Government Executive - Authors - William Matthews

Bio Fleet

William Matthews — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

The Navy is pursuing one of the most ambitious alternative energy programs in government.

A decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq has taught the U.S. military a key lesson: It can't keep fighting like it is. It takes too much energy-literally.

Pentagon officials estimate that U.S. forces burn more than 5 billion gallons of fuel annually in military operations. That's more than 570,000 gallons an hour. The war in Afghanistan alone consumes about 1.3 million gallons of fuel a day. Helicopters gulp hundreds of gallons of fuel per hour and Humvees get less than 10 miles per gallon. On average, ground troops require 22 gallons of fuel per warfighter per day, according to Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That's nearly twice the fuel consumption rate during the Vietnam War and 22 times the rate during World War II.

To keep fuel flowing to the troops, nearly 80 percent of the military's supply convoys in Afghanistan are devoted to delivering fuel. Not surprisingly, the convoys make an attractive target for insurgents-one in 50 experiences a fatality or serious injury.

"That's too high a price to pay," says Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, whose Marines are among the casualties.

There are other costs. For every $1 increase in the price of a barrel of oil, the Navy's annual fuel bill goes up $31 million, Mabus told an energy forum in Washington in October 2011. When the revolution in Libya pushed the price of oil up $30, to $112 a barrel in February 2011, the Navy's fuel bill ticked up an extra $1 billion, he said.

Faced with rising costs and instability in oil-producing countries, top military leaders acknowledge that it's time for an attitude change about energy. But no one pushes harder for change than Mabus.

From a biofuel conference in his hometown of Starkville, Miss., to the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., Mabus preaches the gospel of energy independence. "We buy too much fuel from potentially or actually volatile places on Earth," he told the energy forum. That dependence creates an untenable vulnerability. "We have to change the way we use, produce and get energy," he says. Mabus champions conservation measures, ranging from more fuel-efficient ships to smart meters for controlling electricity use on bases. But in the long run, he says the Navy must find an alternative source for fuel.

To push the Navy-and he hopes the nation-in that direction, Mabus has set some of the most ambitious alternative energy goals: by 2020, at least half the energy the Navy consumes must come from nonfossil-fuel sources. Ships, aircraft and ground vehicles will continue to run on liquid fuel, but Navy officials expect half of that will be derived from biomass that has been converted to fuel.

Building a Biofuels Market

If the Navy meets its goals, in 2016 it will deploy an aircraft carrier strike group dubbed the Great Green Fleet powered by nuclear energy and biofuel. In the meantime, a smaller nuclear and biofuel-powered Green Strike Group is to conduct operations off Hawaii during this summer's Rim of the Pacific exercise.

To power the strike group, Mabus and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced Dec. 5 that the Defense Logistics Agency is buying 450,000 gallons of biofuel, half made from used cooking oil and half from algae. The $12 million purchase is the largest single biofuel purchase by the U.S. government, and possibly the largest such purchase ever, Mabus said. And, at $26 a gallon, "it is half what we were paying for it this time last year," he said.

When the much larger Great Green Fleet deploys in 2016, it will need 10 times that much-4 million to 5 million gallons, says Thomas Hicks, deputy assistant Navy secretary for energy.

To achieve that, the service first will have to create a biofuels marketplace.

In August, the Navy joined the Agriculture and Energy departments in a three-year, $510 million effort to build a viable biofuels industry. Using the 1950 Defense Production Act-Cold War legislation designed to bolster industries essential to the military, such as aluminum and titanium production-the three agencies are preparing to fund biofuel production operations. Private investors will have to put up at least half the money, Navy officials say.

Since August, the Navy has received more than 100 responses to a request for information from farmers, refiners, processors and others interested in developing the biofuels industry-and obtaining government funding, Hicks says.

To Mabus, the benefits of jump- starting the biofuels industry go beyond the Navy. The goal, he says, is to "improve energy security, increase our energy independence and help lead the nation toward a clean energy economy."

Biofuel Takes Flight

On a humid April day in 2010, an F/A-18 Hornet roared down the runway at Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland. White strands of condensation curled back from its wingtips as the Green Hornet lifted off. It was Earth Day and the aircraft was powered by a 50-50 mixture of conventional jet fuel and biofuel squeezed from seeds of camelina plants. Soon the plane was racing at 1.7 times the speed of sound.

Afterward, Lt. Cmdr. Tom Weaver, the pilot, declared the flight flawless. "There is no difference between JP5 [conventional jet fuel] and biofuel," he said.

Mabus was ebullient: "We stretched our imagination a little bit further today. In fact, our imagination flew today, flew because of biofuels developed through American innovation and American science," he said at the time.

The flights have continued. On Labor Day weekend in 2011, the Navy's Blue Angels precision flying team performed using the same 50-50 blend of jet fuel and biofuel. The previous month, a T-45 trainer and an MV-22 tilt-rotor aircraft flew on the same fuel blend.

By late 2011, all manned and unmanned Navy aircraft had flown on biofuel, and testing of surface vessels was under way, according to Hicks. Navy helicopters, riverine command boats and landing craft had been powered by biofuel blends wrung from algae.

"Everything we see in biofuels indicates that the technology's there," Mabus says.

The Navy isn't venturing into alternative fuels alone. The Air Force has test-flown aircraft ranging from big B-52 bombers to unmanned aerial vehicles on blends that include liquid fuels made from camelina, coal and natural gas. Meanwhile, the Army has demonstrated that Blackhawk helicopters can fly on fuel extracted from coal, and is designing hybrid combat vehicles.

Still, the Navy remains the military's most enthusiastic alternative fuels promoter.

