Government Executive - Authors - Paul W. Singer

The Wrong War

Paul W. Singer and Noah Shachtman — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The insistence on applying Cold War metaphors to cybersecurity is misplaced and counterproductive.

For every big policy issue, there's usually a parallel that can be found in the past. As Mark Twain once put it, "History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme."

The problem for policymakers, though, is identifying which tune it exactly is that they are hearing. While applying lessons from the past can be a useful analytic tool, we frequently unearth old analogies that may not be the right fit for the new problem we face. Indeed, most often we turn to the songs we know best, the ones we hummed in our youth, when others may be more apt. For instance, senior Air Force officers during the Vietnam War clung to a strategic bombing campaign more suited to their early experiences bombing Nazi Germany than a Third World insurgency, while in turn, the recent debate about Afghanistan keeps echoing back to baby boomer concerns about whether a 21st century war would be "Obama's Vietnam."

Today, the hit makers of Washington could be making a similar mistake when it comes to cybersecurity, trying to jam a new issue into the wrong historic framework. The new rhythms of online crime, spying and statecraft are unfamiliar. So, perhaps not surprising, they're turning to an old parallel that they spent most of their professional lives working on: the Cold War.

Cold War, Wrong War

Again and again in policy circles, cyber-security's dynamics, threats and responses are consistently compared to the technology of nuclear weapons and the standoff between the United States and Soviet Union. Former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, for instance, describes the Cold War and cybersecurity as "eerily similar," while journalist David Ignatius summed up his meetings with top Pentagon officials in a 2010 article titled "Cold War Feeling on Cybersecurity."

Even the network security firm McAfee is susceptible to such talk. "We believe we're seeing something a little like a cyber Cold War," McAfee Vice President Dmitri Alperovitch says. This attitude culminated, perhaps, with what is reported to be in the classified version of the recent Defense Department cyber strategy, which announced a new doctrine of "equivalence," arguing that harmful action within the cyber domain can be met with parallel response in another domain. Swap in the words "conventional" and "nuclear" for "cyber" and "kinetic" and the new doctrine is actually revealed to essentially be the old 1960s deterrence doctrine of "flexible response," where a conventional attack might be met with either a conventional and/or nuclear response. The Pentagon's Cyber Command and Beijing's People's Liberation Army's Third Army Department now fill in for the old Strategic Air Command and the Red Army's Strategic Rocket Forces.

The problem is that the song is not the same and the historic fit to the Cold War is actually not so neat. Cyberspace is a man-made domain of technological commerce and communication, not a geographical chessboard of competing alliances. The Cold War was a competition primarily between two superpowers, with political leadership and decision-making clearly located in Washington and Moscow, each the center of a network of allied treaties and client states, and a Third World zone over which they competed. By contrast, the Internet isn't a network of governments, but the digital activities of 2 billion users, traveling across a network owned by an array of businesses, mostly 5,039 Internet service providers, that rely almost exclusively on handshake agreements to carry data from one side of the planet to the other, according to Bill Woodcock and Vijay Adhikari in their article "Survey of Characteristics of Internet Carrier Interconnection Agreements" from Packet Clearing House. The Cold War also was a war of ideas between two competing political ideologies. The majority of the Internet's infrastructure is in the hands of these ISPs and carrier networks, as is the expertise to secure that infrastructure. The ideas at play sometimes touch on ideology, but they also range from issues of privacy and human rights to Twitter posts about Justin Bieber's new haircut.

This disconnect goes much further. The barriers to entry for gaining the ultimate weapon in the Cold War, the nuclear bomb, were quite high. Only a few states could join the superpowers' atomic club-and never in numbers that made these second-tier nuclear powers comparable to U.S. and Soviet forces. By comparison, the actors in cyberspace might range from thrill-seeking teenagers to criminal gangs to government-sponsored "patriotic hacker communities" to the more than 100 nation states that have set up military and intelligence cyberwarfare units.

The issues in cybersecurity are more of forensics and attribution and subtle influence than old-fashioned deterrence. Thus, the idea of making old-school nuclear and cyberattacks equivalent may have a certain appeal, but in the cyber realm you may not know who attacked you-or even when and if you were attacked. Take the Stuxnet worm, which was allegedly designed to handicap the Iranian nuclear program. It took the Iranians (as well as most cybersecurity companies) several months to realize they were under attack, and even now the source of that attack is based more on forensic backtracking and deduction than on any obvious source, such as an intercontinental ballistic missile's launch plume.

There is one Cold War parallel that could hold true, however. Many of today's discussions of cybersecurity in Washington are reminiscent of the bizarre debates over nuclear weapons in the 1940s and '50s, in which hype and hysteria ranged freely, real-world versions of Dr. Strangelove were taken seriously, and horrible policy ideas like the Army's Pentomic division (which was organized to use nuclear artillery, as if it were just another weapon) were actually implemented. As "Loving the Cyber Bomb," a recent study by actual cyber experts at George Mason University's Mercatus Center (as opposed to the many Cold Warriors who now have rebranded themselves as cyber experts) found, there is a massive amount of threat inflation going on in Washington's discussion of online dangers, most frequently by those with political or profit motives in hyping the threats. It's a new version of the old "missile gap" hysteria.

Mind the Gap

The result of this fundamental misunderstanding is that in the press, a cyberattack could unquestioningly be portrayed as a massive pixilated mushroom cloud looming over every American city (as the cover of the Economist magazine had it). In Washington, malware could be described as "like a [weapon of mass destruction]" (Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich.) able to "destroy our society" (Scowcroft), meaning it should be looked at as "an existential threat" (Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff). But the reality is that even an all-out cyber conflict wouldn't compare to a global thermonuclear war that truly did threaten to end life on Earth. Nor has there been a Hiroshima-sized prelude yet. For example, the much vaunted Russian attack on Estonia in 2007 was a concern to the country's government, which saw its websites blocked and defaced, but it barely affected the daily life of most Estonians.

In Georgia, Russian cyberattacks in 2008 took down some external-facing government websites for a few days, but these were peanuts compared with the actual damage caused by actual Russian missiles and bombs in the accompanying war. Indeed, the very next year, a 75-year-old woman was able to outdo the entire Russian cyberwarfare apparatus using a mere shovel. Out hunting for scrap metal, she accidentally cut a cable and took out all of neighboring Armenia's Internet service. Yet, no local or global catastrophe ensued from the far more effective physical actions of this so-called "spade hacker."

Similarly, the 2009 attacks against the United States and South Korea are repeatedly cited as examples of what a state government (North Korea is usually claimed in this instance) can do to the United States in this realm, but the actual result was that the websites of Nasdaq, the New York Stock Exchange and The Washington Post were intermittently inaccessible for a few hours. The websites recovered, and more important, these institutions and those that depend on them were not irrecoverably lost as if a real weapon of mass destruction had hit them.

The problem with threat inflation and misapplied history is that there are extremely serious risks, but also manageable responses, from which they steer us away. Massive, simultaneous, all-encompassing cyberattacks on the power grid, the banking system, transportation networks, etc. along the lines of a Cold War first strike or what Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has called the "next Pearl Harbor" (another overused and ill- suited analogy) would certainly have major consequences, but they also remain completely theoretical, and the nation would recover. In the meantime, a real national security danger is being ignored: the combination of online crime and espionage that's gradually undermining our finances, our know-how and our entrepreneurial edge. While would-be cyber Cold Warriors stare at the sky and wait for it to fall, they're getting their wallets stolen and their offices robbed.

Roughly 7 million Americans reported that they suffered directly from cybercriminal activity last year, while according to the British government, online thieves, extortionists, scammers and industrial spies cost businesses an estimated $43.5 billion in the United Kingdom alone. Internationally, these numbers total in the hundreds of billions of dollars, creating a huge drag on the global economy. They also are slowly reducing trust in the IT and innovation industry that powered much of America's economic growth over the last two decades (all the more important during a manufacturing decline). These compromises of critical intellectual property threaten to undermine the long-term advantages the United States has enjoyed in economic trade. Take the so-called Night Dragon attacks, which lifted corporate secrets from Western energy companies just before they were to bid against the Chinese on major oil deposits. The result: billions of dollars' worth of business lost over the next few years. Such espionage even has struck small businesses all the way down to tiny furniture companies. The problem also hits national security. Look at the compromise of U.S. officials' email accounts by China-based hackers and diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks revealing internal secrets and jeopardizing external alliances. Or look at the repeated penetration of Lockheed Martin Corp., maker of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter-the largest weapons program in Pentagon history. Terabytes of unclassified data related to the jet's design and electronics systems were stolen. These lost bytes represent billions of dollars in research and development and years of technologic advantage gone, making it easier to counter (or copy) our latest warplane. And as a sign of things to come, security tokens, allowing infiltrators to pass as company employees, later were taken as well.

The Pirate Code

If the most apt parallel is not the Cold War, then what are some alternatives we could turn to for guidance, especially when it comes to the problem of building up international cooperation in this space? Cybersecurity's parallels, and some of its solutions, lie more in the 1840s and '50s than they do in the 1940s and '50s.

Much like the Internet is becoming today, in centuries past the sea was a primary domain of commerce and communication upon which no one single actor could claim complete control. What is notable is that the actors that related to maritime security and war at sea back then parallel many of the situations on our networks today. They scaled from individual pirates to state fleets with a global presence like the British Navy. In between were state-sanctioned pirates, or privateers. Much like today's "patriotic hackers" (or NSA contractors), these forces were used both to augment traditional military forces and to add challenges of attribution to those trying to defend far-flung maritime assets. In the Golden Age of privateering, an attacker could quickly shift identity and locale, often taking advantage of third-party harbors with loose local laws. The actions that attacker might take ranged from trade blockades (akin to a denial of service) to theft and hijacking to actual assaults on military assets or underlying economic infrastructure to great effect.

During the War of 1812, for example, the American privateer fleet had more than 517 ships-compared with the U.S. Navy's 23-and, even though the British conquered and burned the American capital city, caused such damage to the British economy that they compelled negotiations.

If there are certain parallels, what then are the potential lessons we might adapt to the situation today, other than attempting to hang hackers from the yardarm?

Maritime piracy is still with us today. But it's confined to the shores of failed states and on a relatively minuscule scale (roughly 0.01 percent of global shipping is actually taken by modern-day pirates). Privateering, the parallel to the most egregious attacks we have seen in the cyber realm, has not only fallen out of favor as a military tactic, it long ago became taboo. While privateering may have won the War of 1812 for the United States, by 1856, 42 nations had agreed to the Declaration of Paris, which abolished privateering, and during the Civil War, President Lincoln not only refused to recruit plunderers for hire, but also blasted the Confederates as immoral for doing so themselves. Remember, two generations earlier, employing these hijackers had been a cornerstone of American naval strategy. By the 1860s, it wasn't something civilized governments did anymore.

The way this change came about is instructive for cybersecurity and global relations today. Much like the sea, cyberspace can be thought of as an ecosystem of actors with specific interests and capacities. Responsibility and accountability are by no means natural market outcomes, but incentives and legal frameworks can be created either to enable bad behavior or to support greater public order.

In clamping down on piracy and privateering a two-pronged approach was adopted, which went beyond just shoring up defenses or threatening massive attack as the Cold Warriors would have it. The first step was to go after the underlying markets and structures that put the profits into the practice and greased the wheels of bad behavior. London dismantled markets for trading pirate booty; pirate-friendly cities like Port Royal, Jamaica, were brought under heel, and blockades were launched on the potentates that harbored the corsairs of the southern Mediterranean and Southeast Asia. Today, there are modern equivalents to these pirate havens. For example, the networks of just 50 Internet service providers account for around half of all infected machines worldwide, according to a study prepared for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Just three firms process 95 percent of the credit card transactions for the bogus drugs advertised by spammers, according to research presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in May. When one particularly noxious hosting company-McColo Corp. of San Jose, Calif.-was taken down, the volume of spam worldwide dropped by 70 percent. Without the support of these companies, online criminal enterprises can't practice their illegal action, which not only cleans the seas, but also makes it easier to identify and defend against the more serious attacks on infrastructure. And, much like the pirate-friendly harbors of old, those companies and states that allow cybercrime a legal free pass are generally known.

This links to the second strategy: building networks or treaties and norms. As Janice Thompson recounts in her seminal study, Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns (Princeton University Press, 1996), maritime hijackers (and their state-approved counterparts) became marginalized as nations asserted greater control over their borders, and established a monopoly on violence. Throughout this period, a web of bilateral and multilateral agreements was established that affirmed the principles of open trade over the open seas. Few of these documents explicitly abolished piracy; nor were they universally accepted. But they paved the way to a global code of conduct that eventually turned pirates from accepted actors into international pariahs, pursued by all the world's major powers. They also established that any respect for maritime sovereignty would come only when a nation took responsibility for attacks that emanated from within its borders.

The cyber parallel today again is more instructive than trying to repeat Cold War arms limitation talks, as proposed in a few recent think tank policy reports. (Good luck trying to count botnets as if they were ICBM sites!) Rather, what is needed is the gradual buildup of an international agenda that seeks to create a standard of online behavior that guarantees lawful commerce and holds accountable those who target the Web. The shared global expectation of freedom of the seas should be paralleled by a shared global expectation of freedom of Internet trade. If you knowingly host or abet maritime pirates or privateers, their actions reflect back on you. The same should be true online. Building those norms will motivate both states and big companies to keep a better check on individual hackers and criminals (the pirate equivalent). It also will weaken the value of outsourcing action to patriotic hackers and contractors (the latter-day privateers used so often by states like Russia and China). And it will help create a more distinct line between civilian and military conduct and targets, a major concern of U.S. cyber actors.

In addition to encouraging this new accountability, policymakers also can pursue confidence-building strategies that could have real payoffs. Back in the early 1800s, for example, the Royal Navy and nascent U.S. Navy constantly prepared to fight each other. But they also cooperated in anti-piracy and slave trading campaigns. That cooperation helped underscore global norms, as well as built greater trust between the two forces that helped mitigate the true danger of actual military conflict during several crises. Similarly, the United States and China will certainly continue to bolster our cyber defenses and even offenses. But this should not be a barrier to trying to build greater cooperation. In particular, we might launch an initiative to go after what the Chinese call "double crimes," those actions in cyberspace that both nations recognize as illegal.

The underlying point here is that in navigating the emerging issue of cybersecurity, policymakers are going to have to be more thoughtful than blindly trying to apply the lessons from their own personal past. While cybersecurity is a crucially growing issue of both economic and security importance, the tortured cyber Cold War parallels of their youth are not as fruitful as their widespread use would seem. Indeed, they are less useful than a lesser known maritime history of past centuries.

But for these and any other historic parallels, there is a limit. We should use such metaphors to open new horizons and perspectives, not create new barriers. Indeed, as Mark Twain also said in a corrective to his idea that history "rhymes," there is "but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past." O

Peter Warren Singer is director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution and author of Wired for War (Penguin Press, 2009). Noah Shachtman is a fellow at Brookings and editor of Wired magazine's national security blog, Danger Room.

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Unfinished spending measure complicates release of fiscal 2008 budget

Paul W. Singer — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500

It isn't an issue for the Defense and Homeland Security departments, which got appropriations bills enacted, but the rest of the government is asking: What's the current funding level? That nitty-gritty question won't be answered for a while, since Congress took up a bill this week to fund the government for the rest of the year.

At the macro level, there's another question hovering over the budget: Who cares? With Bush a lame duck, and with Democrats in control of Congress, the familiar phrase "dead on arrival" hangs in the air.

Budget experts, such as Stan Collender of Qorvis Communications, say that Bush's 2008 budget is still the basis for Congress to make decisions about routine funding of federal agencies, even if his policy proposals are rejected. "Ninety-five percent of what is in the president's budget request will be accepted without controversy," Collender said.

Against this backdrop, OMB Deputy Director Stephen McMillin discussed the new budget shortly before the Democratic leadership in Congress unveiled its proposed continuing resolution for the rest of this fiscal year. Edited excerpts from that interview follow.

NJ: How does the current state of uncertainty complicate the process of producing a budget request?

McMillin: The first level of complication is simply workload -- trying to track what's going on in the appropriations [process]. We had a couple of short lame-duck sessions at the end of last year, and then [tried] to get a handle on how the new Congress would engage on completing the '07 cycle. We want to make sure that they are aware of all the challenges and latest information we've got in making those final funding decisions.

[Also, there is] a significant challenge that is being created by the way the leadership is planning to bring the [continuing resolution] to the floor. Normally, you have a markup: People see what's in there, members of the committee can offer amendments, there is a report that explains what the committee meant when it was doing all of these things, you have a little bit of lag time. And from what I can tell, in the House at least, they are planning on a very different approach. [The House released a continuing resolution on January 29 and passed it intact two days later.]

They certainly have been doing a lot of consulting, and they have been open to hearing our input. But there is a lot of money here and a lot of accounts being dealt with, and I just hope that somewhere along the way there is an opportunity to look where there might be some shortcomings or they might have made an unintentional error, so they can find a way to correct it.

NJ: The administration last week announced the 2008 budget request for oceans issues, and it described the funding as an increase over the '07 budget request. But the '07 budget request is inoperable.

McMillin: It may prove to be an inadequate or inappropriate comparison in a couple of weeks when we know what the final funding levels are. The other thing we've tried to do is -- for a rollout like that, where you are talking about a very specific program -- up until the moment that a bill is presented to the president that allocates otherwise, we are going to be advocating our '07 request right up to the very end.

But we know that Congress always makes adjustments to the account level in our request, and by the time the appropriators are marking up and drafting their ['08] bills and coming up with their comparison tables, then they'll have an '07 enacted bill that they can compare to, and that will clarify things a little bit.

NJ: Given the political circumstance and the delays in the budget cycle, what meaning can we find in an '08 budget issued by a Republican president in the first of his lame-duck years with a Democratic Congress? It just seems that this budget document may be hollow.

McMillin: I think if you look at some of the specifics, it starts to cut away at that assumption. There will certainly be a lot of rhetoric to that effect in the aggregate. But let me just give you three examples out of the '07 budget, things that the president made a big deal about: funding for global AIDS; the American Competitiveness Initiative; and the advanced energy initiative last year.

Those are three things that he made a big push on a year ago, and it would be very easy for someone to assume that in a new, hostile Congress, he's going to have a hard time. Well, those were very bipartisan initiatives. I don't have inside information at this point, but from the conversations we've had, even with the Democrats writing the bill, we're expecting that they will be receptive to something along the lines of the president's request. [Democrats did add funding in these areas in their continuing resolution, but only the AIDS initiative received all of the money the White House was seeking.]

NJ: And what about once you get beyond the State of the Union-level agenda items -- what about the rest of the document?

McMillin: In the discretionary world there will be a variety of things we succeed on, a variety of things we fail on. But that's not all that different than under Republican Congresses. I think we'll see when we get to their budget resolution and their subcommittee allocations just how much they want to demonstrate different priorities than us.

I worked on the Hill when Republicans were in charge and President Clinton was in office, and there would be certain proposals that administrations tend to make regardless of party and that Congress, regardless of partisan control, tends not to be in favor of. And some things took on a more partisan tone, but those things were on the margins.

Basically, if the Clinton administration came in with a request for the FBI, that would be taken seriously and vetted seriously and given due deference. I think it will be the same for security- and law enforcement-related things -- have we proposed the right level of resources for them to deliver on their mission? For the vast majority of appropriated accounts, it is that type of a nonpartisan discussion that you get in appropriations, rather than a big showdown.

NJ: In March or April do you start again and say, "OK, here's where we were, here's where we really ended up. Let's rejigger all of our numbers and reoffer the request"?

McMillin: I would say that, by and large, there won't have to be a lot of major adjustments. There might be a case where something is sufficiently off that we need to make a formal adjustment. But for the most part, if you were going to hire 50 more people in this organization in '07 and you only got authority to hire 20, you can move some dollars around there and sort of handle that informally. I don't think it will be that big a deal, frankly.

NJ: Is there a major difference in the president's ability to drive the agenda for the '08 budget because he's a lame duck? Have you been diminished in your ability to set this agenda because agencies can go to a sympathetic Congress and seek support?

McMillin: I've seen no signs that our agencies are in every-man-for-themselves mode. In terms of working together to create a budget that reflects the president's priorities, the team is still very unified. In terms of working with the Democrats in Congress, a Democratic Congress will certainly have different funding priorities than a Republican Congress. It may be that when there are disputes, the mechanism for working things out might be different.

It was more common in the first years of the administration that if something wasn't going our way, that bill would stay in conference until it got worked out. That may not happen now. It may be that there are more-obvious confrontations as we work out our spending differences -- [but] I'm not predicting any specific confrontation.

There are some proposals we made that didn't fare so well in the Republican Congress, and some proposals -- like the funding we'll be seeking for No Child Left Behind -- where we not only get what we want, but we have people suggesting they want to go even further than we want.

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Congressional staff members gather tips on oversight

Paul W. Singer — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Welcome to what might be called Oversight 101, a bipartisan training class that the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group, offers to congressional staff on a periodic basis. With Democrats taking over the Hill in January -- and with their members getting the chance to scrutinize a Republican administration for the first time since 1994 -- the training is among myriad steps being taken in and around Congress in preparation for that oversight role.

From the technicians at the Congressional Research Service to the tacticians at the White House, seemingly everybody in Washington is preparing for a new era of oversight that the Democrats are promising to unleash.

The Project on Government Oversight's pre-Thanksgiving session was its third in a series sponsored by a bipartisan group of members of Congress. Reps. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., Rush Holt, D-N.J., and Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., signed the "Dear Colleague" letter inviting participation in the November training. One of the speakers at the session was Pablo Carrillo, chief counsel to the Senate Indian Affairs Committee under Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz.

Part of the project's premise is that oversight doesn't just happen; people have to do it, and they have to know the techniques for doing it well. Other groups are also offering to share their expertise.

