."

"He charges pretty hard, and when he thinks he's right, the rules don't matter much," said one private-sector official who dealt with Scully at Medicare. "Usually he's right, but the approach he takes sometimes rankles people." A Democratic congressional aide who confesses to finding Scully "a genuinely nice person" nonetheless suggests that when Scully becomes convinced that he's doing the right thing, "protocol goes by the wayside."

The book on Scully is that he gets things done in spite of the bureaucracy and the criticism. The passage of last fall's reform bill stands as his most obvious accomplishment at Medicare's helm. He also pushed through initiatives to improve the program's responsiveness to beneficiaries. But the road to passing the Medicare law, experts say, demonstrated in microcosm Scully's penchant for coloring outside the lines. Examples from the latter part of his tenure include:

The HHS inspector general is investigating claims that Scully threatened to fire top actuary Richard Foster if Foster gave Congress his analysis showing that the Medicare reforms could cost the government as much as $551 billion over 10 years, considerably more than the administration's budgeted amount of $400 billion. In January, after President Bush had signed the bill, the administration announced the estimated cost of the overhaul was $534 billion over 10 years. Last month, Scully told The Washington Post that he had only joked to Foster about firing him. "They can investigate till the cows come home," he told the newspaper, "but I think I was right." Scully declined to comment for this story on the Foster situation or any other matter.
Scully has acknowledged that he entertained job offers while the Medicare bill was being hashed out -- some from potential employers whose clients could have been affected by provisions of the pending legislation. According to federal ethics rules, officials engaged in job negotiations must recuse themselves from "any official matter" involving a potential employer. But Scully sought and received a waiver from HHS that allowed him to continue his job talks without curtailing his official business. However, about a month after Scully's departure, White House Chief of Staff Andy Card declared that, from then on, only the White House would issue such waivers. Speculation about the sudden about-face immediately turned to Scully. Soon after, he told The Post, "If I'm partly the cause for this, I feel badly."
Scully's comments at a private dinner he attended in April 2002 have attracted the attention of Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who raised concerns in a letter to HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson and to officials at the Securities and Exchange Commission. At the dinner sponsored by Credit Suisse First Boston, Scully discussed the business prospects for a certain class of for-profit, specialty hospitals. On the next stock market trading day, one of those hospital companies, MedCath, saw its stock price tumble in trading that was nine times the normal volume. At Welsh, Carson, where Scully is now a senior adviser, the New York City investment firm's extensive health care portfolio includes a 28 percent stake in MedCath. Scully told The Post that he never mentioned any companies by name at the dinner and only discussed his general views on federal health care reimbursement policies. Thompson's office, which has said that Scully told HHS he did not make the statements in reference to MedCath, is preparing a response to Grassley. An SEC spokesman would neither confirm nor deny that the commission is looking into the matter.

Scully, 46, has a gold-plated resume. He started in Washington in 1980 as an aide to then-Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash. In 1985, he went to work for the law and lobbying firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, leaving in 1988 to join the Bush-Quayle presidential campaign. He served in the first Bush administration as associate director of the Office of Management and Budget for human resources, veterans, and labor, and he later rose to the job of deputy assistant to the president and counselor to the OMB director.

After George H.W. Bush lost re-election in 1992, Scully went to the law and lobbying firm Patton Boggs, and was then lured away to head the group now known as the Federation of American Hospitals, which represents more than 1,700 privately owned and managed hospitals. He remained there until May 2001, when he took the helm at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees $600 billion in annual spending.

Health policy experts say that Scully's upward climb was not a fluke. Michael Bromberg, who preceded Scully as head of the hospitals association, said the group started with a list of 20 candidates but Scully quickly became the obvious pick. "Several people who at the time had much higher visibility than him kept saying, 'Tom would be perfect,' " Bromberg said.

Scully is "tireless, working night and day," Bromberg said, "and in meetings, he doesn't care if you're a senator or a junior staffer." Karen Ignagni, the president of the trade group America's Health Insurance Plans, who has been both an adversary and ally to Scully, says, "He did his homework. He was definitely known as a problem solver."

Since joining Alston & Bird in January as a senior counsel, Scully has been a whirling dervish in signing up clients, sources say. Two health care lobbyists said that Scully has boasted to them that he's already landed new business worth about $3 million a year to the firm.

Alston & Bird "wants to grow the firm and its lobbying practice in a short timeframe, and Tom is someone who can help them do that," said one lobbyist. One of Scully's first moves was to bring on Colin Roskey, a former health care aide at the Senate Finance Committee, and sources say he's looking to hire other well-placed Hill aides.

As nicely as Scully has done on K Street, lobbyists who know him say that his long-term interest is his work with Welsh, Carson, where the dollars are potentially even bigger. Currently, Scully is dividing his time between Washington and Manhattan. "Tom will never leave Washington, but the deals will take him to New York more and more as time goes along," said one lobbyist. Friends say that Scully is using his regulatory and legislative expertise to advise the investment firm's clients on how to navigate the complexities of the new Medicare law.

On Capitol Hill, Democrats and even some Republicans are zeroing in on what they say were Scully's ethical lapses. They also want to know whether Scully was covering for the White House in trying to keep the lid on the potential costs of the Medicare reform measure, which critics say would not have squeaked through the House had the higher costs been known at the time. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., is one Democrat who charges that Scully's confrontation with Foster is a "very serious" matter and that any effort to withhold information from Congress on a pertinent legislative issue "may have criminal implications." He said that Democrats are not about to let the issue go away.

But some health policy specialists say that any characterization of Scully as a blindly loyal Bush partisan is too simplistic. On many issues, observers say, Scully had better relations with lawmakers in both parties than did his predecessors at Medicare. Scully is considered close to Sens. Jay Rockefeller IV, D-W.Va., and Max Baucus, D-Mont., insiders say, and his penchant for cooperating with Democrats occasionally riled the White House. "He loves deal-making," Bromberg said.

Scully is "one of the rare people in Washington who says what he thinks," said Mark Merritt, president and CEO of the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, a trade group that was deeply involved in the Medicare negotiations. "I think that's refreshing." One lobbyist who knows Scully well said, "Tom does not like strictures."

That maverick streak seems to have carried over somewhat to his relationship with Thompson, his boss at HHS. At a congressional hearing earlier this year, Thompson drew chuckles when he said, "I cannot speak for Tom Scully. Nobody speaks for Tom Scully, as everybody knows." It was Thompson who, in congressional testimony, pointed the finger at Scully, after the fact, as the person at HHS who had threatened Foster with dismissal.

"It was a love-hate thing" between Scully and Thompson when they worked together at the department, said one health care lobbyist. The two men -- both independent-minded -- respected each other and considered themselves friends, this source explained, but "friends fight, just like husbands and wives fight."

But some who know Scully characterize the situation as more serious than a family spat. "I think Scully feels that Thompson has thrown him under the train," said one pharmaceutical industry lobbyist.

Scully clearly revealed his hotheadedness in a stream of e-mails he sent during his tenure as Medicare administrator. The no-holds-barred missives found their way into The Post's In the Loop column, supplying scribe Al Kamen with dishy items that regularly painted Scully as a loose cannon.

In one e-mail, Scully blasted a University of Wisconsin researcher who was heading a Medicare-sponsored project to study nursing homes. "There is no entitlement to government contracts -- especially when you try to sandbag the agency you contract with," Scully wrote. Later, he fired off another message: "If you want to continue to yank my chain, I will continue to disconnect you from this agency." A General Accounting Office investigation concluded that Scully's actions "undermined the integrity" of the contracting system at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

In yet another e-mail, Scully labeled an official with the Gallup Organization who had criticized the centers' contracting process a "weasel" and a "jerk." Scully sent a copy of the e-mail to an OMB aide and added, "I would like to investigate this idiot." That exchange drew a $5 million lawsuit by Gallup, charging Scully with intimidation. The suit is pending.

Some lobbyists agree with Merritt that Scully's forthrightness is endearing. Others aren't convinced. One calls Scully's habit of frank talk both "refreshing and weird." Some suggest that it loops back to egotism. A congressional aide remembers that when Scully took over the Medicare agency in 2001, he devised a contest to come up with a new name. The grand prize for the lucky winner was lunch with Scully.

When it came to his job search, Scully didn't go out of his way to keep matters secret, even though he was still running the Medicare and Medicaid programs. Over several months, the press widely publicized his talks with Alston & Bird, as well as with other firms, including Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz; McDermott, Will & Emery; and Ropes & Gray. The reports prompted jokes on K Street about how much it would cost to hire him. Scully also was talking with investment firms about a consulting post.

As for the Foster contretemps, it seems likely to dog Scully as long as controversy persists over the new Medicare law. "I don't know anybody who wishes him ill," said a former colleague. "But I think the feeling on K Street is that, in general, he has made a bed of nails and then lain down on it." A friend of Scully's added: "Everything he did to make the agency more transparent and open to the public has been completely overshadowed" by the controversy over Foster.

Alston & Bird appears to be foursquare behind Scully. Thomas Boyd, head of the firm's legislative and public policy practice, asserted that Scully has "done nothing wrong, ethically or legally." He called Scully "one of the most transparent administrators" ever at Medicare, and cited that as "one of the reasons he was appealing to us."

Some experts argue that Scully has little to fear in the way of sanctions. "Legally, I don't know that there's a tremendous amount of exposure," said Stanley Brand, a lawyer who specializes in white-collar defense and government ethics. Added Brookings Institution senior fellow Stephen Hess, "In Washington, loyalty is the coin of the realm. By Washington standards, what would be his crime?"

Brand and others added that Scully's best strategy is to keep a low public profile. Perhaps that advice influenced Scully's decision not to appear when the House Ways and Means Committee asked him to testify at an April 1 hearing on the Foster matter.

But if the issue is kept alive in this highly partisan election year, things could turn sour for Scully's lobbying business. "It could be ruinous -- or it could be just a bump in the road," says one old friend.