"Culturally, the Navy has embraced" the need to begin switching to non-petroleum sources of energy, says Scott Truver, director of national security programs at Gryphon Technologies, an engineering and technical services firm that holds Navy contracts.

Energy has become "a no-kidding issue that's got to be addressed," Truver says. "It's so the fleet can operate within the constraints that are going to be coming." Those include tighter budgets, continued risk in petroleum-producing regions and almost certainly rising petroleum prices.

The nation has reached similar energy tipping points in the past, and always, Mabus says, with the Navy leading the way. In the 1850s, the Navy shifted from sail to coal; in the early 20th century from coal to oil; and in the 1950s, the service introduced nuclear power for propulsion.

"And every single time we did, without exception, there were these naysayers" arguing that energy innovations were too uncertain and too dangerous. Often, "they were inside the Navy saying this. And every time, without exception, they've been wrong. And I have absolutely no doubt they're going to be wrong this time, too," he told attendees at the Washington energy forum.

Coming Sea Change

The shift from petroleum to biofuel could be as significant to the Navy in coming years as the decision in 1904 to move the fleet from coal to oil, Truver says. It could mean that 80 percent of the Navy's energy comes from domestic sources, breaking the service's dependence on foreign oil. And the Great Green Fleet could rival the Great White Fleet of 1907-the 14-month global cruise of 16 white ships that marked the United States' emergence as a world military power.

As the Navy prepares for the 2016 deployment, the focus isn't only on bio-fuels. Ships are being fitted with a range of energy-efficient technologies: Solid-state light-emitting diodes will replace incandescent light bulbs to cut fuel consumption on destroyers by as much as 500 barrels of oil per year. New coatings will keep hulls clean, and thus reduce drag, which could slash fuel consumption by 10 percent. Stern flaps that help ships slide more easily through the water have the potential to increase efficiency by another 7.5 percent. And Smart Voyage Planning software considers hull-form data, weather and ocean current information to optimize ship routing for further savings, the Navy says.

Hybrid-electric drive propulsion offers additional savings.

At 847 feet long and weighing 41,600 tons, the USS Makin Island, with its 1,200 sailors and 1,700 Marines and Harrier jets, helicopters and landing craft, looks more like a floating fortress than an energy efficiency experiment. But the ship's hybrid electric drive and gas turbine propulsion system saved 900,000 gallons of fuel worth $2.2 million during its 12,000-mile maiden voyage in 2009.

Makin Island's main propulsion system includes two 35,000-horsepower gas turbine engines that can push the ship through the water at up to 23 knots. Because gas turbines are efficient only when operating at high speeds, the ship runs on electricity when sailing at 12 knots or less to avoid wasting fuel. Six 4,000-kilowatt diesel generators power two 5,000-horsepower auxiliary electric motors to drive the ship.

The Navy estimates the Makin Island will save $250 million in fuel costs over its 40-year life span. That's at today's oil prices. Savings will increase as the price of oil goes up.

Buoyed by the Makin Island's performance, the Navy plans this year to see how hybrid drive systems perform in smaller ships. The guided missile destroyer USS Truxtun will be fitted with a hybrid electric drive system, a stern flap and other energy-saving technology. The hybrid drive system alone is expected to cut Truxtun's fuel consumption by 8,500 barrels a year-for a savings of about $850,000 at current oil prices. If the electric propulsion system is deemed suitable for Truxtun, then other destroyers might be retrofitted with hybrid drive systems after 2014, Hicks says.

DDG-51-class ships like Truxtun make attractive candidates for hybrid drive systems because "we've got a lot in the fleet and we're proposing to build a lot more," Mabus says.

Looking for 'Mr. Right'

The fuel for these future ships is being developed today on 60,000 acres of Montana farmland, on 11,000 acres in Eastern Washington, in a breeding nursery in Yuma, Ariz., and on five-acre demonstration plots in North Carolina. It's also percolating in giant stainless-steel tanks, in clear plastic tubes and in sprawling ponds stained deep green by algae.

Recognizing the oil potential in camelina, algae and other crops "is like discovering oil in all 50 states," says John Williams, a spokesman for Seattle-based AltAir Fuels LLC. Camelina, a relative of mustard, provides most of the biofuel that has powered military aircraft so far. "The attraction of camelina for biofuel is that you can grow it today-it's out of the research and development phase," Williams says.

Ultimately, though, algae may prove a more promising source of biofuel. "Algae are the most prolific organisms known-they grow fast, they have a high oil content, they're an ideal source for biofuel," Williams says.

"You can get about 75 gallons of biofuel from an acre of camelina, but you can get 2,000 to 5,000 gallons per acre" from algae, he says.

The Air Transport Action Group trade association calls algae "potentially the most promising feedstock for producing large quantities of sustainable aviation biofuel." Among its attributes: It can grow in polluted and brackish water, it can be grown on otherwise unproductive land, and it thrives on carbon dioxide, potentially reducing emissions from sources such as power plants.

But "if algae is Mr. Right, camelina is Mr. Right Now," Williams says. Like algae, camelina does not require prime crop land. It will grow on marginal land, requires little water or fertilizer, and it can be planted and harvested with existing farm equipment. The Navy has set some strict rules for biofuels. They cannot come from food crops, a requirement that rules out corn, soybeans and other edible plants. They must be "drop-in replacements" for petroleum-based fuel, meaning they must perform well without requiring any changes to engines or fuel storage and handling equipment.

And over their life cycle, biofuels cannot produce more greenhouse gas than the petroleum fuel they replace. For now, that rules out coal-to-liquid fuel. The process of turning coal into liquid fuel releases substantial carbon dioxide, and then burning the liquid fuel releases even more. The result is a life cycle that produces nearly twice as much carbon dioxide as that associated with burning petroleum.

