Government Executive - Authors - Samantha Stainburn

Federal Fliers Win Freedom

Samantha Stainburn — Fri, 15 Aug 1997 00:00:00 -0400

n 1996 and early 1997, several innovations pushed government closer to the private sector model of travel management.

Congress made changes to relocation travel rules in seven parts of the Federal Travel Regulation, some of which were inspired by private-sector practices observed in research conducted by the Joint Financial Management Improvement Program, the interagency financial management group which drafted the legislation. Now agencies can pay a home-marketing incentive to employees who are transferring and cover the cost of moving a car to an employee's new duty station if such measures are cost-effective, among other new-found freedoms.

The General Services Administration pushed ahead with plans to rebid the government travel card, charge card and fuel card contracts, with the intent of making federal card contracts more responsive to individual agencies' needs. And GSA took a leap into uncharted waters by translating the Federal Travel Regulation into plain English.

These tangible changes reflect a new way of thinking in federal travel management circles. The new mind-set is supported by GSA's recent structural changes: In December 1995, the agency separated the policy and operations functions of the travel and transportation office of the Federal Supply Service. GSA executives say this has allowed them to give more attention to travel policy-making (and policy-breaking, in the case of outdated and inefficient practices.)

During fiscal 1996, most federal agencies spent less on travel than they anticipated they would. Of the 19 top traveling agencies, only five exceeded their estimated travel budgets.

More typical were agencies like the Social Security Administration, which spent 26 percent less than it planned to spend on travel in fiscal 1996, the Labor Department (which spent 27 percent less) and the Treasury Department (23 percent less). The Energy Department used only 60 percent of the money it allotted for travel in its fiscal 1996 travel budget. The General Services Administration spent a whopping 84 percent less than it anticipated, saving $16 million and consequently falling off The Top 200 Federal Contractors list of top-traveling agencies.

Gazing into the future, however, the Office of Management and Budget estimates that the travel budgets of only three top-traveling agencies-the Defense, Agriculture and State departments-will be smaller in fiscal 1998 than they were in fiscal 1996. OMB envisions most agencies' budgets rising by double-digit percentages over the same period.

For some agencies, like the Environmental Protection Agency, the increase over the two-year period is large because their travel budgets were artificially low in 1996, reflecting emergency cutbacks during the federal shutdown of 1996. Other increases reflect changes in the way agencies conduct their operations. The Department of Housing and Urban Development, for example, expects its travel budget to increase because it's sending employees out to do more hands-on work in communities across the country than it did in the past.

In spite of these growth patterns, OMB estimates that the federal government as a whole will spend 5 percent less on travel in fiscal 1998 than it did in 1996. That's because DoD, which spends $4 billion more on travel than any other federal agency, expects to cut 10 percent out of its travel budget by fiscal 1998.

Readers would be well-advised to take this prediction with a grain of salt. Each year since Government Executive first started tracking federal travel spending in 1992, OMB has been predicting travel budgets would be smaller the following year. Each year, travel budgets actually have been higher than the year before. (The one exception was between fiscal years 1994 and 1995, when OMB correctly estimated spending would rise from $7.5 billion to $7.7 billion.) In fiscal 1996, federal agencies spent $7.7 billion on travel, $300 million more than they spent five years ago.

Charge Card Changes

The biggest travel services procurement story of 1997 may be the re-bid of the federal travel charge card contract, currently held by American Express. This fall, charge card companies will submit their contract proposals to the General Services Administration. GSA will announce the contract awards in January 1998.

For the first time in history, GSA will award master contracts for both core and value-added services for the travel card to several vendors, and agencies will place task orders against the master contracts for specific needs. And that's not all: Vendors have the option of bidding for just the travel card contract, or one of the other card contracts administered by GSA-the purchase card and the fleet/fuel card-or they can offer government customers any combination of the three cards in one. The new contracts are scheduled to be in place by next November.

GSA is looking for card vendors that can provide new and innovative methods to streamline financial and administrative operations; support both front- and back-end processes; and, if a vendor offers several cards in one, provide an integrated solution across travel, purchase and fleet/fuel business lines.

The objectives of this new card procurement strategy include recognizing the diversity of federal agencies' needs, providing agencies with access to advances in technology and enhancing competition among vendors.

Even American Express is singing the praises of the new procurement process, in spite of the fact that it involves splitting the company's lucrative $3.3 billion contract into lots of tiny pieces. American Express officials say the new approach will allow them to introduce new technologies more quickly.

"When a new technology like electronic travel processing or smart card chips come along, "private sector companies just take it," says Dan Goren, vice president and general manager of the firm's government services division. "My government contract gives me no opportunity to offer it."

American Express is only allowed to offer the services it signed up to offer when its contract with the government was originally negotiated. Both parties lose in this arrangement, says Goren: The agency is denied access to services that could improve its travel management processes and the card vendor is denied the chance to increase the amount of business it does with the agency.

One concern about the new card procurement process is that it might set in motion a scramble among vendors to capture the business of the government's top traveling agencies while ignoring the needs of agencies with few or infrequent travelers. Goren doubts this will happen. Vendors will pursue small agencies, known in the credit card industry as "the mid-market," he says, because they are considered a growth business.

Also, "the smaller the agency, the more innovative they can be," Goren says. "Smaller agencies are ideal places to pilot the new technology products that the card re-compete asks for." Agencies with small travel budgets also will have the option to spend less money on a stripped-down contract. If small agencies want to increase their purchasing power, they can join forces and team up with each other under one task order.

In the past, the entire responsibility for selection of the government travel charge card vendor rested on GSA's shoulders. The new procurement process will shift responsibility for choosing cards to the agencies. "I don't see this as a downside, but as responding to a need," says Goren. From what he's seen, Goren says he is convinced, "federal managers are prepared, they want to be involved."

Bill Gormley, assistant commissioner of the Federal Supply Service's office of acquisition, agrees. "Agencies have said to us, 'give me a choice,' " he says. In return for a little extra work by management, each agencies' travelers will get a card or cards that best suit their needs.

The overhaul of the travel card system is occurring not a moment too soon. Earlier this year, the House passed a law that would require federal employees to use government charge cards for all travel expenses. If opting out of the travel charge card program is not an option, cards tailored to each agency's needs will be more important than ever.

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Wake Up and Smell the Data

Samantha Stainburn — Tue, 01 Jul 1997 00:00:00 -0400

n Vice President Al Gore's book, The Best Kept Secrets in Government (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996), Defense Secretary William Perry singles out the Defense Department's Defense Medical Logistics System as an example of a successful outsourcing program. A database management system (DBMS) helped the program achieve this distinction.

DoD used to act as a medical supplies distributor to its uniformed services, which provide health care to 11 million people worldwide. The department would buy pharmaceutical and surgical supplies from manufacturers and store the inventory in warehouses. From there, items were distributed to military hospitals and clinics. The time between ordering and receiving supplies could be excessive, and hospitals would buy pharmaceuticals on the open market to get the drugs they needed immediately. Unfortunately, the hospitals would not always get the best value because they lacked easy access to information about pharmaceutical prices.

To speed up delivery, DoD has eliminated its medical supply warehouses and outsourced the job to commercial distributors. The department was able to close the warehouses by creating an information system called Defense Medical Logistics Standard Support (DMLSS) that enables hospitals to make informed purchases. DMLSS provides medical logistics personnel desktop access to a catalog of supplies available from military depots and vendors. The service runs on an Informix relational database management system.

Before DoD introduced DMLSS, the hospitals "had no ability to [comparison shop] at all," says Army Col. John Clarke, DMLSS program manager. "They'd have had to call up 12 or 13 different manufacturers, who'd be selling aspirin in bottles of 100s or 500s or other amounts. The individual would have had to calculate the price per tablet manually." DMLSS provides a price-per-tablet comparison. DMLSS has reduced the amount DoD medical facilities pay for drugs by 15 percent, saving the Defense Department about $100 million a year, says Clarke.

The system also links the DBMS with an electronic commerce server, which enables DoD facilities to order supplies directly from commercial sources.

DBMS for Dummies

With a database management system, organizations can store electronic information and then retrieve it as needed. Over the years, people who work with data have demanded software that locates data faster, responds to complicated queries and handles non-traditional data such as images and audio. DBMS technology has evolved in response. These days, consumers have four types of systems from which to choose: hierarchical, relational, object-oriented and object-relational. Given the inflexibility of hierarchical and object-oriented systems, however, federal managers will probably find themselves shopping for relational or object-relational software.

A hierarchical DBMS takes the ham-fisted file-cabinet approach to database management-simple lists of data (such as names) are stored in data groups, which may in turn be stored in larger data groups (such as address books). Data cannot be shared between data groups, so the user can perform only limited searches. For example, users can get their hierarchical DBMS to list all employees named Mulder, or all employees who live in McLean, Va., but they cannot get it to provide a list of employees named Mulder who live in McLean.

A relational DBMS, in contrast, can discern relationships between data. The system stores data in rows and columns that can be cross-referenced, rather than in impenetrable data groups. In its most basic form, a relational DBMS consists of a data file, plus access mechanisms. Access mechanisms often include a query planner, which shows how the data can be extracted from the database, and an optimizer, which picks the most efficient route to the data and rewrites the query to perform that operation. Efficient searching is particularly important when a small amount of data is requested from a large database.

Vendors disagree on how relational database management systems are best constructed and delivered. Oracle Corp., for example, markets a stripped down product with minimal processing capabilities-options that would allow the DBMS to process more intricate queries or replicate data, for example, are priced separately. The advantage is that customers can minimize costs because they don't purchase any more database than they need. The disadvantage is that the agency is at the mercy of the vendor on cost if it later needs to upgrade its DBMS to perform new or more advanced queries. In contrast, Informix Software Inc. offers few options with its relational systems-full-blown searching features are built in. However, customers run the risk of paying for features they don't need and the initial price seems high. Other major relational DBMS vendors are IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp., Sybase Inc. and Computer Associates International Inc.

Regardless of how a relational DBMS is constructed, it cries uncle when it confronts data that cannot be organized into columns and rows. A user can store and retrieve complex data like photographs, computer-aided design drawings, maps and sounds in a relational DBMS, but cannot index, search or manipulate it.

The object-oriented DBMS offers an imperfect solution to the challenge of manipulating complex data. It stores data in clusters called "objects" which the user locates and manipulates by following pointers in applications written in programming languages such as C++ and SmallTalk. The drawbacks are that object-oriented systems are expensive to develop and maintain, and most cannot support many users.

"If you look at the architecture of database management systems today, you see the extraordinary ways people went to accommodate the limitations of relational databases," says Michael Keeler, president and CEO of EcoLogic Corp., a software company that focuses on complex data management. Desperate to use complex data with their relational DBMSs, developers united object-oriented and relational database engines, but at first they couldn't get the different storage mechanisms to communicate efficiently.

Enter the object-relational DBMS-software with add-on modules that support complex data in the relational system. Vendors are calling their products "universal servers."

Informix was the first to unveil a universal server, launching its product last December. Its software now offers more than 80 "datablades," each managing a different type of data, including images, maps, sounds and watermarks. Oracle has followed with "cartridges," IBM peddles "data extenders" and Sybase sells "snap-ins" for its universal server products. These add-on modules manage data with attention to its unique characteristics. For example, a module that manages global positioning data allows a user to query the database to find spatial data that intersects, overlaps, or lies beyond or within areas on a map.

Universal servers can handle large quantities of complex data. NASA is looking to a universal server to help scientists perform innovative searches on relational databases containing terabytes of spatial data streaming in from satellites as part of the Mission to Planet Earth program.

Industry experts say universal servers could inspire federal agencies to use existing data in new ways.

"For the last 30 years, the U.S. government has been the largest collector of data in the world," says Jess Worthington, chief technologist for Informix Government. "Now agencies are coming under more and more pressure to use that data constructively and become information providers to citizens." Object-relational DBMS technology gives agencies the ability to determine what new services they are well-positioned to provide citizens, says Toby Younis, director of enterprise systems at Sybase.

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On a Wing and a Crutch

Samantha Stainburn — Tue, 01 Jul 1997 00:00:00 -0400

raveling with a disability can be difficult and humiliating, even if you're the President of the United States.

In March, President Clinton tumbled down a set of stairs at golfer Greg Norman's house in Florida and tore the tendon that attaches his thigh muscle to his knee. Days later, the wheelchair-restricted President flew to Finland for a conference with Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Unable to use the roll-up stairs to descend from Air Force One, the Leader of the Free World had to be hustled through an airplane service door and lowered to the ground in a Finnish Air catering truck. There, a Secret Service agent wheeled him to a van which drove him to downtown Helsinki.

President Clinton's unceremonious arrival in Finland shows that travelers with disabilities are often accommodated as an afterthought. This is the case even though 36 million people with disabilities travel in the United States each year.

Laws forbidding the travel industry to discriminate against travelers with disabilities have been on the books for years. In 1986, Congress passed the Air Carrier Access Act, which requires airlines to facilitate access for travelers with disabilities. For example, airlines are required to install movable armrests on half the aisle seats on planes with more than 30 seats, so that wheelchair-users can easily sit in them. In 1990, Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act, which stipulates that public accommodations and ground transportation must be made accessible to travelers with disabilities.

Consequently, hotels and transportation have become more accessible, travelers report. But travelers with disabilities are regularly treated as second-class citizens by travel industry personnel who are unaware of their rights or needs.

Obstacles Aren't Just Physical

None of the disabled travelers with whom Government Executive spoke for this article believe traveling for the government--flying on contract fare flights, booking per diem rate rooms--additionally inconveniences them. "It would be nice to be able to fly business class instead of coach and have the extra room on long, coast-to-coast flights," says John Lancaster, executive director of the President's Committee on Employment of People With Disabilities, who is a wheelchair-user. "But I understand why the government has contract fares."

The problems feds with disabilities encounter are the same that private sector travelers with disabilities face--and these are often due to untrained travel industry workers.

Recently, gate agents refused to give an accessible seat on a flight from the west coast to Washington to a Transportation Department executive who is also a wheelchair user because they had already assigned all those seats to non-disabled passengers. Rather than reassign a seat, they dispatched an airline representative to lift the passenger over the armrest of a non-accessible seat. The representative didn't have the strength to do this, and, misunderstanding the nature of traveler's disability, asked him to stand up and sit in the seat himself. The situation was resolved by the flight attendants, who were aware of the passenger's rights as a traveler with a disability, and found him an accessible seat.

The man's experience is not unusual. In a recent survey of 500 travelers with disabilities conducted by the Paralyzed Veterans of America, only 48 respondents did not have a complaint to make about air travel.

An air traveler's best defense is to know his or her rights. These rights are outlined in the 1986 Air Carrier Access Act. The Transportation Department will answer questions about the ACAA at (202) 366-4859.

When passengers are not satisfied with how an airline is accommodating them, they have the right to call on the carrier's complaints resolution officer to resolve the situation before take-off, says Peter Shaw-Lawrence, executive director of the Society for Advancement of Travel for the Handicapped (SATH), a New York-based nonprofit. The officer can override even the captain's decisions when it comes to resolving a passenger complaint.

Passengers should also demand to travel on an American carrier throughout their trip when purchasing an international ticket, says Shaw-Lawrence. If a passenger is switched to a foreign carrier under a code-sharing agreement, he cautions, the Air Carrier Access Act ceases to apply, and other, less progressive, international transportation accessibility laws kick in.

Air travelers seeking justice for unfair treatment can complain, formally or informally, to the Transportation Department, which enforces the ACAA. Call DOT at (202) 366-5957 or (202) 755-7687 (TDD).

Full Access

Locating truly accessible accommodation can also be challenge for travelers. The ADA requires all new hotels-defined as public accommodation built to facilitate first occupancy after January 26, 1993-to contain all the accessibility features described in the guidelines developed by the U.S. Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board, also known as the Access Board. These features range from accessible entrances to low-pile carpet to a certain number of accessible rooms with features such as wider doorways and visual alarm systems. The Access Board distributes single copies of the ADA guidelines at no cost. The guidelines are also available on the Internet at www.access-board.gov. The Access Board responds to questions about the guidelines at (800) 872-2253 or (202) 272-5434.

It's a different story for older hotels, however. The ADA only requires them to have made "readily achievable" changes to improve access; furthermore, the law states that the definition of "readily achievable" is determined by each hotel's budget. Therefore, it is possible for two older hotels to be equally in compliance with the law but have different degrees of accessibility.

Even if travelers book rooms in a new hotel, there is no guarantee that the establishment will provide the kind of access they need. The ADA guidelines ensure only a minimum standard of accessibility.

It's a telling fact that the Access Board doesn't rely on its own guidelines to lead it to acceptably accessible lodging. Before the agency books a hotel for an out-of-town meeting, says Ola (her full name), an agency spokeswoman, the agency sends an employee to the destination to inspect a variety of hotels to find one that meets their needs.

Disability advocacy groups like SATH would like to see the government or a travel industry committee assist travelers by developing a universal rating system for hotels--something akin to one star for a minimally accessible hotel, five stars for a hotel that bends over backwards to accommodate its disabled customers.

In the absence of a rating system, travelers whose agency budgets don't support advance reconnaissance might resort to the next best tactic-telephoning potential places to stay and asking them about access.

An agency's travel management center is well-positioned to step into such a research role. Unfortunately, not all of those offices are up to the task, federal travelers report.

Managers might encourage their agency travel offices to send a representative to a conference being organized by the President's Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities and the Paralyzed Veterans of America. "Travelers with Disabilities: The Untapped Market" at the Washington Hilton from Jan. 21 to 23, 1998, will focus on teaching travel services suppliers how to make their systems work for business travelers with disabilities. Conference information is available from the PVA at (888) 633-2403.

THINK TWICE BEFORE TRAVELING WITH A TEMPORARY CRUTCH

resident Clinton traveled while he recuperated from knee surgery--should you?

While the Air Carrier Access Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act ensures accessibility for travelers with temporarily disabilities, John Lancaster of the President's Committee on Employment of People With Disabilities recommends postponing the trip if at all possible. "It's going to be a lot more inconvenient for someone with a broken leg to get around than for a person with a permanent disability," he says. "They know the ropes, they know what to do. And then there's the matter of ongoing pain, which a person with a permanent disability doesn't have."

If a trip cannot be rescheduled, the executive must plan ahead. The first call should be to the travel management center: Hotel reservations and seat assignments may need to be changed to make getting around easier. Lancaster suggests travelers also contact disability organizations at their destinations for advice. "Independent living centers, mayor's offices-they know the accessible spots, which restaurants are accessible, they know about mass transit," Lancaster says.

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When in Rome, Know the Rules

Samantha Stainburn — Sun, 01 Jun 1997 00:00:00 -0400

sstainbu@govexec.com

wo and half years ago, NASA sent astronauts Shannon Lucid and John Blaha to Star City, Russia, to train at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in preparation for their tours of duty on the Russian space station Mir. The day before the two flew to Russia for the year-long training course, Ray Leki, director of the State Department's Overseas Briefing Center, a facility that prepares U.S. government employees for overseas assignments, got a phone call from Houston.

"Hey, there-is there anything you could tell us over the phone that would help our astronauts work with the Russians?" the NASA manager on the other end of the line asked Leki.

That was the extent of cross-cultural training at NASA in 1995. But times have changed. These days, a course in understanding Russian cultural habits is part of the program for crews of space shuttles that will be docking with Mir. And NASA doesn't only brief astronauts who'll be living inches away from Russian cosmonauts. NASA enrolls technicians, engineers and upper management working on the international space station project in one-day cross-cultural training seminars, too.

Along with NASA, other federal agencies have become fans of cross-cultural training in recent years. The Immigration and Naturalization Service has sent its officers to seminars on how to communicate with Haitian immigrants. The Federal Aviation Administration trains its employees on working with airport personnel of different cultures. The Drug Enforcement Administration sends its agents to workshops to improve their ability to negotiate with Mexicans.

Still, many in government view cross-cultural training in the same way that their private sector colleagues view it-as unnecessary. If travelers use common sense when they travel and work overseas, the perception goes, they will be able to communicate effectively with their foreign counterparts.

In this belief, American business travelers are unlike those of other industrialized nations, says Gary Ferraro, director of the Intercultural Training Institute, which is affiliated with the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. "There are 11,000 Americans doing business in Japan and only 5 percent of them speak Japanese," he observes. "How many German or Japanese firms send employees to the United States who can't speak English?" Private firms in other industrialized countries invest more in cross-cultural training programs than do U.S. companies. Only 35 percent of U.S. firms do any pre-departure cross-cultural training, according to "Effective Expatriate Training," a report that appears in Expatriate Management (Quorum Books, 1996).

Cross-cultural experts say it's not a coincidence that about twice as many Americans fail to complete overseas assignments compared to European or Japanese executives.

To Speak, or Not to Speak

Common sense is not enough to prevent misunderstanding and miscommunication, interculturalists say. "Common sense . . . cannot be neutral," Richard D. Lewis writes in When Cultures Collide (Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 1996). "It is derived from experience, but experience is culture-bound. It is common sense in Germany or Sweden to form an orderly bus queue. In Naples or Rio it is common sense to get on the bus before anyone else."