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Postal Service may drop cycling sponsorship

Louis Jacobson — Fri, 26 Mar 2004 00:00:00 -0500

The Postal Service has been the lead sponsor of Armstrong's team since 1996--a period in which the 32-year-old has grown to become the world's most famous and accomplished cyclist, winning five straight Tour de France championships despite a battle with cancer. The sponsorship, which costs a nearly $9 million a year, is so prominent that the cycling team is officially known as the United States Postal Service Pro Cycling Team.

Postal Service officials and sports marketing specialists have long suggested that the link to Armstrong pays unusually strong dividends to the Postal Service, particularly because the deal is relatively modest by sports sponsorship standards. Critics of the Postal Service have countered that any money spent on the bicycling sponsorship is an inappropriate use of the mail service's funds, especially in an era of rising postage prices.

A year ago, the Postal Service's inspector general concluded that while the goal of the cycling sponsorship was to "increase revenue and sales of Postal Service products on a global basis and to increase sales in key international markets," international revenues actually declined by $12.8 million between 1999 and 2003.

On March 22, the lead story in the trade journal Advertising Age said the Postal Service was "set to drop" its long-standing sponsorship deal with Armstrong.

The article quoted Armstrong's agent, Bill Stapleton of Austin, Texas-based Capital Sports & Entertainment, as saying that while the Postal Service is still the "first choice" as a sponsor, team officials "have been in a full-scale sales cycle for the title sponsorship based on the possibility that they might not renew."

The report was greeted jubilantly by PostalWatch, a Virginia Beach-based watchdog group that has repeatedly hammered the Postal Service on everything from mailbox regulations to allegations of wasteful spending. After the Advertising Age article appeared, the group called the news "a major victory for consumers."

PostalWatch executive director Rick Merritt dubbed the sponsorship "a government boondoggle." The Postal Service, he said, has "raised domestic monopoly rates three times while forcing captive ratepayers to pay more than $50 million to sponsor a European sporting event and then, adding insult to injury, they achieved a negative result."

The Postal Service, however, is still negotiating with Tailwinds Sports, the marketing agency that owns the team headed by Armstrong, said Monica Suraci, a Postal Service spokeswoman. The Postal Service sponsorship contract expires Dec. 31.P> Despite this development, Merritt said he was pleased that matters seemed to be heading in the right direction.

"They obviously have not denied that the contract may come to an end, and the indications from the team are that they're pursuing all avenues available to them," Merritt said.

The Postal Service did not indicate when the sponsorship negotiations might conclude.

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Senators seek to retool drug agency's advertising efforts

Louis Jacobson — Mon, 24 Nov 2003 00:00:00 -0500

The bill would also end the public-relations and Web-related activities of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, and would direct the office to spend 89 percent of its federal appropriation on placing ads.

Shortly before the Hatch-Grassley-Biden bill was introduced, a House-Senate conference committee voted to require that 78 percent of the anti-drug program's $145 million budget be spent on advertising, according to AdAge.com.

Earlier tensions over Ogilvy's contract with the White House office led to an investigation by the General Accounting Office into charges of overbilling by the ad agency. As a result of the investigation, Ogilvy agreed to forgo $1.8 million in federal payments.

However, Ogilvy managed to win a contract renewal, thus irritating the sponsors of the Senate bill and other lawmakers.

Also, the media director for the White House drug-control office, Alan Levitt, quit this fall after feuding with both drug czar John Walters and the Partnership for a Drug-Free America.

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Lobbying firms move into federal procurement arena

Louis Jacobson — Fri, 25 Jul 2003 00:00:00 -0400

Cassidy & Associates, already Washington's top-ranking firm in lobbying revenue, recently established a federal marketing practice. In so doing, it joined such lobbying shops as Van Scoyoc Associates, which launched a subsidiary called the Implementation Group last year, and the Jefferson Consulting Group, which has been a mainstay of the field for 15 years.

"It's not lobbying per se," explains Lee Ramseur, Cassidy's vice president for federal marketing. "We consult for federal procurement and acquisition, set up strategic plans for their goods and services, advise clients on the best way to sell to the federal government, and make contacts with federal program directors."

In the six months since Cassidy established the new unit, the federal marketing practice has chalked up "annualized revenues of $1 million, and we've got lots of clients in the pipeline," Ramseur said. The practice's client list includes Kodak, Millivision, T-Mobile, and Veridian. "We've recouped our start-up costs very quickly," he said.

The Implementation Group has also gone from zero to $1 million in revenues during its first year, said Robert G. Efrus, the firm's vice president. Its clients include Yahoo!, BEA Systems and the SAS Institute. The firm recently helped a company called Ocwen win a major competition under Office of Management and Budget Circular A-76 at the Veterans Affairs Department.

"The downturn in the economy and the uptick after 9-11 in homeland defense initiatives has led to many more companies showing interest in this market," Efrus said. "Government became a target-rich environment, and that has held up amply in the last year or so." Efrus said he expects the federal marketing sector to continue to be healthy as long as the economy remains in slow-growth mode.

Though the Jefferson Consulting Group has a longer history in the federal marketing field, it too has experienced growth, said President and CEO Julie Susman. "We're growing 25 to 30 percent a year," Susman said, adding that in the past five years, the firm has increased the size of its staff from 12 to "the mid-30s."

Jefferson's clients include Health Net Federal Services, a subsidiary of a California health-maintenance organization; Flex Products, which makes counterfeiting deterrents; Lexis-Nexis; and a small company called Skydex, which makes protective padding materials.

Sometimes, the federal marketing firms provide traditional lobbying services in addition to specialized procurement assistance. In some cases, they try to help clients who already have contracts with one part of the federal government sell their technology or service to another part.

"The hardest part of the job is the lack of incentive for federal employees to be innovative or to change-the whole civil-service structure doesn't reward people for taking steps in new directions," Susman said. "And the political appointees turn over quickly."

Cassidy's growth has been so rapid that the firm has hired a third professional for the team: John Boylan, most recently a senior staff member in business development at Lockheed Martin. Boylan was named vice president for federal marketing, joining Ramseur and Senior Vice President for Business Development Russell Hale.

Hale said that his goal is for the practice to account for 30 percent of Cassidy's revenues within five years, up from its roughly 5 percent now.

Susman said she isn't overly concerned about the new competition. "Imitation," she said, "is the sincerest form of flattery."

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Park Service at center of controversy over ‘road to nowhere’

Louis Jacobson — Mon, 21 Jul 2003 00:00:00 -0400

In August 1941, shortly before the United States entered World War II, the Aluminum Company of America agreed to let the Tennessee Valley Authority build a dam on more than 10,000 acres of Alcoa land on the Little Tennessee River. As the 480-foot Fontana Dam was being planned, engineers determined that the resulting reservoir, called Fontana Lake, would cut off approximately 44,000 acres on the lake's north shore from the outside world. This land, sandwiched between the lake and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, had been owned and occupied for years by loggers, miners and settlers.

Before the reservoir was filled in early 1945, something had to be done about the land and its only lifeline-the muddy but (in good weather) passable thoroughfare known as State Route 288. So in July 1943, the TVA, the Interior Department, North Carolina and Swain County reached an agreement. The TVA agreed to purchase the 44,000 acres of land and transfer the territory to the national park. As compensation to local residents, the Interior Department agreed to build a new, 20-foot-wide, "dustless" road to replace Highway 288.

Initially, the road-building effort proceeded as planned. In the late 1950s, the state and county built a feeder road from Bryson City to the park border, and later, the National Park Service built a road 6.2 miles into the park itself, ending with a 1,200-foot tunnel dug into a mountainside. But there, the road simply stops.

The effort to build the remaining 30-mile stretch to Deals Gap, N.C., stalled, due to financial constraints and a growing belief among National Park Service officials that the road could adversely impact the ecology of the nation's most visited national park. To the irreverently inclined, the aborted project-officially known as the North Shore Road-was dubbed "the Road to Nowhere."

Park Service officials expressed concern that building the road could expose anakeesta rock, which can produce acids and heavy metals that are toxic to aquatic life. Officials also said that a road could reduce wildlife populations in the area's diverse ecosystem, and that unstable geological areas would need to be traversed, making construction prohibitively expensive.

As time went on, these worries grew, as environmental groups threatened litigation under new laws that did not exist at the time of the 1943 agreement: the 1964 Wilderness Act, the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act, the 1970 Clean Air Act, the 1972 Clean Water Act and the 1973 Endangered Species Act.

At first, public disappointment was muted. But by the early 1980s, some local residents began to question why the federal government had backed off its written promise. They argue that the hazards of anakeesta rock can be contained using up-to-date building practices, and add that the opponents' cost estimates for building the road are too high, particularly if parts of the old road can be salvaged.

Road advocates also believe the road will boost the local economy. With the park's one transverse road often clogged with visitors on summer weekends, advocates say, a less-congested alternate route could lure tourists-and their dollars-to an area that could use them.

Offers to settle the dispute between the road's backers and its opponents have cropped up every few years. But none has ever stuck. Then, in late 2000, Rep. Charles Taylor, R-N.C., who chairs the House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, inserted into the fiscal 2001 Transportation appropriations bill $16 million earmarked for planning and construction of the road.

This development energized both sides. Road supporters cheered the beginning of an environmental-impact statement process, which not only moved the road one step closer to fruition but also forced the Park Service to adopt an official stance of neutrality for the first time in almost 40 years.

At the same time, opponents of the road-who advocate seeking a cash settlement from the federal government instead-found that Taylor's actions provided an urgency that gave their side momentum. In February, the Swain County board of commissioners-with a new chairman freshly elected on a cash-settlement platform-reversed its previous stance and voted, 4 to 1, to seek a settlement of $52 million. The Bryson City council passed a similar resolution, 5 to 0.

Settlement backers view these events, as well as the support they've received from Sens. John Edwards, D-N.C., and Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., as crucial milestones in their bid to show Taylor-whom both sides acknowledge is the key player in this fight-that local opinion stands against the road.