A 'Strategic Imperative'

After the pale yellow flowers are gone and green camelina dries to golden brown, giant combines cut the plants and extract their seeds. The seeds are then pressed to squeeze out their oil. Algae, too, is pressed, and additional oil can be extracted through a chemical process.

In both cases, the oil is cleaned and then refined into jet fuel with essentially the same technology used to produce jet fuel from petroleum, says Susan Gross, spokeswoman for green jet fuel maker Honeywell UOP.

The resulting fuel is slightly higher in energy density than petroleum-based fuel, which means an aircraft can fly farther on less fuel, Gross says. Compared with petroleum, biofuels produce 65 percent to 80 percent fewer greenhouse gases.

Mabus shrugs off the environmental virtues. "There are lots of ancillary things that flow from [biofuels]-more jobs, cleaner environment, better stewards of the Earth. But those are all side effects," he told the energy forum. "We are a military organization, and we're doing this so that we can be a better military organization. So that we can fight better, so that we can perform the duties and missions given to us by this country.

"This isn't trendy; this isn't flavor of the day. We're doing it for the Navy, we're doing it for the Marine Corps, we're doing it for the United States of America to become energy independent," he said. "Energy reform is a strategic imperative."

In the long run, petroleum statistics don't favor the United States. The nation consumes 25 percent of the world's oil supply, but produces only 3 percent. Foreign governments, some of which are hostile to U.S. interests, control 77 percent of the world's oil production. What's more, 30 percent of the oil that the United States depends on passes through the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic waterway linking the oil-rich Persian Gulf with the rest of the world.

For years military planners have worried that Iran, which borders the strait on the north, or some other anti-Western actor might block the strategic choke point. At its narrowest, the strait separates Oman from Iran by 34 miles. On an average day, 13 tankers carry 15.5 million barrels of crude oil through the passage. And there are similar choke points elsewhere, says Navy's Hicks-the Strait of Malacca, the Panama Canal, Gibraltar.

It doesn't take an actual oil shortage, just the threat of one, to roil financial markets and send the price of oil skyward, he says.

For the U.S. economy, expensive oil threatens industrial production, employment and growth. For the Navy, that threatens steaming time, flying time and readiness. But for all the promise of biofuels, there remains a major hurdle-cost.

In 2010, the Navy reportedly paid $67.50 a gallon for camelina-based fuel and $425 a gallon for fuel from algae. That compares to about $4 a gallon for conventional jet fuel. But the price is rapidly coming down, according to Hicks. Today the Navy is buying small batches of specially produced fuel. "We haven't yet got the economy of scale," he says. That's coming.

Even with the "very small amounts we've been buying for testing, we saw a price come down by half last year and it's on track to come down by half again is year," Mabus says. "As the market ramps up, the price is coming down."

That's starting to happen commercially, too. Alaska Airlines reports paying $17 a gallon this fall for 28,500 gallons of biofuel made from used cooking oil. Although that's about five times more than it pays for commercial jet fuel, the airline says in November it flew 75 flights using a biofuel mixture to call attention to the commercial industry need for competitively priced biofuels.

Another energy tipping point is at hand, Mabus says. "I think the U.S. military, particularly the Navy and the Marine Corps, are going to be on the edge causing that tip."

William Matthews is a freelance journalist who has covered government and technology in Washington for two decades.

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The Greenhouse Effect

William Matthews — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0400

EPA wins a long-fought battle over industry fuel standards, but hits roadblocks on other environmental regulations.

With auto executives perched on wooden stools to his right and fuel-efficient vehicles parked on his left, President Obama announced a truce in the decades-old mileage war between the U.S. government and the companies that make cars and light trucks.

Obama unveiled surprisingly aggressive new automobile mileage standards on July 29: companies must build fleets that average 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. Even more surprising, 13 auto manufacturers agreed to try.

The president hailed the deal his administration had struck as "the single most important step we've ever taken as a nation to reduce our dependence on foreign oil," and as a victory for consumers, who he said eventually will be able to drive twice as far on a gallon of gas.

The automakers were less loquacious, but affirmed their support.

General Motors issued a statement: "Reducing fuel consumption and lessening the automobile's impact on the environment is important to our business because it's important to our country and our customers."

Honda said it "embraces this new challenge." Nissan declared, "We're up to the task." And Ford applauded "the regulatory certainty" that comes from setting goals that stretch into 2025. "Knowing what's going to happen long term allows us to invest in technology," company executives said.

That's quite a U-turn for the auto industry, which toiled single-mindedly for five decades to block government efforts to improve fuel economy and to reduce tailpipe pollution.

The mileage agreement also was a rare victory for the Environmental Protection Agency, which has been under relentless attack by Republicans in Congress and business lobbies determined to obstruct the agency's efforts to impose stronger controls on air pollution and greenhouse gases.

Those assaults continue. In October, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, convened a hearing to quiz Obama administration officials and auto industry executives about closed-door meetings that led to the mileage agreement.

On Aug. 29, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., listed seven "job-destroying" EPA regulations that he wants Congress to repeal, weaken or delay. Four days later, amid dismal employment news, Obama dropped his push for stricter rules on ozone pollution at least until 2013.

The president's move prompted five health and environmental organizations to sue in October, claiming the decision not to set stricter ozone standards was illegal because it keeps in place a standard the EPA has deemed inadequate to protect public health.

But the suit may be the least of EPA's problems. In July, the House Appropriations Committee voted to cut the agency's 2012 budget by 18 percent. The committee also attached 39 provisions to the 2012 interior and environment appropriations bill to stop the EPA from creating and enforcing new pollution controls.