Neither is sharing a profession sufficient to override cultural differences, say the experts. In When Cultures Collide, Lewis goes to great lengths to show that while it's true that managers all over the world discuss proposals, conduct meetings and draw up contracts, executives of different nationalities act in strikingly different ways. Lewis' examples in the book include:

Silence. "A silent reaction to a business proposal would seem negative to American, German, French, Southern European and Arab executives. To Japanese and Finnish executives, what is not said is regarded as important and lulls in conversation are considered restful, friendly and appropriate."
Humor. "In the USA, sarcasm, kidding and feigned indignation are regarded as factors which move the meeting along and get more done in less time. Germans find humor out of place during negotiations. Business is serious and should be treated as such, without irrelevant stories or distractions. Japanese also fail to see any benefit in introducing humor into business meetings. They will laugh if they are aware that you have told a joke, but that is out of sheer politeness."
Contracts. "To a Swiss, German, Scandinavian, American or British person [a contract] is something that has been signed in order to be adhered to, but a Japanese regards a contract as a starting document to be rewritten and modified as circumstances require. A South American sees it as an ideal which is unlikely to be achieved, but which is signed to avoid argument."
Mistakes. "While mistakes by German executives are not easily forgiven and American managers are summarily fired if they lose money, there is a high tolerance in French companies of blunders on the part of management."
Leadership. "In Germany, more than anywhere else, there is no substitute for experience. [In the United States,] leadership means getting things done, improving the standard of living, finding short cuts to prosperity, making money for oneself, one's firm and its shareholders. In Malaysia and Indonesia, status is inherited, not earned, but leaders are expected to be paternal, religious, sincere and above all, gentle."

Talking about different cultures' social practices and attitudes strikes many Americans as an exercise in stereotyping individuals. "It's a dicey situation," admits Steven Jones, a consultant with the San Francisco-based East-West Business Strategies. Jones designed and teaches the Russian cross-cultural training program at NASA's Johnson Space Center for employees involved in the Russian-American Mir/Alpha space station project. "I can't tell you what my own motivations are half the time, and here I am telling you what Russians think? . . . No one wants me to speak for you. . . . But in cultural groups, certain predictable stuff happens."

How Can We Get Along?

"Everyone perceives their own culture as being objective reality, and that's where the problem is," says Jones.

Different cultures live by different sets of rules, Jones says. "No one tells you the rules; growing up, you just get it." In fact, he says, the only time most people are even aware that cultural rules exist in their own society is when someone breaks them. For example, when Americans get in an elevator, they turn towards the doors and space themselves equidistant from each other. If someone were to face backward and stand six inches from an American passenger in an otherwise empty elevator, the American's reaction most likely would be scorn-"what's wrong with this guy?"-or fear.

A good cross-cultural training program provides executives with more than a list of social customs to memorize.

"Everyone asks me, 'please just fax me a list of dos and don'ts,' " says Jones. But learning when to bow and when to give out business cards is only a small component of becoming culturally literate, he cautions. "People think, 'If I know the rules, we'll get along.' But look at the divorce rate in America. We're all using the same rules, but it doesn't mean we're communicating."

There are four components to learning how to communicate across cultures, as Jones teaches it:

Awareness. Recognizing that different cultures live by different rules.
Culture-specific knowledge. Learning about another culture's social practices.
Emotional management. Observing your own emotional response to these practices.
Skills. Figuring out how to operate independent of your emotions. "You may never become emotionally comfortable with using other cultures' rules," says Jones. You can, however, develop strategies that will help you cope.

Consider the following scenario, says Jones: In Russia, it is usual for people waiting to draw money from an automated teller machine to stand in a huddle around the person using the machine rather than stand in a line a few feet away as is done in the United States. A culturally insensitive executive at an ATM in Russia might be frightened by the crowd and lash out at them or walk away without completing his transaction.

In contrast, an executive that had undergone cross-cultural training would recognize that there is no universal rule on ATM-use; expect to be surrounded by a crowd of Russians at the machine; feel uneasy that people were looking over his shoulder; but be prepared to concentrate on withdrawing his money quickly and leaving.

Timing of training is important. Often, Jones says, organizations don't hire cross-cultural trainers until there's trouble-and for some international ventures, that's too late. In a business relationship, just as in a personal relationship, Jones observes, "trust can be damaged in the blink of an eye, and that damage might be irreparable. . . . The issue is being proactive so you don't mess up the relationship."

Where to Find It

The State Department offers cross-cultural training to federal employees at its National Foreign Affairs Training Center in Arlington, Va. The training is not of the country-specific dos and taboos variety; rather, "it's an attitude that permeates everything," says Terri Williams, training coordinator at the facility's Overseas Briefing Center. For example, native speakers teach the training center's language courses, so employees learn about interacting with citizens of the country to which they will be traveling at the same time that they're conjugating verbs. In the process of dispensing information about regional geography and politics, the training center's area studies courses draw attention to the origins of different countries' value systems.

Any federal agency can pay for an employee to take a course at the NFATC, although language courses are restricted to foreign affairs agency employees and space in other courses is allotted to foreign affairs agency personnel first.

The Overseas Briefing Center can arrange cross-cultural workshops on demand. "To the extent we can, we will adapt and tailor our workshops to the agency's needs," says OBC director Leki. The OBC is mandated by Congress to recover its costs, so it charges for its services.

Federal offices located outside Washington can contact the OBC for referrals to public-sector cross-cultural training resources in their area.

Employees don't have to be involved in a major international venture to benefit from cross-cultural training-it can help a NIST scientist get more out of that international conference in Europe she attends once a year, for example. However, federal agencies tend to be reluctant to spend scarce training funds on educating travelers individually about other cultures.

The Overseas Briefing Center's Terri Williams says feds who are on their own when it comes to preparing themselves to do business with international colleagues should scour the business section of their local bookstores for cross-cultural advice books. "The number of these books has more than quadrupled in recent years," she says. Washington-based federal travelers can consult the country guides, Craighead's Business Reports and cross-cultural theory books at the drop-in information center at the Overseas Briefing Center, located on the NFATC campus in Arlington, Va. The information center is a free resource for all federal employees embarking on or considering an overseas assignment.

For information on cross-cultural training workshops at the OBC, call (703) 302-7274.

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Flight Safety Worth the Price

Samantha Stainburn — Thu, 01 May 1997 00:00:00 -0400

sstainbu@govexec.com

hat a difference a year can make. One year ago this month, Valujet Flight 592 caught fire on a flight from Atlanta to Miami and plummeted into the Florida Everglades, killing all 110 passengers and crew on board. Two months later, in July, TWA Flight 800 exploded minutes after takeoff from New York. The crash killed 230 people; only 196 bodies were recovered.The cause of the accident has yet to be determined.

In 1996, 380 people died in accidents on large U.S. air carriers-the highest number in 11 years.

As usual, these tragedies prompted inquiries by government task forces and working groups and studies by the National Transportation Safety Board and the General Accounting Office. But the Federal Aviation Administration, charged with protecting the nation's aircraft passengers, may be forced to move beyond its customary response to disasters in dealing with these studies. That's because a respected whistleblower and a White House commission have decreed that the FAA's reliance on cost-benefit rationales threatens aircraft passengers' safety.

Protecting the Airlines' Purse

In her new book Flying Blind, Flying Safe (Avon Books), Mary Schiavo, Transportation Department inspector general from 1990 until she resigned last July, argues that the Federal Aviation Administration misinterprets its mission.

The FAA's mission is "to stand guard over the airlines," Schiavo writes. "That role could be interpreted two ways: as policing the airlines to ensure safety at all costs or as protecting the airlines from any opposition or criticism. During five years as inspector general, I came to realize that the FAA believed that statutes ordered it to champion the aviation industry." The result, she says, is this: When the FAA has had to make choices between ordering new safety measures that would protect passengers and saving the airlines money, the agency has typically chosen to do the latter. For example, despite years of requests from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) to lengthen the distance between planes landing at airports, the FAA complied only last year, after one fatality too many, Schiavo writes.

Over time, Schiavo says, looking out for the aviation industry's bottom line has led the FAA to tolerate rather than correct slipshod aircraft inspections, counterfeiting of aircraft parts and lax airport security.

FAA officials justified their choices to Schiavo as the result of cost-benefit analysis, she recounts: "As the FAA's associate administrator for civil-aviation security, Cathal Flynn, would tell me," writes Schiavo, "the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, cost $1 billion. Trying to prevent another Pan Am 103 would cost $5 billion over 10 years. Couldn't I understand? The numbers just didn't add up."

Schiavo isn't alone in her calls for changes in FAA decision-making processes.

Curbing Cost-Benefit Analysis

Shaken by the crash of TWA Flight 800, President Clinton tapped Vice President Gore last August to head a six-month White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security. Clinton told the group to examine aviation security and regulation and air traffic control system modernization. The commission issued an initial report last September and final recommendations in February.

One of the commission's recommendations is that "cost alone should not become dispositive in deciding aviation safety and security rulemaking issues." The item explains that cost-benefit analysis can lead the federal government to underregulate the airline industry: "The rate of fatal accidents in commercial aviation in the U.S. is less than 0.3 per million departures. The rarity of accidents can make it difficult to justify safety and security improvements under benefit-cost criteria applied to regulatory activities."

At a commission meeting in February, Michael Deich, associate director of the Office of Management and Budget, discussed the implications of the proposal: "In essence, it calls on decision-makers to use all available information, not just measurable costs and benefits, in determining aviation safety and security rules." The recommendation is consistent with the regulatory approach embodied in executive order 12866, said Deich. Though the order requires agencies to conduct benefit-cost analyses of proposed rules, it "recognizes that quantifiable benefits and costs do not always tell the whole story, and sometimes agencies should proceed with a rule even though the benefits and costs cannot be well quantified," he observed.

Gerald Dillingham, associate director at GAO's resources, community and economic development division, praised the commission's recommendation in congressional testimony in March. "The commission has correctly recognized that additional safety improvements may sometimes be difficult to justify under the cost-benefit criteria applied to regulatory activities," he told the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee's aviation subcommittee on March 5. "In effect, this recommendation may increase the number of instances in which the primary factor determining whether or not to go forward with a safety or security improvement is what might be referred to as a public policy imperative rather than the result of a benefit-cost analysis."

What Price Safety?

Schiavo implies that some safety improvements may not be as expensive as the FAA has claimed. The FAA has tended to accept industry measurements of the costs involved in improving aviation safety and security, she charges. "Instead of pressing the airlines to find an economical way to install new black boxes and instead of sending its own investigators to challenge the airlines' assessment of the cost, the FAA simply embraced the carriers' argument that the project would be too pricey," she writes.

Still, the White House Commission's goal of reducing the rate of accidents by a factor of five within a decade will require more money than is presently devoted to the task.

The 1996 FAA Reauthorization Act, signed into law last October, set up a commission to figure out how to finance aviation security measures into the next century. The group will consider higher airline taxes, local airport fees and the federal government as possible funding sources. Many of the White House Commission's recommendations cannot be implemented without additional funding, GAO's Dillingham testified. "For example, the $144.2 million appropriated by the Congress in 1997 for new security technology represents a fraction of the estimated billions of dollars required to enhance the security of air travel. To improve aviation security, the Congress, the administration and the aviation industry need to agree on what to do and who will pay for it-and then take action."

In the meantime, what's a federal traveler to do? One's chances of dying in an airplane crash are slim-more people die in the United States each year by slipping in the bathtub or being struck by a falling object. However, Schiavo writes, "before some of the most tragic, dramatic accidents in recent history, passengers aboard the planes saw something amiss but did not speak up." Travelers may be able to prevent accidents by alerting the authorities when they see snow or ice on the wings of their plane before takeoff, she says. Also, survival of a crash often hinges on a traveler's ability to reach an exit door and get out of the plane quickly. Travelers, therefore, should force themselves to pay attention to the safety procedures announced at the beginning of each flight.

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HUD’S Volunteer Cybercenter

Samantha Stainburn — Tue, 29 Apr 1997 00:00:00 -0400

sstainbu@govexec.com

The folks at the Housing and Urban Development Department's Web site are doing their part to make it easier for Americans to volunteer.

HUD this month opened a virtual Volunteer Center on their Web site in the spirit of the "Presidents' Summit" on community service. The center lists web links to volunteer opportunities at federal agencies, as well as links to national volunteer programs and volunteer clearinghouses.

HUD's Web site is a natural location for such a center because "volunteerism and community development go hand in hand," HUD webmaster Candi Harrison said.

The Volunteer Center may prove particularly useful to summit-inspired federal managers who want to set up volunteer programs in their offices. Feds can follow the links to programs such as EPA's Monitoring Water Quality program, the Education Department's America Reads Challenge and the Small Business Administration's Service Corps of Retired Executives to find out how these agencies use volunteers to improve the delivery of government services.

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Feds on Film

Samantha Stainburn — Tue, 01 Apr 1997 00:00:00 -0500

sstainbu@govexec.com)

n Veterans Day last year, the Treasury Department should have been deserted. Instead, hundreds of people stood shivering on the steps of the Washington building: Movie people, shooting a scene for Contact, a film based on a Carl Sagan novel about an American astronomer who receives a message from outer space.

There were actors, Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey, being filmed walking down the steps. There was a director, Robert Zemeckis, telling them to go back to the top and do it again. There was a crowd of extras, some dressed in nun's habits and monk's robes, waving signs when a man with a megaphone shouted, "action!" There were silver catering trucks and bottles of spring water lining 15th Street.

Still, Treasury employees shouldn't look for their agency to figure into the plot of the film, which is scheduled for release in August. In Contact, the Treasury Department, with its thick white columns, is playing the part of the U.S. Capitol.

Contact's filmmakers needed a location that provided the same stately backdrop as the real Capitol, but was smaller, so it took fewer people to fill the screen.

Treasury officials, who receive several requests each year to film around the building, are happy to oblige filmmakers as long as shoots aren't disruptive to employees or interfere with security. The reason? "Ultimately, the building is owned by the public," says a Treasury spokesperson.

The Treasury Department isn't the only federal agency willing to act the part when Hollywood beckons.

In the last year alone:

The Energy Department's Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill., appeared as a clandestine research laboratory in Chain Reaction, a $50 million action movie starring Keanu Reeves and Morgan Freeman. Producers of the film liked the look of the Argonne complex so much that one of them, John Wells, returned in the fall with actors Anthony Edwards and Sherry Stringfield to shoot a helicopter rescue scene for an episode of the NBC television series ER that aired last November.
NASA's Kennedy Space Center doubled as a giant sound stage for The Cape, a weekly cable TV drama about the lives and loves of fictitious space shuttle astronauts, starring Corbin Bernsen. The show continues to shoot at KSC this year.
The U.S. Postal Service's Los Angeles Processing and Distribution Center allowed director Steve Marshall to film scenes during the facility's maintenance shift for Dear God, a comedy about a con man sentenced to do time in a dead letter office.
The Defense Department loaned out a handful of Humvees for A Time to Kill, Navy fighters for Executive Decision and a squadron of F-15s for the upcoming Air Force One, among other transactions with Tinseltown.

Making movies with federal agencies is nothing new. The Defense Department helped Hollywood churn out patriotic films during World War II, and the government encouraged the production of Carmen Miranda films such as That Night in Rio and Weekend in Havana as part of a foreign relations strategy to popularize U.S. ties with South America.

But filmmakers were less willing to serve as conduits for government policy once the second world war was won. Sen. Joseph McCarthy's witch hunt for communists from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s drove a wedge between stars and bureaucrats. The Vietnam War further cooled enthusiasm for any partnership.

Now, filmmakers are back, albeit with a different agenda. And agencies are trying to turn this surge of interest to their advantage.

Setting the Scene

There are a variety of reasons why federal agencies' numbers are in Hollywood producers' rolodexes right now.

In order to achieve the level of verisimilitude which many directors are after, when a script calls for a federal location, that's where the director wants to be.

"Without the Post Office's cooperation, we would not have been able to make this movie," says producer Steve Tisch of Dear God. In addition to allowing the production to film at its Los Angeles Processing and Distribution Center, the Postal Service supplied postal uniforms, insignias and trucks. Forty processing center employees appeared as extras in the film and showed the actors how to use the automatic phaser cancelers, optical character readers, bar code sorters and parcel sorters the agency had loaned them. Tisch even sought advice from his father, Preston Robert Tisch, who served as postmaster general during the Reagan administration.

Flying and filming in NASA's KC-135 zero-gravity simulator was "the only way to truly recreate zero g for the purposes of making a realistic movie about space travel," director Ron Howard writes in the forward to The Apollo Adventure (Pocket Books, 1995), Jeffrey Kluger's book about the making of the movie Apollo 13. The simulator, nicknamed 'the Vomit Comet,' is a gutted and padded Boeing 707 that NASA pilots fly in arcs between 30,000 and 36,000 feet; at the top of each arc, objects inside the plane are weightless for about 23 seconds. The filmmakers bolted their replicas of the cockpits of the Apollo command module and lunar module to the cabin walls and spent four weeks dive-bombing the earth to capture pictures of actors floating through the set and spinning their sunglasses. The film company paid for the costs of operating the plane.

The Cape's directors favor lingering shots of their actors dwarfed by Kennedy Space Center facilities such as the immense Vehicle Assembly Building, and they film at real astronaut training facilities to lend the show a sense of authenticity. The producers depend on information specialist Lisa Fowler, a Kennedy Space Center employee who spends about 80 percent of her time assisting The Cape, to locate new sites on the KSC complex for each week's show.

Filmmakers who need to shoot scenes in the wilderness will also find themselves talking to federal officials. The National Park Service manages 83 million acres of dramatic vistas, volcanoes, glaciers, beaches and mountains, the U.S. Forest Service tends to 191 million acres of forests and clearcuts and the Bureau of Land Management cares for 270 million surface acres of southwestern scenery.

With military movies, "you can do anything in the movie business if the money is big enough. But it's easier with Pentagon approval," producer Mace Neufield, who worked with DoD on Clear and Present Danger, Patriot Games, Flight of the Intruder and The Hunt for Red October, told the Associated Press last September.

That's one of the reasons Demi Moore made such a fuss when the Defense Department declined to assist In Pursuit of Honor, an upcoming film in which Moore plays a female Navy SEAL. Moore tried to get President Clinton to order the military's participation (a presidential aide wouldn't put the call through) and had Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles telephone Phil Strub, the Pentagon's film liaison coordinator, to argue her case.

DoD, however, stood its ground. "The problem was not that female Navy SEALs do not exist," says Strub. "The problem was the conduct of military personnel in the picture." In Pursuit of Honor was forced to make do with filming at Camp Blanding, a state-owned National Guard base in Florida, and to hire retired SEALs as script consultants.

In many cases, filming at federal agencies helps producers keep their costs down. Many agencies don't charge location fees. "They often come to us with that in mind," says Strub. DoD does require film companies to pay the department's out-of-pocket operating costs-fuel, depot maintenance, electricity and civilian personnel salaries. Uniformed military personnel, who are on the government's payroll 24 hours a day, do not receive extra payment for participating. Big budget films in particular, Strub observes, tend to spend lavishly on the salaries of their star actors, directors and producers, and then look for ways to save on production costs.

Federal agencies are also appearing in more screenplays than in the past.

"The Washington movie is in vogue now," movie critic Pat Dowell observed on National Public Radio in January. The recent string of White House movies, including Independence Day, Mars Attacks!, Murder at 1600 and Absolute Power, have drawn hoardes of film crews to the District of Columbia to film around stately buildings.

The space movie is in fashion, too. Hollywood's interest in filming at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., is cyclical, observes Tina Pechon, audiovisual coordinator at KSC. "We'll have several feature films over a three- or four-year period, then they'll fade away. Currently, we're in another high cycle." Over the last two years, Independence Day, last spring's Charlie Sheen movie The Arrival and the forthcoming Contact all filmed scenes at the Very Large Array in New Mexico and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, two government-owned radio telescope facilities.

Filmmakers aren't deterred from approaching federal agencies by the possibility of tangling with red tape. "Everybody has rules, whether they are a federal agency or a private company," says Paul Pav, Contact's location manager.

However, filmmakers prepare themselves to set aside a substantial amount of time to jump through agencies' regulatory hoops.

"The biggest problem with working with federal agencies is the time-consuming negotiations," says Pav. "It takes sometimes months. You talk to an agency director in one town-they have to call Washington for approval. When you film at a private company, you deal with one person."

"Agency directors change when administrations change and you can be in the middle of that," Pav says. Feature films set their schedules months ahead, he explains. A film company might get an agency official's permission to film at the agency at the beginning of the production cycle only to have the official's replacement come in and disallow it.

From Star Wars to Star Struck

All this attention can be exciting, but what does cooperating on a feature film actually entail? Officials at the Energy Department's Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill., found out for themselves last year.

In March 1995, the Illinois Film Commission called Catherine Foster, Argonne's director of science and technology communications. They wanted to send a photographer to the facility to take pictures of any laboratories at which director Andrew Davis might film scenes for an upcoming thriller. Foster was surprised by the request, but racked her brains to think of a lab that was not in heavy use. She remembered a research facility called the Continuous Wave Deuterium Demonstrator (CWDD)-a lab built by the Army for Strategic Defense Initiative research that had never been used as Congress had canceled the "Star Wars" program just before its construction was completed. The facility had been declassified and released to Argonne in 1994, but it was sitting idle while scientists sought funding for new CWDD projects.

After getting an enthusiastic go-ahead from CWDD manager Tom Yule, Foster invited the photographer for a tour. Photos were snapped and sent to Davis. Then Argonne officials heard nothing for months.

In July, Mike Malone, the movie's location scout, telephoned Foster and arranged a visit. He took more photographs. More months passed.

Finally, in the fall, Malone called and asked if he could bring a group of people, including director Davis and the production designer, to look Argonne over.

"So the retinue arrived, and we did the tour again," Foster recalls. "As they wandered around, Tom was talking about the history of the area. . . . The warehouse-sized buildings in this particular area of the laboratory had housed dozens of different projects, Tom said, and engineers and technicians had moved from building to building, depending on their expertise on a given project. The tunnels connecting the buildings had been heavily used, Tom added. Andrew Davis turned with a gleam in his eye. 'Tunnels?' he asked."