The controversy serves as a reminder of how disruptive the creation of national parks was in the era before laws empowered residents to fight government encroachment. Though the eastern half of the United States includes relatively few national parks, many of them had to be assembled from private landholdings, rather than being carved out of land already in federal hands.

Given the history of forced removals-and the longstanding feeling among Appalachians that they have been pushed around for generations by distant and powerful forces-it's easy to understand why the idea of a holding the government to its word retains so much power.

"The TVA people came in and told everyone they needed this land because of the war effort," says Swain County Commissioner David Monteith, a road supporter. "These were good, patriotic Americans-women and children, mostly, since their husbands were fighting. They said, 'We'll help this effort.' People were trusting of the government back then. But the government took away the tax base and the jobs, and they had to move."

Now, anti-federal animus helps explain why the two sides disagree so sharply. The controversy over the road has even affected the search for a new superintendent of the national park.

Last October, David A. Mihalic, the superintendent of Yosemite National Park, retired rather than be named superintendent of the Great Smoky Mountains park, saying that Park Service higher-ups told him it would be part of his job to push through the North Shore Road, as well as a controversial land swap with a nearby Cherokee Indian tribe.

After Mihalic aired his comments publicly, a Park Service spokesman told the Raleigh News & Observer that the status of the two projects was "unchanged" and termed Mihalic's comments "a parting shot at the Park Service." In an interview in Sylva, N.C., Greg Kidd, the associate southeastern regional director for the National Parks Conservation Association, called the possible politicization of Park Service personnel matters "extraordinarily disturbing."

The superintendent's vacancy is due to be filled soon, and the Park Service must remain officially neutral as long as the environmental-impact process is under way. Francis said he expects the study will be finished within two years.

But the NPCA's Kidd doesn't foresee any easy resolution to the dispute over the road. "It's hard to imagine how a compromise could be reached," he says. "I don't believe that the environmental community would accept any additional road in that part of park, and the pro-road position has made their stance clear. How do you cut the baby in half?"

Editor's note: The original version of this story stated that Graham County, N.C., had voted to seek a cash settlement with the federal government. In fact, county commissioners passed a resolution stating that they were in favor of completing the North Shore Road, but expressing the wish that the county be included in a cash settlement if one were negotiated. The story has been updated to correct the error.

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Titanium companies lobby for Defense procurement measure

Louis Jacobson — Mon, 14 Jul 2003 00:00:00 -0400

The three American producers of titanium used in military planes are urgently trying to shore up a federal law called the Berry Amendment. The law requires that the Pentagon purchase certain materials vital to national security only from American companies.

The Defense Department and some military contractors would like to loosen the law, arguing that it unnecessarily complicates the acquisition of goods. But the three titanium producers-RTI International Metals of Niles, Ohio; Titanium Metals of Denver, known at TIMET; and Allegheny Technologies of Pittsburgh-argue that the measure is crucial to preserving America's defense-industrial base. The companies are concerned about recent efforts by U.S. defense contractors to buy titanium from the Russian company VSMPO for use in American tanker planes and fighter jets.

The companies are promoting language already in the House version of the 2004 defense authorization bill. The bill would require public notice before a defense contractor is granted a waiver of the Berry Amendment to purchase foreign-sourced materials. It would also end the practice of banning the Pentagon from purchasing equipment made with foreign materials governed by the Berry Amendment, but would require contractors who do so to purchase material equivalent to 110 percent of the amount in the Pentagon contract from U.S. suppliers. This material could be used in other products they make. The authorization bill is currently in a House-Senate conference committee.

RTI and TIMET have retained the Fratelli Group, a public-relations firm, to work on the issue. In addition, RTI is using the law and lobbying firm Hogan & Hartson, including former House Minority Leader Robert Michel, R-Ill.; TIMET is using Brownstein Hyatt & Farber; and Allegheny is using Collier Shannon Scott.

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Defense contractors, lawmaker tussle over procurement provision

Louis Jacobson — Mon, 07 Jul 2003 00:00:00 -0400

In rare case of public discord between defense contractors and a Republican chairman of the House Armed Services committee, several defense-related trade associations are waging a high-energy battle against a "Buy American" provision spearheaded by Armed Services chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif.

The provision-which the House has already approved in its fiscal year 2004 defense authorization bill-would require that "critical" components of most military systems be acquired from domestic sources. It would also raise the required "domestic content" in a system's labor and materials to 65 percent, from the current 50 percent. And it would require that major defense-acquisition programs use only machine tools made in the U.S.

Several associations-led by the National Defense Industrial Association, the Aerospace Industry Association and the Information Technology Association of America-argue that the measure, if approved, would wreak havoc in defense contracting.

The associations argue that the act will convince fewer vendors to sell to the Pentagon, as new paperwork expenses-for all potential vendors, not just the winning bidders-and decreased competition combine to raise the price of procurement. Moreover, the critics argue, a number of crucial products-from memory chips to flat video screens-are almost universally made overseas today. If companies attempted to move those operations home, then the cost of retrofitting and establishing separate manufacturing lines for defense and non-defense products would be prohibitive. And some major ongoing programs-such as the multi-branch, $200 billion Joint Strike Fighter-might be placed into jeopardy because they include too many international features.

The NDIA has sent out a legislative alert to its 1,100 corporate members, urging a grassroots effort to derail the provision, said Pete Steffes, NDIA's vice president for government policy. The NDIA has also sent letters blasting the measure to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill.; Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn.; House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas; Senate Armed Services Committee chairman John Warner, R-Va.; Senate Armed Services ranking member Carl Levin, D-Mich.; Hunter; House Armed Services ranking member Ike Skelton, D-Mo.; and Office of Management and Budget acting director Augustine T. Smythe.

"As the measure came out of the House, a lot of members saw the title and thought it sounded like mom and apple pie," Steffes said. "But we think it will have a significant impact on America's industrial base. Several provisions are aimed at doing the right thing, but it will be very costly for companies to comply, especially small businesses, because they don't have the overhead to spread around the extra costs of recordkeeping."

Earlier, ITAA president Harris Miller expressed his group's opposition. "Our military deserves to have the highest quality tools to fight wars and terrorism," he said.

Jon Etherton, vice president of legislative affairs at AIA, said that his group has been holding a weekly meeting with its own members and with allies in other associations to "coordinate our efforts." AIA has asked its member companies to assess the potential impact of the measure so that the association can provide Congress with specific figures on how much the provision would impact their operations.

The measure will addressed in a House-Senate conference that is expected to begin after the July 4 recess. "It's an issue of great importance, and the congressman does plan on addressing it in conference," said Hunter's press secretary, Michael Harrison. "Our dependency on foreign countries for our military resources doesn't serve our national security interests." Harrison added that discussions about the provision are "ongoing" at the staff level, "and when we're back from recess, we may have something more formal."

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Pentagon: Military has enough blood for transfusions

Louis Jacobson — Thu, 20 Feb 2003 00:00:00 -0500

As the military prepares for a possible war in the Middle East, the Armed Services Blood Program Office says that U.S. forces have an adequate supply of blood for transfusions, despite concerns about federal regulations implemented last year that bar blood donations from many Americans, including military personnel, who have lived in the United Kingdom or Europe.

For the past year, the Food and Drug Administration has banned American blood banks-both civilian and military-from accepting blood donations from people who spent a cumulative three months or more in the United Kingdom between 1980 and 1996, who were stationed at European military bases for six months or more during that period, or who spent a cumulative five years elsewhere in Europe since 1980.

The FDA established the policy so that the blood supply would not be inadvertently contaminated with rogue proteins, or "prions," that are believed to cause variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), a fatal, brain-wasting illness that is the human equivalent of the bovine ailment commonly known as "mad cow" disease.

While most scientists and physicians agree that reasonable precautions against vCJD transmission are justified, a sizable number of critics consider the FDA rule to be a matter of overkill. They point out that there is no evidence that vCJD can be transmitted through human blood transfusions. And they question whether it is wise to restrict the blood-donor pool at a time when blood banks are already stretched thin.

The U.S. armed forces-whose members have historically been eager blood donors- appear to have been hit more severely by the new donor restrictions, because many soldiers have been based in Europe at one time or another.

Army Col. Michael Fitzpatrick, director of the Armed Services Blood Program Office, said that donor-deferral rates in the military-that is, the percentage of prospective donors turned away for any reason-is now about 18 percent, compared with the 12 percent deferral rate reported by the American Red Cross. Mad cow-specific deferrals are not tabulated by either organization.

Despite this, Fitzpatrick added that donation rates have actually increased due to active donor-recruitment programs implemented around the same time as the mad cow restrictions.

"We currently have sufficient blood supplies within our system to meet our needs," he said. "We like to have a nine-day supply, and we've been able to maintain that level since November 2001."

Fitzpatrick said that all of the blood shipped to date for Operation Enduring Freedom-about 22,000 units-has come from Defense Department donor centers.

By contrast, the situation is more troublesome in the less-regimented civilian sector. Right now, the Red Cross has a 2.5-day supply of blood nationally, which is below its minimum goal of three days.

Experts say that the civilian shortages could have been even worse but for a surge of donations after the Sept. 11 attacks and a little-noticed decision that allowed the transfusion of blood from patients who have a rare but noninfectious disease called hemochromatosis.

Fitzpatrick added that the FDA regulations cover donations, not transfusions. Thus, American soldiers who were injured on the battlefield would not be prevented from receiving transfusions of British or European blood.

"In emergency situations, blood from host nation medical facilities could be transfused to save a U.S. military member's life," he said. "If a U.S. casualty were evacuated to an allied country's medical facility and required a blood transfusion, that person would receive blood maintained at the allied facility."

In this case, the injured soldier would be followed medically for a year to determine if there was any transmission of infectious diseases, mad cow or otherwise, Fitzpatrick said.