In an address on the House floor, Rep. Michael Simpson, R-Idaho, chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees EPA, decried the agency's "unrestrained effort to regulate greenhouse gases," and denounced its "pursuit of an overly aggressive regulatory agenda.

"My intense opposition to the EPA's efforts to control nearly every industry in this country is no secret," Simpson said. He insisted, "this isn't a partisan issue," but added, "I know some of my Democrat friends will be especially critical of the spending reductions to the EPA accounts."

Appropriations Committee Chairman, Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Ky., said the budget cuts are intended "to rein in unparalleled, out-of-control spending and job-killing overregulation" by EPA. "Though we all appreciate the core mission of the EPA, this agency has lost its grip with economic reality and has become the epitome of the continued and damaging regulatory overreach of this administration," Rogers said.

Business organizations from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the North Carolina Petroleum Council to the Western Energy Alliance have joined the anti-EPA onslaught.

The ferocity of the attacks has been "stunning," says Daniel J. Weiss, senior fellow and director of climate strategy at the Center for American Progress. But it's not unprecedented. In 1995, Republicans won control of the House and attached 17 provisions to the EPA funding bill to block the agency's ability to enforce environmental laws, Weiss says.

In that instance, President Clinton vetoed the spending bill, which also included funding for Medicare, education and public health. The standoff led to a government shutdown that largely was blamed on Republicans.

Positions have hardened since then, says Paul Billings, vice president for national policy and advocacy at the American Lung Association. Even during the Republican revolution of the mid-1990s, "there were some Teddy Roosevelt Republicans" who reliably voted to protect the environment. "There was always bipartisan support for the Clean Air Act," he says. That's gone. "We've seen near-unanimous votes in the House among Republicans" against stricter pollution rules, Billings says.

Which raises the question: How did the embattled EPA manage to overcome a half century of dogged auto industry resistance to reach acceptable-even impressive-new auto mileage standards?

It took an unusual confluence of circumstances, say environmental advocates who have fought the auto industry long and hard.

Clean Air Act

For decades, auto mileage standards were set by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which generally took "a very industry-friendly view," says David Doniger, policy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council's climate center. "The auto companies for decades had NHTSA comfortably in their pocket."

Attempts to change that began in 1998, when EPA's general counsel wrote in a legal opinion that the agency had the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the 1970 Clean Air Act. When EPA failed to act, environmental organizations forced the issue by formally petitioning EPA in 1999 to use its Clean Air Act powers to control greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles.

But regulations were slow in coming. Clinton's term expired, George W. Bush moved into the White House, and in 2003, EPA denied the petition, contending that its legal authority to regulate greenhouse gases was unclear, and regulating greenhouse gases from motor vehicles was "not appropriate at this time."

Thirteen environmental organizations, a dozen states, four cities and the territory of American Samoa sued, and in 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency that EPA does, indeed, have authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles.

Meanwhile, California had already adopted standards for reducing auto emissions of four greenhouse gases-carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and refrigerants from auto air conditioners. Auto industry lawsuits to block these standards failed in 2007, and more than 15 states announced plans to adopt California standards.

The auto industry faced the prospect of building cars to California's standards for some states and cars that met lesser federal standards for other states. "The carmakers' interest was in having one set of standards," Billings says. "So there was a basis for a deal."

According to Doniger at the Natural Resources Defense Council, external forces also drove the need for fuel efficiency.

"At the same time, there were a lot of economic woes," he says. Gasoline prices jumped to an unprecedented $3 a gallon briefly in 2005 and then higher in 2006 and 2007 before rocketing above $4 a gallon in 2008. Prices have dipped since, but remain more than double the average price for the previous quarter century.

As gasoline prices soared, the U.S. economy faltered, falling into deep recession. Demand for gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles, long a gold mine for U.S. automakers, collapsed, and in 2008, U.S. auto sales declined by a third. To stay afloat amid the economic wreckage, General Motors and Chrysler together received a $78 billion federal bailout in exchange for a pledge to restructure for long-term viability.

"Auto companies have come to recognize that now and for the foreseeable future, consumers want more efficient vehicles," says Billings. "And if they want to sell cars in China, India and Europe, they have to make more efficient vehicles." So, battered by rising oil prices, legal defeats, the threat of state standards and changing consumer tastes, and indebted to the government for the bailout, auto companies were ready to compromise.

Give and Take

In 2010, EPA recommended fleet mileage requirements between 47 and 62 miles per gallon by 2025 to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and cut oil consumption. The upper level thrilled environmental groups. The Natural Resources Defense Council said, "a 62 mpg standard would save more oil, cut more pollution and spur more innovation" in auto efficiency.

But automakers balked, warning that requiring such fuel efficiency would push up vehicle costs, cause car sales to plunge and kill industry jobs. The automakers lobbied for 47 miles per gallon.

As negotiations among NHTSA, EPA and auto industry representatives progressed this summer, the Obama administration proposed setting fleet mileage requirements at 56.2 miles per gallon. EPA said building cars that efficient would add $2,100 to $2,500 to the cost of a car, but would save $8,000 on gasoline over the life of the car.

The nonprofit Center for Automotive Research argued the administration's plan would cost much more-$5,270 to $6,714 for most cars.

Ultimately, the government and automakers settled on 54.5 miles per gallon. "It could have been a very strong standard," says Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign. In the end, "it is a reasonably strong standard. The auto industry was pleased that it wasn't any higher and the environmentalists were pleased it wasn't lower."