That clinched it. Labs at the University of Chicago, Northwestern and the Illinois Institute of Technology had also been auditioning for locations in the film. But Davis couldn't resist another opportunity to use tunnels in a chase sequence as he had in his previous film The Fugitive. Inspired by CWDD's particle accelerator and hydrogen tanks, Davis had the screenplay of the film rewritten so that its plot emphasized technology rather than espionage, and changed the title of the movie to Chain Reaction. The filmmakers cast CWDD as Mount Weather, a clandestine laboratory where shadowy government and corporate officials attempt to convert sound energy to light energy for evil purposes; the CWDD's control room would appear as the FBI Counter-Terrorism Center in the movie. That is, with the blessing of top management at Argonne and DOE.

All the while the filmmakers had been mulling over their artistic options, Foster and her boss, Charlie Osolin, had been lobbying their agency for permission to participate.

Safety was a concern. "We're very proud of our safety record here," says Foster. Argonne didn't want movie-makers messing it up. The production company agreed to work with Argonne's fire and safety personnel, and reimburse them for extra hours of work.

The fact that Argonne would appear as a fictitious laboratory where evil minds were at work actually made it easier for Foster and Osolin to sell the idea to agency heads. "If Argonne had been Argonne in the movie, it would have raised our level of participation," explains Foster. The agency would have wanted to approve any scenes in which Argonne or DOE appeared, she says. Chain Reaction agreed not to use the Argonne or Energy Department logos in the film.

Ultimately, says Foster, the head of DOE's operations office in Chicago decided that assisting on the film was a unique way to promote science-in one scene, for example, Keanu Reeves' character's ability to make explosives out of common lab chemicals enables him to escape-and therefore part of the Energy Department's mission.

Only one snag remained. When the filmmakers cast their eyes on the contract, a standard non-federal use of federal property agreement, they were taken aback by a clause that stipulated that in the event of a national emergency, Argonne would throw them off the site. After all the scouting work, "it looked as if they weren't going to come," recalls Foster. Finally, someone at the film company asked the critical question: What would constitute a national emergency? An event such as World War III, Argonne officials answered. The filmmakers decided that, if war did break out, sticking to their filming schedule would be the least of their concerns, and they signed the contract.

Chain Reaction filmed at Argonne for a week in February 1996 and a few days in April. But Foster, assigned to movie-detail, worked on the project for months. She collected photographs of Argonne employees who wanted to be extras in the film and shipped them off to Chain Reaction's casting director. Employees who were chosen had to arrange for time off and were paid by the movie company. On separate occasions, Foster sneaked Keanu Reeves and Morgan Freeman into Argonne without visitor's badges so that they could quietly tour the facilities and talk to engineers to help them develop their characters. It didn't always work. After the actors met with Argonne's management, "we emerged to find employees clustered throughout the lobby and others hanging off the railings on the upper floors," says Foster. Argonne's security chief, Dave Metta, escorted the celebrities out of the building.

"As the lab's representative to the movie company, I spent what seemed like every waking hour on the set while the filmmakers were there during that week in February, just in case something went wrong," Foster recalls.

The national laboratory was lucky to have a communications director with those qualities standing by. But agencies that do a lot of business with Hollywood don't leave it to luck-they appoint members of their public affairs staffs to be "film liaisons" and establish agency guidelines for assisting film companies.

Life as a Liaison

The Defense Department receives hundreds of requests from filmmakers for technical advice and material assistance-access to military bases and military equipment-each year.

Filmmakers direct their requests to Phil Strub or to one of the services' film liaison officers at the Federal Building in Westwood, Calif. Each service, plus the Coast Guard, has at least one film liaison officer. The Westwood branch of Air Force public affairs recently transferred its community and media relations functions to the Pentagon, and now its entire staff (three people) is dedicated to entertainment industry projects.

DoD's film liaisons read scripts submitted by filmmakers to determine whether they present an opportunity to inform the American public about the armed services, and whether they portray the military in a reasonably realistic way.

When a script does, DoD will supply the production with military equipment, locations, extras and technical consultants. That is, if resources are available. "We don't order units to participate," says Lt. Col. Bruce Gillman, director of the Air Force public affairs office in Westwood. Also, when a film crew wants to shoot scenes on a military base, a film liaison must be available to go along to ensure that filming doesn't interfere with the base's mission. Liaisons can be gone for weeks at a time. The film companies pay their travel expenses. "It's first come, first serve," says Gillman. "We don't hold out for a 'better' picture to come along."

If a script doesn't meet DoD's criteria, the film liaisons will suggest changes.

Usually, says Strub, scripts contain a whole lot of technical errors pertaining to rank and military terminology and one or two structural problems. "Sometimes, there's a fundamental show stopper," he says. "For example, in Crimson Tide, a crew mutinies. We can talk about where the ribbons should be pinned, but if there's a fundamental problem with the situation, they're not going to get our help. Then we try to negotiate."

With a fully stocked arsenal of cool military equipment like the vertical-takeoff Harrier jet that Arnold Schwarzenneger's character flew in True Lies, and a legacy of films like Clear and Present Danger that succeeded at the box office in part because audiences loved the techno-reality that only the real armed forces could provide, DoD negotiates from a position of strength. The first film DoD assisted, Wings (1927), even won the first "Best Picture" Oscar presented by the Academy of American Motion Pictures.

But DoD's clout is not always enough.

The producers of Courage Under Fire decided to walk away rather than address faults the Army film liaison found with their script and listed in a memo, later reprinted in Harper's magazine, including:

"Unrealistic relationships: There are several instances of dialogue and behavior between military personnel that would never take place. Although the examples below require only a little toning down, they are currently unacceptably unrealistic and negative. Rady's comment to Walden that she doesn't need to prove she has balls: All soldiers who work with women are trained and counseled many times to watch all sexual references."
"Serling's alcoholism: Serling can't be shown drinking or being drunk while on duty. He could be seen recovering from the night before . . . but otherwise it appears that the army is unabashedly tolerating his serious problem. Also, when Serling says he is trying to quit, he should say something about joining the army's alcohol rehab program."
"Anti-Pentagon comments: Serling would not behave as if everyone assumes that those assigned to the Pentagon are slow and stupid. Micromanagers, maybe."

Rumors that DoD won't cooperate on tough subjects are untrue, Strub insists. "It all depends on how it's depicted." He points out that the agency assisted HBO on Tuskeegee Airmen, a film that shows racial discrimination in the Air Force in the 1950s.

And, while DoD passed on comedies such as Sgt. Bilko, Major Payne, The Peacemaker and the forthcoming McHale's Navy, it was happy to help with Down Periscope, In the Army Now and episodes of ABC's Major Dad. "Pauly Shore's character in In the Army Now attributes every good thing to the Army," including his renewed attractiveness to his girlfriend, says Strub. The insurmountable problem with Sgt. Bilko was that "the military characters were incompetent at best, corrupt at worst," he says.

"We don't ask for documentary realism," says Strub. "We understand these are movies."

Kennedy Space Center, another federal facility that attracts filmmakers like flies, also requests that studios send scripts. But its four film liaisons, who work out of offices at KSC's state-of-the-art press center next to the countdown clock, don't consider films' story lines as much as their impact on operations. "We're not in the business of trying to censor or direct a project so we really look at logistics, whether or not it's feasible," says audiovisual coordinator Tina Pechon, KSC's primary contact for filmmakers.

"The ground rules for anything that we do for these productions is that our main focus in life is to process, launch and land the space shuttle," says Pechon. "Our operations take first priority. If a movie wants to come in here and film, they simply have to do it around our operations schedule."

That said, the agency has earned quite a reputation in the film industry for being "movie friendly." Contact's producers found NASA officials willing to permit the film crew to paint a Contact emblem over the Vehicle Assembly Building's Bicentennial Emblem, as long as the crew would replace the facility's emblem when they were finished filming. KSC discourages outsiders from filming on launch day because, explains Malone, "we have to assign a body to go with any film crew [and] media services personnel are trying to produce a show for the live media." However, when Contact wanted to truck in a few thousand extras and film them, along with the real crowd, watching Space Shuttle Columbia lift off last November, the media services staff rounded up agency volunteers to accompany the film crew. (All these well-laid plans were eventually scrapped. The painting exercise proved to be too expensive to pursue; the multiple delays of the Columbia launch sent the filmmakers scurrying back to the studios with shots of an empty causeway. At press time, the producers intended to add the crowds in by computer, but were also considering returning to KSC in April for the next daytime shuttle launch.)

"There are many projects that we get that we will support entirely on a reference level," says Pechon. KSC maintains a library which filmmakers can use; last November, officials were letting researchers for From Earth to the Moon, a 13-part HBO series on the Apollo program that began filming in February, rifle through boxes of uncataloged papers and photographs in a storeroom. When the Apollo 13 producers were looking for assistance in constructing models of the Apollo command module and lunar module, KSC officials put them in touch with the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center, a privately owned museum in Hutchinson, Kan., that boasts the largest collection of space artifacts outside the Smithsonian Institution. The museum let the filmmakers incorporate pieces of the real Apollo 13 spacecraft in their models.

Unlike DoD's film liaisons, running interference for film companies is not the full-time job of the KSC audiovisual team. They also produce NASA's television programs and oversee all the KSC photography. But the time they dedicate to feature film and television projects has increased, says Manny Virata, KSC's television coordinator. Assisting The Cape-a job which entails helping producers scout locations for future shows while attending film shoots and helping wrap up shows that have completed filming-became so time-consuming for Pechon that KSC had information assistant Lisa Fowler give up her duties as VIP logistics coordinator to concentrate on the project.

Star-Spangled Banner

That federal agencies are willing to commit so much staff-time and resources to Hollywood ventures indicates that officials believe they can turn Hollywood's interest in the government to their advantage.

"Fewer people have any experience with the military today," says the Defense Department's Strub. "Fewer people serve. Fewer people know people who serve. Consequently, we feel a responsibility to be particularly aggressive in looking for opportunities to tell the public about the military. We don't want to be some mysterious guard off on a base surrounded by a wall. We are part of American society. These entertainment products reach a wide and impressionable audience. We would just as soon the impressions be positive."

"There has to be some kind of public information value [to us]," says Strub, "Otherwise it's a lot of trouble for no good reason."

The publicity-shy FBI has been known to break its code of silence when the film industry offers opportunities to boost agency recruitment. In 1990, the agency arranged for Keanu Reeves to spend time with FBI agents as research for a role in Point Break. The FBI also provided assistance to Silence of the Lambs, a film starring Jodie Foster as FBI trainee Clarice Starling, that came down the pipeline at a time when the bureau was looking to recruit more female agents.

Apparently, the agency is not so interested in attracting rogue agents to its ranks. The X Files, a Fox television series whose two main characters, special agent Fox Mulder and special agent Dana Scully, have been known to show up at the deputy director's apartment in the middle of the night with a wanted felon, skip town to Siberia when scheduled to testify in front of Congress and generally disregard agency requests to keep travel spending under control as they crisscross the country in search of aliens and Loch Ness Monsters, gets no assistance from the bureau.

The FBI is more than happy to assist NBC's Unsolved Mysteries: The program's re-enactments of crimes have led to real-life arrests. The FBI's film liaisons are located in its Fugitive Publicity Office, making cooperation with Unsolved Mysteries efficient.

NASA's willingness to bend over backwards for filmmakers-any filmmakers, be they Oscar-winners or Australians documenting the lives of fire ants on the KSC complex-has won it valuable allies in the dream factory. For example, the HBO project From Earth to the Moon is the brainchild of Tom Hanks, the actor who played astronaut Jim Lovell in Apollo 13. While Hanks has been a space buff all his life, his experience working with NASA in 1995 was pleasant enough to bring him back. Each episode of the HBO project will be a separate one-hour movie; big Hollywood names, including Hanks, Fred Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption), Ted Demme (Beautiful Girls) and Lili Fini Zanuck (Rush) have signed on to direct. If your scope of existence is determined as much by public opinion as NASA's, it's nice to have people willing to spend $47 million to tell your story.

Films shot on land owned by the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service earn money for the government. The agencies assess commercial film companies a "use fee" on top of billing them for costs such as agency employee overtime and paperwork processing. The agencies remit the use fee to the U.S. Treasury. The standard rate for filming on BLM property in Utah is $100 to $600 a day, depending on the number of people involved in the film shoot, according to BLM realty specialist Terry Catlin. The rates are based on fair market value for use of the land.

The National Park Service doesn't charge such a fee for land use, although there is currently some discussion at the agency about assessing one. The Park Service, in fact, only received the authority to recover costs incurred by film company use of their land three and a half years ago.

Nevertheless, "the film industry does a tremendous amount of good, by portraying areas in parks that people don't always get the chance to see," says Dick Young, special uses coordinator for the Park Service. "Even if we are not specifically identified, people look at [the scenery] and say, 'gee, where is that?' That's part of our mission, to get the word out." The Park Service allows the CBS series Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman to maintain a set on property once owned by Paramount Studios that is now part of the agency's Santa Monica Mountains recreation area. In their Park Service permit, Dr. Quinn is required to open some shooting locations to the public, so visitors can watch the series being filmed. "Filming is a major cultural attribute of this country," says Scott Erickson, deputy superintendent at the Santa Monica Mountains recreation area. The arrangement with Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman "dovetails very tightly with the National Park Service mission to preserve and protect our cultural resources," he says.

Finally, as Argonne National Laboratory discovered, nothing boosts employee morale like the prospect of catching a glimpse of movie stars acting like feds. And there are the perks of celebrity: When Chain Reaction hit the silver screen last August, a local theater knocked $2.75 off the ticket price for Argonne employees.

"REEL" FEDS

Secret Service
Murder at 1600
Not all Secret Service agents are honest civil servants in this latest film about a murder at the White House. Shot on location in Washington, it stars Wesley Snipes as a DC detective and Diane Lane as a good agent.

Defense Dept.
In Pursuit of Honor
The Pentagon declined to assist Demi Moore's upcoming film about a female Navy SEAL because it didn't agree with the way the movie portrays military personnel.

Energy Dept.
Chain Reaction
Argonne National Laboratory provided the lab scenery for last year's action flick about conspirators who try to steal a breakthrough technology.

NASA
The Cape
Corben Bernsen stars as "Bull" Eckert, director of astronaut training, in this TV series shot at Kennedy Space Center. The show tackles issues such as downsizing at NASA and women who stalk space shuttle pilots.

Justice Dept.
Feds
Actress Blair Brown heads the Manhattan branch of the U.S. Attorney's Office (which works with the FBI) in this new CBS drama about federal prosecutors.

Geological Survey
Dante's Peak
The flowing lava was cool, but what blew audiences away was the fact that feds were heroes.

The White House
The American President
The fake Oval Office in which Michael Douglas made presidential decisions appeared in Nixon, too.

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Fools and Conspirators

Samantha Stainburn — Tue, 01 Apr 1997 00:00:00 -0500

t's so rare for federal employee characters to appear as heroes in movies that, when it happens, the President notices.

In February, President Clinton told the American Council on Education that he had watched Dante's Peak, a film about a volcano that explodes in an idyllic town in the Pacific Northwest.

"And I couldn't help thinking, you know, the hero works for the U.S. Geological Service [Survey] and his life is saved in the end by a contraption developed not here at home for uses on the ground, but by NASA for use in space," Clinton said, according to The Washington Post. "And I thought, the government is not the enemy."

Dante's Peak does more than tout the merits of inter-agency cooperation. The movie portrays its main characters, a team of scientists who work for the Geological Survey, as diverse, yet unified; they're dedicated to their jobs, yet crack jokes and play pool together in the evenings. The team keeps an eye on taxpayer dollars, postponing the evacuation of a town until their scientific data suggests it's necessary. When it turns out that the emotional premonitions of the team's rogue volcanologist are coming true-against all signs to the contrary, a dormant volcano is about to blow-the team leader immediately accepts responsibility for the delay, and they set about rescuing the town.

The film finds its villain in the federal contractor community-a money-grubbing helicopter pilot tries to bilk the government by doubling the price of a chopper ride when he knows the feds desperately need his services.

Dante's Peak admits that federal employment can be a respectable way to earn a living. But, among the movies playing at Washington-area cinemas as this story went to press, it was the only one.

In Absolute Power, Secret Service agents kill the First Lady and White House aides try to cover it up; in That Darn Cat, a cat is more adept at intelligence work than the humans who work for the FBI.

It wasn't always this way.

In the 1930s, audiences didn't laugh when a film character announced, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you"-they applauded. New Deal-era filmmakers gave government characters the "knights on white horses" roles in their movies, says Paul Boyer, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (University of North Carolina Press, 1994). The federally run migrants' camp in director John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940) is the cleanest and best-run facility the film's characters come across. In Gabriel Over the White House (1933), the country benefits when the American president dismisses Congress and assumes near-dictatorial powers.

During the two world wars, Hollywood's contribution to the war effort was to produce movies that assured Americans that the people managing the country's participation in the wars had the talent to win them. Correspondingly, the U.S. military officials that paraded across the silver screen were wise and courageous.

"Certainly there are examples of early films in which politicians are portrayed as greedy-Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, for one," says Boyer, "[but] there was a much wider range of representation."

Observers contend that filmmakers who ridicule or deride federal employees in today's movies are merely reflecting current public distaste for government.

"Blaming movie-makers is like breaking your thermometer when you don't like the temperature," says Boyer. "The filmmakers sense there's a great well of popular feeling that will respond to the characterization. The real question to address is why do these people feel they can get away with it? If government employees were adored, presumably there would be a groundswell of protest. Instead, there's usually a wave of sardonic laughter."

And the sad fact is that federal employee characters, particularly senior-level managers, make good villains. "The advisers in the top echelons of government-so little is known about them that they're fair game," says Robert Kolker, English professor and former head of the Motion Picture/Television/Radio department at the University of Maryland. Federal officials are characters that audiences instantly recognize, says Boyer-a quality liked by screenwriters seeking to sell their products to a national market.

Should feds worry that Hollywood typecasts them as fools or conspirators?

"I'm sure it has a cumulative effect on public opinion," says Robert Sklar, professor of cinema studies at New York University and author of Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (Vintage Books, 1994).

Among the accumulating messages:

Elected officials and political appointees are clueless; civil servants run amok behind their backs. In Independence Day, the Secretary of Defense and his cronies know that government researchers have been poking at an alien in a jar for the past 50 years at a facility called Area 51; the President does not. When the President finally sees the facility, all he can stammer is, "I don't understand. Where does all this come from?"
If you've been in government service for a while, you've perfected the art of lying. When a disgruntled major steals two nuclear warheads and crashes a stealth bomber into a national park in Broken Arrow, one federal official suggests that the Air Force inform the American public what has happened. "Tell the truth? How did you get this job?" snorts a high-ranking officer.
Even good feds abuse taxpayer dollars. In True Lies, CIA agent Arnold Schwarzenneger and his colleagues use agency-issue equipment and personnel to find out if his wife has been faithful.
If you're unfit for work in the private sector, there's a job for you in government. The CIA snaps up a wacko pilot to fly for them in Air America. The people working at the Postal Service's dead letter office in Dear God are endearing misfits, but misfits nonetheless.

"In many cases, when we see rangers portrayed in motion pictures we just wince," says National Park Service senior ranger Tony Bonnano. For example, in The Rock, he says, rangers leading a hike were "real slobs" and unrealistically overweight. "Audiences do put a lot of stock in what they see, so it would be wonderful if the industry came to us and asked us about accuracy," he says. Agencies might initiate fairer portrayals by "developing a better rapport with the film industry," Bonnano suggests.

Then again, "using 'responsibility' in the same sentence as 'the movie industry'-it just doesn't fit," says director John Sayles in an interview in the book, Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (Henry Holt and Co., 1996). "It's not high on their list of things to think about." Agencies may decide that all they can do is wait for popular opinion to rally behind them again. Admittedly, some movie-goers are already tiring of evil federal characters. In February, The Washington Post reviewer Tom Shales praised NBC's miniseries Asteroid because, "even the dread 'feds,' perennial kick-me boys in so many movies, come off well. . . It's refreshing to find a movie in which federal bureaucrats are not portrayed as heartless or incompetent cads."

But there's no guarantee that such a change is around the corner.

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Impressive Imposters

Samantha Stainburn — Tue, 01 Apr 1997 00:00:00 -0500

ederal agency flirtations with the film industry don't always end in collaboration. When federal agencies and filmmakers go their separate ways, the films get made anyway.

Film companies regularly hire foreign armies to impersonate the U.S. Army: Spanish soldiers played American troops in Navy SEALs, the Thai Army donned American uniforms for Platoon and Philippino Army recruits played soldiers on both sides in Apocalypse Now.

Military equipment can be rented from the arsenals of private collectors. The Defense Department may even tell filmmakers where to look. "We know organizations that have World War II aircraft," says Lt. Col. Bruce Gillman, director of the Air Force public relations office in Westwood, Calif. "We'll give the producers a list." DoD passed on Courage Under Fire, but helped the producers import tanks from Australia, which the movie crew touched up to look like American tanks used in the Gulf War.

DoD calls this kind of help "courtesy assistance," and the department extends it as a peace-offering to rebuffed filmmakers. "You never know when a script will come along that we'll want to support," says Gillman. DoD doesn't want to discourage filmmakers from approaching them for help in the future.

When federal employees won't talk, Hollywood producers hire retired feds to act as consultants on their pictures. For example, the Academy Group, a private, Manassas, Va.-based consulting firm staffed by nine retired FBI behavioral specialists, is on monthly retainer to Fox television's Millennium.

Filmmakers also rely on the talents of their design staffs. When the FBI wouldn't grant The X Files permission to use the bureau's logo in the show, the set designers created their own, reports Entertainment Weekly. Look closely: Mulder and Scully are agents for the "Bureau of Investigations," according to the seal on display in Mulder's basement office.