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Key players angle for slices of Pentagon pie

James Kitfield, Sydney J. Freedberg Jr., and Louis Jacobson — Wed, 18 Dec 2002 00:00:00 -0500

President Bush took office pledging to reshape conventional forces into a higher-technology, faster-moving military. Then, when the United States attacked Afghanistan and beefed up homeland security after Sept. 11, 2001, the Pentagon faced heightened demands on current capabilities, from Special Forces commandos to jet transports to military police.

And now the prospect of a second war with Iraq could add another set of demands on the military-for heavy-armor brigades and air wings. Amid all this, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has pledged to send the 2004 defense budget in a bold new direction, and his aides are scrutinizing prized programs, including Navy aircraft carriers, the Marines' V-22 Osprey aircraft, and the Air Force's F/A-22 fighter-not to mention pretty much every priority item in the beleaguered Army budget. That gives the six groups below plenty to worry and fight about as they compete for defense dollars.

Association of the United States Army

The Army has a "problem" the other armed services don't have: Its weapons are cheaper. All but its largest contracts are dwarfed by the dollars spent on the Pentagon's bigger-ticket items, such as Navy aircraft carriers and Air Force stealth fighters. That financial fact means that most Army contractors lack the critical mass to influence Capitol Hill. So while the sea and air services can count on major corporations in their corner, the Army relies on its professional association to make its case to Congress.

Boasting a staff of 85 people and an annual budget of $15 million, the Association of the United States Army does have corporate sponsors: some 319 "sustaining members," seven of which are different divisions of General Dynamics, the only top-tier defense contractor at all dependent on the Army. (The company makes the Stryker lightweight armored vehicle, which is crucial to the Army's future as a lighter, faster-deploying service.) But AUSA's real strength is its individual membership, which tops 100,000. Nearly half of these members are active-duty officers and soldiers. Similarly, the association's chosen ammunition in the Washington budget fight is not dollars, but ideas. Legally banned from lobbying, AUSA wields not one but two in-house think tanks, which can paper Congress with studies and reports.

So even if the Army lacks the corporate influence of the Navy and Air Force, or the gung-ho self-assertiveness that has served the Marines so well on Capitol Hill, the association at least gives the service a voice. AUSA's call to arms this coming year will be to protect the Army's top programs-the Stryker, the Comanche scout helicopter-and above all, the Army's manpower levels-from skeptical Rumsfeld aides.

Lockheed Martin

Lockheed Martin has 124,000 employees and $24 billion in annual revenue-58 percent of it from defense work-and handles everything from C-130J tactical cargo planes to next-generation global positioning satellites. Most important, Lockheed is the prime contractor for two of the Pentagon's signature programs: the F/A-22 Raptor fighter aircraft and the Joint Strike Fighter. Both planes are vital to the company's future; Lockheed's 28 in-house lobbyists, plus the 27 lobbying firms it has on retainer, will be working lawmakers to make sure that Congress buys as many of both airplanes as possible.

The F/A-22, however, is at risk. It was envisioned 15 years ago as the world's premier air-to-air fighter. But outside the Air Force, the plane is viewed today as an extravagance; none of America's enemies possesses formidable air power, and the Air Force desperately needs to replace air tankers, cargo planes, and other more-mundane-but-necessary machines. Because of all this, planners have cut the number of Raptors from the 750 initially envisioned to a maximum of 341. Thanks to spirited lobbying, the F/A-22 has escaped being cut to a mere 180, but the program is not out of the woods yet: New questions arose after the November revelations of a $690 million cost overrun.

The Joint Strike Fighter, meanwhile, is a less elite, more versatile fighter-bomber designed not only for the Air Force but also for the Navy, Marine Corps, and European militaries. It has the distinction of being the biggest defense contract ever, at $225 billion, mainly because of the size of the order-an expected 3,000-rather than because of the cost per plane, which is well below the F/A-22's.

Boeing

Although defense work represents a crucial part of Boeing's future-$23 billion of its $58 billion in annual revenue is defense- or space-related-the world's No. 1 manufacturer of commercial airliners is a relative latecomer to big-ticket defense contracting.

Boeing and its 167,000 employees currently supply the Navy with the Super Hornet fighter jet-an interim model that will satisfy the Navy's needs until the more advanced Joint Strike Fighter is ready to fly. Boeing also produces the C-17 cargo plane, the EA-18 electronic jamming plane, and an airborne tanker that is based on the design of the company's civilian jets. Each of these projects is noted for reliability, not sex appeal. Selling cargo planes such as the C-17 "is like selling reality TV shows to Fox," as one defense analyst put it, and those purchases could continue for decades.

At the same time, Boeing is also pushing the frontiers of technology. It is heavily involved with ballistic-missile defense; it is developing the Delta IV launching rocket; and it is designing Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles for the Air Force and Navy.

The company's 34 in-house lobbyists, and 29 lobbying firms on retainer, should be up to the job of keeping the government checks coming. Like other contractors, Boeing has played the "political engineering" game skillfully. Members of Congress from California, Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, South Carolina, and Washington state are strongly in Boeing's corner, because their districts contain major Boeing facilities.

Northrop Grumman

A decade ago, Northrop Grumman was struggling. Its premier program, the B-2 stealth bomber, had become a byword for cost overruns, and the whole defense industry was convulsed with mergers. "We were quite sure, at the end of the Cold War in 1989, that Northrop Grumman, as just a small manufacturer of airplanes, was not going to be able to survive," said Bob Haffa, director of the company's Analysis Center. But by 2001, Northrop had reinvented itself.

With more than 95,000 employees and $13 billion in annual sales, today's Northrop Grumman has staked its fate not on making planes, but on engineering the electronics that give them their cutting edge. The company integrates the complex electronic systems inside several airframes, including the Navy's nimble F/A-18 Hornet fighter-bomber, the Air Force's lumbering E-8C Joint Stars flying command post, and the prototype Joint Strike Fighter. And in the program Northrop vaunts most, it makes the Global Hawk drone, a robotic spy plane with about a 14,000-mile range.

Despite this high-tech thrust, Northrop has also bought its way into a dominant position in one of the most labor-intensive, Industrial Age businesses around: Navy shipbuilding. An April 2001 acquisition brought the company two shipyards, Mississippi's Ingalls and Louisiana's Avondale. And that November, Northrop stunned observers with its successful bid to purchase Virginia's Newport News Shipbuilding-the nation's only builder of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, whose future seems assured now that the Navy's next-generation "CVNX" carrier program scraped through a recent Pentagon review.

Heritage Foundation

As a nonprofit think tank and educational organization, the conservative Heritage Foundation is prohibited from lobbying. But that doesn't mean it hasn't been influential in shaping Pentagon spending priorities and, in particular, pushing the cause of national missile defense.

That Heritage was key to getting missile defense back on the national agenda is indisputable. Its March 1999 report, "Defending America: A Plan to Meet the Urgent Missile Threat," was exquisitely timed: It came soon after North Korea's surprise firing of a three-stage rocket over the heads of the Japanese, and after India's and Pakistan's dueling detonations of nuclear warheads. The Heritage report's key findings were that the United States needed to accelerate its fielding of a missile defense system; abrogate the Antiballistic Missile Treaty with Russia; and focus on sea-based defenses as the most viable first stage in a layered missile defense. In varying degrees, those findings are now official U.S. government policy.

Heritage has a staff of 185, an annual budget of about $30 million, and continual inflows of money from donors large and small. It will use those resources to hold meetings with lawmakers, give briefings to reporters, and organize conferences for interested Washington players. At an April 2001 conference in Colorado, for example, Heritage brought in more than 20 editorial writers and reporters who covered missile defense to talk with top missile experts. Shortly thereafter, The Washington Post editorial page dropped its long opposition to missile defense.

Marine Corps

The fate of the $40 billion V-22 Osprey aircraft program is hanging by a sinuous string of support from an unusual interest group: the Marine Corps. Designed to take off and land like a helicopter, yet to cruise with the speed and range of an airplane, the Osprey has been buffeted by controversy throughout its decade-plus development. Costing an estimated $89.7 million per copy, the Osprey is considered by some critics as too expensive for a medium-lift aircraft, and the plane was grounded in December 2000 after two crashes killed 23 Marines. The aircraft is currently undergoing a reworked testing program. Pentagon acquisition chief Pete Aldridge has expressed deep skepticism over the safety and reliability of the Osprey's unique tilt-rotor technology.

Yet throughout its travails, the Osprey has survived, largely on the strength of the Marine Corps' rock-solid commitment to the program. That dedication reveals the potency of one of Washington's least understood and most underrated lobbying forces. Unlike the other armed services, which have multiple subcommunities and numerous competing programs, the Marine Corps has focused like a laser on the Osprey as its No. 1 weapons program.

"While the other services are larger and more divided in terms of their goals, the Marine Corps makes an attribute of its small size by combining it with great passion and focus," said Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, a defense consulting group. "The Marine Corps is also expert at tasking its veteran alumni almost as a grassroots political organization that is very effective in lobbying for the Corps' interests. In my mind, the Marine Corps is almost the institutional equivalent of Israel: It's small, impassioned, and it never takes its survival for granted."

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Infamous Teapot Dome becomes test of government transformation

Louis Jacobson — Mon, 16 Sep 2002 00:00:00 -0400

The site, of course, is Teapot Dome: the 10,000-acre oil field that 80 years ago embodied governmental corruption. Now, ironically enough, Teapot Dome-or Naval Petroleum Reserve 3, as it is officially known-stands as a little-noticed experiment in reinventing government.

Teapot Dome's tangled history began in 1915 when President Wilson set aside the site's petroleum reserves for the Navy, which was transitioning its fleet from coal to oil. Six years later, President Harding appointed Sen. Albert B. Fall, R-N.M., to serve as secretary of the Interior. Fall shifted control of Teapot Dome and other naval reserves to his department, and promptly began allowing private exploitation of the reserves-including granting a secret, noncompetitive lease to Mammoth Oil, a hastily created entity controlled by petroleum mogul Harry Sinclair.