But 54.5 is a bit misleading. Many cars-perhaps most-won't go 54.5 miles on a gallon of gas. The auto industry "won a lot of loopholes," Becker says. Electric cars and hybrids, for instance, are rated at 99 miles per gallon, which will pull the fleet average up, according to Doniger.

Automakers also will get mileage credit for using less environmentally destructive air conditioner refrigerants. And less stringent standards will apply to small trucks, which some clean air advocates fear will prompt automakers to label more vehicles as trucks. Then in 2021 there is a midterm review that could lead to reducing the 54.5 mpg standard if auto companies say it is too hard to meet.

Even so, many environmentalists are optimistic. "In 2025, the internal combustion is going to be a heck of a lot better" in terms of efficiency, Doniger says.

Power Struggles

By 2025, the new mileage standards are expected to cut oil consumption by 2.2 million barrels a day, Obama said in his July announcement. And during the next 15 years, they will eliminate 6 billion tons of greenhouse gases-more than the United States now emits annually, according to EPA.

Having negotiated a cease-fire between auto companies, autoworkers' unions and environmentalists, can EPA now reach agreements on new pollution rules that affect utility companies, cement manufacturers, industrial boiler operators and others? Probably not, says Marchant Wentworth, a legislative representative for clean energy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

There are only a dozen or so automakers. "The utility industry is different," he says. There are thousands of utility companies across the United States and "terrific diversity" among them. For those that generate electricity with nuclear power or natural gas, or operate newer power plants, tougher clean air regulations won't be much of a problem. But for decades-old plants that burn coal, more rigorous regulations are anathema.

The auto companies all face the same problems-state pollution regulations, rising fuel prices, lost lawsuits, declining consumer demand for gas guzzlers-and were willing to make concessions. "We don't have the leverage yet to force utilities to compromise," says Becker.

Instead, the utilities have figured out how to fight back-they've convinced House Republicans to take up their cause, according to Weiss of the Center for American Progress. "The House is reacting to pressure from utility companies, big oil and coal to block EPA health protections," he says.

Doniger adds, "The House Republican leadership is grandstanding to their political base. Slamming the EPA is really popular with their people."

Republican presidential hopefuls are piling on as well. Michele Bachmann has vowed to "lock the doors and turn off the lights at the EPA" if elected president. Jon Huntsman accuses EPA of a "regulatory reign of terror." Rick Perry confessed he prays daily that God will give the president the wisdom to "ask his EPA to back down these regulations that are causing businesses to hesitate to spend money."

In addition to the 39 anti-EPA provisions in the House appropriations bill, Republicans have proposed seven "regulatory relief" bills aimed at slowing or halting pollution control regulations the agency is preparing. The new rules would require maximum efficiency for power plants, industrial boilers and cement plants, and limit coal ash, cross-state air pollution, greenhouse gases and particulate emissions in rural areas.

Ozone regulations, which Cantor called "possibly the most harmful of all currently anticipated Obama administration regulations," have been withdrawn. "A step in the right direction," he said in his August memo to lawmakers. But Cantor vowed that "House Republicans will continue our efforts to make sure the remaining regulations do not go into effect."

Environmental organizations are counting on the Senate and the White House to hold off the House assault on EPA. "The House will pass stuff, and the Senate will let it die," Doniger predicts.

But the provisions can still be attached to must-pass spending bills. And if they aren't blocked by the Senate, then the president becomes the last line of defense. Obama came through for environmentalists in 2010, Weiss says.

Anti-environment measures "came up as part of 2011 budget agreement and the president forced [Congress] to remove them. He's got to stand up again," he adds.

"The president is facing a direct attack on his authority, on his agency," Wentworth says. "It's very personal and very partisan." But the 2012 election is looming. "There's still a lot of positioning and skirmishing" ahead, Doniger says. "I don't think you're going to find a happy outcome like with the auto industry."

William Matthews is a freelance journalist covering government and technology in Washington.

Political Resistance

In a memo to House Republicans Aug. 29, Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia unveiled an agenda for blocking 10 government regulations he said threaten job growth. Seven are EPA rules:

COAL AND OIL-FIRED POWER PLANTS

Utility MACT, or maximum achievable control technology, would require coal and oil-fired power plants to sharply cut emissions of mercury, arsenic, chromium, nickel and other metals; reduce sulfur dioxide and acid gas emissions; and make lesser reductions in particulate and carbon dioxide emissions.

CROSS-STATE AIR POLLUTION The Cross-State Air Pollution Rule proposes to improve air quality by reducing power plant emissions that cross state lines. It replaces a 2005 Bush administration rule that was struck down in federal court as too lax. Cantor warned that Utility MACT and the cross-state pollution rule could affect 1,000 power plants and cause "electricity bill increases in many parts of the country from 12 percent to 24 percent." EPA says the cost to utility customers would be modest, but the new rules would save $120 billion to $280 billion annually by preventing deaths and illnesses. Rep. John Sullivan, R-Okla., has introduced legislation to delay MACT and the cross-state rule until further study is done.

INDUSTRIAL BOILERS

Boiler MACT rules would impose new maximum achievable emissions reductions on industrial boilers and incinerators. The National Association of Manufacturers called Boiler MACT "a harsh, inflexible rule that will cost jobs" and hurt global competitiveness. Again, EPA cites benefits from improved health.

CEMENT PLANTS

Cement MACT would impose stricter regulations on cement plant emissions, including mercury, sulfur dioxide, particulates and other pollutants. The Portland Cement Association says new rules could force 18 of about 100 cement plants in the United States to close, costing 4,000 jobs.