Filmmakers have been known to go on covert operations to obtain shots denied them. When DoD declined to provide Crimson Tide with stock footage of a Trident submarine-arguably essential for the movie, which is about mutiny on a Trident submarine-the film's producers found out when and where a Trident was sailing, hired a helicopter and filmed the vessel without DoD's permission. To escape the cameras, the commander of the sub ordered it to submerge, inadvertently supplying the camera people with the picture they wanted. The producers of Under Siege used a similar strategy to film the USS Missouri. No, it's not Defense Department policy to counterattack: "It's a free country," says Phil Strub, film liaison coordinator at DoD.

Occasionally, an impressive imposter can work better than the real thing.

Director Rob Reiner filmed The American President in a shorter and wider format than filmmakers typically use. Since the movie was shot on an enormous White House set built for the film, production designer Lilly Kilvert was able to drop the ceiling height so it would show. "When you see the ceiling, you can feel the building," she says. The lower ceiling also helped foster the idea that "the President is a prisoner, trapped in a beautiful palace," Kilvert says.

Splendor doesn't come cheap. "When I first saw their budget for the set, I said, 'you can't make a palace for this amount of money'," Kilvert recalls. Castlerock decided to invest more money in the set in the hopes that the company could recover their costs by renting it out later. The demand for White House sets has proved high, and the set has already appeared in Nixon and Independence Day.

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Meet George Jetson

Samantha Stainburn — Tue, 01 Apr 1997 00:00:00 -0500

he world of the business traveler is becoming more like the space-age world of George Jetson all the time. Sixty-two percent of Americans surveyed recently by CLT Research Associates and Marriott International lug personal computers along on business trips; 28 percent bring portable phones; and 24 percent hook pagers on their belts or stuff them into their handbags. This makes American business travelers more gadget-laden than their Japanese counterparts-42 percent of Japanese business travelers pack PCs, 15 percent carry phones and 5 percent carry pagers-but slightly less dependent on laptops and portable phones than business travelers from the United Kingdom, according to the survey.

Business travelers love the sound of their voice mail: Fifty percent of travelers with voice mail polled by DK Associates last year say they check their messages at least three times a day.

Federal travelers often complain their agencies are behind the corporate curve when it comes to adopting best business practices for travel management, but nothing is stopping them from getting their hands on new technology. Personal gadgets are on sale to anyone who wants to feel like Flash Gordon, and other innovations are sprouting in public spaces. Information kiosks and customs kiosks are appearing in airports. If a test on Cathay Pacific and Swissair planes pans out, automated teller machines (ATMs) with currency exchange capabilities may be installed in airline seats one day soon.

The General Services Administration has formed a new division that's "trying to move the government into the smart card arena," Becky Rhodes, associate administrator of GSA's office of governmentwide policy, told delegates at the Society for Travel Agents in Government conference in February. Credit-card size smart cards contain memory chips that can store and retrieve data-and, hence, dispense electronic cash with a swipe or keep track of travelers' frequent flier miles.

The 21st century is in travelers' faces no matter which sector they work for.

Card Tricks

Before prepaid phone cards, the 5,500 sailors aboard the aircraft carrier USS Kennedy could only make personal calls from the ship in emergencies using expensive International Maritime Satellite Transmission technology. Now, the sailors can buy $20 MCI prepaid Americana cards in the ship store and place calls via satellite at a set rate of $1 a minute. The cards work on land, too, at pay phones.

With prepaid cards, telephone service is purchased in advance. Users dial a toll-free number and enter a personal identification number to activate their accounts.

Prepaid phone cards can be purchased directly from large telephone carriers such as MCI or AT&T, at some federal facilities such as Veterans Canteen Services locations and Army and Air Force Exchange Service locations, or at shops. One warning: The $1 billion U.S. prepaid card industry includes unmonitored distributors who buy phone time from the major carriers and resell it on phone cards to retailers, and customers have had cards deactivated because of billing disputes between distributors and carriers. A familiar retailer's name on the front of a card is no guarantee that the distributor is dependable, as Kmart customers found out last year when the store's distributor ran into trouble.

Cards on sale at federal facilities are safe because telephone carriers supply them directly to the government. "We don't have a middle man involved," says Tracy Smith, an MCI representative.

Cards sold at federal installations often feature illustrations to warm a fed's heart. MCI has custom-designed a series of five cards to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Air Force, for example.

Some business travelers already swear by another new type of phone card-the enhanced calling card. Enhanced cards give travelers access to conference calls and services such as voice mail, faxes, speed-dial numbers and weather forecasts; charges are billed to their credit card. The Worldlink card from Premiere Technologies, for example, enables travelers with e-mail accounts on Compuserve to scan their messages and forward them to any fax machine to be printed. Travelers can save up to 70 percent on international calls and avoid hotel access fees and surcharges by using enhanced calling cards, reports Sato Travel's TravelLine newsletter.

Savvy international travelers have discovered they can exchange money at more attractive rates than offered by banks and travel agencies by simply using ATMs overseas. The machine spits out foreign cash, and the traveler's bank statement indicates the withdrawal amount in American funds.

Let Your Kiosk Do the Talking

In a few months, Immigration and Naturalization Service kiosks will be operational in 11 airports in the United States and Canada, including New York's Kennedy International, Newark, Miami, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Houston, San Francisco, Chicago, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. The kiosks, developed by the Transportation Department's Research and Special Program Administration's Volpe National Transport Systems Center and the INS to speed up immigration verification procedures, are designed for use by travelers who take at least three international business trips a year. Travelers must be citizens of the United States or the 26 other countries in the visa-waiver pilot program.

To use a kiosk, travelers must first visit an INS office to register their hand prints with the INSPass program. Thereafter, clearing U.S. immigration is a matter of inserting a card and a hand into an INSPass machine, which will automatically approve the traveler for entry.

"These new-age automated passenger inspection systems reduce delays at U.S. ports of entry, save travelers time and promote international commerce," RSPA administrator D.K. Sharma said in a Transportation Department newsletter last year.

More than 65,000 low-risk travelers are currently enrolled in the INSPass program, which won a 1996 Government Executive Technology Leadership Award.

Also in the works at RSPA's Volpe Center is a voice-activated automated inspection system for travelers entering the United States by car.

Touch-screen airport information kiosks provide travelers with easy access to information on ground transportation and local lodging options. In February, at San Francisco International Airport, QuickATM Corp., a leading airport information kiosk supplier, launched a new kind of kiosk-the airport Internet station. Once they register with QuickATM, travelers can visit a station to send and receive e-mail; log on to America Online, Compuserve and the Microsoft Network; surf the World Wide Web; telnet into remote computers to retrieve files, databases and e-mail; and even dig up Internet bookmarks stored on their home or office computer. Charges are billed to the customer's credit card. For more information, visit the QuickAID Web site at www.quickaid.com.

Satellite, Show Me the Way

Rental cars with computer navigation systems are no longer uncommon. Hertz Corp. just installed systems linked to the Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) from Rockwell International in 8,000 cars in 16 cities, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Francisco, Seattle, Orlando and Washington. Avis Rent A Car has equipped 1,000 of its cars in 20 cities with Rockwell units.

The Rockwell navigation system consists of a computer voice which barks turn-by-turn directions and a 4-inch color monitor, installed between the driver and the front passenger seats. The monitor can be read by either the driver or a passenger riding shotgun and shows the position and movement of the car on a map.

Currently, computer navigation systems are only installed in mid- and full-size, premium and luxury cars at Hertz and full-size and premium cars at Avis. Hertz and Avis representatives say there's nothing stopping travelers paying government car rental rates from obtaining cars with computer navigation systems if the cars are available. Government travelers will have to pay the additional fee that each company charges for use of the devices out of their own pocket, however: That fee is $6 a day at Hertz and $5 a day at Avis.

Budget Rent A Car and National Car Rental are testing computer navigation systems. Budget is experimenting with a system that is not GPS-based. The driver tells the car where they are along the chosen route and the computer responds with directions.

While the systems have yet to be perfected, researchers are already developing enhancements, Sato Travel's TravelLine reports. In the future, rental cars may reroute drivers around traffic jams using real-time traffic reports, steer drivers from high-crime neighborhoods and offer them advice on where to go to dinner.

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Meet George Jetson

Samantha Stainburn — Tue, 01 Apr 1997 00:00:00 -0500

Business travelers love the sound of their voice mail: Fifty percent of travelers with voice mail polled by DK Associates last year say they check their messages at least three times a day.

The 21st century is in travelers' faces no matter which sector they work for.

Card Tricks

With prepaid cards, telephone service is purchased in advance. Users dial a toll-free number and enter a personal identification number to activate their accounts.

Cards on sale at federal facilities are safe because telephone carriers supply them directly to the government. "We don't have a middle man involved," says Tracy Smith, an MCI representative.

Let Your Kiosk Do the Talking

More than 65,000 low-risk travelers are currently enrolled in the INSPass program, which won a 1996 Government Executive Technology Leadership Award.

Also in the works at RSPA's Volpe Center is a voice-activated automated inspection system for travelers entering the United States by car.

Satellite, Show Me the Way

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Meet George Jetson

Samantha Stainburn — Tue, 01 Apr 1997 00:00:00 -0500

Business travelers love the sound of their voice mail: Fifty percent of travelers with voice mail polled by DK Associates last year say they check their messages at least three times a day.

The 21st century is in travelers' faces no matter which sector they work for.

Card Tricks

With prepaid cards, telephone service is purchased in advance. Users dial a toll-free number and enter a personal identification number to activate their accounts.

Cards on sale at federal facilities are safe because telephone carriers supply them directly to the government. "We don't have a middle man involved," says Tracy Smith, an MCI representative.

Let Your Kiosk Do the Talking

More than 65,000 low-risk travelers are currently enrolled in the INSPass program, which won a 1996 Government Executive Technology Leadership Award.

Also in the works at RSPA's Volpe Center is a voice-activated automated inspection system for travelers entering the United States by car.

Satellite, Show Me the Way

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In Sickness and in Health

Samantha Stainburn — Sat, 01 Mar 1997 00:00:00 -0500

sstainbu@govexec.com)

he secret's out: Peace Corps volunteers aren't the only federal travelers who get diarrhea. The World Health Organization estimates that 20 percent to 50 percent of all travelers, stripe-suited government agency administrators and three-star generals among them, get it. It's the most common malady among international business travelers, says Dr. Bradley Connor, a spokesman for the International Society of Travel Medicine.

The most common ailment for domestic business travelers is colds and viruses picked up in crowded airports and airplane cabins. Many airlines that once pumped fresh air into cabins are now recirculating air because it saves fuel. Unfortunately, it also circulates germs.

There are steps travelers can take to protect their health before, during and after a trip. But swallowing vitamins may not be enough. Before they leave home, wise travelers also consider what they will do if their worst medical nightmare comes true. Because if it does, having to use an air sickness bag will be the least of their worries.

Dangers Lurk

What travelers don't know about the region they are visiting can kill them, or leave them with some nasty scars. In Latin America, for example, a bite from the 1-inch vinchuca or barbeiro insect, often present in rural and suburban accommodations, may transmit Chagas' disease, which, if not treated in its early stages, causes heart failure. Travelers can prevent the disease by checking their rooms for insects and using bug repellents and insecticides. In some areas of Africa, washing clothes in a hotel sink and hanging them up in the shower to drip dry, a common practice among feds who pack light, is not recommended. Tumbu flies lay invisible eggs in wet fabric, and when egg-infested clothes are worn, the larvae burrow into the person's skin. The first sign of infection is translucent pustules in which the wriggling larvae can be seen, accompanied by uncontrollable itching. Travelers can avoid starring in their own version of the movie Alien by making sure clothes are dried in a machine and pressed with a hot iron, which will kill the eggs.

Travelers visiting tropical and subtropical regions where malaria is present must take anti-malaria pills before, during and after their trip. Malaria is a potentially fatal blood disease transmitted by parasite-carrying mosquitoes. A patient can survive malaria, but the parasite cannot be purged from the blood stream and the disease may return years later. Malaria is continually evolving and becoming resistant to medications, so travelers must consult a doctor who specializes in travel medicine to find out which drug is currently most effective for their destination.

These days, the anti-malaria medication that the State Department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention generally recommend is mefloquine, sold under the brand name Larium. Larium is the strongest anti-malaria drug developed to date, and healthy travelers who have taken other malaria medications without incident have reported side effects ranging from insomnia and hallucinogenic dreams to acute depression and panic attacks. While hallucinogenic dreams are certainly preferable to malaria, many travelers have complained that their doctors did not sufficiently warn them of the risks. The manufacturer's research indicates that 22 percent of users will react adversely to the drug in some way. Travelers can minimize side effects by taking the weekly pill with a large, high-carbohydrate dinner, and washing it down with lots of liquid.

An Ounce of Prevention

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provides information on health risks on its Web site (www.cdc.gov) and its 24-hour automated telephone system (404-639-2572). The State Department's consular information sheets supply cursory information on medical facilities available around the world. The sheets are available online (travel.state.gov), from an automated fax system (202-647-3000) and at U.S. embassies and consulates overseas.

Medical experts recommend:

Getting immunizations. Inoculations are not just for international junkets. Even domestic trips expose a traveler's immune system to new food, water, climate, altitude and airborne pathogens, so it's best to update all standard vaccinations-diphtheria, tetanus, measles, mumps, rubella, polio and whooping cough-before departure. Travelers shouldn't procrastinate about getting jabs--shots for some diseases require repeat visits.
Packing a medical kit. When traveling abroad, carry prescription medicines in their original packages to subdue customs officials' suspicions. Carry copies of prescriptions for medications and for eyeglasses and contact lenses, translated into metric measurements if traveling abroad.
Preparing a brief medical history. Medical Advisory Services for Travelers Abroad (MASTA) suggests travelers carry a record of medical problems and treatment, medicines they are taking, along with dosages and schedules, and allergies to medicines. This information, plus a blood type, can be attached to a traveler's immunization record. Travelers may wish to join Medic Alert, a nonprofit organization that provides members with a 24-hour switchboard number a physician can call to find out information that may affect treatment, such as allergies to medication or HIV status. To register, contact Medic Alert at 2323 Colorado Ave., Turlock, Calif. 95382 or call (800) 763-3428. Membership costs $35 for the first year, $15 for each year thereafter.

"Advising travelers has become a specialist's task," says Connor of the International Society of Travel Medicine (ISTM). "Health risks by destination are always changing; published information is quickly out of date. Also, how do you adjust insulin for a diabetic who is flying through 12 time zones from New York to Hong Kong? Your regular practitioner is not likely to know."

ISTM's directory of travel medicine clinics worldwide is available on the Internet (www.istm.org) or from travel agents.

During and After

During a trip, travelers can prevent trouble by exercising caution around food and drink. Besides causing travelers diarrhea, contaminated food and drink can transmit typhoid and paratyphoid fevers, poliomyelitis, viral hepatitis A and parasitic infections that linger for years.

On international trips, the World Health Organization recommends that travelers avoid uncooked food (apart from fruits and vegetables that can be peeled), unpasteurized milk and non-bottled drinks. Freshly cooked food served piping hot is safe. But, the organization warns, "cooked food held at ambient temperatures (15 to 40 degrees celsius) for some time (more than four to five hours) constitutes one of the greatest risks of food-borne disease, since contaminating or surviving bacteria may multiply in it." Wise travelers avoid ice, and brush their teeth with bottled or boiled water.

On domestic trips, unavoidable rich business lunches may set off a bout of travelers diarrhea. Travelers who pick at their meals may have fewer problems later.

Travelers who are on the road for less than a month and feel perfectly healthy the entire time need not see a doctor upon their return, says Connor. However, he says, a visit to a physician is in order for people who engaged in risky behavior such as eating raw fish in the Philippines; were sick while traveling, even if they feel healthy; or became ill after they returned.

Preparing for the Worst

Every traveler should know the answers to the following questions before they leave home: If [insert personal medical nightmare here] happened,

How would I find a doctor?
How would the doctor get my records?
How would I pay for medical services?
How would I notify my family?

In a medical emergency, the government will arrange for and pay all expenses to transport a federal traveler to the nearest hospital for treatment.

Ailing employees who decide to head home are encouraged to book a contract-fare flight. But an employee is not prohibited from a non-contract fare flight if the plane leaves sooner or is more direct.

While incapacitated, an employee will continue to receive per diem for up to 14 days, after which an extension may be granted. If a federal traveler receives treatment at a government-run facility, they will not receive per diem. When federal employees travel, they're covered by workers' compensation 24 hours a day.

Before traveling, employees should contact their supervisors or human resources offices to find out their agency's plan for medical emergencies.

Travelers should also check their insurance coverage. Most insurance companies cover emergency care wherever an accident or illness occurs in the United States. In a non-emergency situation, however, a traveler may be required to visit a doctor within a particular health care network.

If travelers' health plans can't direct them to a doctor in a strange town, they can call the customer service number on the back of their government or personal American Express card, and an operator can refer them to medical care. Travelers can also join the International Association for Medical Assistance to Travelers (IAMAT) and receive a free directory of Western-trained, English speaking doctors in 125 countries. Association doctors charge $45 for an office visit, $55 for a house call and $65 for an evening or weekend appointment. To join, contact IAMAT at 417 Center St., Lewiston, N.Y. 14092, or call (716) 754-4883. Contributions are urged.

Not all physicians will fax medical records on demand, so travelers should find out their doctors' policies.

In case of death, travelers should carry their organ donor card with them. While not all foreign countries honor out-of-state directives, a traveler can register living wills with the 24-hour Docu-dial system offered by Choice in Dying, a nonprofit group. To register, contact Choice in Dying, 200 Varick St., New York, N.Y. 10014 or call (212) 366-5540. Docu-dial costs $55, or $45 for organization members.

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Postmark America

Samantha Stainburn — Tue, 18 Feb 1997 00:00:00 -0500

The Post Office has seen the future, and it's a Bugs Bunny T-shirt.

Last September, at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., the U.S. Postal Service opened Postmark America, a retail store that looks more like a Warner Brothers shop than any government facility. For sale: Merchandise with a postal theme, including Bugs Bunny stamp T-shirts, Marilyn Monroe stamp ties, Love stamp clocks, "Just Delivered" baby paraphanalia and a $225 Pony Express-inspired leather mailbag.

USPS is not a taxpayer-supported institution, and must cover all its costs from the sale of goods and services. In its business, it's either raise revenue or raise rates. "Postmark America is part of the Postal Service's overall strategy to generate new sources of revenue," explains spokesperson Jim Mruk.

The store manager is a career postal employee, but the sales staff comes from Manpower Inc. "It made more sense from a business point of view to hire people who had retail experience," says Mruk. Since the store does offer some traditional mail services, the sales staff has received the same type of training given to employees at USPS contract stations.

Not all Americans are happy shoppers. Postmark America "is a profit-driven venture...that flies in the face of everything the Postal Service and the government should be doing...which is delivering the mail," Rachel Southworth, executive director of the Coalition Against Unfair USPS Competition, told Bloomberg Business News in December. Also in December, more than 100 union members picketed Postmark America to protest the fact that some of the merchandise the store sells is manufactured overseas.

It cost the Postal Service $250,000-money spent on construction, fixtures, leasing and inventory-to launch the store. USPS expects the store to be in the black in its first year. After year one, the Postal Service projects the store will earn $1.9 million annually.

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Airport '97 Features Convenience

Samantha Stainburn — Wed, 01 Jan 1997 00:00:00 -0500

n estimated 32 million passengers trekked through Washington's National Airport during the week between Christmas and New Year's, and the crowds exacerbated all the little nuisances for which National is infamous.

Travelers walking from the subway to the main terminal found themselves and their luggage outside in the winter weather, jockeying for position on a makeshift pathway that traversed puddles of mud and wound through a parking lot. Those riding shuttle buses to the rental car garage got stuck in traffic in the short loop between the terminals and the garage. People getting picked up bumped into people getting dropped off.

Inside the main terminal, the crowds made the low ceilings and narrow hallways seem more claustrophobic than usual. For many, the only solace was in gazing toward the tarmac at the building with the bubble roof-National's nearly-completed new terminal. In a few months, the terminal will open, ending hassles Washington-based travelers have long endured.

The new terminal is the centerpiece of an $800 million renovation project-the first in National's 55-year history. The three-story terminal will be served by a two-level roadway-one level for departing passengers, one level for arriving passengers. A second exit to the Metro station will be added, and two enclosed moving walkways will carry passengers from the subway to the terminal. Already more people disembark at National's Metro stop than at any other subway stop in the country, but airport authorities hope to increase Metro use from 15 percent to at least 20 percent of airport passengers. A second parking garage opened last September. By the summer, its 4,400 parking spaces will be connected to the terminal by climate controlled pedestrian bridges.

Besides improving access to the airport, the renovation aims to help National shed its nondescript, shabby image. Architect Cesar Pelli's design for the building reminds travelers that they are in Washington: The entire east side of the terminal is glass, presenting travelers with a panoramic view of the airfield, Potomac River and Washington skyline beyond. The terminal roof is composed of domes, reminiscent of historic Washington buildings such as the Capitol. Each dome contains eight skylights, which provide natural light.

"The whole intent is to have a modern airport that reflects the fact that it's the gateway to the nation's capital," says Tara Hamilton, public affairs manager for the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, the independent organization that operates National and Washington-Dulles International airports and finances their capital development.

What is currently the main terminal will be renamed the south terminal and will be connected to the new terminal by a suspended walkway. Today's interim terminal will revert to an airplane hangar.

Then, Washington-based travelers can bid farewell to construction debris.

That is, unless they are heading to Dallas, where workers are preparing to replace the tile floor at the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport as part of a $6 million renovation that will continue into the fall. Or Miami, where the Miami International Airport is spending $1.4 billion to add 23 gates to its terminal by 1999. Or New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport, where a $3 billion renovation begins this spring. Or to any one of more than 10 major American airports that are renovating or expanding in 1997.