The Congressional Research Service produces a "Congressional Oversight Manual" -- last updated in October 2004 -- that lays out details ranging from Congress's broad legal authority on oversight to investigative techniques as mundane as monitoring the Federal Register.

The CRS is helping the House Administration Committee to design an agenda for a new-member orientation session in January, and is preparing information on the policy problems confronting the next Congress, according to a spokeswoman.

The Government Accountability Office is also gearing up. The GAO gives general introductory sessions for new lawmakers, and conducts sessions on specific topics at the request of current members. "We have done some of that recently," spokesman Paul Anderson said, although he would not elaborate on specific issues.

GAO researchers work on oversight and investigations for congressional offices on a short-term basis. Anderson said that about five GAO staffers are now working on Capitol Hill, and that requests for more help are coming in. Ideally, he said, the GAO would have about 15 people on detail at any given time.

Also offering to help is the very administration that Democrats are clamoring to investigate.

Clay Johnson, the deputy director for management at the White House Office of Management and Budget, said in an interview that he plans to meet with key Democratic committee and subcommittee chairmen beginning in early December to talk about how the Bush administration can participate in useful supervision of government operations.

"My belief about oversight is that it should be constructive not destructive, that [investigators] should be focusing on what we want to be working better, at some point in time and at what cost," Johnson said. "The key is, does any oversight hearing wind up with a clear goal for the future, a charge to the agency involved to develop an implementation plan, and a timeframe for getting to the new desired state of affairs at a [specified] cost?"

At that point, he suggested, OMB could take over the task of tracking and brief congressional staff regularly on the status of the issue, without the need for additional hearings.

Such an offer might not be what Democratic chairmen have in mind. For years, they have argued that the Bush White House has been a primary obstacle to congressional oversight. For example, the administration went to court to preserve its right to refuse to give the GAO information about Vice President Cheney's meetings with energy-industry executives. (The White House won.)

The Democrats' skeptical view is shared by Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the co-author of The Broken Branch, a book accusing recent Congresses of failing to perform meaningful oversight, among other shortcomings.

In the Republican-controlled Congress, Ornstein said, when GAO investigators "would go to agencies and demand information, they wouldn't get it, and you'd have the leaders in Congress backing up the agencies to keep GAO from getting the information." In a Democratic-controlled Congress, "we are suddenly going to see the activation of a sleeping giant known as the GAO," Ornstein said.

Or maybe the administration will become more cooperative. OMB's Johnson suggested that his agency could, in many cases, provide information on the status of a program more quickly than the GAO.

Comptroller General David Walker, who runs the GAO, is making no secret of his interest in seeing Congress become more aggressive. On November 17, Walker offered members of Congress a list of 36 issue areas that would benefit from congressional inquiry, ranging from improving collection of taxes to ensuring that $2 billion in contracts for the 2010 census are properly managed.

Beyond short-term oversight goals like addressing flaws in border control, Walker also suggested that Congress tackle major structural issues in government, such as providing a more integrated approach to responding to catastrophic events and overhauling Medicare and Medicaid to ensure their long-term viability.

"Most of the federal government's current policies, programs, functions, and activities are based on conditions that existed decades ago, are not results-based, and are not well aligned with 21st-century realities," Walker wrote. So Congress, he said, should launch broad reconsideration of those programs.

One reason this kind of oversight has largely fallen by the wayside in Congress over the past decade or so, Ornstein said, is that members have failed to reauthorize major laws. Ideally, Congress would use the reauthorization of a major statute as an opportunity to review what is working and what is not, to make changes, and to provide fresh guidance to the implementing agencies.

But that kind of oversight "has always been tough to do in a sustained way because it is tedious and time-consuming, and doesn't have a lot of political payoff," Ornstein said. The temptation facing Democrats, he continued, is that they will delve into "purely political" oversight designed merely to embarrass the Republican administration. The public is likely to have little appetite for that kind of mudslinging, he said.

But who in the new majority will be responsible for keeping vigorous oversight from running off the rails into partisan grandstanding? Democrats in every corner are expressing their interest in oversight, but the party leadership apparently hasn't yet devised a strategy for coordinating investigations or managing the agenda.

Jim Manley, a spokesman for Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said that the incoming majority leader "will give broad deference to the chairmen to set their agenda," with jurisdictional boundaries serving as the organizational plan to ensure that committees do not duplicate each other's efforts.

Similarly, Drew Hammill, spokesman for House Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said that "there is no oversight plan" to control the agendas of the various committees. Pelosi has promised that oversight will be "forward-looking" and that "subpoena will be a last resort," Hammill said. But beyond those ground rules -- and regular meetings of senior staff -- chairmen will generally be left to manage oversight as they see fit, he added.

Although the agenda is a little murky, Democrats clearly are planning to pursue oversight in nearly every available venue, including some venues that do not yet exist. The House Armed Services Committee has already asked Pelosi for a waiver of the limits on the number of subcommittees; such a waiver will allow incoming Chairman Ike Skelton, D-Mo., to re-establish the oversight subcommittee that Republicans folded in 1995.

The day after November's elections, committee member Martin Meehan, D-Mass., wrote to Skelton asking to chair the panel. Meehan even offered an oversight agenda for the not-yet-existent subcommittee, which he does not yet chair. It would cover topics that do exist, such as contracting abuses and the readiness of the nation's armed forces.

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Allegations of cronyism, misdeeds leave labor panel under cloud

Paul W. Singer — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Knouse's departure followed allegations of cronyism and misdeeds that have consumed the commission, leaving doubts about the future of a panel that was once considered a key element of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Knouse told National Journal that he left the commission on good terms and that he has been exonerated of any wrongdoing. He said that the allegations came about because "someone was trying to make my life very, very difficult."

Knouse became executive director of the secretariat of the NAFTA Commission for Labor Cooperation in August 2004. The CLC was created in a side agreement to the 1993 trade pact, a move that Knouse called "a sop to the Democrats then controlling Congress who were very labor-oriented."

The commission -- like its sister NAFTA panel, the Commission on Environmental Cooperation -- was envisioned as a way to placate members of Congress who feared that NAFTA would encourage Canada, Mexico, or the U.S. to reduce labor standards in order to cut the costs of their products.

The CLC is run by a Council of Ministers -- the labor chiefs of Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. -- and the secretariat is its staff office. The commission can review allegations that a nation isn't upholding its own labor standards, but it has no enforcement mechanism, so its mission is primarily to conduct research on labor matters of interest to the three nations.

At the time of his appointment, Knouse was a lobbyist for the Pittsburgh-based law firm of Klett, Rooney, Lieber, and Schorling (now Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney). His wife, Ruth, was then and remains the executive assistant to Chao, the U.S. representative to the CLC. The Canadian and Mexican labor ministers accepted Chao's nomination of Mark Knouse for executive director.

When Knouse took the full-time job at the CLC secretariat -- at an annual salary of more than $110,000 -- he terminated his federal lobbying registrations. But in March 2005, he filed a registration statement with the Pennsylvania Senate, declaring himself a lobbyist on behalf of the Commission for Labor Cooperation and a second client called the Technology Collaborative.

The collaborative, a nonprofit Pittsburgh economic development initiative, is the successor of the Pittsburgh Digital Greenhouse, one of Knouse's clients at Klett Rooney. The collaborative is an alliance of academic and civic institutions that provides money and assistance to technology companies in Pittsburgh.

Knouse's original registration for Digital Greenhouse said that he was lobbying for federal appropriations and training dollars for Pittsburgh projects. Knouse and his partners -- among them Robert Shuster, son of former Rep. Bud Shuster, R-Pa., and brother of current Rep. Bill Shuster -- also lobbied for federal appropriations for other Pennsylvania clients.

The CLC's rules state that the executive director "shall have no employment other than with the commission during their term of employment," except under express authorization of the Council of Ministers. Knouse told NJ that he did not receive a dispensation from the council to continue lobbying on behalf of private clients.

"It was my call," Knouse said. "I felt it was something I would be able to do. In hindsight, maybe I shouldn't have done it." He maintains that he used vacation time and his own money for any lobbying he did for the collaborative, so no government money supported his lobbying business.

But a memo produced by the Labor Department office that oversees the commission raised doubts about that claim. According to the August 18 memo, "The primary concern ... is whether the executive director has engaged in outside activities while charging his time and expenses for such activities to the secretariat."

The memo includes a list of more than 50 meals of "questionable relation to secretariat activities" that Knouse charged to his commission credit card between December 2004 and June 2006. The meals totaled more than $3,000, and the vast majority of them were with staff members of state and federal Pennsylvania legislators.

During the same period, Knouse racked up more than $3,000 in travel expenses for more than a dozen trips to Pennsylvania, and he also spent $1,800 on a trip to Texas for the inauguration of the Texas secretary of state. Knouse said he lived in Texas for 10 years, and "I know a lot of folks from Texas, and some of them are still in the government there."

Knouse says that all of the meetings charged to the commission dealt only with commission business and were appropriate because of the importance of labor issues in Pennsylvania and Texas. The investigation found only one instance in 18 months where Knouse met with a staff member from any other state.

Knouse defends this pattern, saying he focused on meeting with people whom he knew. "That was my contact base; that's where I had most of my past associations," he said. "I think you start with the lowest-hanging fruit." Knouse says he did not lobby on behalf of his Pennsylvania clients at any of those meetings.

There is no way to determine the content of the meetings included on Knouse's expense reports, but some of them may not have taken place. Knouse's records say he dined on at least three occasions with a top staff member to Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa. The staffer denies he ever met with Knouse.

Similarly, Bill Ries, chief of staff to Rep. Melissa Hart, R-Pa., says he knows Knouse from Pittsburgh, but "I did not have lunch with him at any time," despite Ries's name appearing at least three times in Knouse's expense reports.

"It could be an error on my part or a clerical error" made in the process of reporting expenses, Knouse said.

Lobbying experts point out that it is illegal to use federal money to lobby Congress, but Knouse said that "many of them were not lobbying meetings, but bringing them up to date on commission business."

Knouse hired several friends from Pennsylvania to work with him at the secretariat; hired a consulting firm that had been one of his clients; and added college friends of his children to the commission payroll as researchers. "It has been my experience as a manager that you hire people that you know, if you can, because then you have some understanding of what you're getting and what their work product is going to be," he said.

When he was first contacted by National Journal, Knouse said he left the commission because "my term was up next year and I decided to go ahead and just leave." After being shown a copy of the Labor Department investigation report, Knouse said in an e-mail, "It is important to point out that the questions and issues raised in this document were carefully examined by the U.S. Department of Labor solicitor and his office and that no irregularities were found and that my management decisions were found to be in accordance with the rules of the secretariat."

Randy Clerihue, a Labor Department spokesman, said in an e-mail response to NJ's inquiry, "After being alerted to these concerns by the United States, representatives from Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. discussed the matter at an August 24 meeting of the council of the Commission for Labor Cooperation. Shortly thereafter, a joint decision was made by the three countries that it would be best if Mr. Knouse stepped down as executive director."

Knouse said, "I agreed to the separation because it was clear that the countries, particularly Canada and later the U.S., wanted to reduce and ultimately close down the secretariat and that my continued presence would be detrimental to the existing employees." He was not required to repay any expenses, and his separation agreement with the CLC includes a clause releasing Knouse from liability "for any and all claims of any kind whatsoever ... which the commission ... now has or ever had" against him.

Knouse's departure is not the end of the story for the CLC. Several people knowledgeable about the commission's struggles, who requested anonymity before speaking to a reporter, verified Knouse's contention that the Council of Ministers is considering massive budget cuts for the secretariat, which receives $700,000 annually from each of the three nations.

Scenarios being considered for future years include reducing the office's budget by as much as 75 percent. Because the secretariat has produced few research reports in recent years, sources familiar with its finances say it is carrying a surplus of more than $1 million, which is leading the member nations to conclude that they can cut their annual contributions.

Bill Worona, director of cooperative consultations and administration at the CLC, is serving as the secretariat's acting executive director, but he is leaving at the end of the month. He would not discuss Knouse's departure, but acknowledged that the secretariat "is in a transition mode" and is trying to wrap up existing work. There is also an ongoing battle over whether Canadian and Mexican employees whom Knouse allowed to telecommute frequently will be reimbursed for their regular trips to Washington.

Although the CLC by design has no enforcement authority and is widely seen as unproductive, even its critics say it would be a shame if it were left for dead. Kate Bronfenbrenner, a Cornell University professor who once resisted a commission attempt to quash her research into U.S. labor/management disputes, said that despite its flaws, the CLC "is an avenue that people can use to shine some light" on violations of labor standards. "If it didn't exist, there would be nowhere to investigate these violations," she said.

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Commerce secretary works to help tourism industry

Paul W. Singer — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 00:00:00 -0400

In an odd alignment of government and industry interests, Gutierrez essentially asked travel and tourism officials to help him develop an agenda for boosting their business and to provide him with talking points for pleading their case with other federal agencies that control the borders.

The secretary's focus on travel issues is so intense that Al Frink, the Commerce Department's "manufacturing czar," told an industry gathering in July, "I think that the secretary is impassioned, he's committed. He's even at the point where [in the department's senior offices] it's often said, 'Is there another subject that we have on the table right now besides tourism?' And, actually, I would say the answer is no."

According to Commerce Department statistics, international travel to the United States fell after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, dropping from $103 billion in 2000 to $80 billion in 2003. It returned to the $103 billion level only last year. Tourism is an important component of the U.S. balance of trade, making up about 27 percent of the nation's total service exports.

Since 1995, the United States has dropped from second place behind France as the most popular tourist destination to third place behind Spain, and China's booming tourism industry threatens to push the United States into fourth.

Travel executives argue that the U.S. share of the market is shrinking not only because other countries are trying harder but also because U.S. security concerns are making it tougher for foreigners to get visas. The State Department issued 7.6 million nonimmigrant visas in 2001, but only 4.9 million in 2003 and 5.4 million in 2005.

The industry's most immediate concern is the government's Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, which establishes new travel document requirements for visitors crossing the Canadian or Mexican border. Industry executives fear that it could eliminate a significant portion of the 15 million trips that Canadians made to the U.S. in 2005.

For more than a decade, the U.S. hospitality industry has been trying (with limited success) to make the case for greater government attention to travel as an economic engine. In 2003, at the nadir of international arrivals, Congress approved $50 million for the Commerce Department to create an international advertising and promotional campaign to encourage individuals to travel to the United States.

The provision, tucked into an omnibus appropriations bill, also called for the creation of an industry advisory board to help Commerce figure out how to spend the money. But most of the $50 million was never spent.

The advisory board -- officially the Travel and Tourism Promotion Advisory Board -- spent about $6 million for a marketing campaign in Great Britain and has $4 million earmarked for a campaign in Japan, but Congress rescinded the rest. By the time the advisory board's charter was to expire in the summer of 2005, "there was a lot of frustration," one industry source said, "and people were wondering whether it was worth renewing the charter."

As the advisory board was winding down, the industry decided to overhaul its Washington representation. In June 2005, the Travel Industry Association of America, a sprawling collection of hospitality-related businesses that had struggled to create a unified identity, shut down its small government-affairs operation and handed the industry's lobbying efforts to the Travel Business Roundtable, an association headed by Loews Hotels Chairman Jon Tisch.

Promising a "one industry, one voice" approach, TIA's new CEO-former Marriott executive Roger Dow-joined Tisch and advisory board Chairman James Rasulo, president of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, and several other top travel and tourism officials for a series of meetings in Washington.

In the first week of July, the group met with a handful of State Department, Homeland Security, and White House officials to emphasize the importance of international tourism to the U.S. economy and to warn that new border-security initiatives could have a disastrous effect on travel and tourism by making it almost impossible for Canadian and Mexican visitors to make spontaneous trips to the U.S.

The group apparently found a sympathetic ear in Gutierrez, a former CEO of Kellogg.

The day after the travel group announced its "productive high-level Washington meetings" in a press release, a notice in the Federal Register said that the Commerce Department was seeking nominees for a reconstituted advisory board, although it was nearly a month before the department announced its plans for the board.

By August, the board's name had been shortened by dropping the word "Promotion," and its mandate had been expanded dramatically. In addition to working on a marketing campaign, the group would advise Gutierrez on "the development, creation, and implementation of a national tourism strategy." Of the 14 industry executives who make up the new board, 10-including its chairman, Rasulo-were members of the old board.

At the advisory board's first meeting in January, Gutierrez said he wanted a tourism strategy in hand in six months. "It may not be as perfectly designed as it would have been if we waited a year, but I would just ask you to think about what we're going to lose by waiting another six months," the secretary said.

In April and again in July, he returned to help shape the final recommendations that the advisory board would make to him.

"If we could do one single thing for your industry and we could somehow find ways to improve the flow of visas in a way that maintains all of our national security objectives, I think that would be the single biggest thing we could do for you," Gutierrez said.

The final report, which the board presented to Gutierrez earlier this month, focused primarily on the secretary's recommended issues of improving the process for legitimate visitors to get entry visas to the U.S. while maintaining strong security protections. It also returned to the industry's initial themes-creating a national marketing campaign to sell the U.S. as a destination abroad, and revising the border transit requirements to maintain the ease of travel across the Canadian and Mexican borders.

A week later, the industry executives on the advisory board announced their "Discover America Campaign," a national marketing strategy to attract 10 million more international travelers to the U.S. each year. In public appearances, Gutierrez applauded the announcement.

While Washington bookshelves groan under the weight of advisory committee reports that have never been implemented, perhaps few have come with this kind of personal commitment from a Cabinet secretary. Beyond driving the drafting of the strategy, Gutierrez has already promised to help the industry plead its case before other agencies.

"This is not going to be resolved because we talk about it," Gutierrez told the board in July. "It's going to require a lot of follow-up, it's going to require a lot of pushing with our partners at Homeland Security, with the State Department, because we're dealing with a lot of people, we're dealing with a lot of conflicting priorities.... We at the Commerce Department may not have all the strings, we may not have all the departments reporting in to us, but we can give you access to people who make decisions, who can hear your concerns, who have the ability to address some of your concerns."

In an interview, Gutierrez said his work with travel and tourism is no different from his role with other domestic industries. "We're not in the business of business in Washington," Gutierrez told National Journal. "We don't invest money, we don't create jobs, we don't create wealth. We create an environment so that entrepreneurs and business people can do that. In the case of tourism, that's what we do: We listen to them, and then we see where government policy can help. We do that with other industries as well."

Gutierrez said the travel industry is of growing importance to the nation's economy, and a smoothly functioning visa process is critical to that growth. "There is no question that for us, national security is No. 1," he said. "Anything we do cannot compromise national security. But we believe that in that area of visas and tourists and travelers, we can be of help." The challenge for government, he said, is to "allow people in who want to travel or to do business, and to keep out people who want to do us harm."

DHS and State are moving to address some of the industry's concerns, although industry officials express frustration with the slow pace of change. In January, the departments announced an initiative for "secure borders and open doors," emphasizing the use of new technologies to improve the experience for visa applicants and visitors arriving at U.S. airports.

Most of the initiative's projects are under development or in test phases, a State Department spokeswoman said, and one key piece should be rolled out any day now-yet another tourism industry advisory board.

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FEMA acknowledges possibility of longer trailer park stays

Paul W. Singer — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 00:00:00 -0400

FEMA and the nonprofit organization Save the Children jointly announced in July a plan to open a community center on the 450-trailer Diamond Group Site in Plaquemines Parish, La. -- the kind of space that FEMA has resisted providing at other sites. Save the Children and local charities will work with residents to secure child care and other social services, and to create play areas.

According to Barbara Ammirati, Save the Children's deputy team leader for Katrina response, the plan is to use the Diamond site as a model, with the goal of opening a similar center at a second trailer site this year and 10 by next fall. The agreement envisions ultimately opening community centers at 20 FEMA-run trailer parks for evacuees of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

That timeline itself is remarkable, because FEMA officials have long insisted that the agency's emergency assistance program has an 18-month limit. Theoretically, people are supposed to be out of their FEMA trailers by next spring. Social services advocates and local officials have urged the agency to recognize that the "temporary" housing will likely be needed for years, not months.

FEMA had refused to allow broad-use facilities in the trailer parks -- and even banned religious services at one point. Officials said they were bound by the 18-month time limit in the Robert T. Stafford Disaster and Emergency Relief Act, which provides the authority for federal disaster assistance to individuals.

But Darryl Madden, a spokesman for FEMA's recovery office in the Gulf region, said it has become clear that "the aid that we are providing is going to go well beyond 18 months." It will be up to policy makers to figure out how to make that reality fit within FEMA's legal authorities, he said.

The agreement with Save the Children contrasts with the experience of Rosie O'Donnell's For All Kids Foundation, which has been trying since Christmas to create a space for children at the Renaissance Village trailer park outside Baton Rouge. In December, the foundation donated three double-wide trailers for that purpose, but FEMA would not permit the group to set them up until liability and cost issues were resolved.

Nine months later, the foundation's blueprint for the area has grown, and it now consists of six large buildings for child care and other services as well as play areas and other amenities, all in a separate, fenced complex on the trailer park grounds. But it is still not open. Foundation officials say that a ribbon-cutting ceremony is imminent.

Ammirati said she hopes that the problems at Renaissance Village will not befall the project at the Diamond site. "We have gotten green lights every step of the way," Ammirati said. Local FEMA officials "have taken it all the way up to Washington, and no one has pulled the plug."

Madden said that FEMA, at first overwhelmed by the scope of the disaster, is broadening its view of the assistance that is needed. "Our hands are kind of tied with the level of services that we can provide," he said. "But if we can make this work simply by providing access [for private nonprofits], it is in the overall public interest to do it." Madden pointed out that the deal with Save the Children would involve no federal dollars.

Sister Judith Brun, a children's advocate who has been working at Renaissance Village since it opened last October, said that FEMA is more open to outside help. "We are definitely seeing a much more attentive posture on behalf of FEMA," Brun said.

As it becomes clear that people will be living in trailers beyond 18 months, "I have to praise FEMA for realizing that and not just sticking to their original position," she said. "Now that they are catching their breath, they are realizing there are other issues [beyond temporary housing] that people need to address in order to move on."