COAL ASH

Coal ash regulations could classify the "combustion residuals" from burned coal as "special wastes" subject to stricter disposal regulations. Environmental organizations note that the ash can contain arsenic, lead, chromium and other heavy metals. But coal ash is also an ingredient in cement, concrete, wallboard, roofing shingles, plastics, paint and other materials, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce argues that regulating it as hazardous waste "has potentially devastating consequences for America's construction industry." Rep. David McKinley, a Republican from West Virginia, has introduced the Coals Residuals Reuse and Management Act to turn coal ash regulation over to the states.

RURAL AREAS

Tougher rules on particulate pollution in rural areas have been ridiculed in Congress as EPA attempts to regulate "farm dust." Rep. Kristi Noem, R-S.D., has introduced legislation that would delay any new rules on coarse particulate matter for a year and limit regulation of dust. It's not about farm dust, says Marchant Wentworth, a legislative representative for clean energy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. "What we're talking about is soot that comes from power plants and cars. The stuff that kills people."

GREENHOUSE GASES

Greenhouse gas regulations, Cantor warned, "will affect new and existing oil, natural gas and coal-fired power plants, as well as oil refineries nationwide." He added, "the impact on the economy and jobs is likely to be severe."

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High Flier

William Matthews — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400

James Amos is the first fighter pilot to lead the Marine Corps.

When new numbers charting the performance of the Pentagon's latest and most expensive warplane recently flashed across the special computer screen installed next to his desk, Marine Corps Gen. James Amos was relieved and delighted.

"The metrics," as Amos calls them, showed that the gap between the aircraft's weight and its engine thrust had nearly tripled. "The margin is growing, which is good. That's exactly where we want it to go," he said during an interview in July at his office in the Pentagon's E-Ring. It would be hard to overstate the importance of those numbers. In nonengineering terms, they indicate the plane might actually fly-literally. That a critical fighter jet program has struggled to get off the ground with enough capacity to carry a meaningful weapons payload speaks volumes about the F-35B, the troubled Marine Corps version of the multiservice Joint Strike Fighter aircraft.

Amos, who became the Corps' 35th commandant in October 2010, is the first fighter pilot ever to hold the job, and he promptly made saving the F-35B a top priority. "This is our future," he says.

But the future is fraught with other problems as well: scant budgets, expensive weapons, troop cuts and a grim new post-Afghanistan security environment that's already emerging. Amos has scarcely more than three years left as commandant to reshape the Marine Corps to meet these challenges.

So far, his approach has been pretty much head-on. On the F-35B, he says, "I didn't ask permission from anybody. What I did was I just reclaimed ownership of this program."

At Amos' insistence, new metrics-which include test results, assessments of vertical landings and other development data-are sent daily to his computer. "I track the program very, very carefully," he says. "I track it like a dog."

Faced with a long list of F-35B problems in January, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates put the plane on probation and said if the problems can't be fixed in two years, the plane should be canceled.

Weight was one of the most serious problems. Unlike the A and C variants designed for the Air Force and Navy, respectively, the F-35B is designed to land vertically on amphibious ships, which lack the comparatively huge deck space of the Navy's aircraft carriers or the long runways used by the Air Force. Vertical landings are trickier than conventional landings because the plane relies solely on the thrust from its engine, not lift from its wings, to make a controlled descent. The F-35B's maximum weight cannot exceed 32,490 pounds and its engine, obviously, must generate more than 32,490 pounds of thrust. "I track every pound that goes on that airplane," Amos says.

Until the July metrics arrived, the margin between weight and thrust was "pretty tight, [then] the margin increased dramatically, almost by 300 percent," thanks to a combination of reduced weight and increased thrust, he explains. But that doesn't end the F-35B's troubles.

There are other significant engineering challenges, including faulty auxiliary air inlet doors, fatigue cracks in structural bulkheads and poor parts reliability. According to Amos, these problems are being addressed. "I can tell you who's in charge and responsible for the engineering fixes and what the approximate dates of installation of the fixes are in the test airplanes," he says.

In addition, Amos instituted monthly meetings in his office with senior executives from F-35 maker Lockheed Martin Corp.; Vice Adm. David Venlet, the F-35 program executive; Ashton B. Carter, the Pentagon's acquisition chief; Vice Adm. David Architzel, head of the Naval Air Systems Command; and Lt. Gen. Terry Robling, the deputy commandant for Marine Corps aviation.

As Amos sees it, under his watchful eye, the F-35B "is really turning around."

Perhaps. But even the Marine Corps commandant can't change the laws of physics, says David Berteau, a former senior Pentagon official and now senior adviser and director of the Defense-Industrial Initiatives Group at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Unless the weight problem is solved and other defects fixed, the plane won't fly.

Looming Cuts

Even if the F-35B does fly, it could be brought down by cost. At $60 billion, the program simply might be too expensive, says Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst and vice president of the Teal Group market analysis firm.

The aircraft is just one weapon on a Marine wish list populated with items that carry eye-popping price tags. The MV-22 tilt-rotor aircraft "will come to around $40 billion," he says. And the Marines want upgraded attack and utility helicopters that will cost $12 billion, and heavy lift helicopters that will cost $26 billion.

"The Marines still have grand plans," Aboulafia says, but future defense budgets look decidedly more modest. The August deal struck between the Obama White House and congressional leaders to raise the limit on federal borrowing will require $2.5 trillion in spending cuts over the next 10 years, and a good chunk of that will have to come from the Defense Department budget.

Amos is acutely aware of the budget pressures. Earlier this year he began calling for the Corps to return to its "frugal roots." He explains: "All of us have lived fairly well over the last eight to nine years. We've been able to get not only what we needed, but also get what we wanted." Very likely those days are over, he says.