After the Dust Settles

Passenger traffic at North American airports from January 1996 to June 1996 was 7.1 percent higher than in the same period the year before, the Airports Council International reports. And airline industry watchers predict the number of people flying will increase.

To airports, more passengers mean higher profits-if they can find a way to manage the crowds. The airports that will capture most of the next century's new passengers are those that have the space to shove in a few more runways. Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport just added a seventh runway to boost capacity by up to 25 percent and Louisville International Airport in Kentucky plans to open two new runways by the end of this year, Sato Travel TravelLine reports. Zoning laws have been kind to Dulles in Virginia and Orlando International in Florida, granting them the acreage to grow to the magnitude of airports like Atlanta International and Chicago's O'Hare by the middle of the next century. Dulles, perched on 11,000 acres, has room for two more runways. Dulles completed expansion of its main terminal a few months ago, doubling its size by adding 320 feet to either side of the wing-shaped building; now it's adding a fifth lane to the roadway that runs the full length of the terminal. Orlando is already big-one of its runways is long enough that the Space Shuttle, which takes off from nearby Cape Canaveral, could land there if necessary. But the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority, which manages the airport, has a 20-year "master plan" that anticipates its passenger traffic doubling to 55 million by 2014. The airport plans to construct runways parallel to existing runways, so several planes can take off and land simultaneously.

Airports with less space are trying to maximize capacity by redesigning their terminals, squeezing in more parking spots and reorganizing ground transportation routes. For example, authorities at Los Angeles International have launched a campaign that encourages van and car pools to better manage curbside traffic, Sato Travel TravelLine reports.

Expansion is not the only reason for airport construction. When the dust settles at National, for example, it will still only have 44 gates, the same number it had when the airport opened in 1941. National is restrained from growth by geography-all it's got is 800 acres, and some of that is sludge at the bottom of the Potomac-and by several unique restrictions designed to keep it small. No plane flying more than 1,250 miles is allowed to depart from National. Only aircraft that are quiet enough to meet National's nighttime noise standards may fly in and out of the airport.

However, says Hamilton, the airports authority determined that National had become inhospitable to travelers, and that was reason enough to renovate.

The mind-set of airplane passengers has changed since the early days of flight, and airports are finding they need to update their facilities to reflect that change. Today's airline travelers demand convenience and familiar services.

Airports began to pay attention to these demands after the industry was deregulated and airports started to compete for travelers.

At Orlando, the American airport which participants in the most recent International Air Transport Association survey chose as their favorite, focusing on customers has led the airport authority to:

Eschew rows of hard plastic chairs for wicker armchairs and grouped seating.
Invite purveyors of brand name products, from Starbucks coffee to the Shipyard Brewing Co., to open shop.
Bring nontraditional services into the airport. At Orlando, travelers can get their shoes shined, get their hair cut, withdraw cash from an ATM, go to the post office, and buy computer software.

"What do our customers have less of than ever before? Time," says Carolyn Fennell, director of community relations at Orlando International. "We're responding to a public that has little time. [And] they're forced to be here earlier because of increased security."

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Airport '97 Features Convenience

Samantha Stainburn — Wed, 01 Jan 1997 00:00:00 -0500

What is currently the main terminal will be renamed the south terminal and will be connected to the new terminal by a suspended walkway. Today's interim terminal will revert to an airplane hangar.

Then, Washington-based travelers can bid farewell to construction debris.

After the Dust Settles

However, says Hamilton, the airports authority determined that National had become inhospitable to travelers, and that was reason enough to renovate.

Airports began to pay attention to these demands after the industry was deregulated and airports started to compete for travelers.

At Orlando, the American airport which participants in the most recent International Air Transport Association survey chose as their favorite, focusing on customers has led the airport authority to:

Eschew rows of hard plastic chairs for wicker armchairs and grouped seating.
Invite purveyors of brand name products, from Starbucks coffee to the Shipyard Brewing Co., to open shop.
Bring nontraditional services into the airport. At Orlando, travelers can get their shoes shined, get their hair cut, withdraw cash from an ATM, go to the post office, and buy computer software.

World's Busiest Airports

Airport	1995 Passengers (in millions)	Percent Change 1994 to 1995
Chicago (O'Hare)	67.3	1.2
Atlanta	57.7	6.7
London (Heathrow)	54.5	6.3
Dallas/Fort Worth	54.4	3.3
Los Angeles	53.9	5.6
Tokyo (Hanada)	45.8	3.0
Frankfurt	38.2	6.7
San Francisco	36.3	4.7
Miami	33.2	10.0
Denver	31.0	6.4

Source: Airports Council International

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Innovators Honored

Samantha Stainburn — Wed, 04 Dec 1996 00:00:00 -0500

The Ford Foundation gave away $1 million at the State Department last night.

Well, actually, it gave out ten plexiglass cubes. But these mementos, presented to the ten winners of the 1996 Innovations in American Government awards at a ceremony in the State Department's diplomatic reception rooms, will be followed by checks of $100,000 for each award winner.

The Innovations in American Government awards program, co-sponsored by the Ford Foundation and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard university, recognizes federal, state and local government initiatives that apply creative solutions to pressing social and economic problems.

"For 10 years, the Innovations Awards have honored government at its best," said Susan V. Berresford, president of the Ford Foundation. "These examples of effective government have produced extraordinary results for Americans. They are helping to restore faith in government's ability to solve tough problems."

Vice President Gore, who arrived at the ceremony after dinner to present the awards, said that the program was, for reinventors, one of the most important events of the year.

Three federal initiatives survived the arduous selection process, in which 1,560 applicants were whittled down to 15 finalists and then evaluated by a national committee led by former Michigan governor William F. Milliken. The federal winners are:

"Consolidated Planning/Community Connections," a Housing and Urban Development Department program that facilitates citizen participation in community development planning and replaces cumbersome reporting requirements.
"No Sweat," a program developed by the Wage and Hour division of the Labor Department that works to prevent the exploitation of workers in the garment industry by enlisting the voluntary cooperation of industry leaders, maximizing enforcement efforts and raising public awareness.
"Consequence Assessment Tools Set," a disaster damage prediction and mapping system created by personnel at the Federal Emergency Management Agency that speeds the delivery of emergency aid to areas devastated by disasters.

Last year was the first year that federal agencies were allowed to apply for Innovations awards. Six federal programs won awards in 1995. The Council for Excellence in Government, a Washington-based nonprofit organization, receives and administers Innovations award funds on behalf of the federal winners. Winners are instructed to spend at least 80 percent of their award money spreading the word about their achievements and encouraging other organizations to duplicate them.

For many at last night's ceremony, dinner was the second celebratory meal in the day. A few hours before the ceremony, the Innovations Awards winners were honored at a luncheon and panel discussion, moderated by NBC news correspondent Gwen Ifill, at the Mayflower Hotel in downtown Washington.

Panelists included: Secretary of Labor Robert Reich; Barbara Roberts, former governor of Oregon; Stephen Goldsmith, mayor of Indianapolis; Howard Safir, commissioner of police for New York city; and Mildred Winter, executive director of the Parents as Teachers National Center.

While the Innovation Awards program celebrates new approaches to problems, the panelists found themselves discussing old issues, such as red tape, the perceived reluctance of the media to cover "good news" stories and public distrust of government.

"How do you go about reinventing, innovating, changing the way you do business if basically people don't trust government?" Iffel asked the panel.

"This nation was built on distrust of government," Secretary Reich responded. "When we have a national crisis-a recession or a war-we tend to trust government a bit more. But when we don't have a national crisis we tend to go back to our normal state -- distrust. That's not necessarily a bad thing. But distinguish that from the particular things that government does. When you talk about sweatshops, or pension protection, or you talk about health and safety on the job, people want government there. It's only when you talk about government in the abstract that then we go back to our normal state of distrust."

Applications are currently being accepted for the 1997 Innovations Awards. Forms can be downloaded from the Innovations web site or obtained by calling the program at 800-722-0074. The entry deadline is Jan. 8.

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Road to Reinvention Has Bumps

Samantha Stainburn — Fri, 01 Nov 1996 00:00:00 -0500

he Defense Department has a clear vision of what it wants its travel system to be: Seamless, paperless, less costly; a system that supports mission requirements and provides excellent customer service.

DoD has a straightforward concept of how it's going to transform its existing travel system to achieve this vision: Simplify the rules, delegate authority and use the best industry practices.The agency even has a methodical plan: Collect baseline data on current travel processes and test new procedures at pilot sites, then implement the new system one region at a time.

In spite of well-laid plans, reengineering travel at DoD isn't proving to be clear, straightforward or methodical. However, it is proceeding apace, and the barriers that DoD employees are encountering contain valuable lessons for other federal agencies.

"We have made significant progress in a very short period of time," Undersecretary of Defense John Hamre told a Senate Governmental Affairs Committee panel in March. "Given the scope and complexity of the operations in this department and the changes under way in the travel industry itself, I would go even further to characterize the progress as extraordinary. I will admit to you, however, that this change effort has been much harder than we anticipated."

Whittling Down the Regs

DoD initiated its travel reengineering effort nearly two years ago with a task force report which pointed out that the current system was fragmented, inefficient and expensive. Hamre, DoD's comptroller, was chosen to lead the reengineering project, which would institutionalize a new management philosophy: Most travelers and supervisors are honest and responsible, and therefore, controls designed to prevent employees from bilking the travel budget can be loosened. DoD subsequently established two offices to overhaul travel processes. The eight-person Reengineering Travel Transition Office, based in the comptroller's office, changes policies to allow new procedures; the 19-person Defense Travel System Project Management Office implements the new procedures. The Military Traffic Management Command will oversee the new system when it becomes operational.

The Reengineering Travel Transition Office's first order of business was to wrestle the DoD's 230-page travel regulation document down to a 17-page pamphlet that places accountability for travel with the traveler's supervisor and gives all employees equal status as travelers. Since then, the comptroller's office has regularly issued directives which fine-tune the concepts contained in the revised regulations. Directives have included:

Giving supervisors the authority not only to approve travel, but also to obligate travel funds, thereby eliminating the lengthy process of seeking funding approval from a central source.
Maximizing use of travel charge cards.
Performing random audits.
Allowing split-disbursement (reimbursing a traveler's personal account and/or government charge card account).

In June 1995, DoD selected 27 pilot sites to test new travel regulations, 21 of which are up and running. DoD was unable to launch all pilot sites simultaneously because sites used different contractors and equipment, and existing contracts expired at different times. Only pilot sites can use all the revised regulations. However, some changes were rolled out departmentwide in fiscal 1996. These include:

Electronic funds transfer (EFT). DoD now issues travel advances and reimbursements by electronic funds transfer rather than by cash or Treasury checks. The Defense Finance and Accounting Service is developing a Defense Business Operations Fund rate structure that will reward DoD offices for promoting EFT.
Meals and incidental expenses (M&IE). In the past, DoD travelers calculated M&IE for their first and last days of travel based on departure and return times. Now, 75 percent of the regular M&IE reimbursement is the standard for first and last days of travel.
$75 receipt threshold. Since the IRS changed its policy, DoD no longer requires travelers to retain receipts for travel expenses less than $75, with the exception of lodging expenses.
Paper non-availability statement. In the past, DoD travelers staying off base had to obtain a written statement from the installation's billeting offices stating that on-base lodging was unavailable. The statements are no longer required if travelers are unable to reserve lodging with the billeting office prior to departure.

Checks and Balances

Pilot sites reported a number of stumbling blocks to implementing the new travel system, Comptroller Hamre told the Senate panel in March. They noted difficulties in obtaining electronic signature capability, updating software and educating managers and travelers about their responsibilities under the new system.

To make the travel system paperless, DoD needs to ensure that the person claiming travel funds is entitled to them and the person authorizing the funds is the correct certifying official. Electronic signature capability can provide the required integrity, but GAO has been cautious about approving its testing. Senior Master Sgt. Robert Sullivan, a program management officer at Air Combat Command's pilot site in Langley, Va., says the command received permission to test electronic signature technology only after "months and months of negotiation with GAO. They were very, very careful to understand what our system was before they let us go. Our encryption had to be of a high grade."

DoD also underestimated the time it would take to update software at the pilot sites and ensure that their accounting systems accept the changes for payment processing. The software updates are necessary to incorporate new entitlement rules. "Since entitlement changes occur on a regular basis, this is an issue that needs to be worked," Hamre said.

Concerns are beginning to surface about contracting. It is unclear whether DoD's travel reengineers envision one software provider, or several, for all of the department's travel processing. The pilot sites are testing software from different vendors.

If DoD chooses to incorporate a variety of vendors into its new travel system, indications are that software will be procured on a regional basis. The Midwest Defense Travel Region is scheduled to release a request for proposal for new software in early 1997. "We don't view this as a very good thing," says Air Combat Command's Sullivan. Twenty-five percent to 33 percent of DoD's personnel move every year, he points out. If each region uses different software contractors, employees will be required to learn a new system each time they move. If different travel software programs are used in the new travel system, says Sullivan, it would be better to have each service procure its own.

Still, feedback on the reengineering concept remains positive. Employees at Air Combat Command say "the electronic method is long overdue," Sullivan says.

1997 CITY-PAIR CONTRACTS

his fiscal year, travelers' plane tickets will cost an average of 62 percent less than unrestricted coach fare tickets when feds fly on city-pair routes. And federal fliers will have about 1,000 more city-pair routes to choose from than they did in fiscal 1996.

Each year, under the city-pair program, the General Services Administration's Federal Supply Service awards air transportation contracts for official government travel. The awards are based on the best overall value. The decision is based on the type of aircraft, distribution and number of flights, the average flight time and the average ticket price.

For fiscal 1997, GSA awarded contracts for 6,147 city pairs, up from 5,115 city pairs in fiscal 1996. The average discount off the full walk-up fare is 62 percent, saving the government $2.4 billion.

The contracts feature several advantages over commercial fares:

No advance purchase is required.
No minimum or maximum length of stay is required.
The tickets are fully refundable. There is no charge for cancellations or for schedule changes.
Seats are not capacity-controlled, meaning as long as there is a coach class seat available, the government traveler can purchase it at the contract fare.
There are no blackout periods in which the fares do not apply.
The price will not change throughout the length of the contract, enabling agencies to better plan travel budgets.

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Smooth Operators

Samantha Stainburn — Tue, 01 Oct 1996 00:00:00 -0400

nnovation has no hard and fast rules. That's the story behind the seven federal finalists in the 1996 Innovations in American Government Awards program. The program, sponsored by the Ford Foundation and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, celebrates good government by awarding $100,000 to each of 15 federal, state or local government projects. Competition is stiff. This year, the judges received more than 1,550 nominations, 330 from federal agencies. Nominees submit applications of up to 10 pages and judges pick 30 finalists. Academics and other government affairs specialists evaluate the finalists' programs. A panel of judges chaired by William G. Milliken, former governor of Michigan, chooses the winners. Finalists who aren't winners receive $20,000.

This is only the second year federal programs have been eligible to participate in the 10-year-old awards program. Some innovations, such as the Labor Department's program to eradicate sweatshops, were guided by top management. Others, such as the Federal Aviation Administration's oral proposals project, were pushed through from below. Some innovations grew out of agency efforts to do more with less. But the Commerce Department's U.S. export assistance centers developed out of the agency's determination to do more with what they've got. And the Social Security Administration's Disability Services Team is a study in what a program can accomplish when money is no object.

Innovation is not necessarily welcome in the federal sector. But some program officials discovered that letting a valuable product or service speak for itself could win over skeptics. Innovators have to "be willing to lay out a vision," says Maria Echaveste, administrator of the Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division. "Try to get buy-in. But move ahead even without total buy-in. Then come back and say, 'would you not admit that the program is working?' "

The 15 winners will be announced in December.

Federal Emergency Management Agency
Department of Commerce
Department of Education
Department of Housing and Urban Development
Federal Aviation Administration
Department of Labor
Social Security Administration

Federal Emergency Management Agency
Consequence Assessment Tool Set

he day before Hurricane Andrew slammed into South Florida, Federal Emergency Management Agency employee Paul Bryant tried to estimate how many households might qualify for disaster assistance after the storm. Following standard FEMA procedures, he telephoned local officials to discuss the National Weather Service's predictions for the hurricane. However, the phone lines were down, and he was unable to reach anyone. Then the idea hit him: Why not modify the computer model that FEMA used to project the consequences of nuclear bomb blasts to estimate the effect of the hurricane? Using the model, Bryant estimated 260,000 Floridians would need FEMA's services.

In the meantime, other FEMA personnel contacted local officials and come up with a different estimate: 20,000 people. The staff presented the two estimates to FEMA Director Wallace Stickney, who decided the agency would plan around the estimate done by the book. That turned out to be a mistake. In the end, the victim count was closer to Bryant's ad-hoc computer estimate, with 310,000 people requiring FEMA assistance. FEMA's underestimation of the disaster caused delays in delivering food, water and shelter to victims.

In separate audits of FEMA's performance during Hurricane Andrew in 1992, FEMA's inspector general, the National Association of Public Administration and the General Accounting Office urged the agency to develop computer models to improve its predictive powers. Following Paul Bryant's lead, FEMA's applications division formally adapted some Defense Nuclear Agency disaster models, mixed in geographic information systems technology and a handful of databases to come up with the Consequences Assessment Tool Set (CATS).

CATS is a computer-based disaster impact and geographic mapping system which predicts the number of households that may be affected by hurricanes, earthquakes, storm surges, fires, or chemical or nuclear accidents. It lists the characteristics of victims and the location of hospitals, airports and roads. Emergency managers at federal, state and local agencies have access to CATS.

While CATS is still under development (only its hurricane and earthquake models are fully operational), it has already improved FEMA's response to disasters. The system produced accurate damage estimates for 1993's Hurricane Emily (674 homes damaged; the actual number was 683) and 1995's Hurricane Marilyn (5,100 homes damaged; the actual number was 5,300), which helped FEMA direct an appropriate amount of aid to victims. When the Mississippi flooded in 1993, FEMA used CATS to capture images from meteorological satellites every few hours so that it could provide relief agencies with up-to-date information on the extent of the damage. During the 1994 Northridge, Calif., earthquake, CATS enabled FEMA employees to identify and assign the appropriate foreign language interpreters to disaster assistance centers.

Department of Commerce
U.S. and Foreign Commercial Service, International Trade Administration
U.S. Export Assistance Centers

llicott International, a Baltimore-based, 100-year-old manufacturer of dredging equipment, supplied dredges to South Vietnam before the Vietnam War. Five of the dredges are still being used by Hanoi's Ministry of Transportation. In 1994, Ellicott heard the Vietnamese government planned to invest in new dredging vessels, and competed for the contract. Unfortunately for the corporation, full diplomatic relations between the United States and Vietnam were not in place, and a Dutch firm was well-positioned to sell Hanoi the equipment.

Negotiations dragged on until it appeared likely the Vietnamese would buy dredges from the Dutch. Then a trade specialist from the U.S. export assistance center in Baltimore arranged for a variety of high-ranking U.S. officials, including Vice President Gore, to write letters urging Hanoi to do business with the American corporation. The letters tipped the scales in Ellicott's favor. Ellicott won the $12 million contract and became the first U.S. business to enter Vietnam since the end of the war.

The Ellicott win is exactly the type of export expansion the Commerce Department hoped to promote when it opened four pilot U.S. export assistance centers in January 1994. The Clinton Administration believes increasing exports will spur economic growth, and is looking to small- and medium-sized exporters in "emerging markets" to provide that boost.

The centers are one-stop shops offering export counseling, trade finance and export support services from federal and state agencies and private firms. Staffs of trade specialists respond to requests, maintain relationships with exporting firms and introduce the service to new clients. Export assistance centers provide information only the U.S. government can get-intelligence gathered by U.S. embassies-and custom services such as background checks of foreign sales agents at less thsn cost.

There are now 14 export assistance centers in major cities and 15 district export assistance centers located outside urban hubs. The Commerce Department estimates the program assists 27 percent of American firms active in foreign markets. The program measures its impact in terms of "export actions"-new or increased sales of goods or services abroad due to a center employee. Commerce officials anticipate 8,108 export actions in fiscal 1996, a 67 percent increase from the previous year.

The program is not without controversy. While the centers target small- and medium-sized export firms, giant corporations such as Northrop Grumman also benefit from their services. Some critics view the centers as competition for private companies that offer export assistance services. Others contend that a serious export expansion program requires more money.

Still, export assistance centers have convinced thousands of exporters to view the federal government as their ally in the international trade arena. For American companies considering expanding into unfamiliar territory, this is no small matter.

Department of Education
Office of Postsecondary Education/ Office of Student Financial William D. Ford Direct Loan Program

hat do you do with an unnecessarily expensive, complex and fraud-ridden federal program that's been a permanent fixture on the General Accounting Office's High Risk lists since 1990? Replace it with something better.

That's the solution the Education Department had in mind when it developed the Direct Loan Program (DLP). In 1957, the government established the Guaranteed Student Loan Program, later known as the Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP), to help students pay for higher education. The government guaranteed loans to students from financial institutions. Unfortunately, FFELP turned into a bureaucratic nightmare. Seven thousand banks, 50 secondary markets and 41 guaranty agencies are part of the FFELP, and the paperwork causes processing delays as well as administrative headaches for schools. Students cannot adjust their repayment schedules, which many Education officials believe is the reason for the program's high default rate-15 percent in 1995.

The Direct Loan Program attempts to head off these problems in several innovative ways: The government loans money to students directly, from its own coffers. The lending process is conducted electronically-applications and approval are transmitted and money is transferred to the schools by computer. The program gives students three repayment options which they can change at any time and as many times as they wish without penalty. One option is repayment based on a fixed percentage of income, which the government verifies through IRS records.