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EPA requires justification for fully competitive contracts

Paul W. Singer — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 00:00:00 -0400

In a memo circulated last September, Barry Breen, deputy assistant administrator for the agency's solid-waste office -- which manages the Superfund program and other cleanup projects (including Hurricane Katrina) -- declared that the office will require written justification for any service contract over $1 million that is not reserved for small businesses.

The justification must be submitted a year in advance and must explain why open competition is preferable to a small-business set-aside. "I understand that there is appropriate rationale to pursue full and open competition for some of our contracting needs," Breen wrote. "Such cases should be well justified and documented."

Small-business set-asides are nothing new. The Small Business Administration sets targets for each department and agency, with a government-wide goal of hiring small businesses as prime contractors on 23 percent of the total value of government contracts.

The government also has detailed goals for contracting with female-owned businesses (5 percent) and "service-related disabled veteran-owned" businesses (3 percent). But in general, the feds prefer that contracts be open for competitive bidding, with any set-asides made on a case-by-case basis.

The waste office's memo "has taken the present process and stood it on its head," said Alan Chvotkin, senior vice president of the Professional Services Council, which represents 200 companies that sell professional and technical services to the government. "It's the first time I've seen an agency invert the priorities and say, 'We are going to give first preference to small business, and if we are not going to give it to them, we need to have a justification.' "

Christopher Yukins, co-director of the Government Procurement Program at George Washington University Law School, is blunt: "I've never seen such a clever and draconian bureaucratic maneuver."

The goal of all federal procurement is supposed to be achieving the best value for the taxpayer's dollar, Yukins says. The waste office policy would instead declare that "we care first about the size or disadvantaged status of the businesses," he contends, "and second about the best value for the taxpayers. And that just can't be right."

Some procurement experts say that this kind of policy reversal puts pressure on procurement officials to do business with companies that may not be qualified to perform the tasks required. Systems are already in place to benefit small businesses or disadvantaged businesses that have the capability to perform government contracts. Rewriting those policies to make size the primary criterion for bidders would work mostly to the benefit of small businesses that cannot win an open competition for services under the old rules.

The EPA memo also raises the question of what exactly qualifies as a small business. For example, the General Services Administration's electronic contracting database indicates that EPA has given 75 percent of its $194 million worth of Katrina-related contracts to small businesses. (GSA warns, however, that the database is probably incomplete and is constantly being updated.)

According to GSA, $136 million of that total went to one "small business," a Cincinnati-based waste-handling firm called Environmental Quality Management. Under standard SBA definitions, a "remediation services" company qualifies as a small business if it has less than $13 million in annual receipts. A company that does more than just clean up waste -- such as testing, site inspection, and waste storage -- may fall under the "environmental remediation services" category, for which the "small-business" cutoff is 500 employees, regardless of income.

The contract documents in the GSA database indicate that Environmental Quality Management has 150 employees and $51 million in annual revenue, but the company claims on its Web site to have provided "more than 700 skilled personnel" for EPA's cleanup mission on the Gulf Coast, and its revenues have evidently more than doubled in the past year.

Ironically, EQM won its contract in an open competition. The company did not return phone calls seeking comment.

Chvotkin says that EQM may be an example of the kind of "churn" that EPA's new rule may create -- that is, when small companies get big contracts, they are quickly disqualified for further consideration for small-business advantages. But EPA can still claim to be contracting with a small business because the firm was small when the contract was written.

In response to questions about Breen's policy, EPA spokeswoman Roxanne Smith said in an e-mail, "The September 2005 memo does not change EPA or federal contracting policy. The memo simply requests explanatory information that is designed to encourage [solid-waste] offices to consider contracting with socioeconomic firms when it is appropriate to do so. The request is consistent with EPA and federal government contracting goals and practices."

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FEMA bulks up on supplies, systems for tracking them

Paul W. Singer — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 00:00:00 -0400

In their efforts to repair the most-pressing shortcomings exposed by the 2005 hurricane season, officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency have invested millions of dollars in equipment and supply upgrades to try to ensure a smoother flow of supplies to, and communications at, the site of the next disaster.

State emergency-response officials applaud these investments but warn that the upgrades may have done little to repair underlying flaws in FEMA's operations -- a loss of experienced staff and a strategy that emphasizes federal decision-making in disasters that are primarily local events.

At his swearing-in ceremony on June 8, FEMA Director David Paulison told a roomful of employees: "I know very clearly how hard you've worked; how much time you've put in; the sacrifices you've made, and your families; the beating you've taken from the public." But, he added, "this is a great organization. I've told you before -- you hold your head high. We are going to make America proud of this organization again."

FEMA's first step was to lay in more supplies. The agency says it has on hand 770 truckloads of Meals Ready to Eat, 1,540 trucks of water, and 2,030 truckloads of ice. Before Katrina, FEMA had 180 meal trucks, 600 water trucks, and 430 loads of ice.

The federal government is also offering to pre-position truckloads of emergency supplies in states that sign an agreement that they will not open the caches until a federal emergency has been declared. Earlier this month, FEMA reported that 13 states, including Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, had received or were about to receive the supplies. But increased quantities of supplies are useful only if they can get to where they are needed. To prevent a repeat of stories of trucks loaded with ice and other supplies cooling their wheels for days in depots outside Louisiana, FEMA bought a $20 million system that will put individual satellite tracking devices on 20,000 supply trucks. At the touch of a button, a manager at a response center will be able to see the exact location of each truck. When the supplies are delivered, the tracking unit can be removed and attached to another load.

Paulison said that FEMA has purchased sophisticated satellite telephone systems, portable cell towers, and mobile video units to improve communication among first responders in the event that a storm destroys land-based phone and power lines.

The agency has overhauled its system for tracking hurricane victims and providing assistance to individuals. FEMA officials said that in the wake of Katrina, they had no idea how to locate victims who scattered across the country. Federal agencies relied in some cases on information from private charities about where evacuees were housed, and had little ability to verify their eligibility for assistance. The Government Accountability Office reported earlier this month that FEMA had made as much as $1.4 billion in payments to people who were not eligible for disaster assistance.

FEMA disputed the report's findings and accused the GAO of giving prominent play to a few isolated -- if embarrassing -- incidents of fraud. But the agency has a new computer registration system that will automatically weed out duplicate payments and verify the Social Security numbers and addresses of applicants.

And FEMA is reducing the amount of cash it will hand out for emergency relief. After Katrina, the agency distributed as much as $2,000 to homeless victims to address immediate needs; in any upcoming disaster, such emergency relief will likely be limited to about $500.

On top of these technological and logistical improvements, the federal government has spent the winter revising response plans and improving coordination among responding agencies, in hopes of clarifying roles and responsibilities during a disaster. At the end of May, the Department of Homeland Security published a 50-page volume of amendments to the National Response Plan, including provisions to ensure that emergency-response agencies all operate out of a single command facility, called the Joint Field Office.

DHS also enters this hurricane season with about 50 presigned agreements with other federal agencies to provide resources -- such as helicopters, medical assistance teams, or base camps for first responders -- in the event of an emergency, four times the number that were in place when Katrina struck. These agreements mean that disaster coordinators won't have to scramble in the immediate aftermath to figure out who can provide resources and under what authority the help can be ordered and paid for.

Several state emergency-response officials applauded FEMA for these efforts but voiced lingering concern about whether any of it will make a difference.

"Do I think FEMA is as equipped and as talented and as service-oriented as they were three years ago? No. No way," said Albert Ashwood, director of emergency management for Oklahoma and the incoming president of the National Emergency Management Association.

He said that when FEMA was moved into the Department of Homeland Security, a layer of bureaucracy was added to the government's emergency-response system. The change has slowed assistance to states and diverted attention from fairly frequent storms and crises to once-in-a-lifetime catastrophes.

Ashwood noted that it took FEMA several weeks to respond to his request for a disaster declaration for Oklahoma counties struck by wildfires in December, far longer than in past disasters. "I thought it was really bad," he said. "I didn't know who to talk to. In the past, if I talked to the director of FEMA, I got an answer. Now it was like, 'Well, we have to check that out with six or seven other people, and legal has to check it out and see what we can and cannot do.' "

And until FEMA approved the disaster designation in mid-January, no federal relief money could flow to the state to help fight the fires or to assist the victims.

"They have made a lot of changes ... but until you test it in a big event, you don't really know" whether the new steps will do any good, said Craig Fugate, director of Florida's Division of Emergency Management. He is skeptical of FEMA's response plans because they center on a large federal role in directing and controlling resources in response to a disaster, instead of putting those resources at the disposal of the state officials in charge of the response.

"In many cases, the state doesn't need the command structure of the federal government -- it needs the resources of the federal government to join that governor's team," Fugate said. For example, while Fugate says that the tracking system for supplies is a good idea, he points out that FEMA has told state officials that they cannot have access to the tracking system for fear that it would make it easier for someone to hijack trucks or cause other havoc.

FEMA plans to run its system and share information with the state, but that offer leaves Fugate unimpressed. "If we do ask for [federal help], we need your stuff. We don't need you to come in and take charge."

Bruce Baughman, director of Alabama's Emergency Management Agency, has more faith in FEMA. "For the state of Alabama, unequivocally, yes, they are much further ahead of the power curve on this one than they were last year. And we are satisfied with their progress," he said.

Although he believes the revisions to the National Response Plan have added unnecessary levels of bureaucracy to disaster management, Baughman said that none of his concerns are "show-stoppers."

But Baughman -- who is the outgoing NEMA president -- echoes Ashwood's fear that federal attention on rare catastrophic events is draining resources from more routine natural disasters. "Alabama gets $2.9 million a year to prepare for natural disasters," Baughman said, "and $21 million to prepare for terrorism." Terrorists have never struck the state, "but 30 times in the last 10 years we've been hit by natural disasters."

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DHS seeks to better serve disaster victims with disabilities

Paul W. Singer — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Census figures indicate that more than 20 percent of the population affected by Hurricane Katrina had some type of disability. As people flowed out of New Orleans last August, complaints began flowing in from those with disabilities who were poorly served during the evacuation.

People who used customized wheelchairs were rescued, but their chairs were left behind, rendering the evacuees essentially immobile when they arrived at a shelter. Shelters had no sign-language interpreters or written announcements for the hearing-impaired. Travel trailers and mobile homes were ill-equipped for people with disabilities, and trailer parks had no accommodations for them. Some shelters refused to accept evacuees traveling with service animals.

By the end of September, in an effort to help the disabled, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff dispatched a team from Washington to join the Federal Emergency Management Agency's recovery operations. It was the first act of what are likely to be dozens of operational changes being implemented by FEMA, the Red Cross, and state agencies.

Daniel Sutherland, the DHS officer for civil rights and civil liberties who is chairman of the department's Interagency Coordinating Council on Emergency Preparedness and Individuals With Disabilities, said that DHS began implementing changes even before formal policy reviews were completed. The first -- and likely most sweeping -- of these is establishing a disability section in the disaster headquarters. Other changes will include new operating procedures to address special needs.

"We need to have a team that can really focus on these issues," Sutherland said in an interview. "It's not in the National Response Plan, so one of our key recommendations is that the plan be rewritten. When I told Chertoff that, he said, 'That's fine, but get your team ready to deploy now. We are not waiting for rewriting documents.' "

The DHS coordinating council is working on other recommendations, including ensuring that announcements in emergency shelters are accessible to people who do not hear or see, and providing ways for the disabled to identify their special needs when they register for federal assistance.

Many of the problems identified during Katrina were also highlighted in after-action reports from other disasters such as 9/11 and Hurricane Andrew, Sutherland told a hurricane conference in April. "It is time now to stop writing reports cataloguing the problems, but instead to take action to implement commonsense solutions," he said.

Sutherland says that his group has been giving Chertoff "a report every other week that tracks progress on the 20 or 25 items that we think are most urgent." The official recommendations will likely be finished this month.

Already, Sutherland's group has begun discussing new guidelines with the American Red Cross that will improve accessibility of shelters and provide communication options for people with auditory or visual disabilities. An expert team dispatched by DHS has helped FEMA rewrite specifications to make trailers more accessible. And at the end of June, DHS and the Health and Human Services Department will host a national meeting with officials from all 50 states in hopes of improving state programs.

But all this activity still meets with skepticism among disability advocates. "All that we have heard is verbal commitments," said Jeff Rosen, policy director for the National Council on Disability, an independent federal panel that advises the White House and Congress on disability policy. "Secretary Chertoff made a commitment to changing the infrastructure of DHS, especially FEMA, to better serve people with disabilities, but we haven't seen anything yet. There have been some important incremental steps that have been taken, but these issues are in no way able to be dealt with in incremental ways."

Rosen argues that DHS and FEMA still rely heavily on voluntary agreements with outside organizations to address the needs of people with disabilities, steps he calls inadequate to serve the millions of citizens with disabilities. "You've got to have dedicated officials with designated resources, and that's not happening," Rosen said.

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Government continues to subsidize building in hurricane-prone areas

Paul W. Singer — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 00:00:00 -0400

But there is one critical difference. Bay St. Louis is in Hancock County, which before being struck by a Category 3 hurricane last August was home to 47,000 people, having added just 4,000 residents between 2000 and 2005. Southport is in Brunswick, one of the nation's 100 fastest-growing counties. Its population jumped from 73,000 to almost 90,000 during that five-year period and will soon explode if the state of North Carolina gets its wish.

The state government recently bought 600 acres of farmland on the outskirts of Southport with the intention of building one of the largest seaports on the East Coast. The state is predicting that the port will create thousands of jobs and be an enormous economic boon to the Carolina coast. Meanwhile, meteorologists warn that the area -- as well as the rest of the southern half of the Eastern Seaboard and the Gulf Coast -- faces a growing risk of being hit by a storm packing the wallop of Katrina.

Thus, Southport stands at the dangerous intersection of two dramatic trends: One is the government-subsidized growth of the nation's hurricane-zone population. The other is the increased ferocity of the average hurricane season -- an upswing in the frequency and intensity of named storms that contrasts markedly with the comparatively quiet hurricane seasons typical of the quarter-century that ended in 1995.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on May 22 predicted that there will be "13 to 16 named storms" during the six-month 2006 hurricane season, "with eight to 10 becoming hurricanes, of which four to six could become 'major' hurricanes of Category 3 strength or higher." From 1950 to 2000, the average Atlantic season produced 11 storms, six of which became hurricanes, two of them major. The 2005 season produced seven major hurricanes and a record 28 named storms.

The fierce-hurricane trend, expected to continue for at least another decade regardless of whether global warming is partially to blame for it, is beyond the control of government. But the growth trend putting more and more people and possessions in harm's way is being encouraged and subsidized by all levels of government.

As monstrously expensive Katrina certainly reminded federal appropriators and taxpayers, once a killer storm slams ashore, the federal government ends up footing much of the bill for rescue and repair. And the more developed the spot where a powerful storm makes landfall, the more costly the cleanup. But what can or should the federal government do to discourage or storm-proof development along high-risk stretches of coastline?

A few federal officials have begun asking that question. But in the decades preceding Katrina, Uncle Sam took the opposite tack -- shouldering more and more of the costs and financial risks associated with locating very close to shifting sands and unpredictable waters. Federal tax dollars pay for highway expansion to support coastal development, and highway repair after a storm.

The Environmental Protection Agency's subsidized loans and grants help build water and sewer lines in coastal communities, which spur growth. Homeland Security dollars help upgrade emergency communications systems and evacuation routes, making it safer to move into high-risk housing. The Army Corps of Engineers spends billions of dollars dredging waterways to promote or preserve economic activity, and pours countless tons of sand onto eroding beaches.

"Historically, everyone who built anything out there [near the shore] understood that it was at risk," noted Courtney Hackney, chairman of the North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission. "Once communities had the wherewithal, basically backed by the federal government, to build the infrastructure and keep repairing the infrastructure, that provided the incentive for a lot of development that you would obviously say is risky. Anytime you build within a few hundred yards of the ocean where you are only a few feet above sea level, that's really risky. It really required state, local, and federal backing to make any of this happen.

"And then, of course, federal flood insurance -- that sort of put the icing on the cake," Hackney continued. "Now you could build out there relatively risk-free.... As long as somebody else is paying the cost of repairing it, it's a great deal."

If You Build It ...

If the North Carolina International Port planned for Southport is ever built, the federal government will spend hundreds of millions of tax dollars on dredging and maintaining a channel deep enough for massive cargo ships. The port would also require federal money to extend rail lines and upgrade roads.

All this to build a gigantic port 10 miles from the ruins of the first North Carolina seaport, which was abandoned 230 years ago when settlers decided that the place was too susceptible to storms and pirates. They moved upriver to Wilmington, 28 miles inland, where the state's largest port still operates.

Now, Brunswick County is once again prime real estate. The building boom started years before plans for the mega-port were unveiled. The addition of the port would guarantee that if a Big One starts bearing down on that part of the coast, the federal government will spend millions to help evacuate residents, more millions to rescue people who couldn't or wouldn't leave, and still more millions to shelter people who can't return home. Add to that the millions in insurance claims it will pay to the beach-town residents whose homes were destroyed, and the billions it will provide to rebuild the devastated towns that perhaps never should have been put there in the first place.

The resort towns of North Carolina's Outer Banks are stunning examples of what can happen when the federal government underwrites growth without insisting that it be smart. On tiny barrier islands, such towns as North Topsail Beach and Kure Beach are packed with three-story McMansions, 12-bedroom guesthouses, rows of town houses on stilts, condos, and surf shops -- all within 100 steps of the waves. Unseen are the billions of state and federal dollars that made those private investments financially feasible.

This year alone, the Carolinas have an 18 percent chance of being ravaged by an "intense hurricane" (Category 3 or higher), according to Colorado State University's widely respected meteorologists. And yet people continue to flock to hazardous coasts. Twelve of the nation's 100 fastest-growing counties are on the coast in hurricane-prone regions of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. Another dozen sit just one county inland.

The anchor for the stretch of coast where North Carolina meets South Carolina is Wilmington -- a place where federally subsidized roads, sewers, and port facilities have helped to nearly double the population since 1990.

Democratic Rep. Mike McIntyre, who represents the southern part of the Tar Heel coast, sees the federal role as entirely appropriate: "We're not paying to put people there. We are not paying [for infrastructure] so people will come. We are doing it because, in fact, people are there. It is almost like everyone has discovered the great historic port city Wilmington and all of its charm, but also they have discovered the small little sleepy coastal beach towns. And everything is booming."

Meanwhile, the Corps keeps dredging 28 miles of the Cape Fear River -- from the ocean to Wilmington's port. But the floating behemoths that are rapidly becoming the standard in international shipping can't navigate that channel. Rather than trying to deepen the waterway to accommodate them, the state bought the parcel in Southport to start over.

Of Risks and Benefits

State officials argue that creating a new port in Southport will save the federal government a lot of money because it's less expensive than upgrading the Wilmington port. The state has no intention of closing the Wilmington port; the Corps will continue maintaining the existing shipping channel. So, why bother building a second port?

"It's all about economic development -- exclamation point, exclamation point," said Thomas Eagar, CEO of the North Carolina Ports Authority. "A port will attract business, and that is something that we haven't been able to do competing with places like Norfolk and Charleston. We've lost a lot of major projects because of our lack of a Class 1 port."

The ports authority estimates that a new port will create 48,000 jobs in the state, generating $47 million in annual tax revenues. All of this economic activity, of course, will live in the shadow of a growing hurricane threat.

Eagar says North Carolina will be better able to mitigate hurricane hazards in Southport than anywhere else along its coast. "We are starting this project with a blank slate," he pointed out. The area is still lightly populated, and local planners can take storm risks into account when expanding roads, upgrading building codes, and mapping evacuation plans.

Of course, planning can't eliminate hurricanes. "You could get a Category 3 or 4 through here," Eagar acknowledges, "but those are the risks you have at any location, and the farther south you go, the greater the risk will be. You can't let that risk prevent economic development."

The new port is critical to the nation's continued economic growth, Eagar argues. International trade is spawning an enormous increase in shipping traffic, and the United States needs to expand its port capacity to keep up. Southport, he insists, is a solution, not a problem, for the federal government.

The state has already made a significant financial commitment to the port, spending $30 million for the land, but the federal share of the project could ultimately be hundreds of millions of dollars. First, the state is seeking a $100,000 federal appropriation for an initial Corps study of the site. That will be followed by a full feasibility study costing about $6 million, split 50-50 between the feds and the state.

The ports authority's planning documents suggest that federal funding will account for "a significant portion" of the $400 million needed to dredge the new port, and the project also depends on major expansions of interstate highways in the area and upgrades of federally funded rail lines.

As Brunswick County grows, it needs to expand its capacity to evacuate large numbers of people quickly. Randy Thompson, the county's director of emergency services, says, "Right now, I am real concerned about our road structures. Most all of our roadways leading out ... from all of our coastal communities are two-lane roads. You would have to run 18 [or] 20 miles to the west before you actually got to a primary four-lane roadway."

So tax money will be needed to widen the roads, and as the roads are widened, people will build along them. Yet, just since 1996, hurricanes have done $250 million in damage to Brunswick.

Even though states north of them are far less likely to be hit by killer storms, every North Carolinian interviewed for this article said that Southport shouldn't be singled out as a dangerous place for the federal government to invest. They're right that federal money is underwriting growth in hurricane-prone areas up and down the Atlantic coast.

In the past 12 months alone, members of Congress from coastal states have proudly announced millions of dollars' worth of federal projects along the shoreline, including $8 million to expand the airport in Myrtle Beach, S.C., and $615,000 to improve the town's storm-water management system; $19 million to deepen the harbor in Brunswick, Ga.; $1.5 million to improve a waterfront road in West Palm Beach, Fla.; $17 million to expand a Maryland coastal highway to four lanes; and $2.5 million to study hurricane protection along Long Island's vulnerable South Shore.