Much as it wants new equipment, the service will have to re-examine what it already has and determine how much of it is "good enough that it can sustain us through this economic downturn. If it's good enough, we'll live with that," Amos says. "That allows us to focus on those things that we absolutely have to have."

Among the items likely to be deemed an unaffordable luxury is the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle. Under development for nearly four years, the vehicle is intended to be a more survivable replacement for the 30-year-old Humvee. But there are problems.

"The early feedback is they will weigh 20,000 pounds and cost $500,000 apiece," Amos says.

That's nearly twice the weight and more than three times the cost of armored Humvees. The vehicle can be lifted only by the largest helicopters. "I just said we're not buying it," he says. "First of all, I can't have a vehicle that heavy. And I can't buy a vehicle to replace my utility fleet at $500,000 apiece. It's just too expensive." Instead, the Marines will re-examine the current fleet of Humvees to see how many are "good enough."

A Long Shot

What's clearly not good enough for Amos is the Corps' amphibious assault capability. Even though the U.S. military has not conducted a major amphibious assault in more than a half century, the Marines still consider the ability to launch an infantry attack from the sea to be indispensable.

And after a decade of serving essentially as a second land-based army in Afghanistan and Iraq, Amos is eager to return the Marines to their maritime roots.

But equipping a modern amphibious force won't be easy. In January, the Pentagon pulled the plug on the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, the concept for which dates to the 1980s. The idea was to build a 38-ton armored vehicle that could skim across the water at high speed from ship to shore and then fight ably on land. But after spending 25 years and $3 billion on development, all the Marine Corps had to show for it was seven test vehicles.

Costs had risen from $4 million per vehicle to $17 million to $18 million a copy, Amos says.

"I asked myself, how did we get to this point?" His answer: "We service chiefs have abrogated our responsibility and given the program to the acquisition community." As with the F-35B, it was time to take back control of the amphibious assault program.

Amos says he wants a new amphibious assault vehicle ready for testing by the time his term as commandant is up in 2014. In his mind's eye he sees it clearly: "I want to be in it and driving it and steering it into the water."

It's an ambitious goal by any measure. Following standard Pentagon acquisition practices, Amos says he could expect to see a new amphibious vehicle in 2024. Instead, Amos wants to apply a new standard, one established by the mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicle, more commonly known as the MRAP. Because Marines and soldiers were getting blown up at a politically unsustainable rate in Iraq as that war dragged on, the Pentagon found the wherewithal to design and field comparatively safer vehicles in about a year.

"I'm looking for something along the lines of the MRAP," he says. "It's going to take longer than the MRAP, but we ought to be able to have at least two prototypes by the time my term as commandant is over."

That's a long shot, says CSIS' Berteau. It was possible to field MRAPs in a year because the basic vehicles were already in production. Assembly plants existed, machine tools were in place, "it was just a matter of increasing through-put," he says. By contrast, nothing like the EFV or a plant to mass produce it exists today.

Building prototypes in three years might be possible if the Marine Corps opts for "something that's already almost commercially available," says Dakota Wood, a former Marine Corps officer and now a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

For now, the Pentagon plans to spend about $1 billion to upgrade existing amphibious assault vehicles.

Amos' vision of the future is fairly grim. He sees developing countries awash in poverty, unemployment, violence, criminality and extremism. Accelerated birth rates and migration to urban areas in the developing world will create overpopulated cities that become lawless havens for terrorists, insurgents and criminal gangs. In a world awash in weapons large and small, competition for scarce resources will spark conflict and fuel chaos.

Shaping the Corps

Most of this will occur where the Marines have traditionally operated-in the coastal areas where most of the world's population lives. Amos is fashioning a "middleweight force," light enough to arrive quickly from the sea, "yet heavy enough to accomplish the mission when we get there," he says.

The service must become more efficient, more lethal and more capable, he says. In the process, the Corps will become smaller. After the Marines leave Afghanistan, he expects the service to shrink from 202,000 troops to 186,800. To get more out of that smaller force, Amos plans to increase the five-year-old Marine Corps Special Operations Command from 2,500 to 3,600 troops. "I'm a believer in special operations," he says. "I think it's a real force multiplier. You can take a team of 12 or 13 Marine special operations folks and put them in someplace you otherwise might have to put an infantry company or larger. And because of their unique skill sets and training and equipment, they will begin to make a difference almost immediately.

"It's like having larger maneuver units available to you but at a much smaller cost," Amos says.

He's also planning to significantly increase the number of troops trained for cyber operations. "Cyberwarfare is probably the biggest growth industry in warfare that's out there," he says. "We're putting 600 more Marines into that effort over the next couple of years, and I predict at the end of that we're probably going to end up putting more." There are already almost 1,000 cyber specialists in the Corps.

Cyber operations now touch on almost everything the Marine Corps does, Amos says. Mainly, cyber-trained Marines would defend the service's networks against intrusions, but they also would be trained to exploit and attack enemy networks, he says.

Law enforcement as another specialty Amos intends to expand. Informed by experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, Amos plans for new law enforcement battalions that take detective tactics to the battlefield, allowing troops to infiltrate bomb-making networks, for example.

For all Marines, he wants more education. In future operations, "we're probably going to be spread out more than we are today in Iraq and Afghanistan," Amos says. "There's a very good chance that a sergeant may be the most senior Marine in an area of 40 square kilometers. So we need to have sergeants who are better educated because they'll be making decisions that have international significance." Instruction in languages and cultural awareness will be important, but so will training in critical thinking, he says.