Carl Magee, Fall's political foe and neighbor in New Mexico, noticed that Fall had made sudden, lavish improvements to his ranch-and Magee apprised Congress. After months of increasing scrutiny, Fall resigned, heightening widespread suspicions of illegality within the Harding administration.

In 1929-after seemingly endless congressional investigations and legal battles-Fall was convicted of accepting a bribe. He served nine months in prison and died penniless in El Paso, Texas, in 1944. Sinclair did quite a bit better. He was cleared of conspiracy charges but jailed for seven months after refusing to answer certain questions in a Senate hearing. After his release, he returned to Sinclair Oil and built it into a petroleum giant that, by 2000, rang up almost $2 billion in annual sales.

Despite its colorful history, Teapot Dome quickly slipped back into obscurity. Beyond routine maintenance, the Navy did nothing with the site until the 1970s, when President Ford-responding to the Arab oil embargo-signed legislation that encouraged oil production on federal properties. Production began under Navy auspices and continued after primary control of Teapot Dome passed to the newly created Department of Energy in 1977.

Though Energy was constrained by tight rules that governed how the reserve's oil could be used-a direct legacy of the 1920s scandal-the department managed to produce as many as 5,000 barrels of oil a day, with the proceeds going directly into the federal Treasury. Because the field is now nearing the end of its productive life, yields have declined. But the site's 666 working wellheads still produced enough oil last year to funnel $7.1 million into federal coffers.

Even so, by the mid-1990s, employees at the reserve read the handwriting on the wall. The proliferation of nuclear-powered vessels and more-efficient engines meant that the Navy no longer had much need for big petroleum reserves. And Energy officials had decided to move toward substantial privatization of energy resources, selling or leasing several of the department's naval oil reserve sites to private companies-this time, following above-board procedures. The biggest deal came in 1998, when Occidental Petroleum bought the government's share of the Elk Hills oil field in California. At $3.65 billion, it ranks as the largest privatization of federal property in history.

But Teapot Dome was too tapped out to attract buyers. The environmental measures a company would have to undertake to close down the field would far outweigh the dwindling income to be mustered from petroleum extraction. So in 1994, Energy transformed Teapot Dome into the Rocky Mountain Oilfield Testing Center-essentially a field laboratory where oil companies and independent inventors could test new ideas for finding and producing petroleum.

"We could have taken a defeatist attitude and said that our future was in the hands of the people in Washington," said Clarke Turner, who heads the Energy Department office in Casper that oversees the testing center. "But we said, `Let's re-engineer ourselves and make ourselves useful."

Turner-who worked at Teapot Dome from 1983 to 1986 and returned in 1994 after a stint with the Army-credits the industry with helping to make the case for the testing center. "The impetus was really bottom up," he said. "It started with a bunch of oil companies and environmental-related people here and within the Rocky Mountain area saying that this makes sense."

The center's mission, simply put, is to "bridge the gap between good ideas and the application of those ideas," says Sandy Andrew, who handles marketing and business development for the facility. One could describe it as a mini-National Laboratory for petroleum technology-or perhaps a big sandbox for creative petroleum engineers.

Since it was established, the center has participated in more than 110 major projects-testing drilling systems, environmental cleanup techniques, motor efficiency, and metallurgical breakthroughs. Typically, 10 to 12 experiments are going on at any given time. One project even looked at whether wastewater from oil drilling could be used to increase production of shrimp and tilapia at aquaculture farms.

Although perhaps a third of the center's customers are big corporations, smaller start-ups compose the center's largest constituency. "The big companies have an easier time getting into the field to test things," Turner says. "We like to work with the smaller companies, especially those that were started in a garage. That's where some of the bigger breakthroughs come from."

The testing center was a godsend for Leland Traylor, president and CEO of Pumping Solutions, a five-employee, maverick start-up based in Albuquerque, N.M. Traylor had designed a new-generation pumping system for low-yielding oil wells, known as "stripper" wells. But he needed to test the system in real-life situations, and doing so at the center made much more sense than trying to entice a private owner into lending a field.

The center approved Traylor's project quickly. After running nearly a dozen tests here at Teapot Dome, Traylor said, he's having a much easier time getting his foot in the door with potential customers.

Today, the center employs about 20 people and has a budget of $3 million-up from the modest $240,000 it began with in 1994, but still a pretty low price tag for a federal program.

The entrepreneurial spirit runs deep at the center-which suits Wyoming, a state that is more suspicious of the federal government than perhaps any other state. Center officials take pride in being more business-oriented than bureaucratic. About three years ago, the center re-engineered its operations, slashing several layers of management, instituting measurable goals, and streamlining procurement authority. It also likes to undertake projects that are geared toward getting products to market quickly.

"People in this state are hesitant to work with the government, but we show them that there's nothing to worry about," Turner said. "Because we're in the oil business, we understand the problems that operators are having; but because we're the government, they don't see us as trying to make a buck off them." Being small helps, Turner added. "The bigger you get," he said, "the more bureaucratic you have to become."

The center's main legislative wish is to get out from under some of its financial restrictions. Last year, Houston-based Omega Oil sought to form a partnership with the Energy Department to test a technology for reducing the cost and footprint of drilling rigs by feeding dozens of horizontal pipes into a central shaft. Omega's technique could have cut the number of wells on an 8,500-acre parcel from 220 to just one-thus, the company argues, lessening the environmental impact of drilling.

But even though Omega was prepared to invest $27 million of its own capital to pay for a test at Teapot Dome, the company wanted to recoup some of its costs by selling a fraction of the oil it pumped there. That, however, would have violated congressional budget-scoring rules: Any incremental oil reserves that Omega kept from the test would have to be counted as costs on the federal government's books.

"The budget-scoring rules were not developed to handle a situation where the government could make money with no investment," Turner said. An effort to lobby Congress failed, so Omega pulled out. The company is now seeking an alternative testing facility.

Two factors make such legislative changes unlikely, however. One is the center's diminutive size and remote location. "Being located in Wyoming and being such a small organization, it's really hard to get the word out," Turner said. Numerous interviews with politicos and oil-industry officials in Wyoming suggest that few people know much about the center. And seeking help for a federal program is not the easiest assignment in this staunchly conservative state.

The second obstacle is the continuing stigma of the Teapot Dome scandal. "Even though it happened 80 years ago, the scandal still has legs for politicians here because of the symbolism involved," said University of Wyoming historian Phil Roberts.

How long that stigma lasts is anybody's guess. "For people 35 and over, when I mention Teapot Dome, the scandal is the first thing that comes to their mind," Turner said. "For people younger than that, they say, `What's Teapot Dome?' "

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Western land, law agencies take on fossil poachers

Louis Jacobson — Tue, 27 Aug 2002 00:00:00 -0400

Now add to that list the poaching of vertebrate fossils.

Since the mid-1990s, two trends-a growing public fascination with dinosaurs and a handful of high-priced auctions of skeletons-have encouraged fossil hunters to comb the arid West for buried treasure. Some gather for themselves, while others sell their haul to collectors.

Legally, they can do so only on private land and with the landowner's permission. Federal lands-which, due to their ruggedness, happen to include some of the continent's best fossil-hunting territory-remain strictly off-limits to all but pre-approved digs by museums, universities or other credentialed institutions.

This dichotomy has led to tensions between scholars and commercial fossil-hunters-and federal law enforcement officers have been on the front lines of the battle.

The issue has reached the point where the BLM, the FBI, the National Park Service, the Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service and state officials have created a task force to share intelligence about fossil-poaching in Colorado, the Dakotas, Nebraska and Wyoming.

"We view fossil theft as a very significant issue," said Scott Lopez, the chief ranger at South Dakota's Badlands National Park. Lopez said his park sees 20-30 fossil-related cases a year and probably misses an equal number due to understaffing. Most violators are ticketed, with about one-fifth being charged with crimes serious enough to land them in court.

"We've had cases where we've arrested groups of up to four people who were university students searching around for fossils," Lopez said. "Some are avid collectors who sell to rock shops, and some are total amateurs. It's a wide variety."

John Silence, the Bureau of Land Management's special agent in charge for Colorado and 31 states east of the Mississippi River, said his region sees two or three "significant" fossil cases a year.

Silence said BLM works closely with local law enforcement officers to follow up on fossil-poaching tips. The bureau sometimes uses hidden cameras to catch violators in the act.

Once caught, Silence said, suspects are typically charged with theft or damage of government property or conspiracy. But they rarely end up in jail. (Unlike laws that cover the theft of human or archaeological remains from federal lands, no specific federal law bars the taking of fossils.) Often, defendants plead down to a fine and restoration of the site of the dig.

A major engine of controversy has been "Sue," a major set of Tyannosaurus Rex fossils discovered in 1990 that became the subject of a complex and drawn-out legal battle.

Sue was discovered by the Black Hills Institute, a private organization in Hill City, S.D., that eventually lost Sue in a dispute that involved federal officials, an Indian tribe and the man whose land it was found on.

After a high-profile raid on the institute's offices, federal prosecutors charged founder Peter Larson with several fossil-related charges. He was acquitted on all of the key counts, but he spent almost two years in jail on loosely related customs violations-an unexpectedly long sentence that was considered unnecessarily punitive by his supporters.

Sue, for her part, was purchased at a 1997 auction by Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. Most observers agree that Sue's $7.6 million price tag inspired many of the new fossil hunters.

"Things changed significantly after Sue," said Bill Perry, a Forest Service biologist and conservation specialist in Wall, S.D.

Many commercial fossil collectors consider the law enforcement crackdown to be overkill, suggesting that it is being driven by a minority of credentialed scholars who have long been protective of their own ability to dig on federal land.

"There is not some huge black market," said Marion Zenker, the Black Hills Institute's marketing coordinator. "The agencies insist that there is, because it helps them get more funding. Whenever a bureaucracy finds an issue like that, they're going to grab onto it with both hands and feet."

Charlie Magovern, who runs a well-established fossil-preparation business, The Stone Company, in Boulder, Colo., shared Zenker's concerns about certain government practices, which he compared to "hitting a fly with a sledgehammer."