Many of the biggest price tags are for post-storm rebuilding. While the Louisiana and Mississippi gulf coasts will ultimately receive tens of billions of federal dollars in infrastructure reconstruction funds, the federal government is also channeling millions of dollars to other states for damage done by Katrina, Wilma, and other hurricanes. For example, $2 million is going to repair a Miami amphitheater. And $500 million is designated for storm-damaged Florida roads and traffic lights.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., is sympathetic to the North Carolinians' desire not to have Southport singled out. What with floods, fire, tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, and volcanoes, "75 percent of the American people are at risk of some kind of disaster," he estimated. For example, he noted, "if we are not careful, in the next 20 years there will be a million more people who are going to bleed into exurban/rural Colorado," which is prone to wildfires. And once they set up housekeeping, Blumenauer said, "they will say, 'OK, you let us build here. Now protect us.' "

Blumenauer, leader of a congressional Livable Cities Task Force, is a one-man traveling show, crisscrossing the nation to advocate disaster preparations, strong building codes, and sustainable development. He says the nature of the congressional appropriations process is one of the chief roadblocks to smarter planning.

"It is easier for the appropriators to spend tens of billions of dollars to clean up after Katrina than to spend tens of millions of dollars to prevent" the damage, Blumenauer said. Reducing risks by, say, elevating structures or toughening building codes can be expensive. And any federal support for such efforts would have to survive the ordinary budget process. By contrast, hurricane relief funds are provided through emergency supplemental appropriations, which are not constrained by normal budget ceilings.

"It is a very perverse budget logic," said Blumenauer, who suggests making it easier to fund projects that promise to protect people and property, and thus reduce the need for emergency assistance. Blumenauer also argues that the federal government should shift more of the burden for bad decisions back to the communities that made them: "You think it's a great idea to develop this beach? [Then] you are going to be responsible for more of the cost of infrastructure, beach replenishment, and recovery from disaster."

Castles on the Sand

A dizzying array of federal programs -- with goals as diverse as wildlife preservation and oil production -- are involved in some aspect of coastal management. The only things they seem to agree on is that local land-use decisions are largely the purview of state and local officials and that there is precious little the federal government can do -- or wants to do -- to keep people away from hazardous areas.

But federal officials are taking the first tentative steps toward reconsidering policies that have had the perverse effect of encouraging people to build their castles on the sand. James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, is the point man for a nascent administration effort to grapple with the whole issue of risky coastal development and the liabilities with which it burdens taxpayers.

"You are tapping into an undercurrent of [federal] activity that hasn't broken into the top line," Connaughton said in an interview. "For there to be power in local politics, you need accountability. There is almost no accountability when the federal government is the one writing the checks and operating the program for you.... And that's where we need to reset that balance."

Under the auspices of the Ocean Action Plan, which President Bush signed in December 2004, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta chairs a Cabinet-level committee on maritime transportation with broad authority to consider all aspects of port development, including survivability. "We are able now with that new process to take much better account of those inappropriate conflicts between development and natural forces on the coast," Connaughton said.

"There is going to be trillions of dollars of new investment along our seaboards over the next half-century," he added. "The way we look at it is, How can we harness that investment toward lower risk, higher economic yield? That's an operating concept within each of these decisions we make."

In December, the Federal Emergency Management Agency warned North Carolina that many of its coastal counties would have their flood insurance rating downgraded (thereby driving up insurance premiums) unless the state adopted more-stringent building codes to reduce the damage that flying debris can cause. In January, the state began requiring houses within 1,500 feet of the shore to be equipped with storm shutters or plywood. FEMA wants the requirement to extend much farther inland. The state has balked.

Wanda Edwards, deputy commissioner of the North Carolina Department of Insurance, said a state task force is grappling with whether to expand the new requirements. The basic question it must address, Edwards said, is, "Do you want the consumer to bear the cost, or do you want the state and federal government to pay" to clean up the damage that more prevention would have avoided? Meanwhile, luxury beach houses with large plate-glass windows looking out toward the sea continue to spring up all along the Outer Banks.

A new task force of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is working on guidelines for reducing coastal wind damage. Earlier this year, the office produced a "Windstorm Impact Reduction Implementation Plan," which largely focuses on improving research on vulnerability to wind damage, construction standards, and disaster-response plans. A multiagency group has been formed to coordinate the report's recommended projects.

Whatever policies these groups develop, the biggest federal player along the coast will still be the Army Corps of Engineers, which is one of the hardest agencies for any White House to control. Much of the nation's coastal development is driven by multibillion-dollar projects, such as ports and levees, that are ordered by Congress and built and maintained by the Corps.

The Corps also plays a major role in trying to protect coastal areas once they are developed through beach replenishment. Since the Clinton administration, the White House has tried to essentially eliminate Corps funding for pouring sand onto eroding beaches. Without regular "beach renourishment," East Coast beaches will continue their natural erosion and accretion cycles, and any structures near the shoreline will wash away eventually.

But the Corps didn't actually get out of the beach-rebuilding business. Through earmarks and appropriations bills, Congress simply restored the beach projects.

"The way the Army Corps of Engineers gets involved in projects and activities that pertain to development is ... Congress directs it to," said George Dunlop, the Army's deputy assistant secretary for civil works. The Corps has no independent authority to set construction priorities and little ability to consider the broader effects of the projects that Congress assigns it.

"Congress needs to give the Corps more programmatic authority. Don't [mandate] a bunch of individual projects," Dunlop said. "If you look at the authorizations that take place for most other agencies of government, the agencies have a great deal of discretion about how to actually deploy funds between programs. The Corps doesn't have that."

Nevertheless, the Corps is trying to shift more responsibility back to the states. For major development projects, "the current cost-share formula is typically 65 federal, 35 local," Dunlop said. "We really believe that, moving forward, these cost shares ought to be 50-50 federal and local. There has to be more local ownership. You'd think that the 35 percent would keep them a little involved, but it really doesn't. There is too much of a tendency for the local people to think, 'Well, this is a federal project, a federal responsibility.' "

Dunlop said the Corps is trying to get communities to think through development in more comprehensive ways. "If you have a 27-foot levee and [the possibility of] a 30-foot storm surge, you have to have a whole lot of policies in place," he said, "which would include evacuation and local land-use and local flood-plain management, and efficient highway systems that can facilitate evacuations. And those are really local responsibilities."

As Katrina demonstrated yet again, once catastrophe strikes, it is almost impossible for Congress to say no to requests for help with reconstruction, regardless of whether the original development was wise. Thus, the federal government is beginning a multiyear, multibillion-dollar effort to help residents return to Bay St. Louis and other coastal towns that were destroyed not because a levee failed but because the storm that struck was simply more powerful than construction there was able to withstand.

"When people are in need, people will respond at all levels of government, and that's appropriate," Connaughton said. "What we need is greater political will that can be brought to bear so people aren't put in a position where they need to call on their governments for such response."

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White House working to better coordinate ocean research

Paul W. Singer — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Now James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, is beginning to roll out plans for improving research and coordinating policy. A scientific subcommittee is taking public comments this month on a priority list for marine research, ranging from basic science (how is ocean chemistry changing?) to broad policy issues (what are the cumulative effects of residential development on the seashore?).

In June, the White House will convene a national conference on ocean education to promote academic programs in marine sciences and learning opportunities in ocean recreation.

And later this summer, watch for new rules creating a big marine protected area in Hawaii.

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Lobbyists seek to broker deals with agencies

Paul W. Singer — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500

If you were a business executive who wanted the chance to rub shoulders with Davis, Barrales, and the local lawmakers, it may have helped to be a client of the government-affairs and lobbying firm Dutko Worldwide. The reason: The mayors hired Dutko to manage their group, as did the National Conference of Democratic Mayors and the Democratic Lieutenant Governors Association.

The groups are basically forums where elected officials talk about issues or policy changes they share. They also discuss policy challenges or best practices for government management. Corporate guests are not there to sell anything, said Pat McCrory, the mayor of Charlotte, N.C., who heads the Republican group. "It's an opportunity to interact with us. They can introduce themselves and help educate mayors on issues. No promise is made of anything else."

Dutko executives say that attendance at the meetings is not limited to their clients, and that the firm's role is simply to manage the sessions and make sure that the attendees are not selling "junk" to elected officials.

For Dutko's clients, it's a networking opportunity to get to know key decision makers -- and potential customers -- at the local level, who may advance in their political careers and become players at the state or federal level.

Welcome to the world of "government marketing," or "federal marketing," a nebulous but rapidly growing practice area on K Street. As the value of government contracts has ballooned, lobbying firms have pitched this marketing assistance to help their clients sell products and services to the public sector.

According to the General Services Administration, the value of federal contracts has grown 50 percent over the past five years. Several reasons explain this growth. First, the creation of the Homeland Security Department in late 2002 spawned a giant new bureaucracy with needs for goods and services.

Second, the government is still trying to integrate into its operations the information-technology revolution that has transformed the private sector since the mid-1990s. And third, the Bush administration's emphasis on competitive bidding for services traditionally provided by government has created billions of dollars in business opportunities for private firms.

All of this has set off a scramble for government contracting business. Today, articles by this magazine and other news organizations listing the "top 10" or "top 20" K Street firms almost invariably include a quote from a company executive explaining that their government-marketing practice is partly responsible for their success. Everyone, it seems, is doing it, and doing more of it than a decade ago.

Even Michael Brown, the former Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator who was pushed out of the agency last fall, is in the federal-marketing business. Brown says he has about a dozen clients, including a firm with a product that he says could solve some of the communication problems that dogged FEMA during its response to Hurricane Katrina. The firm already does business with the Defense Department, Brown said, and "I am going to try to get other departments to adopt it."

But no one can offer a single, clear definition of "government marketing." Firms use that term to describe an array of practices ranging from getting earmarks into appropriations bills to inviting clients to meet with the Republican mayors of midsize cities.

Dutko is a good example. The firm has had a state and local practice since 1994, but in 2004 it broke out a separate government-marketing practice to help clients sell to the feds. That practice saw a 50 percent growth in revenue last year, and Dutko CEO Mark Irion said that the firm is planning to increase government marketing "at a pace that will exceed the growth in our traditional federal lobbying business."

But marketing to the federal government involves more than just knocking on agency doors and trying to sell widgets.

George Thompson of the PR firm Fleishman Hillard -- which opened a government-marketing practice in June 2004 -- likened selling to the private sector to "planting a wheat field": You lay seeds in the spring, harvest the wheat in the fall, and start over the next year. But marketing to the government "is like planting an orchard: You plant the seeds, and in a couple of years they end up bearing fruit that will sustain you for a long period of time."

Firms come at government marketing with different strengths and philosophies, but they generally agree on several elements. Most practitioners interviewed for this article expressed some skepticism about a strategy that relies on getting an earmark into an appropriations bill that directs an agency to buy a product or invest in research with a specific firm. It's not that such earmarks are impossible to get or are undesirable. But they tend to be all-or-nothing propositions, and if they don't pass for whatever reason, the client is back at square one.

That leads to Plan B, which seems to be the larger part of this growth industry -- building relationships with decision makers within government agencies.

The first step is establishing a reputation for government officials to take note of. Companies can do that by placing advertisements in media aimed at government officials; by filling exhibit halls at government conferences; and by trying to get their executives placed on panels discussing policy issues. Lobbyists help plan these sophisticated campaigns.

Beyond building a client's reputation, practitioners say that the most important part of government marketing is getting to know the needs of the agency to which the client wants to sell.

Robert Perreault, a vice president at health care provider Health Net, said that the Jefferson Consulting Group, a pioneer in federal marketing, helped his company land a contract to provide health care coverage to the Veterans Affairs Department -- but the process took years.

Jefferson introduced Health Net to VA officials around the country, looking for ways to expand on the company's work of providing health care to the Defense Department. At the suggestion of some regional VA officials, Health Net developed what amounted to a preferred-provider network for veterans' health care delivered outside the VA system.

The VA, Perreault explains, sets a price that it will pay out-of-network providers for a procedure -- say $1,000 for a minor surgery. But Health Net, using its provider network, can get the same service for $700 and split the savings with the VA. The company is paid only for the savings it generates, and Perreault said that the arrangement has saved the VA $56 million since the system was launched at the end of the 1990s.

Federal-marketing lobbyists emphasize stories like these, in which a company sells a product that helps the government do a job better. The lobbyists argue that building relationships with purchasing officials is as important to government as it is to private companies, because agencies can't purchase what they don't know is available.

So federal marketing involves a lot of schmoozing. Greenberg Traurig hosts a breakfast session every month or so, where it brings in a federal procurement official to speak with about two dozen Greenberg clients. Speakers have included the head of the White House Office of Federal Procurement Policy and a top acquisitions officer at Homeland Security.

Bethany Noble, who heads the seven-person practice at Greenberg, says it is not a sales opportunity for clients, "but they get a lot of face time and Q&A" with top purchasing officials.

For lobbying firms, expertise in federal purchasing also opens the door to a lucrative consulting practice -- namely, market forecasting for venture capitalists. Someone considering investing in a company that makes picnic tables, for instance, may ask Dutko or Greenberg to conduct a quick-turnaround study on the potential federal market for picnic tables.

Lobbyists emphasize that none of their marketing practices establish any direct link between contact with government officials and the actual sale of a product to the government. Ultimately, any vendor has to clear the various legal and procedural hurdles to win a government contract, or to be approved as a vendor by the General Services Administration.

But the growth of the marketing business worries watchdogs. They fear that it creates incentives for a revolving door that lets government procurement officials retire into the private sector, then go back and sell their products to former co-workers. Moreover, the practice is not nearly as transparent as other lobbying activity.

In general, under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, contact with a federal agency counts as lobbying only if it involves repeated contacts with top officials on behalf of a single client. The bulk of government-marketing practices won't rise to this level, so firms don't have to disclose what they are paid to contact agencies, as they do when they contact Congress.

Charles Tiefer, professor of government contracting at the University of Baltimore Law School, said nothing is inherently wrong with companies meeting with government officials to explain technologies or products that could make agencies more efficient.

The danger, he said, is when a purchasing officer who wants to be innovative meets a lobbyist representing a company with a new or exciting product, and together they hatch a purchase that may have little value to the government and that operates outside of any meaningful oversight.

"Junk gets sold," Tiefer said, "and services that shouldn't be bought get bought."

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FEMA works to keep trailer parks temporary

Paul W. Singer — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500

For the "mayor" of Renaissance Village, FEMA manager Michael Cosbar, the church issue is just the latest trailer-park headache that his agency did not anticipate and is ill-equipped to address.

Ever since FEMA set up this community in October to shelter victims of Hurricane Katrina, religious charities have been active. Cosbar, who oversees most of the agency's trailer communities in the state, says he was unaware that Christian groups were regularly leading Bible study classes and holding Sunday school and other religious services.

After learning about the religious activities, he announced on February 16 that FEMA would no longer allow them. An independent evangelist named Pastor Judah, who had parked his 40-foot motor home on the site and was handing out tracts and praying with residents, was told to leave.

"If we let one group do it, we'd have to let every group do it," Cosbar explained. During a tour of the site in late February, he said that church groups were welcome to transport residents to services elsewhere and that residents could invite members of the clergy into their trailers to pray. But the park should be considered a "gated community," he said, generally off-limits to outsiders, including clergy wanting to hold services in its one common area.

Residents protested: "When they take God away from you, they've taken everything," said James Waller, vice chairman of the trailer park's citizens' council. Complaints soon reached agency headquarters -- and the White House. Within a week, FEMA scrapped the ban.

Instead, Renaissance Village now has a sign-up sheet for any resident who wants to schedule an event of any sort for the park's single public gathering space, an unheated 60-by-30-foot canvas tent erected by local charities. FEMA officials say they had not grappled with the church issue before because they don't generally set up a "community tent" when they provide emergency housing. The sterile, treeless "park" was not designed to have a gathering space, because it is meant to be temporary.

Welcome to Mr. Chertoff's Neighborhood, where the landlord -- Secretary Michael Chertoff and his Homeland Security Department -- provides only the bare necessities and operates the property with the intention of chasing the tenants out.

Although many of the evacuees come from areas of New Orleans that have not even begun to rebuild, and although most observers expect them to stay in the park for years, FEMA maintains that it will strictly follow federal rules: The trailers are temporary housing. The government provides evacuees a trailer, water and sewer lines, and electricity. Residents must now get pretty much everything else on their own or from a charity. FEMA does not want anyone to get too comfortable here.

After any major disaster, FEMA is the federal agency charged with providing temporary housing to displaced people. Its officials read that mandate very narrowly -- they will supply housing, and little else, for as long as 18 months while people get back on their feet. Typically, the agency must provide for just a few hundred or a few thousand people. But in the wake of Katrina, FEMA is sheltering tens of thousands of evacuees and providing assistance on an unprecedented scale.

Renaissance Village is the largest of the approximately 65 FEMA-run trailer parks in Louisiana. Agency officials insist that by April 2007, all the residents must find another home, find a new job or return to an old one, and generally resume their pre-Katrina lives. But an outsider walking through the rows and rows of trailers meets hundreds of people whose homes are gone and are unlikely to be rebuilt any time soon, whose workplaces were wiped out, and whose lives seem permanently shattered.

FEMA has distributed some 48,000 trailers and mobile homes in Louisiana, in a variety of ways. Its preferred approach is to give a trailer to an individual homeowner so family members can live in it on their own property while rebuilding. FEMA also parks its trailers in empty spaces in commercial trailer parks. The agency's least favorite option is to cluster its trailers where they can be hooked up to an existing or newly built sewer system; FEMA has set up about 300 group sites in Louisiana and runs about one-fifth of them. Some sites house merely a handful of employees from a particular company. But Renaissance Village is nearly 600 trailers strong.

New Orleans wants to open a FEMA site for almost 1,000 trailers in City Park, but neighbors object. Scores of FEMA trailers are sitting empty, and thousands of evacuees remain homeless because of similar objections. Regardless of the government's euphemisms -- group site, village, gated community -- this slapdash suburb is basically a refugee camp. And a lot of folks just don't want a refugee camp in their backyard.

Location, Location, Location

In the last days of August, as Katrina's victims fled toward Baton Rouge, government officials and charitable groups established emergency shelters in churches, municipal buildings, and anywhere else they could find room. When it became clear that tens of thousands of people in short-term emergency shelters would not soon be going home, the question of where to house them became urgent.

In late September, FEMA began building its first group trailer site in a 62-acre cow pasture owned by the Jetson Correctional Center for Youth, a juvenile prison. Crews working around the clock took three weeks to lay sewer and power lines, and to install about 575 trailers ranging in size from 18-foot units for single individuals to 40-footers for large families.

FEMA opened the gates of what it dubbed "Renaissance Village" on October 6. The trailer park runs along Groom Road, a narrow, pitted strip of asphalt that is slated for widening this summer and that is about a mile off the main thoroughfare here in Baker, a town of just under 14,000 people on the northern edge of Baton Rouge. Local officials approved the site.

Baker Mayor Harold Rideau said, "I don't have any regrets" about hosting the trailer park. "We did what we did because it was right." But that doesn't mean it has been easy. The Baker fire department soon tired of responding to calls at the park and declared in December that it would no longer come unless FEMA ponied up for the extra costs. The agency agreed to pay Baker about $400,000.

But Chief Danny Edwards said that, as of March 1, the department still did not have the money, despite answering about 100 calls at Renaissance Village, 25 percent of the department's total for the five-month period. Between October and January, the East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Department responded to 165 calls at the village.

And that tally does not include the first four weeks, when a deputy was on the site full-time. "We intend to submit a bill to FEMA," said sheriff's office spokesman Fred Raiford. "Whether they will reimburse us, who knows? We don't have a formal agreement, but they said, 'Keep your receipts.' "

Despite its fancy name, Renaissance Village is little more than a barren grid of metal trailers separated by gravel roadways. Patches of new grass sprouting between trailers are the only natural greenery. Some residents have landscaped their lots with potted plants from the local Wal-Mart but, otherwise, little distinguishes one trailer from the next -- beyond the black-and-white numbers pasted to their sides that serve as an address: C-10; J-18; F-9. The overall effect is "compound," not "community."

Few children are anywhere in sight. According to FEMA, the park has nearly 600 residents under age 18, but not many of them play in the dusty streets. Resident Anita Richardson says, "A lot of our kids in this trailer park are under a tremendous amount of stress. There are a lot of children, but you don't hardly ever see them. Even in the afternoon, you don't see the kids. They get off the bus, and they go home, and that's it. It scares me that kids don't go out -- even when it's sunny." Many trailers have aluminum foil or paper taped over their windows, perhaps for privacy, perhaps to keep the world at bay.

Social services providers also worry about the invisible young people. Sister Judith Brun, a former Catholic school principal who is now a child-services advocate for the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, says she is very concerned about a potential rash of child abuse, because parents and children are cooped up in small spaces. Many kids are skipping school, she said.

FEMA allows local school officials to come into the trailer park to search for truant schoolchildren. Because parents can be evicted for failing to keep their children in school, some kids caught by truant officers have refused to provide their names. So now, FEMA requires residents to carry ID badges at all times and has threatened to kick out any child found without an ID.

Sister Judith and other advocates for the poor had hoped that FEMA would build a model prefab community -- with schools, public spaces, and a sense of hope. On a rainy morning in February, she gazed sadly across the shuttered trailers. "We were going to have a model city out here. It could have been life-giving."

FEMA's Michael Cosbar is sympathetic but says his hands are tied. "I see individuals who have needs, but we can't provide them for them. There is nothing in the Stafford Act that says that we can offer them assistance beyond what we can offer." The act, which governs federal disaster assistance to states, is quite clear, he said: FEMA can offer housing assistance for 18 months, and that's about it. "That's the law, and we have to follow the law. And it wasn't FEMA who set it up. It was Congress."

Food, Faith, and Propane

The Stafford Act indeed spells out in detail what disaster aid the federal government may provide to individuals: It basically limits help to temporary housing, to cash assistance for home repairs, and, in some cases, to funeral, dental, or other emergency needs. At Renaissance Village, FEMA initially provided more than the act required.