"We can report firsthand the benefits of direct lending for our students," several hundred university presidents wrote to Congress in November 1995. "The simplicity of application, the speed of delivery of funds, the disappearance of lines of students waiting to endorse their checks at registration time, the precipitous drop in the number of emergency loans issued to students waiting to hear about their loans from banks and guarantors, and fewer visits to financial aid offices. Students often borrow less under direct lending because they know they can adjust their loan amounts without repeating the entire application process, and therefore only borrow what they believe they need, not the maximum for which they are eligible. At the institutional level, direct lending has eliminated redundant paperwork, reduced staff time allocated to dealing with thousands of lenders, guarantors and intermediaries, and vastly improved our overall aid delivery process because it seamlessly integrates with other federal aid programs."

In 1994, auditors granted the Direct Loan Program the first "clean" audit for a federal student aid program in the history of the Education Department. In a 1995 Education Daily survey, 90 percent of participating colleges and universities rated the Direct Loan Program as "excellent" and 100 percent said they would recommend it to other schools.

However, the Direct Loan Program will have to win over Congress if it is to survive, let alone replace the monolithic FFELP. Lobbyists for the loan industry-which stands to lose millions of dollars in business forwarded to them each year by FFELP if it is replaced by the Direct Loan Program-have the ear of some lawmakers.

Department of Housing and Urban Development
Office of Community Planning and Development
Community Connections

ccording to the National Election Studies Center at the University of Michigan, 76 percent of Americans think the government is run by a few big interests looking out for themselves rather than for the benefit of all the people. Fifty-five percent of Americans believe citizens don't have a say in what government does. Twenty-one percent of eligible voters are not registered to vote, and 20 percent who are registered didn't vote in state and local elections in 1994.

Government workers know that trust in their institution is at an all-time low; mostly, they do their best to ignore the catcalls and get on with the agency's mission. Not at HUD's Office of Community Planning and Development (CPD), however. The office has made the restoration of civic involvement part of their mission, and are pursuing it with a program called Community Connections.

Community Connections works to restructure the relationships between the government and citizens by improving their access to information. "Information is a form of power," assistant secretary for community planning and development Andrew Cuomo said in an interview earlier this year. "We want to get as much information as possible to the citizens so they have power to deal with the decision-makers."

In the past, information HUD provided to citizens was difficult to get and hard to digest. Community Connections disseminates information about community development in a language and style that draws citizens in. The program maintains a Web site (http://www.comcon.org) and a toll-free number (800-998-9999) and provides mapping software to public libraries and schools for free. The software, developed by CPD, enables users to pull up and manipulate community maps, viewing them according to race, income levels and unemployment rates. The mapping software prompts the kind of questions that spur citizen activism: "Why doesn't my neighborhood have a police station, while that neighborhood has two?" Individuals and organizations can purchase the software at a subsidized cost of $125.

Citizen understanding of community development has been obscured by the onerous applications that states and localities have been required to submit to obtain federal funding. CPD administers 12 programs that distribute more than $10 billion nationwide. Previously, each of these programs was run by a separate staff, required a separate application and operated according to its own set of regulations, grant cycles and reporting requirements. Connections between programs were difficult to discern or advocate. Assessing the impact of federal funding on a regional basis was a daunting task. So CPD folded the 12 sets of procedures into one consolidated plan. States and localities are required to submit their consolidated plans electronically, using CPD's mapping software to describe their intentions. In 1995, consolidated planning enabled CPD to administer 82 percent more in program funds with 20 percent fewer employees than in 1992.

The program's administrators expect local participants to develop uses for Community Connection's tools that they never dreamed of. To encourage leapfrogging innovations, CPD has formed a development team to support users developing new applications for the system.

The Federal Aviation Administration
Office of Air Traffic Systems Development
Oral Proposals in Major Government Procurements

t most agencies, complex procurements that take a year or so are tiresome. At the Federal Aviation Administration, such procurements can be life-threatening.

FAA air traffic controllers need working equipment if they are to keep airplanes from colliding. Unfortunately, the FAA's procurement procedures have prevented the agency from replacing its archaic, deteriorating air traffic control system. In 1983, the agency attempted to update the system by commissioning the Advanced Automation System. However, the agency scrapped the modernization effort in 1994, when the program had overrun its budget and fallen eight years behind schedule, and managers realized the system would be obsolete before it was completed.

The FAA began a new modernization program, but this time the agency did not have the luxury of conducting business at its usual snail's pace. Already, components of the air traffic control system were wearing out. Contractors hired to provide technical services had only six months left on their contracts. Procurements of hardware and technical assistance had to be speeded up.

Desperation spawned innovation at the Office of Air Traffic Systems Development. The office abandoned its normal procedures for procuring technical support. Instead of requiring paper proposals (which typically took months for vendors to prepare and months for evaluators to read), the agency gave vendors 30 days to submit videotaped oral proposals. It took less time to evaluate videotapes, which enabled the project team to recruit busy, senior FAA officials to participate in the evaluation.

The office took other steps to streamline procurement, including posting a draft request for proposal (RFP) on the Internet and prequalifying vendors.

The result: The FAA awarded its technical assistance contract five months after it released the RFP and three weeks ahead of the anticipated contract award date. In the past, procurements of similar size and complexity had taken 12 to 14 months to complete. The FAA estimates it saved $280,000 through the streamlined pro

curement process since employees spent less time on the project, no extra storage space was required for stacks of paper proposals and additional office space did not need to be leased for proposal evaluators. Vendors reported that the process cut their costs in half.

Federal agencies have used oral proposals to streamline small procurements, but the FAA's oral proposals project demonstrates the same techniques can be applied to procurements worth more than $300 million that are central to agency missions.

Department of Labor
Wage and Hour Division
Eradicating Sweatshops

n November 1995, the Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division discovered that underpaid workers in a sweatshop in Massachusetts were sewing garments for Talbots, the upscale women's clothing retailer. The division informed Talbots, which, like most large clothing retailers, is several steps removed from the garment assembly process and was unaware of the origin of its goods. "They said, 'Thanks for the information,' and that was it," Maria Echaveste, the administrator of the division, recalls. Six months later, the Labor Department busted another sweatshop whose workers were manufacturing clothes for Talbots. This time, after notifying Talbots, the Wage and Hour Division issued a statement to the press stating that Talbots was receiving merchandise produced in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Talbots finally took action. In June, the company circulated a new policy to its suppliers, stipulating that "Talbots suppliers now will have to annually sign and notarize a certification form stating that they have a program of monitoring their contract sewing shops and other contractors."

Public humiliation is only one technique being used these days by employees of the Wage and Hour Division working to eradicate sweatshops.

The division is charged with ensuring industry complies with laws protecting American workers. Violations are rampant in the garment business, where the multi-tiered structure and the pressure to turn a profit encourage subcontractors to send piecework to sweatshops that abuse immigrant labor. Even though retailers manage to monitor their contractors for quality and on-time delivery, they have traditionally turned a blind eye to labor law violations in the manufacturing of their products. The eradication of sweatshops would increase retailers' costs.

Until recently, the Wage and Hour Division's impact on sweatshops was scattershot and fleeting. Acting on tips from sewing shop workers, investigators would visit sites of alleged abuse. When they found labor law violations, investigators would order shop owners to clean up their act. Usually, instead of improving working conditions or paying back wages, the shops would close down, then reopen down the street under a new name. "We were hitting brick walls," says Suzanne Seiden, director of special projects at the division. The scope of the division's mission is also an obstacle-the Labor Department only has 800 investigators to monitor the nation's entire civilian workforce of 110 million.

So, in 1993, Wage and Hour administrator Echaveste and Labor Secretary Robert Reich devised a new strategy: use a combination of recognition, education and enforcement to provide incentives for the retailers to police the industry themselves. Wage and Hour investigators were instructed to invoke the "Hot Goods Provision" of the Fair Standards Act, a law that declares it illegal to ship goods manufactured in violation of the law from one state to another. With regular use of the "Hot Goods Provision" by investigators, retailers risk losses if their manufacturers hire sweatshops.

In 1995, the Wage and Hour Division published the first edition of "The Fashion Trendsetters List," identifying retailers and manufacturers that monitor their contractors' labor practices. Retailers wishing to share in the favorable publicity have to improve their monitoring record. The list has grown since 1995, and now includes 35 retailers. The division has made it routine to let the public know when investigators discover the labels of a prominent retailer on a sweatshop floor. When the clothing line is endorsed by a celebrity like Kathie Lee Gifford, who then adopts eradicating sweatshops as a personal cause, the publicity generated far exceeds anything the Wage and Hour Division could accomplish with its shoestring budget.

Since it initiated new anti-sweatshop strategies in 1993, the Wage and Hour Division has recovered more than $7.3 million in back wages for more than 25,000 workers. But perhaps more significantly, the division's strategy has recruited fresh troops in the battle to curb labor abuses-retailers, manufacturers and the public.

Social Security Administration
Office of Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity
Disability Services Team

he Social Security Administration dispenses disability benefits to more than 10 million Americans each year. Yet, until recently, the agency's commitment to the disabled was not reflected in its own workforce. In 1986, employees with disabilities made up less than 1.6 percent of the SSA's workforce. They were about half as likely to be promoted as their able-bodied counterparts.

The problem was logistics more than oversight. In order to perform SSA jobs, people with disabilities may

need adaptive equipment, communications devices or personal assistants. Managers were unaware of the resources available, and didn't have the expertise or the budgets to procure them.

In 1992, following the recommendation of an employee work group, the SSA created the Disability Services Team, a staff of eight whose full-time job is to ensure that no qualified individual is prevented from getting a job or advancing in the agency because of a disability. Team members accommodate needs on a case-by-case basis, in response to requests from employees or managers. Accommodation ranges from assigning sign-language interpreters to deaf employees to installing voice-activated computers, Braille output systems and optical scanners at employees' workstations and supplying employees with motor scooters. Team members hire trainers to instruct employees in using their adaptive devices, and they research and test new adaptive technology.

The Disability Services Team strives to integrate people with disabilities into the workplace. Initiatives have included installing closed-caption televisions and video recorders in conference rooms; creating an electronic bulletin board to notify employees with disabilities of workplace activities; providing transportation to meetings; and disseminating agency publications to blind employees in alternative media.

In the Disability Services Team's first three years, the number of employees with disabilities at the agency grew from 5,205 to 5,713. Disabled employees are now slightly more likely to advance than able-bodied employees. The team has decreased the time it takes for its staff to process requests for accommodation from an average of 8 months in 1992 to 31 days in 1995.

The Disability Services Team stands out from other government and private sector efforts to level the playing field for workers with disabilities. The SSA has increased the team's budget from $994,000 to $5.2 million over the last four years, even as it has reduced or eliminated funding for other programs.

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Smooth Operators

Samantha Stainburn — Tue, 01 Oct 1996 00:00:00 -0400

The 15 winners will be announced in December.

Federal Emergency Management Agency
Department of Commerce
Department of Education
Department of Housing and Urban Development
Federal Aviation Administration
Department of Labor
Social Security Administration

Federal Emergency Management Agency
Consequence Assessment Tool Set

Department of Commerce
U.S. and Foreign Commercial Service, International Trade Administration
U.S. Export Assistance Centers

Department of Education
Office of Postsecondary Education/ Office of Student Financial William D. Ford Direct Loan Program

Department of Housing and Urban Development
Office of Community Planning and Development
Community Connections

The Federal Aviation Administration
Office of Air Traffic Systems Development
Oral Proposals in Major Government Procurements

t most agencies, complex procurements that take a year or so are tiresome. At the Federal Aviation Administration, such procurements can be life-threatening.

The office took other steps to streamline procurement, including posting a draft request for proposal (RFP) on the Internet and prequalifying vendors.

Department of Labor
Wage and Hour Division
Eradicating Sweatshops

Public humiliation is only one technique being used these days by employees of the Wage and Hour Division working to eradicate sweatshops.

Social Security Administration
Office of Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity
Disability Services Team

The problem was logistics more than oversight. In order to perform SSA jobs, people with disabilities may

need adaptive equipment, communications devices or personal assistants. Managers were unaware of the resources available, and didn't have the expertise or the budgets to procure them.

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The Relocation Blues

Samantha Stainburn — Sun, 01 Sep 1996 00:00:00 -0400

fter 12 moves in the last 12 years, Francesca Kelly has learned a hard truth about relocating for the federal government: No matter how much you prepare, it's never easy.

"I thought it would [get easier], but it doesn't at all," says Kelly, the wife of a Foreign Service officer and the editor of The Spouses' Underground Newsletter, an independent publication for Foreign Service spouses. "You know you have to get organized ahead of time, but the last weeks are pretty much always a nightmare."

The car has to be sold, the house has to be rented, bank accounts have to be closed, pets have to be shipped. And then there is the multitude of tiny, but critical, decisions that need to be made: "You find three puzzle pieces [when you're packing]," says Kelly. "Should you spend time looking for the rest of the pieces, or should you just throw them out?"

It's true that the federal government provides its employees with relocation allowances, language training and designated transportation services. "They expedite everything for you. They give you someone to call," observes Jim Murphy, a State Department employee who moved to Moscow with his family in July. Still, when Government Executive caught up with Murphy one week before his departure and asked what preparations he had left to do, Murphy rolled his eyes. "Everything," he said. "Luckily, my wife's doing a lot of it."

Therein lie two more truths about moving for the federal government: First, the families of federal employees do not merely accompany them, they do much of the work. Second, when it comes down to the wire, you're on your own.

Relocation Reforms

Why do even veteran movers find relocating such an ordeal? One reason is that every move is different. It's easy to devise coping strategies when travel is routine: A three-day temporary duty trip means one suit, a Tom Clancy novel and a small carry-on. But each time a federal employee relocates, says Ray Leki, director of the State Department's Overseas Briefing Center in Arlington, Va., chances are they will be at a different stage of their life-single, married, raising a family-and their needs and concerns will have changed.

At the beginning of Francesca Kelly's husband's Foreign Service career, for example, the Kellys did not have children. Now they have four. "With each additional kid, it's that many more people pulled out of their lives," says Kelly. "And they all need different things."

Federal travel regulations make moving even tougher. Relocation regulations are dense, sometimes counterintuitive and always changing. Change can be good, however. Seeking to save money anywhere they can, agencies and the Joint Financial Management Improvement Program (JFMIP), an interagency group, are exploring opportunities to reduce relocation travel costs. It turns out that many cost-cutting maneuvers also improve the relocation process for employees. For example, in 1994, the Social Security Administration (SSA) piloted a Relocation Home Marketing Incentive Program to see if it could encourage more transferring employees to sell their homes themselves. (The SSA, like most federal agencies, offers its transferring employees the option of having a contractor market their homes for them. The agency pays the contractors' fees, which can be substantial.)

The SSA offered a cash incentive of $2,500 to each transferring employee who sold and closed on his or her home in connection with a change of station. In the first year of the program, the agency saved $930,000 on contractor fees, and 92 transferees walked away $2,500 richer. In July, Congress enacted legislation that will allow other agencies to authorize similar home marketing incentives.

In another cost-cutting maneuver than helps employees, some agencies have decided that the 30 days advance notice for relocation suggested in GSA's Federal Travel Regulations is not enough time. Observing that the more time an employee has to plan for relocation, the lower the relocation costs, they've instituted longer notification periods of 120 to 180 days. As a result, temporary housing and storage costs have declined, along with employee stress levels.

The military services are trying to cut relocation costs by encouraging consecutive assignments in certain geographic locations. In October 1995, the commandant of the Marine Corps ordered personnel managers to increase the number of enlisted personnel assigned to consecutive tours in three regions-North Carolina, Southern California and the Washington, D.C., area. The Marine Corps saves money by reducing the number of moves for which it has to foot the bill, and the quality of life of its employees improves.

Agencies are recognizing that relocation travel is not a process that only affects the federal employee. "If the family is unhappy, this could affect the employee's productivity," says Maureen Johnston, information assistant at the State Department's Overseas Briefing Center. One of the JFMIP's Relocation Travel Improvement Team's recommendations is that agencies be given discretionary authority to pay for employment assistance-such as resume printing, career counseling and job placement fees-for relocating spouses. Some American embassies abroad assign personnel the task of expediting the paperwork for spouses' local work permits.

Still, the extent to which many spouses are involved in the logistics of moving has yet to be sufficiently recognized by most agencies. In the fall 1995 edition of The Spouses' Underground Newsletter, Lois Phalen writes about the frustration caused by her unofficial status in the moving process when her Foreign Service husband was assigned to Frankfurt, Germany, in 1995: "I tried to change the moving date that I had arranged with the moving company. I was told, however, that any change had to be authorized by the State Department and of course I could not talk to our personnel technician (as I am the eligible family member [not the employee]). It is the difficulty not being able to talk to personnel myself or any number of offices that makes moving so difficult. Virtually everything has to be filtered through my husband, who has plenty of other distractions."

Mental Preparation

While employee- and family-friendly regulations help, moving will never be easy. It requires employees to rip their houses apart, bid farewell to family and friends, and head off into the great unknown. Many federal employees underestimate the amount of mental preparation they-and their families-need to do in order to manage the unavoidable emotional turmoil.

The U.S. government will ship a federal employee's household effects to their destination, but it's up to the employee and their family to decide which state of disarray they prefer: Do they ship their goods early and camp out here or ship their goods late and camp out there?

Kelly sides with packing out early. "A good piece of advice someone once gave me was to send your air freight early because you're going to need your stuff more at the new post than at this end," she says.

The Military Personnel and Civilian Employees' Claims Act of 1964 does not provide full coverage against loss and or damage to property. Federal employees must determine how much private insurance they need in order to adequately protect their belongings.

And federal employees have to collect information to mentally prepare them and their families for the move. "Network with people who have been where you're going," says Barbara Jacquin, a State Department employee who moves to Burkina Faso this month. The information center at the Overseas Briefing Center maintains a file of people who have recently returned from abroad and are willing to answer questions about their last post. The center also stocks yearbooks from overseas schools, culture guides and country briefing boxes which contain maps and information on housing, medical facilities and local shopping. This information is provided for all federal government employees and their families who are heading overseas, not just State Department employees.

The Kelly family expects to move again next year, and Francesca Kelly vows to be more relaxed. "The packers pack up what they see," she says. "So the worst that can happen is they'll pack up a garbage can with garbage in it, or something else you don't want to bring. You can deal with it at the other end."

For information on subscribing to The Spouse's Underground Newsletter, fax (703) 319-9348. The OBC Information Center can be reached at (703) 302-7277.

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The Relocation Blues

Samantha Stainburn — Sun, 01 Sep 1996 00:00:00 -0400

fter 12 moves in the last 12 years, Francesca Kelly has learned a hard truth about relocating for the federal government: No matter how much you prepare, it's never easy.

Relocation Reforms

Mental Preparation

For information on subscribing to The Spouse's Underground Newsletter, please e-mail Francesca Kelly at fkellysun@aol.com, or check out the SUN website at http://www.thesun.org.

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Agencies Fight to Stay Within Budgets

Samantha Stainburn — Thu, 15 Aug 1996 00:00:00 -0400

n 1995 and early 1996, federal travel received a lot of press, most of it bad. General Accounting Office officials testified before Congress that the federal government spends up to 12 times more than private sector companies on travel-related administrative processes. The Commerce Department inspector general revealed that some Commerce employees had been using their government travel cards to buy jewelry, liquor and flowers. The House Appropriations Committee chairman charged that the Transportation department frequently sends too many employees on government business trips and lets them travel for too long. Cabinet secretaries, most famously Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary, were accused of taking an excessive number of trips to foreign locales.

Does federal travel deserve its growing reputation as a hotbed of abuse of tax dollars? Not when you look at the big picture. Government Executive's Top 200 Federal Contractors data sketches a picture of agencies making an effort to stick to their travel budgets.

Federal spending on travel in fiscal 1995 totaled $7.77 billion, roughly matching what the Office of Management and Budget had reported a year earlier that agencies would spend. Of the 19 agencies with the largest travel budgets, only two of the government's financial regulatory institutions, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Resolution Trust Corp., exceeded their travel spending estimates for fiscal 1995. Some components of RTC have been absorbed by FDIC, and OMB is projecting that spending on travel in the combined agency will decrease by more than 40 percent in fiscal 1997.

Some agencies, such as the Energy Department, have identified travel spending as an area of their budget that they can cut back by instituting more efficient travel procedures. Other agencies, who've shut field offices to reach federal workforce reduction goals, are finding that their travel budgets have to increase as headquarters-based staff take more trips into the field.

The reality for many federal employees is that they must travel in order for their agencies to accomplish their missions. Many agencies learned this the hard way during the federal shutdowns in October 1995 and January 1996, when they curtailed travel spending in response to the budget crisis. Some Environmental Protection Agency offices cut back inspection of hazardous waste storage and treatment sites by 50 percent; employees at the National Institute of Standards and Technology were unable to participate in international conferences where participants set trade standards; and Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspectors were unable to travel to training centers to receive instruction in safety and health issues, Federal Times reported.

Until fiscal 1995, the travel spending chart was typically dominated by the same five agencies: the departments of Defense, Transportation, Treasury, Justice and Agriculture. In 1995, the Veterans Affairs Department knocked the Agriculture department out of the top five. Travel sending at the VA increased 13 percent from fiscal 1994 to fiscal 1995 while Agriculture Department spending decreased 28 percent. In fact, the travel budgets of all of the five top-spending agencies decreased from 1994 to 1995. Even the Transportation Department, whose travel budget jumped from the fifth largest to the second largest in government over the year, spent $10 million less on travel in fiscal 1995 than it did in fiscal 1994.