Magovern said he has seen government appraisals that significantly overestimated a fossil's actual market price. "If a case is about a $100 pile of junk and the appraisal says it's worth $1,000, suddenly it's grand larceny," he said.

BLM's Silence acknowledged that its fossil appraisals-which are often handled by a combination of in-house and outside experts-are not an exact science. "We try to guard against [bias]," he said. "We want our appraisers to come at it from the mind, not the heart."

But even if much of today's fossil poaching is being done by unorganized novices-even, in some cases, by schoolteachers in search of visual aids for their classes-it still exacts a significant cost, officials say.

"If you've got a million visitors a year, and if people are coming around and picking up a tooth or a cat skull, it doesn't take long before the park's resources have been stripped," said Lopez of Badlands National Park.

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Rocky Flats nuclear cleanup effort finally on track

Louis Jacobson — Wed, 14 Aug 2002 00:00:00 -0400

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Rocky Flats seemed to be a hopeless case. Established in 1953 at the height of the Cold War, the plant churned out plutonium triggers for four decades. But it also spawned numerous contamination problems that were compounded by long stretches of mismanagement by federal contractors.

In 1989, the FBI raided Rocky Flats as part of an environmental investigation of Rockwell International, the company that had managed the site since 1975. Rockwell eventually pled guilty to 10 federal counts and paid $18.5 million in fines. In 1992, after the Cold War ended, President George H.W. Bush announced that Rocky Flats would cease operations permanently.

With the plant shut down, the Energy Department was stuck with cleaning up 12.9 metric tons of plutonium and sizable quantities of beryllium, asbestos, lead and myriad other toxic chemicals. These materials were stored throughout a 365-acre complex that included 100 major buildings and 700 other structures.

"A cleanup of this magnitude and complexity had never been attempted or accomplished anywhere in the world," said Patrick Etchart, an Energy spokesman.

For several years after its closure, observers say, Rocky Flats was beset by suffocating bureaucracy and halfhearted management. "In the early 1990s, relations with the nearby communities and the regulators were pretty rough," said David Shelton, vice president for environmental systems and stewardship for Kaiser-Hill Co. LLC, which took over Rocky Flats' management contract in 1995. "Under the regulatory agreement then in place, milestones were being missed, with no hope of recovery. A lot of studies were going on, but no real cleanup was being done. People were getting pretty frustrated."

The situation began to change once Energy and Kaiser-Hill agreed to a creative governance structure. Kaiser-Hill's contract junked many of the paperwork requirements that typified previous contracts, and called instead for tangible progress in cleaning up the site. Kaiser-Hill would see its payments pegged to such indicators as worker safety, its speed in finishing jobs and its ability to stay within budget. The two successive contracts signed by Kaiser-Hill are valued at $7.6 billion. The contracts specify that the cleanup should be complete by Dec. 15, 2006.

Len Ackland, a University of Colorado journalism professor and author of Making a Real Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West (University of New Mexico Press, 1999), said that Rocky Flats is finally on the right track. "For the first time, you have as the head of the DOE office and the head of the contractor, people who are environmental specialists," Ackland said. "Before, you had bomb-builders posing as environmental specialists."

Another key step, participants say, was establishing effective cooperation among federal, state, local and private sector stakeholders, especially on such issues as jurisdiction and oversight. An agreement signed by the key parties "forced everybody around the site to develop a vision. Before that, people were groping," said Doug Young, an aide to Rep. Mark Udall, D-Colo., whose district includes Rocky Flats and who has worked with his Republican colleague, Sen. Wayne Allard, to turn Rocky Flats into a wildlife refuge.

The focus on achieving concrete cleanup results has helped ease relations between site managers and two groups that had spent years fighting each other: liberal activists in nearby Boulder, Colo., who had long opposed either the site's war mission or its environmental record, or both, and Rocky Flats' 4,000-strong, unionized workforce, which celebrated its Cold War achievements and feared for its long-term job security.

"Once we started knocking down walls and shipping waste and nuclear materials offsite, it started changing the workforce's mind-set," said John Schneider, an assistant manager at Rocky Flats. "They suddenly understood that their mission was not to wait for a call from the president to build more triggers--it was to close the site."

Kaiser-Hill has also taken unconventional approaches to keeping the project ahead of schedule and on budget. For instance, officials decided to start tearing down low-contamination buildings on the site's periphery sooner than planned. By so doing, they reduced the site's security and maintenance perimeter, thus saving money.

"Elsewhere, cleanups have generally gone for the high-risk stuff first," said Frank Gibbs, a deputy project manager with Kaiser-Hill. "But the managers here brainstormed and decided that if you did that at Rocky Flats, by time the plutonium was gone, there would be too much work at the back end to finish the job by 2006. It's a unique approach to decommissioning a nuclear site, but I think this will become the new standard."

While many of Rocky Flats' dangerous materials have by now been moved to facilities in Tennessee, New Mexico and Nevada, much work remains. Officials warn that while radioactive materials usually attract the most public attention, other more common chemicals, such as cleaning and degreasing solvents, pose equal challenges.

In some of the more contaminated buildings, "you have every hazard in the world," said Mark Ferri, a Kaiser-Hill vice president. "From a technical standpoint, it's a lot of pretty basic operations. But when you combine it all from a strategic and tactical point of view, it's cutting-edge."

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Merging cultures of homeland security agencies will be big challenge

Louis Jacobson — Thu, 13 Jun 2002 00:00:00 -0400

Contractors lobby against Labor Department reporting requirements

Louis Jacobson — Wed, 05 Jun 2002 00:00:00 -0400

A coalition of government contractors is trying to convince the Labor Department's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) to reduce and streamline its requirements for statistical information about employment and compensation patterns. Much of the paperwork that the coalition is targeting was implemented during the Clinton administration and was backed by pro-diversity organizations and labor unions.

Robert J. Smith, a lawyer-lobbyist with the firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius in Washington, said that the OFCCP Coalition for Reform-the contractors' group that he advises-doesn't quarrel with the office's need to compile statistics that ensure that federal contractors adhere to equal-employment practices. Instead, Smith said, the coalition wants to reduce what it considers duplicative paperwork.

"We're hoping to work with the department to assist it in coming up with realistic templates and measures," Smith said.

The efforts to streamline data-collecting by federal contractors is "definitely" on the Labor Department's radar screen, said Deron Zeppelin, director of government affairs at the Society for Human Resource Management.

"It's not moving as fast as a hare, but it might be moving a little faster than a tortoise," Zeppelin said.

Among the issues the coalition is targeting is the Equal Opportunity Survey, a questionnaire that asks contractors to supply detailed statistical information about employee compensation patterns. Smith argues that the survey requests information in a way that is "effectively meaningless. At the end of the day, you can't parse anything from the data they're seeking."

It takes companies an average of 20 hours to complete the survey, but since one survey is required for each company facility, bigger contractors can spend hundreds or even thousands of hours filling out the surveys.

The coalition also opposes the way OFCCP analyzes compensation patterns. Currently, the job classifications that are used to determine patterns of pay can include wide variations in job types, Smith said. The coalition favors relying on long-established job classifications.

"We're asking the department to refrain from sending out any more forms until the survey's vitality can be established," Smith said.

Such views are opposed by a broad range of women's groups, civil rights organizations and labor unions, including the National Partnership for Women and Families, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, the AFL-CIO and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

"We strongly support the survey," said Jocelyn Frye, director of legal and public policy with the National Partnership for Women and Families. "The survey was the result of years of outreach from different groups on both sides of the issue. There were at least three opportunities for comment. It was a very important and solid compromise that tried to reflect and balance a lot of competing interests."

The coalition's other main concern involves the definition of the term "applicant." Federal contractors are supposed to keep records of the demographic breakdown of job applicants and then forward that information to the Labor Department. The idea is to ensure that contractors seek their employees from a diverse labor pool.

But ever since the advent of e-mail and job-search Web sites, companies have become deluged with inquiries about job openings, many from people who have little intention of seriously pursuing a job. The coalition argues that keeping track of all such inquiries-and securing demographic information from each applicant-is pointless.

"These mandates come irrespective of whether the company is actually looking for individuals to hire, and irrespective of whether the individual meets the basic qualification for any job that's available-much less the one they are applying for," Smith said.

Instead, the coalition urges that the department require companies to track applicants only when the company is known to be statistically under-employing minorities or women. And in those cases, the coalition suggests, companies should only be required to track application patterns when positions are open, and only for applicants who meet minimum job qualifications.

The current requirements "make the agency look foolish, and don't benefit the whole affirmative-action compliance process," Smith said. "We're trying to help the agency rationalize its procedures."

Feminist, minority and union groups "would not object to reasonable limits" on the term "applicant," Frye said. But, she added, she and her allies want to ensure that the new limits aren't so "amorphous" that they defeat the purpose of data-collecting. " 'Qualified' is an ambiguous term-there's a lot of litigation surrounding it," she said. "So if it gets to that level, we'd be real concerned."

Moreover, Frye said, companies should first try to harness Internet technologies themselves to handle the flood of information more effectively.

Under the Bush administration, the OFCCP has not been enforcing the broader definition of "applicant" to the same degree the Clinton administration did, Zeppelin said. But as of yet, it hasn't scrapped the policy either, he said.

The issue of defining the term "applicant" will get extra impetus because the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is also looking at the issue, Zeppelin said.

Smith declined to reveal the membership of his coalition, saying only that its members are approximately 10 trade associations.

National Journal Group Inc., the parent company of Government Executive, is among the companies classified as federal contractors that must comply with OFCCP regulations. It is not a member of the coalition.

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Bank accused of shredding taxpayers’ returns hires Washington lobbyists

Louis Jacobson — Thu, 04 Apr 2002 00:00:00 -0500

The lobby firms--Sullivan & Cromwell and the Smith Free Group--did not return calls from National Journal, and a spokesman at Mellon's headquarters said that the company would have nothing to say about the lobbying arrangement.