Taking away the extras, such as propane, has caused some of the agency's biggest headaches. Richardson remembers the joy of being escorted to her new trailer: "When I came to my trailer, there was a beautiful basket of cookies and treats and chips, and sheets and pillows. And everything was just here waiting for me. The welcome was laid out."

FEMA installed a water and sewer system for the park and provided the propane for heat, hot water, and stoves -- until February 1. Residents now have to pay for their propane, at a cost of $25 to $35 a tank. Richardson, whose four-bedroom house was destroyed by Katrina and who now shares a two-bedroom trailer with her husband and five children, says that the family burns through more than a tank a week.

When FEMA announced it would no longer pay for propane, residents went ballistic. Many are on government assistance. Some lost their jobs as well as their homes in the storm. And most came from houses or apartments in New Orleans where they had never used propane for anything but a barbecue grill. How would they know how to hook up the tanks, to use the gas efficiently? Would the senior citizens in the park survive a frost without heat?

Beyond the actual cost of propane, FEMA's announcement upset residents because it contradicted what many say they were told. According to Richardson, "They said to me, 18 months free. No utilities, no nothing. Free." That's a common refrain in Renaissance Village. Residents believe they were promised 18 months of free living, with all expenses paid. FEMA is now reneging on the deal, they believe, although everyone has a different story about how this promise was made, and no one seems to have proof of it.

Cosbar insisted that FEMA never promised any such thing. Even though the Stafford Act says that FEMA is not to pay for utilities, the contractor FEMA hired to build the park initially provided propane through a subcontractor because "it was an emergency situation," he says. The residents were never promised that the propane would last forever, he stresses.

The free food service is likewise coming to an end. The Keta Group, the contractor that helps manage the site for FEMA, has been serving three meals a day out of a double-wide construction trailer. That service is scheduled to stop on April 6. FEMA typically does not supply food when it provides housing, but the government made an exception, Cosbar said, because Katrina "was considered an emergency situation. People had lost their homes; thousands and thousands of people had lost their homes. They didn't have money; they didn't have anything, so the food service was put in, initially."

In the beginning, Keta served 3,000 meals a day, Cosbar said, but that number had dropped to 600 or so by the end of February, because people had begun using the kitchens in their trailers. Nicol Andrews, a spokeswoman in FEMA's Washington headquarters, points out that people living in other FEMA trailers around the state do not get food or propane and that FEMA's mandate does not extend to providing a full range of human services. "Our goal is to get people back on their feet," she said "not to make them whole again."

Because of the local attention that Renaissance Village has attracted as the largest and most visible outpost of evacuees, its residents have received a number of services that most other Katrina victims have not gotten. A medical trailer visits regularly to provide prescriptions and other health care services; a state-chartered nonprofit organization has established an on-site center for coordinating social services; and residents (whose trailers do not have phone lines) have been given free cellphones by T-Mobile.

Cosbar says that FEMA is actively recruiting charitable organizations to provide similar services at other group sites, but The Washington Post reported last month that area charities have already burned through about two-thirds of their Katrina funds.

By some measures, the residents of Renaissance Village have been a bit spoiled. In December, Sister Judith recalls, so many charities were bringing gifts that "we were forcing stuff on these people." One donor said that her church brought turkeys on Thanksgiving, even though the stoves in the trailers were probably too small to accommodate them. "There have been so many donations," Cosbar said, "there comes a time where you have to say, 'Enough is enough.' "

People living in the collection of smaller trailer sites 5 miles away, along the fence line of the Baton Rouge Metropolitan Airport, get far fewer extras. Together, these newer sites have nearly as many trailers as Renaissance Village but have attracted much less assistance from charities. At one airport site, staff members pointed to the empty space where a community tent might someday go and joked that at least the park offers free entertainment: Residents can watch airplanes take off and land all day.

Despite FEMA's contention that private charities need to help, the agency does not always cooperate when do-gooders answer the call. Rosie O'Donnell's For All Kids Foundation has committed $3 million to provide services for children displaced by Hurricane Katrina. In mid-December, the foundation delivered three double-wide trailers to Renaissance Village to serve as an after-school care/early-childhood education complex. By Valentine's Day, the trailers still sat where they had been left; FEMA would not let the foundation hook them up.

The foundation sent in two set-up crews to places that Keta had told it the trailers could be placed, but both times those plans got changed and the set-up crews had to go home, according to foundation officials. FEMA officials said that the trailers' placement had to be negotiated to clarify cost and liability issues. On February 22, two months after the gift trailers arrived, FEMA signed an agreement accepting them and allowing the foundation to set them up.

Planned Obsolescence

Under current policies, people who apply to FEMA for assistance are given whatever aid is most appropriate or most readily available -- hence the now-ubiquitous FEMA trailers. Even so, most observers of FEMA's Katrina response, including the White House's review panel, have concluded that large-scale emergency trailer parks are a bad idea.

Communities hesitate to permit them. Social services agencies believe they create inhospitable environments. Members of Congress argue that they waste government resources by setting up structures that will just have to be removed later. In late February, the White House panel that assessed the government's response to Katrina concluded that in future disasters the Housing and Urban Development Department, not FEMA, should take the lead in sheltering refugees and that "the provision of trailers should not be the default means of temporary housing offered to all evacuees leaving shelters."

Former FEMA Director Michael Brown, who lost his job after Katrina, said of FEMA's trailer parks, "They've been a bad idea for 20 years." Brown added that, before Katrina, he had requested funding for an in-depth study of alternative approaches to emergency housing, but Homeland Security never approved his request.

Scott Wells, FEMA's federal coordinating officer for hurricane recovery in Louisiana, told a Senate committee in December that the government pays $30,000 to $40,000 to purchase and install each trailer and that evacuees would be better off if FEMA just gave them cash. "Temporary housing is not cost-effective or customer-oriented," he said.

The trailers might be sold when FEMA is done with them, but it's hard to envision them bringing much money. Most were not designed for long-term living, and they are likely to need major repairs before they can be reused.

Nevertheless, with so much of Louisiana's housing stock destroyed, trailers remain the quickest answer to FEMA's housing shortage. The government will probably open additional mega-sites before the recovery from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita is complete. FEMA is likely to spend about $4 billion overall on trailers, said agency spokeswoman Andrews. What's more, given the difficulty in getting local officials to accept FEMA trailer parks, the agency will try to cram as many trailers as possible into any approved site.

"What I fear," said Randy Ewing, interim director of the Louisiana Family Recovery Corps, the nonprofit group set up by Gov. Kathleen Blanco to coordinate state, federal, and private humanitarian assistance, "is [that] we will be left with thousands of people living in trailers that are dilapidating, and we will have the worst slums in America."

Ewing and officials of other nonprofits in Louisiana have said that government should erect emergency housing with an eye to longer-term -- even permanent -- occupancy. "For what we are spending for these travel trailers and their location, for just a little bit more," he said, "we can go to modular manufactured facilities or houses that could be spaced out a little bit more, look at green space: Create neighborhoods."

The only community space at Renaissance Village is the tent donated by the anti-poverty group Share Our Strength. The tent hosts meetings, events for children, health fairs, and, now, religious services. But the village has no playground, no park bench, no dining hall. Meals prepared in the Keta kitchen are served in plastic foam containers and carried away. FEMA's approach "gives you no way to create social fabric in that environment," said Sister Judith, who adds that she had to hector FEMA for weeks for a liability waiver that would allow the tent to remain on site.

FEMA counters that there is no point in developing a community setting, because nobody is supposed to live in the park long enough to make it a real community.

"You have to maximize the use of the space," Cosbar said. "Yes, it would be great to be able to make it more a village, but also, consider that this is temporary housing. I have to underscore that. We are not expecting people to be here forever. It's not as though we are turning a blind eye to that, but for the sake of getting people out of the situations they're in, they have to get these parks put together as quickly as possible and populate them as quickly as possible." Andrews agrees: "We want to discourage planning any kind of permanence" for the trailer parks.

Besides, FEMA has no legislative authority to construct long-term housing. Congress would have to rewrite the laws to allow FEMA to think beyond 18 months. But, Ewing argues, "the government needs to take a more long-term approach. I don't think that anybody who has been here longer than 10 minutes believes that we will be completely through with the job, or anywhere near there," at the end of 18 months. Nobody at FEMA wants to speculate on what will happen at Renaissance Village in April of next year, but the official line is that any remaining residents will be evicted.

Perhaps some people will never leave, though. Bob Hebert, director of recovery for Charlotte County, Fla., said 300 occupied trailers remain in a FEMA park outside Punta Gorda that was created after Hurricane Charley crashed into Florida's Gulf Coast 18 months ago. FEMA has extended housing there for an additional six months, Hebert said, and is considering charging the remaining residents rent or just handing over control to the county. But the stragglers -- at its peak, the site had 571 units -- might be hard to move.

Many work but do not make enough to rent or own in the region, particularly since Charley's devastation drove up housing prices. Others are elderly people on fixed incomes or have disabilities that make it hard for them to find or pay for other housing. Public housing units in the area are still being rebuilt. A third slice of the trailer population consists of what Hebert calls "system-gamers," people who have lived on government handouts for years and will continue looking for ways to do so.

The lesson of Punta Gorda, according to Hebert, is that FEMA "shouldn't be building any trailer parks with more than 25 or 50 units on them." Large collections of trailers take up so much space that they must be placed on big tracts of land on the outskirts of town, often far from services and jobs. "There is no social system, no community center in the park where people can gather, no churches, no schools," he added. "You have isolated these people."

Hebert gets three or four phone calls a week from local officials in Louisiana who are seeking advice about setting up trailer parks and who fear they may be re-creating the crime-infested slum that Punta Gorda's FEMA City has become. But "the interesting thing," he says, "is that FEMA has never asked us what we thought."

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OMB seeks feedback on risk assessment guidelines

Paul W. Singer and Jenny Mandel — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 00:00:00 -0500

John Graham, head of the Office of Management and Budget's regulatory division, is making his last days memorable.

Graham, who leaves on March 1 to run the RAND Corp.'s graduate school in policy analysis, has issued a proposed risk assessment bulletin that would create new rules for regulators in the interest of promoting "sound science." An OMB spokesman said, "The quality and transparency of risk assessments currently varies from agency to agency. This bulletin provides clear, minimum standards for agency risk assessments."

The guidelines, which were published as a draft bulletin on Jan. 9, will be open to public comment through June 15 and have been forwarded to the National Academy of Sciences for review, according to an OMB statement. These inputs, as well as comments from federal agencies, will be used to issue final guidelines late this year.

The bulletin would apply to all federal agencies covered by the 1995 Paperwork Reduction Act, but is likely to have the most impact on the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Environmental Protection Agency, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the departments of Commerce, Health and Human Services, Interior, Labor and Transportation, according to an OMB official who asked to remain anonymous.

The bulletin would require agencies to explain in more detail the uncertainties involved in estimating hazards from things such as toxic chemicals and to present their findings ("this chemical can kill you") in the context of other risks ("you are more likely to be hit by a bus").

Environmentalists, who have portrayed Graham, a former Harvard professor, as a shill for industry, argue that burying risk statements under such caveats will make it more difficult to regulate anything.

But James Hammitt, director of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, said the proposed guidelines incorporate a good deal of common sense.

"I imagine that many of the best risk assessments that are done, for example, those at EPA that I'm most familiar with, already comply with most of this," Hammitt said. "These guidelines are trying to raise the level of the not-so-good examples."

The proposal covers a wide range of appraisals, including ones that evaluate baseline risk or risk mitigation activities, as well as less comprehensive studies such as exposure or hazard assessments. The bulletin separates risk assessments into two categories: "influential" and standard.

Assessments identified as influential--defined as having a "clear and substantial impact" on public policies or private sector decisions--would be subject to more rigorous standards.

The guidelines also would require in-depth risk analyses to include a range of estimates, including central and nonconservative estimates in addition to conservative "upper-bound" estimates. Assessments of the degree of uncertainty associated with each estimate would need to be included.

Hammitt said this could be difficult for studies of human exposure to rare toxic chemicals, which often are extrapolated from testing on laboratory animals, where direct applicability to humans is difficult to quantify.

A provision requiring agencies to consider all "significant comments" on draft risk assessments is likely to cause debate because it presumes that all "scientific" comments are significant, Hammitt said. "How do you decide if someone is a crackpot scientist?" he asked.

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Agencies tackle massive Gulf Coast waste removal challenge

Paul W. Singer — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 00:00:00 -0500

By year's end, contractors hired by the Army Corps of Engineers and other government agencies had hauled away some 40 million cubic yards of junk in Louisiana and Mississippi. Even so, millions of cubic yards of debris remained, much of it in houses that will have to be gutted or demolished.

By most estimates, the hurricanes created at least 50 million cubic yards of debris in Louisiana and another 40 million in Mississippi. Trucks will still be carting it away next Thanksgiving.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency calculates that in Alabama and Texas, the storms transformed an additional 12 million cubic yards of bathtubs, tree limbs, car fenders, and smoke alarms into trash. Just how much rubbish is that? Well, the average professional football stadium could hold only about 2 million cubic yards of debris.

To the untrained eye, the rubble that used to be New Orleans's lower 9th Ward looks as if it simply needs to be pushed out of the way by bulldozers to allow new construction to begin. But when waste experts eye the rubble here and in other wrecked neighborhoods, they see something else entirely: a dozen kinds of garbage, each of which needs to be collected and disposed of separately.

Thus, several crews must pick over each pile of rubble, so that they can sort, number (yes, really), and lug the various parts of the pile to the places best equipped to receive them.

Nearly every item in the millions of tons of trash that Katrina and Rita created will be assessed for hazardousness before it ends up in a final resting place -- one of the hundreds of landfills around the region, a hazardous-waste disposal facility, or a recycling plant.

Where Dead Refrigerators Go

Down a dirt road on a Louisiana National Guard outpost, past the Slidell Police Canine Training Range and the recreational paintball field, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is operating what looks like a refrigerator graveyard on a former helicopter landing pad. In fact, the site is more like a refrigerator mortuary -- the place where dead appliances are prepped for their final destination in the beyond.

Each day, waste contractors who are scouring the streets of Katrina-ravaged St. Tammany Parish deliver hundreds of refrigerators, ovens, washing machines, and other major appliances. Mortuary overseer Michelle Rogow, an EPA employee from San Francisco, constantly updates a parish map posted on a trailer's wall. Each red dot on the map indicates where a refrigerator or other appliance has been left at a curb.

Each red square signals where hazardous household waste has been sighted. Each pinpointed item is logged into a database and tracked until it is delivered to the helicopter field. Only then is it crossed off the map. Since the first week of October, when the EPA's collection process began, Rogow's site has received more than 47,000 "white goods" and 71,000 containers of hazardous material.

The logistics of getting all of this junk to the mortuary demonstrate the enormousness of the debris management problem. After the storms, many people returned to their houses and dragged most of the contents to the curb. The EPA, the Army Corps of Engineers, and local waste-management authorities explore every street to assess the waste piles.

The Corps handles debris management for FEMA, and its contractors haul off nonhazardous debris. But if a pile contains a refrigerator or another hazard, the Corps tells the EPA to pick it up.

Items delivered to the helicopter pad are inspected for toxicity as they are unloaded. Refrigerators are emptied of their rotted food, then power-washed with bleach. The Freon or other coolant is drained for recycling, and the ruined appliance is piled on a heap to be crushed into metal bales.

A scrap-metal dealer buys the compacted remains and hauls them away. The state Department of Environmental Quality estimates that Louisiana will recover 1 million pounds of Freon, a fluorocarbon that can damage the ozone layer if it's released into the environment.

Other hazardous materials -- paint, pesticides, solvents, and the like -- are separated, sampled, and placed in safe containers. They are then transferred to a licensed hazardous-waste disposal site. Televisions and computer monitors are pulled out for collection and recycling. The EPA estimates that the typical TV contains 4 pounds of lead, which can cause brain damage if it leaches into drinking water.

"We are literally managing individual pieces of people's stuff," Rogow said.

Chuck Brown, state assistant secretary of environmental quality, said that Louisiana may ultimately retrieve and dismantle 1 million appliances, each of which will be tracked individually, sorted by several contractors, and emptied largely by hand. The EPA is running half a dozen hazardous-waste and appliance mortuaries around the state, at a cost of about $2 million a day.

The Waste Doctors

On a blustery December morning, a small EPA crew gathered in the parking lot of an unremarkable office park in eastern New Orleans. The cluster of low, black-glass buildings had been battered by the storm and then gutted by looters and contractors. Now, piles of debris sat on the pavement. The debris contractor hired by the Army Corps of Engineers could not haul the trash away until the EPA found and removed anything dangerous.

Most of the office-park mess was no different from countless other rubble piles around town -- furniture, books, magazines, sodden chunks of drywall, sections of carpet. But because these office suites housed medical professionals, the waste also included hazardous medical debris. The EPA crew in white hazard suits and yellow boots picked through the junk with handheld grabbers, retrieving bottles of toxic chemicals, biological waste, needles, and several canisters of compressed oxygen, which explode if they're crushed.

As the workers finished picking over a section of the pile, a small backhoe spread out the remains so that the workers could see any hazardous materials they had missed. The property owners "probably hired people to gut the office, and they did not distinguish between drywall and blood products," said Brad Stimple, EPA's on-scene coordinator for this operation.

Stimple said that EPA crews have visited dozens of small commercial locations like this one. Typically, one site yields enough hazards to fill two dozen special cardboard boxes, each the size of a nightstand.

But like all other government-led cleanup crews, Stimple's is allowed to sort through only what property owners have dragged out to the curb. Officials throughout the region stress that, except in extraordinary circumstances, they are not authorized to remove anything from private property without the owner's permission.

For instance, one medical lab in the office park that Stimple's crew was scouring that December day had been torn apart by the storm and apparently looted, but had not yet been emptied by the owner. The hurricane had wrenched the door from its hinges.

Inside the lab, vials of who-knows-what were strewn everywhere. A poster ominously warned of "blood-borne pathogens." Yet Stimple and his crew had no authority to enter. As renters and property owners return home and begin to clean up, they dump new piles of debris at the curb. At some point, the feds will declare their job done and local officials will be left to cope with whatever garbage is left. Even now, some officials wonder which trash is FEMA's responsibility.

Marnie Winter, director of environmental affairs for Jefferson Parish, just west of New Orleans, said, "FEMA will not authorize pickup of new-construction debris, but it will be pretty hard to determine which is which" if one homeowner is tearing out flood-damaged walls and a neighbor is throwing out scraps from a remodeling project unrelated to the storms.

Indeed, Axel Hichos and his Boston-based crew from Trident Environmental Group, a subcontractor for the Corps, spent a recent Wednesday afternoon collecting the asbestos tile -- and only the asbestos tile -- from a debris pile in front of a house on New Orleans's Lowerline Street in the city's southern bulge along the Mississippi River.

That neighborhood suffered little storm damage and no flooding. But many roofs need repairing, and some residents have taken the opportunity to renovate or clear out their houses. The debris pile that Hichos and his crew were tackling was, according to neighbors, the result of an eviction and a renovation, not an inundation. "We'll come back through here in three days, and there will be more piles," Hichos predicted.

Although the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11 created 2 million cubic yards of rubble, all of that debris was concentrated in a few square blocks of Lower Manhattan. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, by contrast, spread their destruction over thousands of square miles.

Every town in the storms' paths now has hazardous hotspots that used to be photo shops, drycleaners, hardware stores, or nail salons. Toxic chemicals are hidden under heaps of brick, wood, and wallboard.

Josie Clark, an EPA employee from Chicago, is heading a "school assessment group," a 10-member team that searches storm-tossed Louisiana communities for schoolroom hazards, mostly chemistry labs with collections of toxic materials in various states of disarray and destruction. By late December, Clark's team had worked its way through 40 schools that officials hope to reopen. Schools beyond repair will be searched later.

Many of the cleanup jobs involve coping with stomach-turning stenches. Rick Tillman, a Corps debris specialist, won't soon forget the New Orleans meat-storage facilities where the loss of power caused tons of chicken and seafood to rot. The Corps, worried that the carcasses posed a health threat, hauled 50 million pounds of putrid meat to a special dump in lined trucks that had to be decontaminated before they could return to the roads. Tillman says that his truck stank for weeks.

And then there are the wrecked vehicles. In Louisiana alone, officials expect they will have to dispose of 350,000 cars and perhaps 37,000 boats. Each will be tagged, towed, disassembled, drained of petroleum products and other hazardous waste, stripped of recyclable materials, and finally crushed.

A FEMA spokesman in Mississippi pointed out that several hundred cars and boats have to be dredged up off the coast before being tagged, towed, and all the rest.

How Much Wood Could a Termite Gnaw?

By Army Corps of Engineers estimates, Katrina and Rita together produced 12 million cubic yards of vegetative debris in Louisiana, mostly downed trees and branches. Mississippi officials estimate that the hurricanes created 20 million cubic yards of woody waste. Much of this debris was gathered up quickly, as crews cleared streets for safe passage.

Woody waste presents some excellent recycling opportunities. In Washington Parish, north of New Orleans, the waste is being ground up to serve as fuel in a paper mill. Elsewhere, it is being chipped or shredded for use as temporary cover for landfills. Environmental groups suggest that the woody materials could be used to build new levees around endangered wetlands, and some have even proposed that clean woody waste be used to fill industrial canals that contributed to the flooding of New Orleans.

But even for this seemingly benign material, disposal can be complicated, because of a pernicious local critter called the Formosan termite. Accidentally imported in the 1940s by U.S. warships returning from Asia, the termite is such a serious problem that Louisiana's wood waste cannot be shipped out of state or to uninfested regions of Louisiana.

"If we didn't have a termite problem, we could use barge or rail to send this stuff to other states," said Brown of the DEQ. "People from Texas and Alabama have called us asking for some of our waste," but it cannot be sent. The prohibition also applies to wooden waste from residences.