Bucking the downward trend, some agencies are anticipating large increases in their travel budgets over the next two years. They include the Social Security Administration (67 percent), the General Services Administration (33 percent), the Justice Department (26 percent) and the Environmental Protection Agency (24 percent). All these agencies say the increases will come as a result of the expansion of agency programs.

In spite of many civilian agencies anticipated increases in travel spending, the Office of Management and budget expects overall federal spending on travel to decline by 6 percent by fiscal 1997. This is due mostly to a projected 12 percent drop in DoD's travel budget.

Procurement Practices Change

In fiscal 1996, GSA, along with a few other agencies, decided to simplify its procurement of travel agency services by "bundling" travel management center (TMC) contracts. Instead of contracting with 30 different TMCs as it had in the past, the agency looked for one travel agency contractor that could take care of all GSA units nationwide. The agency stipulated that their TMC contractor must be able to maintain five on-site locations and have a "presence"-a regional office or a travel agency subcontractor hired by the TMC-in six other cities. Some local travel agencies that had served GSA the year before were thus knocked out of the bidding because they were too small. But the agency assessed that their decision to bundle contracts negatively impacted only one percent of the TMCs that handled the agency's travel during the previous year. GSA let its contract to Sato Travel.

Now, it seems that everyone is getting on the bandwagon. For fiscal 1997, 137 out of the 138 federal agencies based in Washington have elected to solicit nationwide bundled contracts for travel agency services. The Defense Department, for example, has divided the world into 12 regions (10 of which are in the United States) and solicited commercial travel office (CTO) bids for each region.

Lin Goad, chief of GSA's transportation management branch, says that bundling TMC contracts has gained popularity because dealing with a single TMC contractor streamlines an agency's reimbursement process. When GSA bundled its contracts, it was able to consolidate its 67 different charge card travel accounts into 1. He says, "it's much easier to put federal travel policy into effect. If a policy changes, I don't have to go to numerous travel agency contractors to explain the new policy. I just go to one."

Not everyone's a fan. Federal travelers who once could walk into their TMC and discuss their travel plans face-to-face with an agent may now be forced to arrange their travel over the telephone and receive their tickets in the mail. Some small- and mid-sized travel agencies complain that they're being shut out of government contracts.

Not true, say GSA officials. GSA still solicits TMC contractors in three ways: through full and open competition, small business set-asides-contracts worth $5 million or less on which only small travel agencies may bid and 8(a) contracts on which only minority-owned businesses may bid. While the number of contracts available through full and open competition has decreased because of bundling, Goad points out that in most cases, contracts are bundled within, not across, agencies. There are a few exceptions, though. Due to staff cutbacks, GSA's Federal Supply Service has been forced to consolidate contracts for separate agencies that do $1 million or $2 million worth of traveling a year into single contracts that still add up to $5 million or less. The government travel program simply doesn't have the staff to contract TMCs for every agency individually, Goad says. But "we don't want to eliminate the ability of small businesses to bid on contracts," he adds.

This year, GSA also initiated proceedings to restyle its travel charge card program by November 1998. Currently, credit card companies compete for a single contract award, effective for one year with four renewable option years, to provide charge card services for travel. American Express is the travel charge card contractor. Companies also compete for single contracts for GSA's two other credit/charge account programs-the fleet services card and the purchase card. But GSA wants to open up all three of its credit/charge card programs to multiple vendors.

"We're trying to accomplish three things," says Donna Bennett, deputy assistant commissioner for transportation and property management at GSA's Federal Supply Service. "Give more choice to our agency customers. Maximize competition between vendors by allowing competition during the contract, not just in the beginning when they are competing for the contract itself. And we're trying to set a platform for future technological innovation."

Companies that won travel charge card contracts under a multiple-vendor program would have to offer at least the equivalent of services that are offered now by American Express. Some contractors might offer additional services over and above these basic services, perhaps slanted to a particular type of travel or region. Agencies would be able to choose the charge card contractor best equipped to provide for their particular travel needs. GSA has proposed moving to multiple-vendor contracts because the number of government card holders and the amount of money charged on the cards has increased dramatically over recent years, says Bennett.

GSA officials are spending the summer and fall discussing proposed changes with agency customers and travel industry representatives. The agency will begin soliciting bids for the multiple-award contracts in the spring of 1997.

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Contractors Finding Strength in Numbers

Samantha Stainburn — Thu, 15 Aug 1996 00:00:00 -0400

oethe wrote, "on every mountain height is rest." Lockheed Martin executives would disagree.

In March 1995, Lockheed and Martin Marietta merged to become king of the hill in the federal contracting world. Lockheed Martin found itself perched high above all other defense industry climbers-no two corporations could combine to overtake it in federal revenues. Analysts expected the new giant contractor to take some time to enjoy the view from the top while it adjusted to the altitude.

Instead, Lockheed Martin kept on climbing. In April 1996, Lockheed Martin shelled out $9.1 billion to purchase most of Loral, the corporation currently clinging to the number nine spot in Government Executive's list of top 10 federal contractors. As a result of the acquisition, Lockheed Martin now employs 190,000 workers and expects annual sales of $30 billion. The Loral acquisition will widen the already enormous gap between Lockheed Martin and other federal contractors. Lockheed Martin's fiscal 1995 contract awards-won before the Loral purchase-were more than twice those of its closest competitor, McDonnell Douglas.

Many greeted the Loral acquisition with dismay. Lockheed Martin workers-still coming to terms with the restructuring and downsizing that accompanied the 1995 merger-ßand Loral employees braced for staff cuts. Over at McDonnell Douglas, CEO Harry Stonecipher vowed to replace regular subcontractor Loral with more neutral subcontractors, such as Litton Industries and Honeywell, when his company is competing with Lockheed Martin for the same contract. (Lockheed Martin's President and CEO Norm Augustine responded by warning that this "blacklist purchasing policy" could force his company to cancel some of its own subcontracting agreements with McDonnell Douglas.)

To win Federal Trade Commission (FTC) approval, Lockheed Martin and Loral finagled several deals: Loral's space and telecommunications business was spun off into an independent company in which Lockheed Martin holds a 20 percent share. Inter-company firewalls were set up to block the sharing of competitive information about tactical fighter aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles. Still, the sheer size of the corporation bothers some industry watchers. Lockheed Martin is "basically a wholly owned subsidiary of the U.S. government," a Federation of American Scientists spokesperson quipped to The Rocky Mountain News in May.

"We are approaching the point that the FTC concerns [about fair competition] will be legitimate," conceded Augustine at the National Press Club in April.

The corporation should certainly have enough work to keep it busy. Lockheed Martin has contained Loral in its own business segment while it contemplates restructuring options. This brings the number of business segments over which Lockheed Martin presides to six: Space and Strategic Missiles, Aeronautics, Information and Technology Services, Electronics, Energy and Environment and the Loral segment, named Tactical Systems.

Space and Strategic Missiles is Lockheed Martin's biggest business, earning revenues of $7.5 billion in 1995. The segment manufactures Atlas rockets, Titan expendable launch vehicles and Trident fleet ballistic missiles. In 1995, the Air Force awarded the segment a $1.3 billion contract to build the fifth and sixth satellites in the Milstar constellation, which will provide secure communications for U.S. forces. Also, Lockheed Martin is prime contractor for the Army's Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) weapons system, currently in development, and is producing second-generation satellites for the Defense Department's Global Positioning System.

In July, the Space and Strategic Missiles division beat McDonnell Douglas Aerospace and Rockwell International to win the coveted Phase I contract of NASA's X-33 reusable launch vehicle program. The program aims to produce a new generation of space shuttles that will be cheaper to operate, and can be built and run by the private sector. Under the contract, worth $1 billion, Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works will build a prototype X-33 and conduct its first test flight by March 1999. NASA has not committed to replace today's space shuttle fleet with the prototype, but if it does, the Phase I contract could lead to $12 billion worth of business producing a new line of X-33 spacecraft. As stipulated in the contract, Lockheed Martin and its partners are contributing $220 million of their own money to the project's start-up costs and initial research and development.

Lockheed Martin's Aeronautics division took in $6.6 billion in revenues in 1995. The division's F-16 fighter and its derivatives are popular with the Air Force and international customers such as Taiwan, Turkey, South Korea, Greece, Singapore and Japan. In partnership with Boeing, Lockheed Martin is developing the F-22 Advanced Tactical Fighter, designed to replace aging F-15 fighters. The first test flight of the F-22 is scheduled for 1997 and production of 442 aircraft is slated to begin in 1998.

The Aeronautics division is competing for critical contracts this year in the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program (formerly known as the Joint Advanced Strike Technology program). The Defense Department will select two contractors to build demonstrator aircraft for the JSF program, which seeks a common, affordable fighter for the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps. A Lockheed Martin-led team is competing against teams led by Boeing and McDonnell Douglas to design the one-size-fits-all jet fighter. The Pentagon will eliminate one of the three bidders in late 1996; the remaining two will build two versions of their design and compete in a "fly-off" for the actual contract in 2000. DoD expects to buy at least 2,800 planes in a contract that could be worth $1 trillion.

Lockheed Martin's Information and Technology Services sector is the corporation's main civilian agency contracting unit. In 1995, it operated the Environmental Protection Agency's Environmental Supercomputing Center, worked to modernize the information systems of the Social Security Administration and provided services to the Treasury Department, the General Services Administration and the Patent and Trademark Office. In January of this year, Lockheed Martin won a six-year, $100 million Federal Bureau of Investigation contract to implement the agency's Automatic Fingerprint Identification Segment. The Information and Technology Services unit is also involved in a wide range of NASA programs, and has entered into a joint venture with Rockwell to negotiate a sole-source contract for the space shuttle program.

Sales in Lockheed Martin's Electronics division decreased almost 19 percent last year due to cuts in AEGIS surface ship combat systems and the AN/BYS-2 submarine combat system program. However, the Navy continued to be the division's single largest customer and awarded it a $577 million contract to upgrade the AEGIS system. Lockheed Martin's Energy and Environment division manages several facilities for the Energy Department, including the Nevada Test Site and the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory.

cDonnell Douglas danced to its own tune in 1995. It revived a huge program that observers had written off as a failure. It didn't give up on its commercial aircraft business, although that's what many analysts had advised. It declined to enter the mergers-and-acquisitions fray with any of its defense industry competitors. And here it is, solidly occupying the number two position in Government Executive's top contractors list. (McDonnell Douglas was the perrenial top federal contractor until the Lockheed-Martin Marietta merger knocked it down to No. 2 last year.)

The McDonnell Douglas tendency to fly in the face of convention resulted in its big triumph of 1995: The turnaround of the C-17 program. Just two and a half years ago, it appeared that McDonnell Douglas's contract with the Air Force to build a new transport plane, the C-17 Globemaster III, would bankrupt the corporation. Due to personnel upheavals at McDonnell Douglas, a rigid fixed-price contract from the Air Force and intermittent support from Congress, the C-17 was more than $1 billion over budget, a year behind schedule and failing to meet contract standards. Then-Defense Secretary Les Aspin gave McDonnell Douglas and the Air Force an ultimatum: Resolve the problems of the C-17 program in two years or scrap the contract.

Astonishing many industry observers, McDonnell Douglas and the Air Force did turn the program around. The company delivered the first squadron of C-17s in January 1995. Last August, the C-17 exceeded Air Force specifications in a 30-day reliability, maintainability and availability evaluation. By the end of 1995, McDonnell Douglas had delivered 11 C-17s ahead of schedule. The first operational wing of C-17s won praise for flying oversized cargo onto short, muddy runways in Bosnia and in post-hurricane St. Croix and St. Thomas. Swayed by these successes, the Defense Department ordered 80 additional C-17s from McDonnell Douglas in May 1996, bringing the total number of airlifters ordered to 120. The additional 80 planes will bring McDonnell Douglas $18 billion over the next seven years.

McDonnell Douglas is working to revive Douglas Aircraft Company, its commercial aircraft unit, which produces planes such as the MD-11 tri-jet, MD-80 twin-jet and MD-90 twin-jet. Five years ago, Douglas Aircraft controlled 22 percent of the commercial aircraft market; today it controls a mere 9.8 percent. The company has pinned its hopes for a comeback on its new MD-95 family of twin-jet airliners, designed to operate economically on routes currently flown by DC-9s. Delivery of the first MD-95s is scheduled for 1999 and Douglas Aircraft's first big customer will be Valujet Airlines, which is paying $1 billion for 50 MD-95s, with options to purchase 50 more. A Douglas Aircraft spokesperson said in July that the grounding of Valujet by the Federal Aviation Administration in June was not affecting the airline's order. But gathering other orders for the planes is proving to be difficult. Douglas Aircraft is competing with new planes recently unveiled by Boeing and Airbus. Scandinavian Airlines, for example, backed out of a major order in early 1995 to go with Boeing.

Douglas Aircraft's operating revenues increased 23 percent in 1995, but they are still 11 percent lower than they were in 1993. In contrast, the corporation's military aircraft division, McDonnell Douglas's biggest business unit, thrived in 1995, setting records for revenues and earnings despite pressure on military procurement budgets. Military aircraft revenues were up 4.5 percent; operating revenues were up 27.8 percent. In 1995, McDonnell Douglas controlled more than 54 percent of the market for fixed-wing military aircraft. And the company is the prime contractor for 52 out of the 71 aircraft that the Pentagon plans to purchase in fiscal 1996.

The military aircraft division's F/A-18C/D Hornet fighter planes sold briskly in 1995, especially to foreign customers. McDonnell Douglas delivered 43 Hornets, including the first seven of Finland's 64 aircraft in 1995 and the first of 34 planes to Switzerland in January 1996. Malaysia will receive the first of its eight Hornets in October 1996. McDonnell Douglas declared in its 1995 annual report that it believes the impact of the shrinking Pentagon budget "could be mitigated by foreign sales" and is seeking to lengthen its list of foreign customers.

The military aircraft division's F/A-18E/F Super Hornet fighter completed its first flight in 1995, and the program is on budget and on schedule. The Navy plans to purchase 1,000 Super Hornets-at an estimated program cost of more than $80 billion-through 2015.

In another move that surprised analysts, McDonnell Douglas sat out the consolidation frenzy through 1995 and into mid-1996. John McDonnell, chairman of the board, and Harry Stonecipher, president and CEO, explained their position in the company's 1995 annual report. "We will not be driven to the merger or acquisition table out of a need for critical mass or top-line growth. Frankly, we already have critical mass. If we act, it will be from a position of strength. We have the luxury of waiting for the right deal."

Still, many industry observers maintain McDonnell Douglas won't hold out much longer. A merger with Boeing, which controls more than 60 percent of the commercial aircraft market, could solve Douglas Aircraft's problems. Other options that McDonnell Douglas might pursue include selling its missile business; buying competitors' helicopter businesses; or pursuing joint ventures in those areas.

eaders of Westinghouse's 1995 annual report may think there has been a publishing error. Photographs of David Letterman, Murphy Brown and Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman, grace the pages that only a year before featured photographs of turbine generators and radar systems. But there's been no mistake: Westinghouse bought CBS Inc. for $5.4 billion last November, transforming the company into the largest radio and television broadcaster in the United States.

In fiscal 1995, it was business with Uncle Sam that bolstered Westinghouse's bottom line. Federal revenues accounted for fully 68 percent of the company's $6.2 billion in sales.

However, Westinghouse officials have visions of a non-federal future. In March, Westinghouse sold its defense electronics business to Northrop Grumman for $3 billion. Company officials have said they expect Westinghouse/CBS Group-the company resulting from the merger of CBS with Westinghouse's cable TV and satellite distribution businesses-to generate 65 percent of Westinghouse's earnings in the years to come.

"The changes in the defense industry, which has consolidated into larger, highly efficient players, presented us with a clear strategic choice," Michael H. Jordan, Westinghouse chairman and CEO, said as he announced the sale last December. "Take advantage of the high premiums for defense-related assets and divest the business, or grow in scale to retain our industry leadership position for the future. Given this choice and our strategic decision to drive investment and growth in our broadcasting business, the logical decision was the sale of our defense electronics business."

Westinghouse's strategy is part of its effort to focus on business areas it deems to have high-growth potential in order to pull itself out of its slump of recent years. Just four years ago, Westinghouse was $10 billion in debt. Through asset sales and divestitures, the company cut that debt-plus an additional $5.4 billion incurred when buying CBS-to $4.8 billion by the first quarter of 1996.

With the defense electronics divestment, Westinghouse will become a civilian rather than military contractor. Most of the company's civilian-side contracts are with the Energy Department. In March 1996, DOE and Westinghouse completed construction and testing at the Defense Waste Processing Facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the agency's largest new construction project in recent years. At the facility, liquid radioactive waste, a by-product of nuclear weapons production, is immobilized by processes which turn it into glass. Westinghouse also processes nuclear waste at the Energy Department's West Valley (N.Y.) Demonstration Project. In January, DOE extended the company's West Valley contract for five more years at $500 million.

Other facilities Westinghouse manages for the Energy Department include the Waste Isolation Pilot Project, near Carlsbad, N.M., and the troubled Hanford Site, near Richland, Wash.

Hanford, where nearly 80 percent of DOE's spent nuclear fuel inventory is housed, is the site of the United States' largest environmental cleanup project. In the early 1990s, Westinghouse's efforts to develop a long-term storage plan for Hanford's radioactive wastes were such a failure that the government contemplated rebidding the project. Westinghouse appointed a new Hanford site president in 1994 who has cut 4,000 employees over the past two years and set new cleanup priorities. Early this summer, Westinghouse was competing against Bechtel Northwest Corp. to remain the primary contractor at Hanford.

One government market in which Westinghouse is striving to increase its presence is chemical weapons destruction. In March 1996, the Defense Department awarded Westinghouse a nine year, $575 million contract to destroy 2,250 chemical weapons at Anniston Army Depot in Anniston, Ala.

he first component of the international space station has yet to be launched, but it is already sprinkling riches on Boeing, NASA's prime contractor for the program since 1993. While Boeing's overall operating revenues declined for the second year in a row in 1995, Boeing's Defense and Space Group revenues rose for the second year, due mostly to space station work. In 1995, defense and space revenues totaled $5.6 billion, an increase of $700 million, or 14 percent, over 1993 revenues. The company's defense and space division accounted for 29 percent of its sales in 1995.

NASA has put Boeing in charge of the U.S. industry team that is designing, developing and integrating the space station with Russian, Japanese, European and Canadian counterparts. The project has an estimated value of $5.6 billion. Boeing reports the project is proceeding according to schedule, with more than 100,000 pounds of flight hardware completed. The first major space station components are due to be assembled in space in 1997.

The major earthbound programs of Boeing's defense and space division in 1995 included the F-22 fighter, V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft and RAH-66 Comanche helicopter. Boeing is preparing the F-22 for its first flight in 1997. Operational tests of the V-22 begin later this year. The RAH-66 flew for the first time in January.

Production and manufacturing of CH-47 helicopters, work to update military aircraft, production of 767 Airborne Warning and Control Systems and B-2 bomber subcontracting work also generated significant revenue for the company. And Boeing's sales of defense equipment to foreign governments rose 9 percent in 1995, accounting for 19 percent of total defense and space sales.

Not all of Boeing's defense and space initiatives were successful in 1995, though. The company had urged the Defense Department to expand its airlift capability by purchasing 747 aircraft modified for airlift operations from Boeing rather than by buying more C-17 airlifters from McDonnell Douglas. However, DoD chose to order 80 additional C-17s in May.

Boeing demonstrated its faith in the merits of partnership in 1995. The company is running three major programs with other defense contractors: It works with Lockheed Martin on the F-22, Bell Helicopter Textron on the V-22 and Sikorsky, a division of United Technologies, on the RAH-66.

Last November, Boeing officials met with McDonnell Douglas Corp. to talk about the potential for combining some of their business segments. Both companies refused to comment on the discussion, but the meeting fired the imaginations of industry analysts who speculated on what mergers might work best-and which ones the federal government would allow. While most agreed that the government probably would not permit the two companies to create a giant McDonnell Boeing, analysts thought that mergers of their helicopters or space businesses would be just the kind of consolidations the Pentagon has been encouraging. The buzz around the talks caused the stocks of both companies to rise.

Boeing has identified the Defense Department's conceptual design contracts for affordable aircraft, such as the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program, as rare sources of new government defense and space business. During 1995, Boeing completed a series of tests in preparation for the 1996 competition for the JSF contract.

ne big ship. That's what catapulted Tenneco Inc. from 41st place in last year's top 200 federal contractor rankings to 5th place in this year's list. In December, Tenneco's Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company delivered to the Navy a new Nimitz-class nuclear aircraft carrier, the USS John C. Stennis. And so, government records show, the company received the final payment for the carrier-$3.47 billion.

Newport News has built all of the Navy's Nimitz-class carriers. However, the Nimitz-building business appeared to have dried up in the early 1990s. Before the John C. Stennis, the last time Newport News had commissioned a Nimitz-class carrier was 1992.

Now, Newport News is hammering away at two more carriers-the Harry S. Truman, due to be launched in 1998, and the Ronald Reagan, scheduled for delivery in 2002. And, in May, the Navy awarded the company operation a $119 million contract to refurbish the lead ship in the class, the Nimitz itself.

"Three years ago, the obituaries were all being written for this yard," Dana Mead, chairman of Tenneco, told The New York Times in February. "So when you put this against that background, not only has there been a pretty dramatic recovery, but a resurrection."

Newport News has also benefited from a change of heart at the Pentagon and in Congress. About three years ago, as part of a cost-cutting strategy, the Clinton Administration began pointing all construction of nuclear submarines to General Dynamics' Electric Boat division and all construction of nuclear carriers to Newport News. Not willing to sit back and watch a large portion of their business float away, Tenneco lobbied hard to get the Pentagon to send them nuclear sub-building work again.