But the move comes roughly seven months after Mellon officials acknowledged that employees at its Pittsburgh processing center lost tens of thousands of tax returns sent by individual taxpayers in New York and New England.

Several commercial banks--including Mellon--contracted with Treasury's Financial Management Service to receive returns from taxpayers, under what is called a "lockbox" contract. The role of the banks is to deposit the enclosed checks on behalf of the government and then forward the tax documents to the IRS. But the agency canceled Mellon's Pittsburgh contract after hundreds of taxpayers called the IRS to ask why their checks hadn't cleared.

A subsequent investigation found that as many as 71,000 tax returns sent by taxpayers to Mellon's Pittsburgh center had disappeared. The documents were reportedly stuffed in drawers and hidden in boxes. Some are alleged to have been shredded.

The company fired the workers responsible, but the IRS canceled the contract, and Mellon did not win the replacement contract.

It is unclear why Mellon has decided to hire lobbying firms now. Prior to the hiring of Smith Free and Sullivan & Cromwell, Mellon Financial Corp. did not report having any lobbyists in Washington, either in-house or outside the company.

However, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., recently cited Mellon's mistakes in a well-publicized letter to IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti. In the letter, Schumer asked Rossotti about the safeguards now used by the IRS to prevent similar problems elsewhere.

Mellon also has other contracting work with the federal government to protect. An existing "lockbox" contract with a Mellon facility in Los Angeles is still active, said Alvina McHale, legislative and public affairs director at the Financial Management Service.

Another Mellon program was touted as recently as last month by Treasury officials in testimony before Congress. In that program, Mellon collaborated with the Bureau of Public Debt, Treasury's Financial Management Service, MasterCard and IBM Corp. to build a widely used Internet-based system to sell U.S. Savings Bonds directly to the public.

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Park Service working on Flight 93 memorial in Pennsylvania

Louis Jacobson — Wed, 13 Feb 2002 00:00:00 -0500

"We had people almost immediately after the crash recognizing that this was not some ordinary event, and that some kind of monument or memorial ought to be placed on the site," said Brad Clemenson, a spokesman for Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., who represents the nearby area. "We told people it was premature-it was still a crime scene then-but we took their names and ideas, and we have continued to work with everyone."

Officials from Somerset County, the borough of Shanksville, Pa., and Stonycreek Township, Pa., have taken the lead in preserving the site and establishing a task force to design a memorial for the 40 passengers and crew who died there. Soon after the crash, officials from these jurisdictions asked for and got assistance from the National Park Service.

Murtha is working with the Park Service to craft legislation that would initiate the process for establishing a national memorial at the site. Typically, Congress asks the Park Service to consider whether a site is worthy of national memorial status, at which point the agency conducts a detailed study before recommending what form of designation is appropriate. Alternately, the president can invoke the 1906 Antiquities Act to establish new Park Service sites unilaterally.

Already, private donations that could ultimately be used to build a memorial are pouring in. At least two funds have been established to keep those monies in escrow until design plans have materialized.

The efforts to preserve the sites of the Sept. 11 attacks are part of a trend toward ever-more rapid memorialization. In decades past, Congress and the Park Service would typically wait decades before establishing historical monuments or memorials. But beginning with the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington and accelerating with the Oklahoma City memorial to the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building, the American way of commemorating history has changed dramatically. The memorial to the Oklahoma City victims was dedicated five years after the bombing.

"Americans are demanding memorials sooner, partly as a way to help themselves get through the ordeal," said Linda Neal, the Park Service's project director for the national parks located in New York Harbor. "It's become much more interactive. People no longer just lay a wreath or flower at a tomb for an unknown soldier of World War I. They leave personal notes, teddy bears and all sorts of artifacts."

Officials say that the memorialization effort in southwestern Pennsylvania has advanced more rapidly than efforts to create memorials at the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan or at the Pentagon. One major reason is that in Pennsylvania, only about a half-dozen landowners stand to be affected by the construction of a memorial, and the biggest of those owners-a coal company-has already indicated a willingness to cooperate.

Moreover, the assessment and cleanup of the Pennsylvania site has been far less complicated than at either of the other two crash sites.

In New York City, "there's so much going on I don't even know where to start," Neal said. "There are scores of organizations and coalitions cropping up, and they're all grappling with what should be the process for planning a memorial and redevelopment of lower Manhattan. Sometimes these groups intermingle, sometimes they stay pretty segregated. It depends on who's coordinating the meetings.

"In New York, the Park Service has not been asked to do anything officially. I've simply been attending as many of the committee meetings as I can, but if you go to one, you may be missing five others held the same night."

In Pennsylvania, by contrast, local officials tapped the Park Service's institutional knowledge from the beginning.

"In October, we helped the county develop procedures for collecting artifacts," said Joanne Hanley, the superintendent of four Park Service sites in southwestern Pennsylvania. To do this, the Park Service brought in Pamela West, a Washington-based Park Service employee who has helped gather artifacts at the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial and the site of the Oklahoma City bombing.

The Park Service also helped organize a December town meeting near the crash site. The purpose of the meeting, Hanley said, was to discuss "not the memorial itself, but a process for establishing one, because frankly the process is just as important as the memorial itself. It needs to be inclusive and have many voices. It should be slow and deliberate. And the process itself can serve a very important purpose in healing and grieving." To drive home this point, the Park Service invited several panelists with experience working with Oklahoma City's much-praised memorial task force to speak at the meeting.

"The Park Service is playing a very supportive role, but only when asked by the county commissioners," Hanley said. "The worst thing that could happen is for the government to come in and tell the local people what to do. It has to be bottom-up and inclusive. In Oklahoma City, the task force included 300 people, and every decision was unanimous."

Because the efforts to memorialize the three Sept. 11 sites are not being coordinated, the quick progress in Pennsylvania means that the sites could open at different times and offer varied narrative content. While cooperation further down the road is considered likely, some observers also worry that memorializing the sites too quickly could make it hard to put the events of Sept. 11 into their proper historical context.

"Sometimes it's difficult to know what that larger story will be," Neal said, adding that the war on terrorism launched after Sept. 11 is far from over.

Hanley takes some comfort in noting that the Park Service is quite used to dealing with the needs of memorialization. In her region alone, Hanley oversees Fort Necessity National Battlefield, where the first battle of the French and Indian War was fought, and the Johnstown Flood National Memorial, marking a tragedy that killed 2,209 people on May 31, 1889. That was the largest one-day loss of civilian life in the United States-until Sept. 11, 2001.

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Biometrics firms step up efforts to lobby agencies

Louis Jacobson — Thu, 01 Nov 2001 00:00:00 -0500

Atlanta-based AcSys Biometrics has hired two lobbyists from Barnes & Thornburg, an Indianapolis-based law firm: John Edgell, a former aide to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio; and Jeff Taylor, a former aide to Rep. David McIntosh, R-Ind.

Another company, 3rd Millennium, has retained veteran Democratic lobbyist Jim Davidson.

In the meantime, the industry's three-year-old trade group--the International Biometric Industry Association--is trying to boost the industry as a whole.

AcSys makes a system that recognizes faces by comparing facial dimensions to a database of scanned mug shots. It is entering into a partnership with another company, Maximus, to propose a "smart card" identification system.

"We've been making the rounds with the homeland security-related agencies," Edgell said, specifically citing the Federal Aviation Administration, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Customs Service and the Secret Service.

Edgell and Taylor have also been working on Capitol Hill, where Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., have proposed major INS reforms.

Kansas City-based 3rd Millennium wants to offer a card with a digital photo, numerical identifier code and a chip that stores a biometric image of the cardholder's finger.

Initially, the system would be geared towards confirming the identities of foreign nationals and airport employees, said Mike Stock, a managing member of the company who visited Washington this week.

The system could be expanded for use by the general, flying public he added, with the assurance that-for privacy reasons-it would not be able to provide fingerprint images of a good enough quality to be of help in ordinary police investigations.

"It's a system that's proven and ready to go, and I think it certainly meets the unique demands of the moment," Davidson said.

Stock, who was referred to Davidson by a Kansas City law firm, told Government Executive that selling his product to federal decision-makers "would be very difficult without having professional lobbyists in the D.C. area."

In the meantime, at IBIA, "everyone associated with the association has been deluged with requests for advice and counsel, and particularly to testify at hearings before Congress and to meet with executive branch agencies, to discuss the uses of biometrics to detect and deter terrorists," said a senior official with the group.

IBIA representatives have already testified before two Senate Judiciary subcommittees, and "we have all kinds of requests pending with no fixed dates set."

One lobbyist added that while interest in biometric technology among agency officials is high, federal executives are so busy dealing with terrorism-related issues that it's hard to secure time to demonstrate their products and services.

"It matters how you happen to catch people and what time you catch them," the lobbyist said.

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Interest in Foreign Service jobs soars

Louis Jacobson — Wed, 24 Oct 2001 00:00:00 -0400

"While we are focusing on the difficult issues that are confronting our country since Sept. 11, I think it is a tribute to the American people and the vital role of this department that 12,807 people took the Foreign Service written exam," deputy State Department spokesman Philip T. Reeker told reporters at a Monday briefing.

The spike in test-takers--an increase of 63 percent over 2000--is not a direct result of patriotic sentiment after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, since people had to apply to take the exam earlier in the year. Still, Foreign Service officials are encouraged that applicants did not skip the test in large numbers because of concerns about the safety of overseas postings.

"The big question was what would people do after Sept. 11," said John Naland, president of the American Foreign Service Association, which represents Foreign Service officers. "No one knew what would happen after the print and television images of our embassies in Indonesia and Pakistan surrounded by mobs. I think it bodes very well that a large number of people took the test."

The Foreign Service exam consists of a written portion--which was given Sept. 29--and an oral exam, administered later to people who pass the initial test. Typically, only about 500 applicants out of 12,000 will receive placements as Foreign Service officers, Naland said.