What's more, warns Bob Odom, Louisiana's commissioner of agriculture and forestry, "if you buried all this wood waste, all you would have done is to create a haven for those termites." Odom advocates burning the woody waste or spraying it with a pesticide. He said he would support composting only if he could be convinced that it would generate enough heat to kill the insects. Otherwise, he said, all of the chipped wood will have to be sprayed before it can be used.

Even woody waste from areas not infested with termites generates questions. Winter said that FEMA approved collection of Jefferson Parish's downed trees and limbs, but did not immediately approve the collection of stumps. "People kept calling and saying, 'When are you going to pull out these stumps?' "

Eventually, FEMA agreed to get rid of the stumps, but then had to assign contractors to the task. In the Army Corps's debris database, it still counts tree removal and stump removal as separate disposal operations.

The infrastructure developed to track and manage all of this waste is extraordinary. In a dingy building in Baton Rouge, Georgiann Shult, a Corps employee from central Pennsylvania, has developed a computerized database that tracks every truckload of waste hauled by her agency's contractors.

Every load has a paper ticket signed by the driver and by the operator of the disposal site. Dozens of staffers in the Baton Rouge office enter information from those tickets into the database, at a rate of several thousand tickets per day. At the touch of a few buttons, Shult can locate any truckload of waste.

By late December, she had records on more than 300,000 loads of debris hauled by the 10,000 trucks that the Corps's primary contractors had operated since September.

Where Does It All Go?

After hurricane debris is picked through, sorted, and collected, a dizzying array of hurdles still must be cleared before it is laid to rest somewhere. In New Orleans, the Army Corps of Engineers is using the Old Gentilly landfill as its primary disposal site for construction and demolition rubble, but reopening that site has sparked a firestorm of protests. Gentilly, a former city-owned municipal landfill, was closed in 1986.

The city was in the process of getting a site permit for construction debris when Katrina struck. The landfill reopened days later. Critics contend that the dump does not meet the standards of a modern landfill. Marsh surrounds Gentilly, and owners of nearby landfills argue that they have plenty of capacity for hurricane-related waste and can handle it more safely.

Joel Waltzer, a lawyer suing on behalf of the Louisiana Environmental Action Network to try to force the state to close the landfill, said that Gentilly is simply not equipped to handle the hazardous materials that are almost certainly mixed in with the curbside debris that's arriving by the truckload.

"They can pluck through those rubbish piles, and they will get the [dangerous] stuff that's on top.... But if they get even 25 percent of it, I will be shocked," Waltzer said.

The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality counters that Gentilly is needed. Assistant Secretary Brown said, "If it weren't available, we would really be behind the eight ball." He added that the landfill "meets every standard that every other construction and demolition debris landfill meets."

Gentilly sits on a spit of marshy land east of downtown New Orleans that is covered with decades-old illegal dump sites. Herons and other coastal birds stand in brackish waters amid abandoned cars, junked furniture, and garbage from various eras. Trucks bearing hurricane debris continually drive in and out of unregulated sites that have no apparent environmental controls.

"I've been raising hell about those sites," but the DEQ has not shown any interest in shutting them down, said Sierra Club organizer Darryl Malek-Wiley. DEQ Enforcement Director Harold Leggett testified before the state Legislature's environmental committees in mid-December that the state had not emphasized enforcement in the immediate aftermath of the storms, but said, "There are some criminal investigations going on related to the landfill activities."

Brown said that his agency is very concerned about illegal dumping near the Gentilly landfill and is working with city police to identify the perpetrators.

In some places, the Louisiana DEQ favors burning hurricane debris, but the EPA has issued warnings about the combustion of debris that may be contaminated with asbestos or other health hazards. The Corps, officials said, is not burning any waste and will not unless the EPA approves.

Brown said that his agency is burning clean, woody debris and is hoping to rely heavily on shredding or grinding other wastes to reduce the space they take up in landfills. The state has begun using a tractor-trailer-sized grinding machine called the "annihilator" that can chew more than 100 tons of waste an hour into 2-foot chunks.

In Mississippi, about half the hurricane debris is woody waste, but the state Department of Environmental Quality would prefer not to burn it. "We tolerate [burning], but we don't encourage it," said Mark Williams, the department's solid-waste administrator. Mississippi's biggest challenge, he said, is sorting through the debris fields that were left after the storm.

Katrina made a direct hit on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and while Louisiana was left with thousands of damaged structures, most of the buildings along the Mississippi coast were obliterated. Ron Calcagno, public works director of the pulverized town of Waveland, Miss., said that officials are scheduling waste-crew visits so that residents can meet the crews at their former homes to collect any valuable or sentimental objects that remain.

The greatest mystery lying at the bottom of the massive piles of hurricane waste is the total cost of disposal. The federal government has already signed waste contracts totaling $2 billion. But FEMA and the Army Corps refuse to say what they are paying per ton for waste hauling. Officials maintain that totals are not yet available or that releasing the information would give contractors a leg up in price negotiations.

Parishes around New Orleans have complained that the structure of FEMA's waste contracts -- FEMA hires the Army Corps, which hires national contractors, who hire local subcontractors -- guarantees that the hauling price will be marked up several times. Local haulers hired directly, critics contend, could do the job more cheaply. A FEMA official in Mississippi said that the recovery of recyclable materials will defray some of the disposal cost.

But, in the end, there's no getting around these facts: Katrina and Rita trashed the Gulf Coast. And trash disposal is expensive and environmentally difficult.

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SBA slammed for Katrina delays

Paul W. Singer — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Regional business leaders gathering in Washington this week for a strategy session blasted the SBA for moving slowly to distribute disaster-recovery loans and for being inflexible, uncreative, and bureaucratic. Small businesses devastated by the storm are in danger of going bankrupt if they cannot get quick access to loans to keep them afloat until their customers return, participants said.

The numbers are striking. SBA spokeswoman Anne Marie Frawley said that as of November 29, the agency had received 18,080 applications for loans to offset physical damage caused by Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana alone. In response, the SBA had so far approved 472 of the applications and had distributed only 84 loans, totaling $724,000.

The agency had also received 1,890 applications for "Economic Injury Disaster Loans," and it had approved 436 of the applications and disbursed 102 loans, for a total of $1.4 million.

Frawley said the small numbers are not the result of SBA foot-dragging. "There is a lot of criticism, and a lot of it is misinformation," she said. The agency's critics "have not done their homework."

Frawley explained that the Federal Emergency Management Agency refers homeowners and small businesses to the SBA for loans first, and then makes grants to applicants whom the SBA has turned down. The bulk of the people who apply for an SBA loan "are not intending to get a loan," Frawley argues. They are simply going through the steps required before they can apply to FEMA.

In addition, the SBA loan process follows normal loan requirements: Borrowers have to prove some ability to repay the money, and physical-damage loans require estimates for the repair costs, plus a physical inspection by an SBA assessor. Once approved, borrowers do not simply get a check. They have to request funds, generally in installments, to pay for portions of the repair project. That explains why the disbursement numbers are smaller than the approvals.

The SBA has established a "Gulf Opportunity Pilot Loan Program" -- called "GO Loans" -- that essentially offers a federal guarantee for disaster loans issued by private lending institutions. SBA Administrator Hector Barreto announced the program on November 8, saying it would be effective immediately and would "unleash the liquidity and expertise of commercial banks" in funding the Gulf Coast recovery effort. But as of November 29, the agency could provide no data to show if any GO loans have yet been granted.

Walter Isaacson, co-chairman of the new Louisiana Recovery Authority, said that the SBA has to eliminate the bureaucratic hurdles and move more quickly to get money to Gulf Coast businesses. "SBA has not been very good, has not been very effective or creative," he said. "It is not treating this as an emergency situation."

While the SBA is hiring thousands of new people in its disaster office, Isaacson said, it takes time to train those people, and time to implement new programs like the GO Loans -- time that small businesses do not have. "You can't expect someone who is hanging on by their fingernails to figure out a new program."

Senate Small Business Committee Chairwoman Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, has proposed legislation to increase the SBA's loan authority and provide specific aid to businesses and nonprofits affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The administration has opposed the bill.

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Gaps remain in government strategy for handling natural disasters

Paul W. Singer and Brian Friel — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

On paper, federal, state, and local planners prescribe an "all-hazards" approach to preparing for disasters -- a one-size-fits-all plan on how to anticipate and respond to the many non-terrorism hazards, everything from volcanic eruptions to chemical spills. In reality, though, federal agencies and their state and local counterparts organize their plans into disaster-specific programs of detection, prevention, and response, while specific agencies remain focused on particular kinds of disasters. And all responders still have to deal with federal bureaucratic infrastructures that grew haphazardly out of past crises and are strapped for cash.

"It's almost inevitable that the windows of opportunity for change are going to happen in the aftermath of disasters," says University of Colorado disaster expert Roger Pielke. The nation's dam-safety program, for example, was created after the poorly designed Teton Dam in Idaho broke in 1976, killing 11 people and costing millions of dollars in damage.

The federal earthquake program came to life after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The volcano program exists thanks to the cataclysmic 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington state. The wildfire-response system was developed following the catastrophic California fires of 1970. A myriad of flood and drought programs around the nation were created on the spur of the moment after various floods and droughts.

"What we're doing," says Dennis Mileti, a natural-hazards expert at the University of Colorado, "is getting ready for the disasters we've already experienced."

Most of the disaster-specific programs have notable, even growing, gaps that leave the nation more vulnerable than it needs to be. Because of budgetary constraints, stream gauges that warn of impending floods are being shut down, even as more people move onto the floodplains below them. Few tsunami-prone communities have workable evacuation plans. Some dangerous volcanoes are inadequately monitored. Community-preparedness boards are dwindling, despite nonstop reports of hazardous-chemical accidents. The state of the nation's levees is a mystery.

No one has undertaken a comprehensive federal effort to assess these gaps or to encourage experts in the many disciplines of science and engineering associated with natural hazards to work together to try to minimize the damage that disasters can inflict. "We live on a very unsafe planet," Mileti said. "We just always try to pretend it's safe. And it's because we prefer believing it's safe that we don't tend to do the things we need to do, to deal with the problems nature throws at us."

Whose Fault?

It's 4 p.m. on the second Tuesday in July, sometime in the future, when the ground starts to shake in the Pacific Northwest. The Cascadia Subduction Zone, an 800-mile-long fault on the Pacific Ocean floor running parallel to the Washington, Oregon, and Northern California coasts, has shifted, triggering a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and a massive tsunami. The last time this happened, in 1700, the Pacific Northwest was sparsely inhabited. Now, 6 million people on the West Coast will feel the effects.

This once-every-500-years event was going to be a disaster no matter what. But because things that should have been done to prepare for the double whammy of an earthquake-tsunami were never done, the event turns out to be a true catastrophe. Sections of several long bridges collapse, power lines snap, and pipelines rupture. Many older structures weren't retrofitted to withstand the 4-minute earthquake that accompanies the fault's lurch; as a result, portions of buildings fall off, injuring a few pedestrians; in a major city, one tall concrete-frame building collapses entirely, killing nearly half the people inside.

In coastal areas, small wood-frame houses survive virtually intact, but multistory brick buildings -- including some schools -- are reduced to rubble. Portions of the coastline drop several feet and flood with seawater. Buildings and roads resting on weak soil crack, crumble, and slide away. Landslides bury houses at the foot of predictably vulnerable hills. Tilt-up doors on some firehouses break, making it impossible to get trucks out immediately. Few coastal towns have sirens to warn of tsunamis, so police try to drive down streets shouting through bullhorns that people should head for higher ground. But because roads are torn up and littered with debris, officers can't warn everyone. People who do survive the tsunami on higher ground have enough provisions for only a few days.

This scenario was scripted by a Pacific Northwest multiagency workgroup of geology and engineering experts for a Cascadia Subduction Zone failure. It envisions three disasters in three states in the span of a few hours; the events affect more than 6 million people, kill hundreds, injure thousands, and cut off numerous communities from road access, rail lines, power, and water service. The first disaster is the earthquake, the second the tsunami, and the third an inadequate human response.

Even the single task of searching debris for survivors will overwhelm state and local responders. Hospital staff will be consumed with assisting patients already in the hospital when people injured on the outside begin trickling in. Communications systems will be down, so relief efforts will be confused. For days, many areas will be reachable only by helicopter.

Buildings and structures that could have been built to withstand the earthquake and tsunami forces won't have been. People who could have been educated to deal with the danger won't know what to do. And backup plans won't have been thought out well enough.

Emergency planners already recognize that current strategies are inadequate. "We no longer support the three-day-preparedness mantra that the federal government puts out," says Stephanie Fritts, the emergency manager in Pacific County, Wash. "We encourage [individuals to keep] seven days of supplies, because we recognize we're going to have 'islands' of people for some time."

The Fires Are Burning!

The interagency command post that offers the best model of coordination, prevention, and reaction in the disaster-response community is in a nondescript cluster of buildings at the edge of the Boise, Idaho, airport, next to an overnight shipping warehouse. A boulder at the headquarters' entrance displays a large logo of the National Interagency Fire Center. That sign partially obscures a second sign, which bears the same name as well as much smaller logos of the nine federal and state agencies represented in the center.

Inside, several hundred staff members from the various agencies roam the halls with no indication of who comes from where. The only logo worn on any shirt is the fire center patch. This state of affairs is symbolic of the center's mission: State, federal, and local agencies work in nearly seamless coordination to put out forest fires before they become actual disasters.

The ferocious 2000 wildfire season featured a "prescribed burn" (set by federal officials to reduce the risk of wildfire) that leaped out of control, burning nearly 50,000 acres in New Mexico and destroying 239 homes. After that, federal fire spending nearly doubled, from $1.6 billion in 2000 to close to $3 billion annually since then, according to the Congressional Research Service.

This money goes for a range of prevention activities, such as clearing brush to reduce the "fuel" for forest fires, carrying out prescribed burns, thinning certain forests, and educating communities about how to reduce their own fire risks. Nevertheless, the fire center in Boise recorded 206 new fires, nationwide, on September 27 alone, and considered that a "moderate" day. The bulk of the federal money is spent fighting fires.

What's interesting is how responders fight those fires. After the disastrous 1970 California wildfire season, a group of state, local, and federal officials developed a fire management system called FIRESCOPE (Firefighting Resources of California Organized for Potential Emergencies). Although the system has evolved over the years and been renamed the Incident Command System, the general concept remains the same: Establish a standard organizational structure for managing fire emergencies, so that any person from any agency who has been trained to do a certain kind of job -- such helicopter coordinator -- can do that job at any site.

The system is analogous to political campaigns, in which consultants who specialize in polling, or fundraising, or direct mail can perform that job on a campaign anywhere in the country, no matter the issues or the office being sought. The more complex the campaign (say a senatorial or presidential race), the more experience a consultant needs to handle the top job, but even the biggest national campaigns need people who know how to set up computers and rent ballrooms.

Within the fire community, people around the country are trained and certified for specific roles in the Incident Command System, such as "logistics section chief," and are listed on a national database. At a small wildfire, the local firefighting unit that arrives first designates a single person to serve as "incident commander" with full authority for all decision-making at the site. If the fire grows, the commander can call for additional staff from local dispatchers, specifying what roles need to be filled.

If the fire begins to threaten, say, a residential area, the commander can summon a more highly qualified regional or national team. The national center in Boise oversees 17 national teams capable of managing the most-complex wildfires.

A national distribution system manages all orders for staff or equipment; any request that cannot be filled locally will be passed up to a regional or a national dispatch center. The fire center in Boise has direct access to 11 regional supply caches stored around the country. It deploys the national response teams, and it maintains contracts with air tankers, caterers, and other suppliers who promise to deliver supplies wherever they are needed within a specific amount of time.

Clearly, the system works. In late September, a fast-moving wildfire fueled by dry Santa Ana winds broke out near the northwest suburbs of Los Angeles. Within hours, a five-agency command center had been established at the site, and a chief goal had been agreed on: Do not let the fire jump the highway into more-populous areas.

But even inside that perimeter, an estimated $800 million worth of property lay in the fire's path. Over several days, nearly 3,000 firefighters battled the blaze, and hundreds of residents were evacuated. Ultimately, the fire was controlled. It destroyed only three homes and three commercial buildings; property damage was limited to about $2 million. Nobody died.

The National Interagency Fire Center has proven so adept at handling emergencies that authorities have called in its teams to assist with many non-fire events. Sitting in his spartan office above a Boise supply warehouse, Fire Center Operations Chief Tom Boatner notes that in 2003, fire teams were sent to California to assist in the slaughter of chickens carrying exotic Newcastle disease and to Texas to help collect debris from the space shuttle Columbia, which was destroyed in an explosion.

The incident command system used in the wildfire community is "simply a way to organize [ourselves] to manage an emergency incident," said Don Artley, fire director for the National Association of State Foresters and a member of the Boise fire center's directorate. "If you are going to bring a bunch of people with different talents and equipment with different capabilities to a location where there is some sort of an emergency, you need a system to organize it -- a command-and-control system."

The wildfire system also involves more than just fighting fires. Morning meetings begin with a briefing from the National Weather Service that reports which areas of the country are at highest risk for wildfires. Eleven regional command centers participate in regular conference calls to update each other on local activities and the availability of resources in their part of the country.

Doug Shinn, assistant manager of the fire center's interagency coordination unit, said that this regional network allows him to know what resources are available where -- so he knows exactly what he can immediately tap when any wildfire grows beyond the capabilities of its region.

The fire system's standardized management procedures and high level of coordination have become the model for all other federal disaster-response efforts. By presidential decree, all state and local emergency-response agencies are required to adopt a version of it in order to be eligible for federal homeland-security grants.

Last December, the Department of Homeland Security adopted a National Response Plan that spells out which agencies would take the lead on particular kinds of emergencies, and the plan mandates that all emergency-response agencies adopt the National Incident Management System, which is based on the firefighting model. By October 1, 2006, state and local emergency-response agencies must certify that they are implementing NIMS before they can qualify for any federal homeland-security money.

But the system is still a work in progress. Fire teams were called in to support recovery operations at about a dozen Gulf Coast sites in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The teams, however, found the situation maddening, Boatner said, because "FEMA had no system, no way to certify people." He added, "We found it difficult to integrate with FEMA and coordinate with them [during the Katrina response], because we do all of our work using the incident command structure, and they are using it in some places but not in all places. And they are not real comfortable with it yet, and that just led to a lot of confusion."

FEMA officials admit that they are still learning how to implement the command system. The Gulf hurricanes, they say, simply slammed ashore before the new system was fully in place.

At a congressional hearing at the end of September, representatives of several first-responder organizations said that the Gulf Coast recovery efforts lacked an organized command structure. William Killen, president of the International Association of Fire Chiefs, said relief workers sent to Louisiana found that that state's emergency operations center had no formal command structure "until two weeks after the hurricane hit. There was no formal procedure for making requests for supplies or services. Instead, requests were written down on bits of paper and passed around until someone filled them."

For now, there is no reason to believe that the federal, state, and local response to other sorts of serious natural disasters -- other than wildfires -- would be much better. Speaking of the National Interagency Fire Center, Jim Hubbard, director of the Interior Department's Office of Wildland Fire Coordination, declared, "There is nothing else like this, except maybe in the military."

The End Is Nearing!

Whatever preparations humans make, hurricanes will still hit coasts, earthquakes will shake the ground, volcanoes will erupt, fires will burn, and waters will rise -- and the cost of such disasters will continue to explode, as more people move into hazardous areas.

"People tend to live in areas subject to natural hazards," said Thomas Birkland, director of the Center for Policy Research at the University of Albany's Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy. "We put more and more property at risk every year. There might not be more hurricanes and earthquakes and floods, but there are more people. The other thing is, we've altered the environment to make natural disasters worse. When you get a big flood, you get a really big flood."

What's most striking about the threat is not how varied the natural hazards are but how similar the challenges are. Nearly all call for enhanced monitoring and detection systems. Nearly all techniques for mitigating the destruction from one hazard can be applied to other hazards. And preparedness for all involves both educating the public about the dangers and developing coordinated response strategies for federal, state, and local agencies, as well as for the private sector and the public.

The closest thing the nation has to a national vision for dealing with natural disasters is a report issued last June by the National Science and Technology Council, a White House-managed interagency committee. The report laid out six common challenges facing the country, no matter the disaster.

First, the right people need to be warned at the right time. Second, scientists need to understand the causes of disasters. Third, Americans must build their communities to resist natural hazards. Fourth, the vulnerability of critical infrastructure -- water, communications, power, gas, transportation, and sewage -- must be reduced. Fifth, communities must regularly assess their resilience to disasters using standard methods. And sixth, people must be educated to make wise choices about risks and disaster preparations.

But the report assigned no responsibilities, made no assessment of relative dangers, and issued no specific call for action. The report's existence is little known except among the people who helped create it.

Priscilla Nelson, a former National Science Foundation executive and an author of the report, said she doubts that the study will lead to a coordinated national strategy on natural hazards.

"We've got to figure out how to combine apples and oranges," said Nelson, now provost at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. "The federal government needs to take a leadership role to pull the agencies together.... That really hasn't happened yet. Showing the way to integration is something I would hope would happen. I don't have a reasonable expectation it will. People are organized in a way that doesn't promote integration or accountability or authority."

For each challenge identified in the report, lessons already abound within each disaster discipline. Among all of the hazard planners, earthquake engineers, for example, have the best mitigation programs. Coastal engineers trying to prepare for hurricanes could learn from the earthquake specialists. Wildfire managers have the most advanced response system. Their method of fighting fire with fire offers a lesson to floodplain managers, who could rely less on levees and more on natural methods of allowing minor flooding to lessen the chance of a dramatic flood.

But the experts are not sharing lessons well, and little coordination is taking place. "It's hard, because each field, each discipline, may have developed their own catechism of words and their own judgments about what kind of response is necessary," Nelson said.