Recently, Newport News president Bill Fricks testified at a House hearing that the Navy could save $3.5 billion if it canceled production of a third Seawolf submarine and let Newport News bid to supply its new attack submarines. As a result, Congress affirmed Newport News' right to participate in the new attack submarine program. In early 1996, the Pentagon announced that it would split its order for four prototype attack submarines between Newport News and Electric Boat. After the prototypes are built, the two companies will compete for the $71 billion contract to build the subs.

It's not necessarily going to be smooth sailing for Newport News in the future. Navy work accounted for 95 percent of Newport News' revenues in 1995. While recently won contracts will keep the shipbuilding yard busy for the next few years, it could be in deep trouble if Navy contracts decline again. So, Newport News has begun to round up commercial and international orders. The company hopes to derive as much as 30 percent of its business from commercial ships and foreign military orders by the year 2000, Tenneco chairman Mead told The New York Times.

In May, Newport News laid the keel for the first commercial ship it has built in nearly 20 years-Despotico, one of four tankers recently ordered by the Greek company Eletson Holdings. Newport News is also building five Jones Act Double Eagle product tankers for the Dutch company Hvide/Van Ommeren, an order worth $240 million. Earlier this summer, the company was negotiating a $2 billion contract with the government of the United Arab Emirates.

Newport News will be navigating the choppy waters of the future alone. In March, Tenneco announced that it would spin off Newport News Shipbuilding as an independent company by the end of 1996. Tenneco, an $8.9 billion conglomerate with four significant business segments (packaging, automotive parts, natural gas and shipbuilding), is shedding units to concentrate on its core interests-packaging and automotive parts.

he price tags on defense products manufactured by Hughes Electronics Corp., the $14.8 billion government contracting unit of General Motors, were once so high they shocked even the Pentagon. Now, Hughes is advertising itself as an economical contractor. In 1995, the company consolidated divisions and standardized manufacturing processes in an effort to reduce its prices for services-and pinch some extra profits out of its government businesses to help finance its commercial ventures.

The corporation gathered Hughes' multiple defense businesses under one umbrella, Hughes Aircraft Company, combined four Navy-related businesses into a single Naval and Maritime Systems division within Hughes Aircraft and realigned four information systems divisions into a single business unit. But Hughes reports that its biggest cost-saver last year was the company's development of common engineering, planning and development processes.

"From now on," enthused HAC president John Weaver in Hughes Electronics' 1995 annual report, "if a customer has a weapons system that includes some combination of missiles, radar and electro-optical products, there will be a seamless interface between engineering groups, and the company will be more efficient."

HAC acquired three companies in 1995 and early 1996 that it believes will also help to control service costs. The company bought CAE-Link Corp. in February, to enhance its ability to provide military training and simulation services; Magnavox Electronic Systems Co. in December, to help develop more affordable ways to upgrade analog military communications systems to digital; and Itek Optical in 1996, to improve Hughes' reconnaissance expertise.

Government business generates 31 percent of Hughes Electronics' revenue. Due to divestments made in 1995, Hughes Aircraft Company now operates only four primary business units: weapons systems, radar and communications, information systems and electro-optical systems.

Major contracts that Hughes won in these areas in 1995 include those for the low- and high-altitude components of the Air Force's Space-Based Infrared System and a missile early warning and surveillance system. With 15 other companies, Hughes was awarded a $2.4 million contract to electronically integrate soldiers' equipment, the initial phase of the Army's Land Warrior program. The potential value of the contract over the next 20 years is $1 billion.

Two contracts awarded in fiscal 1995 made Hughes a main supplier to the Federal Aviation Administration. In August, the FAA awarded a team comprised of Hughes, Wilcox Electric Inc. and TRW a $475 million contract to develop and implement the Wide Area Augmentation System, which will enable the United States' air traffic control system to use global positioning technology. In September, the FAA awarded Hughes a $140 million contract to develop the Advanced Oceanic Automation System, part of a program to upgrade and automate the nation's oceanic air traffic control operations.

1995 also saw Hughes form the Standard Missile Company with one-time Standard Missile contract competitor Raytheon. The company, owned in equal parts by Hughes and Raytheon, is the Navy's prime contractor for the design, engineering, production and depot-level maintenance of the Standard Missile.

n 1995, a rain forest dampened Raytheon's enthusiasm for defense conversion-but only temporarily.

In 1994, Raytheon won an international competition to build an environmental surveillance system for the Brazilian government. However, allegations that an independent Raytheon contractor had bribed a Brazilian official surfaced, and, in November 1995, Brazil's legislature let Raytheon's contract expire. Only after months of lobbying by Clinton Administration officials did they relent and let the project go forward.

Now, analysts expect the rain forest project to be the biggest defense conversion project in history, creating 1,100 jobs in the United States and bringing Raytheon $150 million a year for the next 10 years.

Another Raytheon strategy for coping with the consolidating defense industry-teaming up with competitors-also paid off. In June 1995, H&R Co., a joint venture between Raytheon and Hughes Aircraft Company, was one of two winners of the Army contract for the International Medium Extended Air Defense System (MEADS). Each U.S. team has been paired with a European counterpart team to carry out the first phase of the program-project definition and validation. In 1999, one of these multinational teams will be awarded a contract for the program's second phase-design and development. MEADS, also known in the United States as the Corps Surface-to-Air Missile, will provide U.S. and Allied forces with missile batteries, sensors, and command-and-control systems. The program has a potential value of more than $3 billion.

A second Raytheon/Hughes alliance, the Standard Missile Company, won $47 million worth of work producing the Standard-2 Block IV missile. Hoping for similar successes, Raytheon has joined forces with Northrop Grumman Corp. to bid for the Defense Department's Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) contract.

Over the past year, Raytheon also continued to win contracts in its top market-missiles. Raytheon's largest program is the Patriot surface-to-air missile system, the centerpiece air defense system in the United States. Patriot sales brought in over $1 billion in 1995. In fiscal 1996, Raytheon will conduct $35 million worth of research in the first phase of the Army's $75 million Patriot Anti-Cruise Missile Seeker upgrade program. Other recent missile contracts include a follow-on, $52 million contract for the Enhanced Fiber Optic Guided Missile Demonstration Program, awarded by the Army in January; and a $174 million contract to manufacture 623 Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missiles (AMRAAMs) and spares, awarded by the Air Force in January.

Raytheon's aircraft division, which supplies planes for commercial and regional airlines as well as aircraft training systems for the military, will provide the next-generation trainer for Air Force and Navy pilot candidates. This Joint Primary Aircraft Training System contract, awarded in February, is valued at up to $7 billion over 20 years-a big win for the company.

Raytheon increased its presence in air traffic control in April with the commissioning of a new air traffic control center it created in Oslo, Norway. The company has provided air-traffic-control systems to Schipol Airport in the Netherlands and the German Air Navigation Service, and is currently installing air traffic control systems in India, Oman, Hong Kong, China and Australia.

While Raytheon recorded its highest total sales in its history in 1995-$11.7 billion-sales and profits from Raytheon's defense operations declined. Defense-related sales accounted for 20 percent of the company's total sales. However, the U.S. government portion of Raytheon's backlog at the end of 1995 was $5.1 billion, $1.7 billion higher than at year-end 1994. This was due in part to their May 1995 acquisition of E-Systems, a $2 billion defense and government electronics company that specializes in intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance systems.

orthrop Grumman Corp. has had its share of problems with government programs in recent times. The company explained in March that its latest round of cuts-1,200 workers were scheduled to be sent home by July-was due to declining work on its two major aircraft programs, the B-2 stealth bomber and the F/A-18 attack fighter, and to the shrinking production budget of its new version of the F/A-18.

Perhaps the company's biggest headache has been the cool reception accorded by the Clinton Administration to its signature product-the swept-wing B-2. Last year, Northrop Grumman lobbied hard to convince the Administration to fund the production of 20 new B-2 bombers, enlisting the support of seven former Defense secretaries in its effort. However, in February the White House decided against ordering more B-2s because it believes the planes are not needed and are too expensive. The White House estimated that it would cost $30 billion to build and operate 20 more B-2s.

Northrop Grumman was left to hope that a Defense Department study on the Pentagon's long-range air attack needs, ordered by President Clinton and due out in late 1996, would change the Administration's mind. "We do not rule out the possibility the study could come in and provide the basis for buying additional B-2s," Robert Bell, a National Security Council official, said in February. "But we don't presume that."

Yet Northrop Grumman officials still think the defense contracting world hold opportunities for them. "In spite of perceptions to the contrary, there are areas within the defense industry that are growing," chairman Kent Kresa told shareholders at a meeting in May. "The Electronic Industries Association is predicting the Pentagon's electronics procurement budget will reach nearly $20 billion by the year 2000, a 23 percent increase over today. We believe that most of that growth will occur in areas with high-leverage technologies, such as those encompassed in surveillance precision strike and targeting systems, information warfare and advanced battle management."

In order to take advantage of these emerging opportunities, Northrop Grumman executives believe, their operation has to transform itself from principally an airplane company to an electronic sensors and systems integration firm. This planned metamorphosis was behind Northrop's acquisition of Grumman in 1995 and its March 1996 purchase of Westinghouse Electric's defense and electronics division for $3 billion.

The change is already evident. Just three years ago, Northrop Grumman derived more than 80 percent of its revenues from aircraft production and only 15 percent from electronics. The Grumman acquisition doubled the company's electronics revenues to nearly 30 percent. With the addition of Westinghouse's defense and electronics division, the company estimates that its electronics and systems integration business will grow to nearly 50 percent of sales.

One winning product in Northrop Grumman's systems integration line is its Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (Joint STARS), an airborne surveillance system that provides real-time information about ground activity. Northrop Grumman designed the system and installs it in Boeing 707 airplanes that it modifies. The Pentagon commandeered two developmental Joint STARS aircraft for use in the NATO peacekeeping mission this past winter in Bosnia, and the surveillance system won rave reviews. In February, Northrop Grumman delivered the first of 20 production Joint STARS aircraft on order by the Pentagon. The government has expressed interest in expanding the order, and Northrop Grumman is discussing the possibility of offering Joint STARS to NATO in a program that could exceed $6 billion. A decision on this proposal is expected in 1998.

Kresa told shareholders at the May meeting that Northrop Grumman's "strategic thrust in electronics in no way minimizes the importance we place on our military and commercial aircraft businesses." The company is McDonnell Douglas's main subcontractor on the C-17 military transport plane and stands to benefit from the recent Defense Department decision to triple C-17 production. Work on the complete order of 120 C-17s will bring Northrop Grumman an estimated $2 billion. In 1996, Northrop Grumman and teammates McDonnell Douglas and British Aerospace will compete for the latest contract in the Pentagon's Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program. The program aims to develop an affordable JSF to replace aging F-16s, F/A-18s and other aircraft. Northrop Grumman has already received more than $78 million worth of JSF awards.

his entry will be Loral's last appearance in Government Executive's annual top 10 federal contractors list. In January, Lockheed Martin Corp. bought most of Loral for $9.1 billion. Acquisition was an ironic end for Loral, as the company shot to the top of the defense industry by taking up divisions of its competitors-Unisys, IBM, LTV, Ford and Goodyear among them.

The Lockheed Martin deal, assembled in secret over the last four months of 1995, transferred Loral's defense electronics, systems integration and telecommunications businesses to Lockheed Martin. While Lockheed Martin develops an integration plan, these former Loral divisions comprise a separate business segment, Tactical Systems, at their new company. To comply with antitrust laws, Loral's telecommunications and space division was spun off into an independent $1 billion company, Loral Space and Communications Corp., in which Lockheed Martin owns a 20 percent share. Loral Space and Communications will concentrate on the emerging international market for civilian satellite telecommunications.

Loral's core defense businesses-a group which included electronic combat, tactical weapons, training and command, control, communications and intelligence (C3I)-continued to receive contracts after the merger with Lockheed Martin was announced.

In January 1996, the Army gave Loral a $31 million contract to do additional testing on the company's major new tactical weapons, Patriot Advanced Capability (PAC) III missiles. The PAC IIIs are currently in the engineering and manufacturing development phase. Also in January, the Air Force Space Command awarded Loral a $110 million contract to provide C3I services at the Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado Springs, Colo. Cheyenne Mountain is part of the nation's missile warning and defense system. In February, the Army chose Loral to develop four prototype High Mobility Artillery Rocket System launchers. This 53-month technology demonstration contract is worth $23 million.

Throughout 1995, Loral provided systems integration services to the Federal Aviation Administration, the U.S. Postal Service, the Internal Revenue Service and various defense agencies. Contract awards included one for FAA's Advanced Automation System upgrade contract, worth $955 million. The contract charges Loral with developing and installing display systems for air traffic control centers and a management system for airport towers.

The Internal Revenue Service awarded Loral a follow-on contract for the computerized Document Processing System (DPS) that the company began developing for the IRS in 1994. Once created, DPS will image and store tax returns and correspondence for the agency. DPS will replace the imaging system developed by Northrop Grumman in 1993, which the IRS currently uses. While protracted fiscal 1996 federal budget negotiations forced Loral to delay the installation of pilot DPS components by several months, Congress did not cut funds for the project, valued at $1.4 billion over 15 years.

Recent defense systems integration contracts include a follow-on contract from the Air Force to upgrade data processing subsystems for Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft. The contract has a potential value of $87 million through 1997. In February, the Army selected Loral as the prime contractor for its Intelligence and Electronic Warfare Common Sensor system program. Loral will integrate electronic warfare equipment on Army helicopters and vehicles during the five year, $277 million program.

ockwell has an image problem. Most people think of the $12.9 billion corporation as a defense contractor-manufacturer of B-1 bombers and ICBM guidance systems. In reality, Rockwell derives most of its earnings from its commercial and international businesses-producers of sunroof systems, modem chips and bar code scanners among them. In fiscal 1995, these businesses grew 30 percent to comprise 72 percent of the company's total sales. Government business, including aerospace contracts, accounted for less than 30 percent of Rockwell's sales in fiscal 1995.

It's true that, once upon a time, the U.S. government was Rockwell's main customer-in 1985, 63 percent of the corporation's revenue came from government contracts. But Rockwell's strategy to survive the shrinking Pentagon budget has been to replace $4 billion in defense and government sales with $4 billion in commercial sales over the past 10 years. That has meant diversifying with a vengeance. Unique among its competitors, Rockwell has cobbled together businesses in a wide range of fields-aerospace, semiconductors, automation, vehicle systems and avionics.

Rockwell CEO Don Beall told shareholders at the company's annual meeting in February that he expects the proportion of income generated by Rockwell's electronics, commercial and international businesses will increase. Still, said Rockwell president Don Davis last September, "Rockwell's government businesses continue to represent a core part of our company." And a more distinct part: Last September, Rockwell combined its former defense systems division with its Rocketdyne and space systems divisions to create a single Aerospace and Defense division.

Rockwell's aerospace business accounted for 19 percent of sales in fiscal 1995. Rockwell is NASA's number three contractor, providing rocket engines and launchers for the Space Shuttle program and acting as a subcontractor to Boeing for Space Station Alpha. NASA recently selected Rockwell, along with Lockheed Martin, to take over day-to-day management of the space shuttle program. Earlier this year, Rockwell competed against McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed Martin for a $900 million contract to develop a prototype of NASA's next-generation X-33 reusable launch vehicle. Although NASA awarded the X-33 contract to Lockheed Martin in July, Rockwell will still be involved in the project since Lockheed Martin's winning design uses rocket engines manufactured by Rocketdyne.

Much of Rockwell's defense work is in the business of keeping systems up to date. Last year the Air Force awarded the company a four-year, $232 million contract to integrate joint direct attack munitions, global positioning satellite and anti-jamming communications in the B-1 bomber fleet. The Air Force also awarded Rockwell the contract for the Scope Command Modernization Program, potentially worth $350 million.

Rockwell continues to receive orders for its AGM-130 precision weapons. The Air Force ordered 102 weapons worth $55.3 million in 1995 and 100 more weapons worth $30.5 million in March 1996. As of March, the Air Force had ordered a total of 600 AGM-130s from Rockwell.

In December, the Air Force gave Rockwell responsibility for the Aerospace Guidance and Metrology Center at Newark Air Force Base in Newark, Ohio. The contract, part of USAF's depot privatization program, is valued at $264 million.

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Don't Let Burnout Trip You Up

Samantha Stainburn — Thu, 01 Aug 1996 00:00:00 -0400

opping the list of misconceptions about federal employees is the myth that most government executives never venture beyond the beltway surrounding the swampy city of Washington, D.C.

In fact, for many feds, it seems that the opposite is true: Washington (or wherever they call home) is a place that they visit only every so often, to hand in a report at headquarters and drop off their dry-cleaning in between trips.

Yes, overall federal spending on travel is decreasing as agencies tighten their budget belts. In fiscal 1995, most agencies spent less on travel than they had estimated they would the year before, and the Office of Management and Budget is projecting a 6 percent decrease in total federal spending on travel between 1995 and 1997. (For more detailed data on government-wide spending on travel between fiscal 1995 and fiscal 1997, see "The Top 200 Federal Contractors," Government Executive's special August 1996 issue.) Agencies such as the Energy Department, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the State Department are using videoconferencing technology to reduce the need for their employees to travel. The technology enables federal executives to attend conferences, collaborate on scientific projects with researchers from laboratories across the country, preside over hearings or negotiate international trade agreements without leaving home. Still, many federal executives have never traveled as much as they are traveling now. Agency travel may be decreasing, but, due to downsizing, so is the number of employees available to take trips. Employees that survive staff cuts may find themselves taking on more traveling assignments to get their agency's work done.

The departments of State, Transportation and Energy, and the government's financial institutions, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Resolution Trust Corp., are the civilian agencies who report the highest per capita travel expenses. In fiscal 1995, these agencies each spent over $3,500 per employee on business travel.

The nature of federal travel is as varied as agencies' missions. However, travel burnout is a malady to which all frequent federal travelers are susceptible. To avoid it, people need to develop strategies to cope with three aspects of traveling that can most wear them down-dead time, living out of a suitcase and managing the brief interludes they spend at home.

Dead time.
Dead time-those hours spent sitting on plastic chairs before a flight is announced, shuffling from foot to foot at the end of a line at a rental car counter or staring out the window of a taxi stuck in traffic-can consume much of a frequent traveler's life. Steve Yantz, a telecommunications specialist in the Office of the Director of Information Materials at Fort Knox, Ky., considers dead time the worst aspect of traveling extensively. His rule of conduct: "You don't want to add more time to your dead time." That's why Yantz squeezes everything he needs into a carry-on bag when he flies. "I'm usually out of the airport while people are still waiting for their luggage" to appear on the conveyer belt, he says. He may only be saving minutes for each flight he takes, but those minutes would add up to hours of watching baggage carousels over a career.

Yantz also looks to his laptop computer to minimize his dead time. "I can plug into any phone line, dial up an 800 number and retrieve my e-mail, transfer files," he says. "It cuts down on the amount of time you're not useful."

As airlines perfect their ticketless travel procedures, purchasing electronic airplane tickets may become a time-saving strategy. Passengers who have tested ticketless travel know that the system often requires them to wait in a long line at the airport in order to check in with a gate agent and collect boarding passes. In June, American Airlines and United Airlines introduced machines at which ticketless travelers with no checked baggage can confirm their seat assignments and obtain boarding confirmation. The machines, currently in only a few airports, will appear in more terminals as the year progresses.

Living out of a suitcase.
Packing light reduces the hassles of living out of a suitcase. Lugging less means that there are fewer items to leave behind and makes packing a less time-consuming chore. However, packing light can be foolish if carried to extremes. "I've known business men and women who go to such extraordinary means to pack light," writes Jack Cummings in The Business Travel Survival Guide, "that they would practically freeze to death if the temperature dropped 20 degrees." A good rule of thumb is that 90 percent of the contents of a traveler's luggage should be for use on the trip, and 10 percent should be a safety margin-another day's worth of clothing, a second pair of glasses.

The best way for travelers to determine how little they can get away with is to note what items they bring and do not use as they travel and leave them behind on the next trip they take. "You learn quick what you really need, and what you don't need," says Yantz. However, observes Cummings, "each new business trip can dictate new travel requirements." Travelers aiming to pack light for an unfamiliar climate can obtain local weather forecasts from American Express (800-554-2639) or the Internet. Also, suggests Cummings, travelers should time themselves to learn how long it takes to pack, so they know how much time to set aside before each trip. "A rushed packing job is likely to be a poor packing job," he says. This is even more true when packing for a new destination.

In between trips.
Federal employees who travel as frequently as every other week say that their lives at home seem to revolve around preparing for the next trip. After they've submitted their travel voucher, done their laundry, mowed the lawn and filed the travel authorization for their next trip, it's time to hit the road again. Days at home are often compromised by post-trip exhaustion. "When I'm traveling, I have unlimited energy, due to the change of scenery," says Yantz. "When I get back home, I'm wiped out."

Unfortunately, most home-based chores can't be avoided. Many frequent travelers depend on their spouses or roommates to take care of the lion's share of bill-paying, plant-watering and dog-feeding. When leaving an empty house behind, it's important for travelers to practice crisis prevention so precious days at home aren't consumed by cleaning up after disasters that can occur when they are away.

Epicurious Travel, a new site on the Internet (http://travel.epicurious.com) provides a checklist for travelers to ensure their homes are intact when they return. Among the more insightful suggestions:

Unplug televisions, stereos and computers so an electrical storm can't zap them.
Don't close all the curtains, since a completely shuttered house always looks empty.
In the winter, lower the thermostat but don't shut off the heat completely-otherwise, pipes may freeze and burst.
Send clothes to the dry-cleaner while traveling; if the house is robbed, at least you'll have something to wear.

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