Naland credited the efforts of Secretary of State Colin Powell for increasing interest in the Foreign Service exam. Powell, he noted, has made the recruitment of career diplomats a priority following a decade in which the number of Foreign Service officers has dwindled due to budget cutbacks and attrition.

"He has obtained the resources to advertise the Foreign Service exam and openings in the department, and he has been talking in the media about the crucial role of diplomats in building the coalition against terrorism," Naland said. "So we had been very hopeful that this new prominence would have this kind of result."

Powell has backed a three-year effort to increase the size of the diplomatic corps, beginning with 360 new people who will fill existing vacancies and provide reinforcement so that active Foreign Service officers can return home for specialized training.

In addition, the State Department will begin offering the written exam twice a year next year--rather than the traditional once a year. The department is also working to accelerate the process of getting successful applicants posted overseas.

Reeker said in his briefing that the proportion of minority test-takers increased from 23 percent last year to 31 percent this year. The department set new records for African-American and Hispanic test-takers, while the numbers of Asian-American and Native American test-takers increased by 47 percent and 100 percent, respectively.

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Praise for agencies may not translate into new recruits

Louis Jacobson — Tue, 23 Oct 2001 00:00:00 -0400

Asked to rate their interest in taking a federal government job, only 16 percent of college-educated respondents rated it a 9 or a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10. That's about half the level of interest found among those who lacked a college degree.

At the same time, only 17 percent of respondents currently employed in professional and managerial occupations rated their interest as a 9 or 10, compared to 35 percent of blue-collar workers.

While 71 percent of those surveyed in the October poll believed that the federal government responded to the terrorist attacks "very well" and another 20 percent said it responded "fairly well," the survey found that interest in entering the federal workforce did not automatically follow.

A full 75 percent of respondents said that their interest in working for the federal government remained the same after Sept. 11, another 5 percent said it had declined, and only 18 percent said it had increased.

"These results suggest that the federal recruitment problem remains as substantial as it was prior to the terrorist attacks," Hart-Teeter concluded.

The survey found that people focused on personal advancement goals found private business opportunities to be superior. College graduates said they believe that jobs in private business are better when it comes to offering interesting and challenging work (40 percent, compared to 9 percent for government), rewarding outstanding performance (62 percent compared to 5 percent), and allowing employees to take initiative (69 percent to 3 percent).

At the same time, those who say they want to contribute to society increasingly favor the nonprofit sector. By a margin of 52 percent to 10 percent, respondents said that non-profit organizations offer a better opportunity than the government when it comes to contributing to society and making a difference.

The one bright spot for federal recruitment is that people aged 18-29 said they felt more positively toward federal employment than older workers did.

The survey results are to be announced at today's launch of the Partnership for Public Service, a $25-million-plus private-sector effort designed to aid the recruitment of a new generation of government officials.

The surveys were sponsored by the Partnership for Public Service and the Council for Excellence in Government. The first survey of 1,018 respondents was done between July 31 and Aug. 8 and included adults who are employed, looking for work or attending school and who do not currently work for the federal government. The margin of error was ±3.1 percent.

The second survey of 800 similar respondents was conducted from Oct. 12-14. Its margin of error was ±3.5 percent.

Organizers of the launch said they were expecting Senate Governmental Affairs Committee member George Voinovich, R-Ohio, to use the occasion to formally propose legislation requiring agencies and departments to appoint chief human resources officers, and promoting student loan forgiveness for graduates who enter government service.

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Postal Service weighs new needs in bioterror fallout

Louis Jacobson — Wed, 17 Oct 2001 00:00:00 -0400

"We've had a lot of calls from the committees asking us what we need, and we are in the process of evaluating that--talking with Homeland Security people and looking at what kinds of technology is available," said Deborah Willhite, senior vice president for government relations and public policy at the Postal Service. "We're trying to figure out what would be the best use of technology to provide another level of security for the mail without being invasive--and whether that technology exists."

Willhite noted inconsistencies in public information about dealing with anthrax.

"You can watch television and hear very well-informed experts who believe that radiation will kill anthrax, yet you can watch the same channel 30 minutes later and hear just as many PhD's say it will not," she said. "We are evaluating what the various answers might be, and what the value-added would be to the American citizen."

Willhite said that the Postal Service is keeping its options open about requesting additional funding from Congress rather than paying for security upgrades out of its existing budget--a budget that has been especially squeezed this year because of operational shortfalls.

"There's been no decision yet on how to pay for it," Willhite said.

She added: "We've been very appreciative of the offers we've already gotten from the Hill and from various other government departments that are very concerned. They understand that the mail is a fundamental part of the nation's infrastructure."

Willhite and groups representing mailers--who despite some policy differences have worked together to promote postal-reform legislation--are aware that the growing list of war-related legislation items will make it more difficult to pass postal reform.

But they argue that the anthrax scare actually spotlights the need for fundamental reforms, such as giving the Postal Service more freedom to set prices and try different approaches to collecting and delivering the mail.

"If anything, I think that the recent scares have drawn more attention to the need for the Postal Service to have some flexibility to respond to unusual costs like this," said Neal Denton, executive director of the Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers.

"Mailing is a $900 billion industry employing 9 million workers and representing 8 percent of GNP," said Bruce Heiman, a lawyer and lobbyist who represents the mail-technology company Pitney Bowes. "Certainly the mail needs to keep moving. The anthrax scare emphasizes the need for postal reform, to ensure that mail remains a competitive, affordable universal communications medium in the 21st century."

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Effort to promote public service to be launched next month

Louis Jacobson — Fri, 28 Sep 2001 00:00:00 -0400

The Partnership for Public Service--now slated to launch on October 23--has significant financial resources. Samuel J. Heyman, a Connecticut businessman who worked in the Justice Department under Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, is bankrolling the group to the tune of $25 million over five years. The initiative also has the support of high-profile figures from government, business, and academia.

The partnership's board includes the chairmen and ranking members of both the House Government Reform Committee and the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee--Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., Rep. Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif., Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., and Sen. Fred D. Thompson, R-Tenn. Other board members are: Sens. Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., and George Voinovich, R-Ohio; former Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J.; former Secretary of State James A. Baker III; former Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole; former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker; Lockheed Martin Corp. Executive Committee Chairman Norman Augustine; Walt Disney Co. CEO Michael Eisner; and Yale University President Richard C. Levin.

Partnership officials point out with alarm that nearly 20 percent of federal civilian employees are expected to retire over the next five years, including 45 percent of the federal government's senior executives. Yet just 10 percent of recent Phi Beta Kappa graduates from American universities rate the government as a first choice for employment, the group says.

"The bottom line is that the federal government is facing a crunch that's quite dramatic," said Max Stier, the new group's president and CEO. The existing government workforce is aging, he said, but the government "is no longer being viewed as an attractive employer by talented people just out of college and graduate school."

The partnership has five goals. The first is to mount a public relations campaign highlighting the positive actions of government--an effort aided, tragically, by the terrorist attacks. Other goals are to: advise government agencies on how best to recruit young, talented people; work with agencies to allow employees more flexibility and creativity in their jobs; and conduct research on human resources issues in government. The partnership has also hired pollsters Peter Hart and Robert Teeter to survey American attitudes on government.

The partnership's final goal is to encourage Congress to pass new legislation. The first proposed bill--The Human Resources Officer Act--would require agencies and departments to appoint a chief human resources officer who would "elevate human capital management" to positions of prominence within government on a par with financial and information-technology issues.

The partnership's second legislative proposal is to encourage student loan forgiveness for graduates who enter government service. Currently, student-loan debts that are forgiven by universities are not treated as taxable income, but student-loan debts forgiven by the government are. The proposed bill would eliminate this difference, which the partnership says is arbitrary and counterproductive.

Stier said that he and other organizers hope that having key legislators on the partnership board will improve the chances of passing this agenda.

Stier, 35, was an aide to Rep. Jim Leach, R-Iowa, and clerked for Supreme Court Justice David Souter. He also worked for the Justice Department and the Housing and Urban Development Department. His most recent position was as HUD's deputy general counsel for litigation in the Clinton administration.

Other government employment specialists are welcoming the launching of the partnership. "We see it as a very nice fit," said Myra Howze Shiplett, director of the Center for Human Resources Management at the National Academy of Public Administration. "We have a shared set of values and will be able to complement each other."

Those sentiments were echoed by Patricia McGinnis, president and CEO of the Council for Excellence in Government. McGinnis, who is also a member of the partnership's board, said the "effort will have to go beyond the insiders. It's got to be a public issue. I would hope that they invest their time in broader public communications efforts."

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Federal employees continue work with a new perspective

Louis Jacobson — Fri, 14 Sep 2001 00:00:00 -0400

With news gradually filtering back of the federal employees who were killed, many staffers discovered personal links to the victims. "The bodies are here. The minds are focused on other places," said Dianne McSwain, a rural specialist at HHS. When federal buildings reopened on Wednesday morning, security procedures had been greatly ratcheted up, just as they had been after the Oklahoma City bombing. HHS employees were greeted with small chains at the door and informed by security that they needed to wear their identification badges at all times inside the building. Cars pulling into the subterranean garage were stopped and checked with mirrors for hidden explosives.

"We go through periodic blips of security," said McSwain, "but I don't think this is a blip. And I didn't hear a single complaint." Hap Connors, a spokesman for the General Services Administration, said: "Without a doubt, security [at federal buildings] will be increased. Since the Oklahoma City bombings, we have spent $1.2 billion on security upgrades. We've gotten more people, better technology, and more intelligence. Now, there are already calls on Capitol Hill for even more. I think you will see a lot more security. That is how we responded then, and that is how we will respond again." Ironically, some suggest that Tuesday's tragedies will burnish the image of government work in ways that help future recruiting. "The events of [Tuesday] have drawn attention, especially among young people, to the important roles that government plays in their lives--from mayors, to police, to the rescuers, to the agencies, to the President," said Patricia McGinnis, president and CEO of the Council for Excellence in Government. Corine Hegland, Shawn Zeller and Michael Steel contributed to this story.

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