There are, of course, bright spots. The National Science Foundation, for example, sent researchers from the University of Hawaii to study the effects of Hurricane Katrina's storm surge on the Mississippi coastline. The researchers will use those findings to develop engineering standards to help structures resist tsunamis.

Meanwhile, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is spearheading a 10-year international effort to develop a global network of sensors and monitors placed in space, in the upper atmosphere, and on the ocean floor to better predict and prepare for all types of hazards.

The network, called the Global Earth Observation System of Systems, theoretically could predict droughts early enough to avert unsuccessful plantings, anticipate tornadoes before they form, and improve the accuracy of hurricane forecasts to prevent needless evacuations like that of Houston before Hurricane Rita, said retired Navy Vice Adm. Conrad Lautenbacher, the head of NOAA. "I would call it a giant step in helping us understand how the Earth works."

Similarly, emergency managers and scientists from a variety of agencies are trying to develop standard warnings for alerting the public to various disasters without resorting to disaster-specific jargon. The Common Alerting Protocol, as it is called, is in the early stages of development.

Just as past disasters caused governments to change their ways, Hurricane Katrina has prompted federal, state, and local officials to give more thought to natural disasters -- and how to minimize damage from them.

But will interest translate into action? Many hazard experts say that a key improvement would be better coordination -- which could mean a national strategy for natural hazards, or it could just mean that the White House or FEMA brings together the experts in the various fields of science, politics, engineering, communication, and technology to learn from one another.

But history suggests that narrow, disaster-by-disaster policies will continue to be implemented, and that most people will continue to behave as if a natural disaster will never befall them.

And most people really won't experience an extreme natural disaster, according to the University of Colorado's Mileti, because the natural cycle of most of these catastrophes is hundreds or thousands of years. But, he added wryly, "all we are is human beings, twirling in space. We haven't been here very long, and we're not going to be much longer. Life on the planet has ended seven times. It's probably going to end an eighth."

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Air Force rejects benefits for 'Air America' employees

Paul W. Singer — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

The Defense Department doesn't think so. The Air Force has rejected a petition by former Air America employees to have their time in the unfriendly skies declared "active duty," which would earn them veteran's benefits. The CIA has acknowledged that it owned Air America and its predecessor Civil Air Transport beginning in the late 1950s, and that it used the airline to run support missions in Southeast Asia for two decades.

The famous 1975 photo showing a helicopter snatching evacuees from the roof of a building during the fall of Saigon? It was an Air America chopper. Shortly thereafter, the airline was dissolved and the employees were cut loose. "It was, 'Adios, fellas, have a nice day,' " said Air America alum Jesse Walton.

Two years ago, Allen Cates, who worked for Air America from 1966 through 1974, filed the petition on behalf of some 500 or 600 alumni. An Air Force review board denied the petition in September, concluding that there was not enough evidence that the clandestine airline was supporting military operations to justify declaring the employees "active duty." But, Cates said, additional documentation has since come to light, and the board has invited him to resubmit the petition.

Cates argues that since many of the Air America workers were former military, most of them already qualify for VA benefits, and so a ruling in their favor won't cost the government much money. More important, he says, given the rogue image of Air America -- which Hollywood helped to create with its 1990 movie of the same name -- a Pentagon declaration that it was a military operation "would establish once and for all that there was more to it than just a bunch of drug runners and malcontents and psychopaths."

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and Rep. Shelley Berkley, both Nevada Democrats, are pushing legislation that would give Air America workers civil service benefits, including pensions. "We have a lot of widows that could really use a few extra hundred bucks to get by," Walton said.

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Energy recycles conservation initiative

Paul W. Singer — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

After weeks of news about high prices for gasoline and heating fuel, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman announced this month a new department effort to encourage consumers to save energy.

The campaign includes a series of public service announcements featuring a "spokes-villain" called the Energy Hog -- an energy waster who resides in old refrigerators and poorly insulated attics -- and a whistle-stop nationwide tour by top officials who will speak about overlooked conservation practices.

Bodman's predecessor at Energy, Spencer Abraham, 18 months ago launched a similar initiative, unveiling the same Hog and promising to travel the country touting conservation.

Even then, the Hog was not really an Energy Department project. The character was created by Energy Outreach Colorado and the Ad Council as part of a conservation awareness campaign that began in 2002, according to Energy Outreach Executive Director Skip Arnold.

Abraham unveiled the first ads in March 2004, at the same time the Ad Council unveiled an Energy Hog Web site offering video games that enlist children in the hunt for energy inefficiency in their homes. (Players shoot rolls of insulation at the Energy Hogs creeping around in the attic -- did we mention that insulation manufacturers are helping to pay for the campaign?)

And this was not the first attempt to make conservation fun. In October 2003 on The Tonight Show, the "Sears Toss Your Energy Hog Catapult Team" launched old, inefficient refrigerators across the NBC back lot.

Bodman's "Easy Ways to Save Energy" campaign includes other well-worn ideas, such as encouraging homeowners to replace incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents and to buy new appliances that carry the federally certified "Energy Star" logo.

But efficiency advocates say that Bodman does deserve credit for a new round of radio spots urging Americans to conserve, even though one of the spots reprises President Carter's suggestion that folks turn down their thermostats.

Energy Department spokeswoman Chris Kielich said the first round of Energy Hog ads last year "sort of tested the waters," and a new and bigger round of ads will be rolled out in January. The conservation campaign was created "in response to the shortages caused by Katrina and Rita," Kielich said.

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The Decision Makers: Office of Management and Budget

Paul W. Singer and Daniel Pulliam — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Office of Management and Budget assists the president in overseeing the preparation of the federal budget and supervises its administration in executive branch agencies. OMB evaluates agency programs, procedures, and policies; assesses funding demands among agencies; and sets funding priorities. It also oversees and coordinates the administration's procurement, financial management, information, and regulatory policies.

Josh Bolten
Director
202-395-3080

What do you do when you have the best job in Washington and the president asks you to give it up for a less enticing assignment? If you are Bolten, you try to talk him out of it. Bolten joined the Bush campaign as policy director in March 1999 and then served as White House deputy chief of staff for policy, enjoying wide purview over national issues. After budget director Mitch Daniels left to run for governor of Indiana in 2003, Bush tapped Bolten to head the agency that symbolizes the president's M.B.A. approach to government. "I originally told the president that I thought I would be a poor choice for this job because I lacked Mitch Daniels's comfort and facility for saying no," Bolten says. "I found it one of the more challenging parts of the job, but I am getting more comfortable with it all the time." Bolten, 50, also says he has come to appreciate that -- with the possible exception of his old job -- the OMB helm is the best position in Washington for someone who truly cares about policy. The job is essentially "to watch out for the fulfillment of the president's agenda, much of which has to be accomplished through the budget process." Bolten has a pure Washington pedigree -- Princeton, Stanford Law, four years on Capitol Hill, and four years with senior appointments in the Bush 41 administration -- but he also plays guitar in a rock band, rides a Harley, and throws late-night bowling parties.

Joel Kaplan
Deputy Director for Budget
202-395-4742

Kaplan's problem is that the law requires the president to send his budget to Congress by the first Monday in February. For the past two years, that Monday has come the day after a Super Bowl Sunday featuring Kaplan's beloved New England Patriots. The team marched to victory both times -- while Kaplan prepared for budget briefings. As he wrote on a White House Web site on February 2, 2004, "I was pretty depressed that I had to work during the game -- but I had it on TV." He added, "The budget is exciting too, though." Kaplan insists that the budget really is exciting. "If you are a policy wonk, it is really where the rubber meets the road." Kaplan, 36, is a committed policy wonk and a well-connected lawyer, having clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and for U.S. Circuit Court Judge J. Michael Luttig, who is considered a candidate for a Bush appointment to the high court. Kaplan's conservative credentials and Harvard College/Harvard Law degrees may offset the fact that his family has produced generations of Massachusetts Democrats. Kaplan was a policy adviser to Bush in 2000. He came to the White House to serve as a special assistant in the chief of staff's office, and was tapped in July 2003 to be deputy director of OMB.

Clay Johnson
Deputy Director for Management
202-456-7070

Johnson plays the "Fred Thompson" character in the Bush White House -- the large, important, no-nonsense Southern guy with a deep voice, easy-going demeanor, and self-deprecating wit. He is also one of the president's closest advisers, and he embodies Bush's attempt to remake the federal bureaucracy through corporate management principles. "I like fixing things, and I like making things work better -- and there is a lot of opportunity to do that here," Johnson says. He publishes a quarterly report card on federal departments' and agencies' progress toward better management, an effort that he says forces change through the "public shame and humiliation" of failing agencies. Johnson, 59, has known Bush since they attended Phillips Academy in the 1960s, and he roomed with the future president at Yale. During a business career in Texas, Johnson worked for Neiman Marcus, Wilson Sporting Goods, and Frito-Lay, and he also served as chief operating officer of the Dallas Museum of Art. On a White House Web site about management initiatives, the native Texan warned administration appointees about the dangers of "Potomac Fever," a Washington disease that causes people to "use words like 'paradigm' and 'synergy,'" get angry when people at parties don't recognize them, and focus on their own political future instead of the president's agenda. Johnson's remedy: "Visit any small town outside the D.C. media market, go into a local store or restaurant to ask how many Cabinet officials and senior staff members the person waiting on you can name."

John D. Graham
Administrator, Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs
202-395-4852

Graham, 48, belongs to a very rare species; he's a truly influential academic. And sooner or later, he is expected to return to the ivory tower with Moynihanesque experience at translating theories into policy. A Harvard professor from 1985 to 2001, Graham created the university's Center for Risk Analysis and led the charge for rigorous application of cost-benefit analysis to regulatory decisions. In 2001, he took over the White House office that oversees the paperwork and regulations of federal agencies, setting tough guidelines that federal departments and agencies must follow. For instance, in December 2004, Graham issued a new mandate requiring agencies to get opinions from independent experts before releasing any major scientific conclusions. Supporters said that the policy will improve the quality of the science behind regulatory decisions; critics said that it makes it easier for industry to challenge agency actions.

Austin Smythe
Executive Associate Director
202-395-4844

If you need to write a budget, you'll likely want to have Smythe around. His boss, Josh Bolten, said that Smythe is "among the nation's leading experts on the budget process." He ought to be. Smythe (rhymes with "blithe") spent 15 years (1984 to 1999) on the Republican staff of the Senate Budget Committee, working with Sen. Pete Domenici. A former co-worker says, "A large percentage of the [current] Congressional Budget Act [the law that governs the budget process] was written by Austin." Smythe, 48, left the committee in 1999 to join the D.C. office of Lehman Brothers, but he returned to government service as an adviser to the Bush presidential campaign in 2000. He joined the OMB staff in 2001. His public appearances generally involve standing next to the OMB director at annual budget briefings, correcting the director's math, and confirming key points, such as which funds are counted in the budget baseline and how employee pay increases have been factored into the budget estimates. Smythe is a South Carolina native who received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Texas (Austin).

Noam Neusner
Associate Director for Strategic Planning and Communications
202-395-7254

Neusner says he enjoys shaping events more than reporting on them. After being a reporter at The Tampa Tribune and at Bloomberg News, he was a senior editor at U.S. News & World Report before moving to the White House in November 2002 to work as an economics speechwriter. In 2004, Bolten asked Neusner to head up OMB's press office. He and his staff tried to make the bulky budget books easier to understand. Neusner, 35, grew up in Providence, R.I., and graduated from Johns Hopkins University. He studied at Hebrew University in Israel, and he serves as a White House liaison to the Jewish community. He hasn't ruled out a return to journalism but says he's having fun on the other side.

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HHS chief lays out 500-day management plan

Paul W. Singer — Fri, 03 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0400

A 500-day plan actually, a management tool that he says he uses to schedule his time, focus the attention of the department, and provide his staff with a road map for understanding the boss's vision.

The 500-day plan, which Leavitt rolled out in May and posted on an HHS Web site, describes the secretary's long-term vision for the future of American health care, as well as about two dozen steps the department must take to get started. It includes a set of underlying principles that Leavitt has been repeating from various podiums for years, ideas that he says form "a prism through which those who work with me can look to determine how I will view a problem."

Leavitt's penchant for plans and principles gives him a useful way of establishing clear goals for a large public bureaucracy, management experts say. But whether the plans offer a meaningful yardstick for measuring the performance of the man or his department is an open question.

Leavitt was in his third term as the Republican governor of Utah when President Bush tapped him in August 2003 to succeed Christine Todd Whitman as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. After Bush won re-election in November, he asked Leavitt to move from the EPA to HHS, which has three times the employees and 50 times the budget.

During his 447-day tenure at the EPA, Leavitt issued a 500-day plan that promised to "increase the velocity of environmental progress by implementing 'a better way.' " The wording of many of the plan's elements makes it difficult to render a judgment on Leavitt's success or failure in his former post.

The EPA plan included, for example, promises to "restore watersheds and coastal waters" and to "apply consistent and certain enforcement to motivate compliance." Neither goal included measurable benchmarks. Some of Leavitt's specific legislative commitments -- including elevating the EPA to Cabinet status and passing broad Clean Air legislation known as "Clear Skies" -- remain unfulfilled. Leavitt did make headway on some of his regulatory initiatives, such as signing a proposed rule to regulate mercury emissions from power plants. New EPA Administrator Steve Johnson is expected to unveil his own list of priorities in the next few weeks.

Leavitt's 500-day plan for HHS has two parts: visionary goals that the secretary posits for the nation over the next 5,000 days (that is, by 2019), and concrete strategies that he will concentrate on for his first 500 days. The "visions" include establishing an electronic system for managing individual health records, in place of today's paperwork. The "strategies" in this area include convening a "national collaboration" to develop standards for the data and technology that would handle such a system.

HHS has already taken some of the short-term steps in the 500-day plan; in some cases, work had begun before Leavitt arrived. For instance, in May, the Government Accountability Office reported that the department is "taking initial steps toward developing a national strategy for health IT." But the biggest success that the GAO pointed to was the July 2004 (pre-Leavitt) release of a three-phase framework for action on the national strategy. The GAO said that Health and Human Services had begun taking steps to implement the first phase of the strategy, but "has not established milestones for completion of phase I activities, nor has it made detailed plans or set milestones" for the second and third phases.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., who has been promoting the potential of medical technology to save lives and money, has criticized HHS for a slow start, spending tens of millions of dollars when, he says, billions will be required. Leavitt counters that it is necessary to get standards in place before investing huge sums of money.

Leavitt says he plans to spend the majority of his time working on items in the 500-day plan, but he cautions, "It is not even a full list of all the things that would be considered a priority in the department. There are many other things that others have been tasked with responsibility for."

Underlying both the EPA and HHS plans is a set of nearly identical slogans that shape Leavitt's prism: "National standards, neighborhood solutions.... Markets before mandates.... Collaboration, not polarization.... Change a heart, change a nation."

Leavitt enumerated the same principles in the late 1990s as part of the Western Governors' Association's vision for collaborative decision-making on environmental issues, a plan called "Enlibra." In 1999, when Leavitt became the National Governors Association chair, the same principles became part of its standing environmental policies.

Joseph Newhouse, professor of health policy and management at Harvard University, said that the department's 500-day plan seems to be mostly a recitation of the administration's existing priorities. "I would have thought there was something underlying this that was substantially more detailed," Newhouse said.

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Group advises EPA on Web site management

Paul W. Singer — Mon, 09 May 2005 00:00:00 -0400

The EPA, embarrassed and concerned that the announcement would make the site a target for new attacks, pulled the plug on its Internet site, leaving the agency without a home page (or e-mail capacity) for several days. Many of the agency's Web-based services took weeks to repair.

Five years later, the EPA is at the forefront of a new initiative to improve oversight of government agency Web sites, creating centralized management structures and practices to replace the decade-old model in which division managers construct their own pages and post whatever information they see fit.

In a December 2004 memo to EPA staff, then-Administrator Michael Leavitt (now secretary of Health and Human Services) acknowledged that "management of our Web site has been largely ad hoc." With the growth of the Internet, the Web site has become "a more critical part of doing business," Leavitt wrote, and "it is time to bring structure to the management of epa.gov."

Leavitt established new governance principles for management of the Web site and established a "Web Council" -- a group of senior managers from every office and region within the EPA -- to overhaul the site. The council, which met for the first time this month, includes a content manager and an infrastructure manager in each branch of the agency; they are responsible for developing procedures and standards for the Web site and overseeing and organizing the content. These officials report to Rick Martin, the national infrastructure manager in the EPA's Office of Environmental Information, and Richard Stapleton, the national content manager in the Office of Public Affairs.

The new structure will ensure that the Web site content is up to date, high-quality, and easily accessible to the public, Stapleton said. The "grassroots" process for posting material led each office within the EPA to create its own Web page, with information that might overlap or conflict with material on other pages. "We've found wildly conflicting information about things, such as the health effects of a substance," Stapleton said. "If you are saying different things about the toxicity of a chemical, you are simply confusing people."

Beyond content, organization of the site is also a critical issue for the Web Council. On the current Web page, a visitor has to choose which office to browse, rather than finding information organized by topic. The group plans to restructure the content by subject area and root out conflicting and outdated information.

The EPA is part of the leading edge of agencies trying to establish more-coherent management practices for their Web sites, said Bev Godwin, director of First Gov.gov, the federal government's central Internet portal. "There is definitely a movement in government, and everybody is trying to improve their Web sites so that they are the best in the world," Godwin said.

While this effort has been emerging throughout the government over the past few years, it has been spurred on by a December memo from the Office of Management and Budget establishing a December 31, 2005, deadline for agencies to comply with Web site policies, ranging from ensuring the quality of Web content to establishing clear standards for linking to other sites.

HHS and the Department of Housing and Urban Development are also at the forefront of Web site management, Godwin said. HHS content manager Bill Hall said his agency is creating a single "Web management team" in the Office of Public Affairs that will bring the content staff and the technology staff under one roof.

The primacy of the public-affairs offices in Web management makes some watchdogs nervous. Sean Moulton, a senior policy analyst at OMB Watch, said, "I worry that this could become a tool for greater control and manipulation of the political message" on agency Web sites. Moulton said he is particularly concerned that the agencies have not included open-government advocates in their policy development. "They need that reality check when they say, 'We don't need to put this up.' Somebody needs to be able to say, 'Yes, you do.' "

The EPA's Stapleton acknowledges that "the control of the Web site is shifting away from the IT people and moving to the communications people." But he and Hall both say that that only means the Web site will be treated like any other official agency communication. "To me, the Web site is an organization's public face on the Internet," Hall said. "It is no different than the published material that you put out, whether it is an annual report or a press release." The key, both content managers agree, is to separate the agency's political message from its professional or scientific content, and to clearly indicate the difference. "We are not making this a place that is simply a political piece of real estate on the Internet," Hall said.

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OMB to put user-friendly versions of performance assessments on Internet

Paul W. Singer — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Tentatively called Results Matter, the site will seek to translate the managerial and budget details of the "Performance Assessment Rating Tool" into language that citizens can understand and easily peruse. It does not have a Web address yet.

PART is a controversial rating tool that the White House is using to determine how well federal programs are performing.

Although some critics have accused the Bush administration of judging programs based on the president's political agenda instead of the goals spelled out in legislation, the White House has generally received high marks for making the assessments public.

Robert Shea, counselor to the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, said that the information on the site will resemble information in PART documents that are already publicly available through the OMB Web site, "but translated into content that would resonate more. A lot of what we write now is so technical that it is not really compelling to the average American citizen."

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Bush and the bureaucracy: a crusade for control

Paul W. Singer — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

The authors -- two former officials at the Office of Personnel Management and a former congressional staffer who is now at OPM -- laid out an ambitious agenda to overhaul civil service rules and "reassert managerial control of government." The paper emphasized the importance of appointing strong leaders to key government positions and holding bureaucrats "personally accountable for achievement of the president's election-endorsed and value-defined program."

Reminded of this paper recently, co-author Robert Moffit, who has moved on to other issues at Heritage, dusted off a copy and called a reporter back with a hint of rejoicing in his voice. "They apparently are really doing this stuff," he said.

To Moffit and other proponents of strong management, the Bush White House has indeed initiated a dramatic transformation of the federal bureaucracy, trying to create a leaner, more results-oriented government that can better account for taxpayer dollars. Reshaping the agenda of government to match the president's priorities is the purpose of democratic elections, Moffit said.

But critics charge that the White House is embarking on a crusade to replace expert judgment in federal agencies with political calculation, to marginalize or eliminate longtime civil servants, to change laws without going through Congress, to silence dissenting views within the government, and to centralize decision-making in the White House.

"A president cannot wave a wand and wipe prior policy, as implemented by duly enacted statutes, off the books," said Rena Steinzor, a founder and board member of the Center for Progressive Regulation, a think tank of liberal academics. "We have made a judgment as a nation, for decades, that an independent bureaucracy is very important." The Bush administration, she said, is "politicizing and terrorizing the bureaucracy, and turning it 180 degrees."

Critics point to a long list of manifestations of greater White House control. Among them:

Reorganizations in various federal agencies, such as major staff cuts anticipated at NASA, that eliminate career civil service staff, or replace managers with political appointees;
New management systems to grade federal agencies on the results they achieve, with the White House in charge of defining "success";
Increased White House oversight of regulations issued by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Labor, and other departments and agencies;
The president's proposal to replace the civil service employment system with new, government-wide "pay-for-performance" rules that make it easier for managers to promote, reward, or fire employees;
"Competitive sourcing" requirements that force thousands of federal workers to compete against private contractors to keep their jobs;
A series of steps that may weaken traditional watchdogs and the office that protects whistle-blowers;
New restrictions on the public release of government information, including a huge jump in the number of documents labeled "classified";
A growing cadre of government employees who are going public with charges that their recommendations were ignored, their reports edited, or their conclusions reversed by their political-appointee managers, at the behest of the White House.

Many presidents have tried to reshape the federal bureaucracy to their liking. President Nixon had his "Management by Objective" program that attempted to rein in anti-poverty programs; President Clinton had his "Reinventing Government" initiative that aimed to improve government services and streamline rules. But under Bush, White House control of the federal agencies is "more coordinated and centralized than it has ever been," said New York University professor of public service Paul Light, who is also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "It is a sea change from what it was under the Clinton administration."

Clay Johnson, who as deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget is the point man for Bush's "management agenda," denied any "Republican conspiracy" to control the bureaucracy or silence civil servants. "It's about things working better; it's not about controlling," Johnson said. "The thing that we can impose more of than anything else is clarity -- clarity of purpose. We want to have a real clear definition of what success is," he said.

"The overall goal of all that we are doing," Johnson added, "is, we want to get to the point in three or four years where we can say to the American taxpayer that every program is getting better every year."

The federal bureaucracy is a notoriously unwieldy beast. It includes about 1.9 million civilian employees, many of whom have agendas that differ from the president's. Each administration, Republican or Democratic, struggles with its relationship with an army of workers who were on the job before the new political team arrived, and who expect to be there after the team leaves.

"You have this bizarre cycle, where the leader comes into the room and says, 'We are going to march north,' and the bureaucracy all applaud," said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga. "Then the leader leaves the room, and the bureaucracy says, 'Yeah, well, this "march north" thing is terrific, but this year, to be practical, we have to keep marching south. But what we'll do is, we'll hire a consultant to study marching north, so that next year we can begin to think about whether or not we can do it.' "

The White House is proud of its management initiatives and Bush's reputation as "the M.B.A. president." The administration regularly issues press releases to announce progress on the President's Management Agenda -- a list of priorities that includes competitive sourcing and development of "e-government." And Bush's fiscal 2006 budget includes cuts based on performance assessments for hundreds of individual federal programs. But critics fear that the management agenda, combined with an array of other administration initiatives, has established a framework that makes it easier for political appointees to overrule, marginalize, or even fire career employees who question the president's agenda.

For example, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a rule earlier this month to regulate emissions of mercury from power plants. In unveiling the rule, the EPA asserted that it represents the most stringent controls on mercury ever issued. According to the agency, the requirements are cost-effective, will achieve significant health benefits, and will create an economic incentive for companies to continually improve their environmental performance.

But the rule is driven by the Bush administration's novel -- some say, illegal -- interpretation of the Clean Air Act that allows the EPA to avoid imposing mandatory emissions controls on each facility. Environmentalists, and some EPA staff, contend that the mercury rule is far weaker than one the Clinton administration proposed, and that political appointees at the agency ignored the scientific and legal judgment of career staff to push the rule through the regulatory process.

The battle over the mercury rule has been bitter and public. Many other efforts to tighten central control are buried deep within the bowels of the bureaucracy.

Structures

The Natural Resources Conservation Service is not generally a political hotbed. A division of the Agriculture Department, the NRCS -- working through "conservationist" offices in each state -- is responsible for helping farmers implement soil and water conservation measures, such as restoring wetlands, building dams, and designing systems to prevent animal waste from running off into waterways.

In a major reorganization over the past two years, NRCS chief Bruce Knight eliminated the service's six regional offices, which were headed by career managers and oversaw the state offices. He replaced the six regional managers with three political appointees in Washington and shuffled 200 career staffers from the regional offices into other offices throughout the agency.

Knight said the reorganization is "really just a strong business case." It created a "flatter, leaner structure" that relies much more heavily on the expertise of the state conservationists and makes better use of employees, he said. "I had about 200 highly valuable [employees] scattered around the country, and I needed to put them at the mission of the agency."

But in so doing, Knight has also raised concerns about the independence of the technical staffers who oversee conservation measures across the country.

Under the new structure, career NRCS scientists might worry that their technical decisions about where to spend money and how to implement programs will be overruled for political purposes, said Rich Duesterhaus, a former NRCS staffer and now director of government affairs for the National Association of Conservation Districts.

"They clearly now have a direct line from the politically appointed chief, through these three politically appointed regional assistant chiefs, to the line officers who supervise and carry out these programs," Duesterhaus said. And why should political control over a soil and water conservation agency matter? Because the 2002 farm bill doubled the NRCS's budget for assistance to farmers, from about $1.5 billion in 2001 to $2.8 billion in 2006, with a total increase of $18 billion slated through 2012.

"In the old days, the money wasn't big enough to matter," Duesterhaus said, but the influx of cash in 2002 has made the NRCS "a contender in terms of spoils, and where those spoils go becomes an issue." With direct political oversight of the state conservationists, Duesterhaus said, "it becomes a little easier to say, 'Well, we need Ohio, so make sure we put a little extra money in Ohio.' "

Earlier this month, Charles Adams, one of the six career regional conservationists who were unseated in the reorganization, filed a discrimination complaint against Knight and other agency officials, arguing that the reorganization derailed his 37-year career in favor of three political appointees with far less expertise. "I allege that ... a calculated, arbitrary, and capricious decision was made to preclude me from the line and leadership of this agency," Adams wrote in his complaint to the Agriculture Department's Office of Civil Rights.

Knight rejects any suggestion that he has politicized the work of a technical agency. "The real power is in the state conservationist, the career individual in the state who manages the budget and the people," he said. "Most people will agree that we are more scientifically and technologically based now" than before the reorganization. The agency has about 12,500 staff members and only a dozen political appointees, Knight said.

But employees in other federal agencies have also asserted that reorganization plans have bumped career managers from senior positions, or diluted their authority.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is instituting a major overhaul that will create a new layer of "coordinating centers" -- including a strategic center responsible for developing long-term goals for the agency -- between CDC Director Julie Gerberding and the health and science centers that formerly reported directly to her. Gerberding said, "I don't think our goal is to have control over the organization -- our goal is to have an impact on health."

But some career staffers say they are being pushed aside and losing the ability to manage their programs. The Washington Post earlier this month reported a memo from a top CDC official warning that CDC employees are suffering a "crisis of confidence" and that they feel "cowed into silence." CDC aides -- who are unwilling to have their names published for fear of reprisals -- say they are losing the ability to make independent professional judgments on topics ranging from sexual abstinence, to drug use, to influenza. Gerberding replied, "I think that is a very inaccurate assessment of what is going on at CDC."

Nevertheless, throughout the federal government, complaints can be heard from disgruntled civil servants who feel they are being elbowed aside by the political leadership -- though it is hard to assess whether the invariably anonymous sources have been targeted for elimination or are simply frightened of the change.

Some of the administration's efforts have attracted congressional scrutiny. On March 16, the House Science panel's Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee held a hearing on the administration's plan to slash funding for aeronautics research at NASA and to eliminate 2,000 jobs in order to focus the agency on the president's "Vision for Space Exploration," which includes the goal of manned missions to Mars.

But the administration is not backing down. In fact, it wants more authority to carry out these reorganizations. The White House has said it is drafting legislative proposals to create a "sunset" process requiring federal programs to rejustify their existence every 10 years and to set up "reform" commissions giving the president authority to initiate major restructuring of programs. House Government Reform Committee Chairman Tom Davis, R-Va., said in an interview this month that he believes that Congress should restore the president's unilateral authority to reorganize executive branch agencies -- authority that presidents held from the late 1930s until 1984, and that Nixon used when he created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.

Procedures

Beyond its tinkering with organizational structures, the White House is pursuing a sweeping overhaul of personnel rules that is aimed at giving managers across the federal government more flexibility to promote, punish, or fire hundreds of thousands of civil servants. While a proposed transformation of the pay systems at the Defense and Homeland Security departments has spurred vigorous debate -- fueled by the administration's announcement in January that it wants to extend these systems to the rest of the federal government -- less fanfare attended last year's rollout of a new pay-for-performance plan for the roughly 6,000 veteran federal government managers who constitute the Senior Executive Service.

Together, the two new approaches give political appointees in federal agencies greater authority to reward or discipline senior career managers, and give managers the same authority over the civil servants below them. The White House calls this a "modern" personnel system, where everyone is judged on results. Critics call it a process for weeding out recalcitrant civil servants or political opponents.

The new pay-for-performance plan for the Senior Executive Service eliminates annual raises for top career managers and replaces them with a system of merit ratings. Some career executives fear that the system will allow the White House to simply push aside managers who are unenthusiastic about the president's agenda.

"We all know that performance is in the eyes of the beholder, no matter what you say about wanting to have many numerical indicators and so forth," said Carol Bonosaro, president of the Senior Executives Association, which represents members of the SES. "The concern is that if you know that your boss has the total authority to not give you a pay raise, are you going to be more inclined to skirt an ethics requirement for them? Are you going to be more inclined to do what is perhaps not really right?"

And the layers of performance ratings based on the president's goals serve to reinforce the agenda throughout the bureaucracy, Bonosaro said. "You kick the general, and the general comes back and kicks the soldiers, and it goes down the line."

In another move, which could affect thousands of civil servants, Bush has made "competitive sourcing" one of his primary management goals for federal agencies, requiring government workers to compete for their jobs against private contractors.

In January, OMB reported that government employees had won about 90 percent of the 30,000 jobs awarded in 2003 and 2004, with decisions still to be made on about 15,000 jobs offered for competition in those years. But in February, the Federal Aviation Administration announced that Lockheed Martin had won the government's largest-ever job competition, covering about 2,300 flight-service jobs. FAA workers slated to be displaced under the contract filed an appeal this month, complaining that the agency's bidding process was flawed.

"Everything they do is sending the signal [to employees] that they can be replaced easily by contractors, if the work they do isn't done by whatever standards the president is going to put out in his new measurement system," said Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union.

"It's all about putting more power in the hands of the appointees and making it easier to downgrade, get rid of, use the rules as a weapon against employees who are not in lockstep with you," said Mark Roth, general counsel of the American Federation of Government Employees.

OMB's Johnson denies any intent to enforce political orthodoxy on the civil service. "Rewarding people for their political views is against the law. It's like incest: verboten. Not allowed. Doesn't happen," Johnson said.

"You are being encouraged, and evaluated, and mentored, and managed, and held accountable for doing things that the administration considers to be important," he said. "That does not mean vote Republican versus Democrat; that doesn't mean be pro-life or pro-choice, or be for strict-constructionist judges, or be against strict-constructionist judges," Johnson contended.

"We are controlling what the definition of success is, but shame on us if that's a bad idea. I think it's a really good idea," Johnson said. "It is a mind-set and an approach, and it is a focus on results that [the president] is imposing. It's not 'I want everyone to be like me and have the same political beliefs as me.' "

Checks and Balances

But what if "incest" does happen? Where would a civil servant go to report "verboten" behavior?

Critics of the administration charge that the White House is tampering with the independent structures that protect against waste, fraud, abuse, and political retribution -- the federal inspectors general and the Office of General Counsel. The White House vehemently denies the charge.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the top Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, issued a report last October -- and updated it in January -- declaring that the Bush administration was appointing inspectors general with political connections to the White House much more frequently than the Clinton administration did. Working with a very small sample -- 11 IGs appointed by Bush, 32 appointed by Clinton -- Waxman's report concludes that 64 percent of the Bush appointees had political experience on their resumes, and only 18 percent had audit experience. For the Clinton appointees, the ratios were reversed: 22 percent had political backgrounds, 66 percent had audit experience.

Gaston Gianni, who until his retirement in December was the Clinton-appointed inspector general at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and vice chairman of the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency -- an IG professional group -- said, "I've read the Waxman report. Factually, it's correct. The conclusions, I don't think flow from the facts."

Gianni said it is true that the Bush administration is favoring political background rather than investigative experience in appointing IGs, but he said there is no evidence that the people Bush has appointed have any less independence or zeal for their work.

Nevertheless, Gianni said, the practice worries him. "The environment is such, as we go forward, that the perception will be that, rather than 'small-p' political appointees, they are going to become 'capital-P' Political appointees. Even though nothing else has changed, that is what the perception will be."

Steinzor and NYU's Light agree that the White House has generally sent the message to inspectors that an excess of independence may be bad for their careers.

Last July, Johnson and Gianni signed a memo to inspectors general and agency heads, spelling out the "working relationship principles" for both positions and emphasizing the need for mutual respect, objectivity, and communication between an IG and his or her agency head. Johnson serves as the chairman of the president's council on integrity, and the memo was his idea. Some critics read it as a warning to IGs not to be too aggressive, but Johnson denies any such message.

"The IGs should not be, by definition, adversarial agents," Johnson said. "They are there to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse. The heads of agency are there to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse. The IGs, by definition, are for positive change.... Where you get into disagreements is when somebody tries to constantly play 'gotcha,' or where the IG gets a little too enamored of their independent status and tries to do things in a negative fashion, tries to uproot things, or identify things that will hurt the agency," he said. "The IG is there to help the agency."

Johnson said that he had recommended the "relationship principles" to the professional group, but that IGs and agency officials drafted the principles.

Light said there is nothing untoward about principles extolling the virtues of communication and common decency, but he argued that the memo -- together with the pattern noted in the Waxman report and some high-profile firings of IGs early in the Bush administration -- sets a tone that may have a chilling effect on inspectors.

Johnson dismisses this concern. "I don't think there is any information that suggests that the IGs are less critical than they have been. I don't think there is anything that says they are finding less waste, fraud, and abuse, that they are being less effective IGs as a result of this 'Republican conspiracy.' "

The Office of Special Counsel is a bigger concern for administration critics. Established as an independent agency charged with protecting whistle-blowers and civil servants who are mistreated for political or other reasons unconnected with their performance, the office is in a bitter feud with several of its employees who argue that they are being punished for resisting attempts by Bush's appointee to dismantle the operation.

Among other things, current and former employees charge that Special Counsel Scott Bloch has summarily dismissed hundreds of whistle-blower complaints, instigated a reorganization of the office that will significantly increase political control of investigations, and forced senior staff members critical of his work to choose between relocating to regional offices or being fired. Several anonymous employees, joined by four public-interest groups, filed formal charges against Bloch on March 3, and at least half a dozen staff members have resigned or been fired for refusing to relocate.

Bloch characterizes the complaints against his office as the work of a few disgruntled employees, reinforced by groups that are on a mission to embarrass the White House. Together, these critics are "going out and making reckless allegations that have no truth. They don't like the success Bush officials are having in dealing with the bureaucracy," Bloch said. "They don't want a Bush appointee like myself to get credit" for reducing a large backlog of old cases that were languishing when Bloch took office in 2004. "We have doubled our enforcement over prior years in all areas," Bloch said. His critics "hurl accusations at the office and basically say insulting things about their fellow employees, and they are false."

Levers of Government

An Interior Department official who has worked in the federal government for 30 years denied that the White House is trying to marginalize the civil service, arguing that what people are seeing is simply better executive management from the White House.

"This administration runs a more effective management of the government than did the previous administration, which was a lot more loosey-goosey," this person said, requesting anonymity to speak freely about his bosses. "They bring more of a business mind-set, but I don't think that's a particularly bad thing. They are more organized, and they are smart about it."

The sharper management focus extends into the minutiae of government, giving the White House oversight and control of the executive branch at several levels. In some cases, the Bush administration is creating new approaches, but in most cases, officials are simply using authorities created under prior administrations and applying them more aggressively.

For example, Clinton issued a regulatory-review executive order in 1993, charging OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs with ensuring that regulations "are consistent with applicable law [and] the president's priorities." The order emphasized use of the best available science and the most cost-effective approach to regulations.

The Bush administration has built on this executive order, setting new requirements for reviewing the costs and benefits of regulatory proposals, establishing a higher threshold for reaching scientific certainty in regulatory decisions, and creating new opportunities for outside experts to challenge the government's conclusions about the dangers that a rule is designed to mitigate.

A regulatory agency career official who demanded anonymity said that OIRA, under the Bush administration, is "much more active" in the regulatory process. "They get involved much earlier in the process on large rules," the official said. "They are reviewing drafts of preambles as they are being written for some rules, or sections of rules."

The executive order gives OMB 90 days to review agency rules, but OIRA Administrator John Graham said in an e-mail response to a reporter's query: "During an important rule-making, OIRA may work informally with agencies at the early stages of the rule-making. This early OIRA participation is designed to make sure that our benefit-cost perspective receives a fair hearing, before key decisions are made and final documents are drafted."

Graham added, "A key benefit of early OIRA involvement is that the pace of rule-making is accelerated by building consensus early in the process and avoiding contentious delays beyond the 90-day review period." He said that the majority of OMB staffers are career civil servants with significant expertise in their issue areas and that, contrary to the assumptions of many critics, OMB involvement does not always result in an outcome that is more favorable to industry. For example, he said, OMB initiated a Food and Drug Administration rule-making to require that producers add the trans-fat content of foods to nutritional labels.

Sally Katzen, who held both John Graham's job and Clay Johnson's job during her years in the Clinton administration, said, "There is nothing wrong with more-centralized review, guidance, and oversight. It is, after all, a president -- singular -- who is the head of the executive branch." But, she cautioned, "the problems we face are often highly technical or otherwise highly complicated, and those who serve in the White House or OMB do not have all the answers. And they certainly don't have the manpower, the expertise, or the intimate familiarity with the underlying detail. They cannot -- and, in my mind, should not -- replace the agency expertise, the agency knowledge, and the agency experience."

While OIRA serves as the central regulatory-review office for the White House, OMB has also positioned itself as the central performance-accountability office, with the establishment of the "President's Management Agenda" and the Program Assessment Rating Tool, or PART, under which the White House grades every agency and program on the basis of its management activities and real-world results. After several years of conducting the assessments without imposing any real consequences for failure, the administration, in the first budget proposal of Bush's second term, used the results assessments to justify eliminating or significantly reducing funding for about 150 federal programs.

John Kamensky, who was deputy director of the National Performance Review (the "reinventing government" initiative) in the Clinton administration, said that Bush's White House is, in many ways, simply expanding on efforts begun in the previous administration.

"We had proposed, in the Clinton administration, tying performance to budget, but there wasn't enough performance information to do that. The Bush administration has that information, finally, so it's sort of a natural progression," Kamensky said.

But critics worry that the review process gives the administration the opportunity to establish its own measures of success for programs, without taking into account the requirements established by Congress.

For example, OMB's review declared the Housing and Urban Development Department's Community Development Block Grant program "ineffective," charging that its mission is unclear, it has few measures of success, and it "does not effectively target funds to the most-needy communities."

But a study by a National Academy of Public Administration panel in February disputed OMB's assessment. The program's "statutory mission or purpose seems clear," the panel said. As a block grant, CDBG is able to fund a broad range of community-development functions, and "if the CDBG program lacks clarity, it is likely because the statute intended it so," according to the report. The breadth of the program's activities makes it difficult to provide specific measures of success, the panel concluded, and the White House suggestion that funding be geographically targeted "seems to contradict the statute's intent."

Donald Plusquellic, mayor of Akron, Ohio, and president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, defends the CDBG program. "I can evaluate anything as a failure if I get to set up the standards," he said.

Johnson acknowledges that CDBG fails the test in part because the administration is applying a new definition of success. "We believe the goal of housing programs is not just to build houses, but the economic development that comes with them. So those are the results we want to focus on," Johnson said. "You can say we are imposing our political views on people, or our favored views of the housing world or the CDBG world on people. Well, guilty as charged. It's important to focus on outcomes, not outputs."

The president has proposed to eliminate the $4 billion block-grant program and shift its functions into a new community and economic development initiative in the Commerce Department. The Senate voted 66-32 last week for a budget amendment designed to block the administration plan.

NYU's Light says the administration has instituted a host of other procedures that centralize power in the White House, ranging from a vetting process for political appointees that allows little independent decision-making for Cabinet officials, to regular conference calls between the White House and the agency chiefs of staff that help to "focus [the staffers'] attention up Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, and away from down in your department."

But is that a bad thing? The Heritage Foundation's Moffit doesn't think so. "Why would that be anything other than 100 percent American?" Moffit asks. "I elected a president, and I expect the president to run the executive branch of the government. And there is an issue about whether he is? That's absurd."

The role of the civil service is "to make the car run," Moffit said. "And if they have been driving the car east for the past 25 years of their professional life, but the president says, 'Fine, I know you've been going east, but now we're going to go west; you're going to do a 180-degree turn and go in exactly the opposite direction,' their job is to make sure the car goes exactly in the opposite direction. Nobody elected them to do anything else."

Roth of the American Federation of Government Employees disagrees. "You do not entirely change your entire focus every time a president is elected, because it is not the job of the president to pass the laws. It is the job of the president to execute the laws," Roth said. "These laws are on the books, these programs are in regulations." An administration "can't just say, 'We don't like it, so don't do it.' "

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Whistleblower office to be subject of workers' complaint

Paul W. Singer — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

The complaint, to be filed by unnamed career employees and three independent whistleblower protection groups, alleges that U.S. Special Counsel Scott Bloch has, among other things, retaliated against employees who complained about office policies and ultimately forced senior career staff to relocate from Washington to a new regional office in Detroit, according to a source close to the groups.

The employees contend Bloch has issued illegal gag orders to prevent them from talking to the media or members of Congress, and has discriminated against gay employees.

Bloch's tenure at the Office of Special Counsel has been rocky.

Appointed by President Bush last year from the Office of Faith-Based Programs at the White House, he immediately fueled controversy by removing documents from the office Web site dealing with discrimination based on sexual orientation, and initiated a review of his authority to address such complaints.

Bloch's office is responsible for reviewing whistleblower complaints about improper government actions and retaliation against government employees.

But as he is the subject of the complaint scheduled to be filed this morning, the document requests Bloch recuse himself and elevate the complaint to the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency.

Bloch had not seen the complaint Wednesday night, but he previously has defended the reorganization that created the Detroit office, saying he is trying to "power-down" the Washington office and distribute personnel around the country. There are two regional OSC offices in Dallas and San Francisco.

In a letter last month to House Government Reform ranking member Henry Waxman, D-Calif., Bloch denied similar allegations of retaliation, saying, "There is no evidence of any wrongdoing or failure to follow all applicable laws and regulations."

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