Growth in subject areas like special operations, cyber operations and law enforcement will inevitably come at the expense of other parts of the Corps. Amos projects that the infantry will shrink by 11 percent; cannon artillery by 20 percent; armor by 20 percent; fixed-wing aviation squadrons by 16 percent; logistics by 9 percent; nonoperational billets by 7 percent; and the civilian workforce by 13 percent. It's a calculus undoubtedly unsettling to many.

Amos says his goal for the Corps is twofold: Prepare Marines for the threats they are likely to face in the next decade or two, and ensure that the Corps remains "the nation's crisis response force of choice." Time will tell if he succeeds.

William Matthews is a freelance journalist who has been covering government and technology in Washington for two decades.

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Mapping Human Terrain

William Matthews — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Intelligence analysts are tracking the potential for poverty, extremism and pandemic disease to predict the next national security crisis.

If you walk the hallways-that is, if you're escorted through the hallways-of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in Bethesda, Md., you'll see some remarkable maps.

Based on photos taken from space, they depict cities, highways, farm fields, forests and rivers in exquisite detail and vivid color. But these are mere decorations compared with the highly detailed and highly classified images that geospatial analysts here study daily behind heavily bolted doors.

Working with satellite images, video shot by unmanned aerial vehicles and data collected from spy planes using a variety of other overhead sensors, NGA provides the U.S. armed services with maps, images and targeting analysis to guide military operations.

Agency Director Letitia Long provided rare insight into NGA on May 2 when she issued a statement highlighting its role in the discovery and killing of Osama bin Laden.

"NGA applied a range of geospatial- intelligence capabilities, including imagery, geospatial and targeting analysis, along with image sciences and modeling" that helped guide the U.S. special forces who located and killed bin Laden in Pakistan on May 1, she said.

Publicly discussing NGA's role in a risky military operation was uncharacteristic of the secretive intelligence agency. But Long, who has been NGA director since August 2010, has been pushing the agency to move beyond its comfortable stock-in-trade of maps, photos and other images. While those products are critical for revealing what's happening and where and when it's happening, and even who might be involved, Long has told her agency that it also should be trying to predict what will happen.

NGA, which is relocating employees to its new headquarters building in Springfield, Va., should "be moving to more of an anticipatory posture," she said in an address to a geospatial intelligence symposium in November 2010.

Rather than report what is happening, NGA analysis should aim to predict "what could happen, where it could happen and why it could happen," Long said. That way "we can create new value for the policymakers, the warfighters, the intelligence community and first responders," she said.

The key to predicting the future? "Human geography," Long says.

Maps, photos and other images provide information about the tangible features of a particular location-the buildings, the roads, the mountains and rivers-that's physical geography. And it's valuable, as far as it goes.

But the human geography of the same place would reveal much more-tribal boundaries, political ideology, ethnicity and languages. According to Long, it could include such elements as birth and death rates, degree of education, access to media, principal market commodities and proximity to health care facilities.

All are factors that would influence human behavior.

Unlike natural terrain and man-made features, the human geography "data set can and does change rapidly and dramatically based on the problem," Long said. Geospatial intelligence "is the examination of all this data viewed through a spatial and temporal lens."

That is space and time-where and when events happen.

Long contends that human geography "can yield new insight" that would help answer such questions as:

Where are conditions right for weapons of mass destruction proliferation?
Where will the next pandemic outbreak occur?
Where will transnational criminal activity spread?
Where will the next mass migration event occur?
Where are the populations most susceptible to extremist ideology?

"We would look at a broad range of geospatial information," such as terrain, elevation, roads, buildings, hilltops and rivers, and then consider how people in the area move from one place to another, and over what period of time, Long said. Local language, ethnicity, education and demographics can suggest whether local populations would be likely to form alliances. And history can reveal previous peaceful or warlike tendencies.

The economy, the climate and access to technology provide additional insight, Long said.

"Our analysis will be greatly enriched by understanding the interrelationship of all [geospatial-intelligence] factors-the Earth's physical features, imagery intelligence and human geography," she said. "The resulting analysis will yield new analytic insights and give the national security community a deeper context to grapple with these difficult questions."

Once they understand the situation on the ground, Long expects her analysts "to communicate this GEOINT analysis visually. Often, the human mind cannot absorb vast amounts of data through the written word alone," she said.

Which brings NGA back to the maps-or their dynamic, interactive digital equivalents. "NGA thinks spatially and can depict that visually," Long told the symposium. "This is a unique, core competency that we bring to the national security mission."

Human Factors

One thing NGA does not do much of is publicly disclose what it knows about human geography in the places that matter to today's military and political policymakers.

The agency has released few examples of its work influenced by human geography, and none with anywhere near the degree of detail that analysts would typically use. One map-perhaps the only one-cleared for public release is an aerial photo of Baghdad taken in 2009 overlaid with semi-transparent patches of green, orange, red and blue to indicate various concentrations of Shias, Sunnis and Christians.

"Knowing which areas of the city are predominantly Sunni and which are Shia helps coalition forces better understand their environment," says a caption published with the map in NGA's magazine, Pathfinder.

When the same map was published in a commercial imaging magazine, the caption noted that the color patches represent only "hypothetical areas of different ethnic groups."

In person, NGA analysts are no more forthcoming. When asked how human geography has contributed to handling recent crises, such as the uprising in Egypt this spring that ousted President Hosni Mubarak, two NGA analysts balk.

"I don't know if we should get into that or not," says Craig Rickert, NGA's human geography domain lead. "That's too current, too recent to get into."

His colleague quickly concurs. "I don't want to get into what we were or weren't doing here at NGA; that wouldn't be appropriate," says Carrie Sallaway, a geospatial analyst and member of the agency's vision team that is working to incorporate more human geography into its analysis.

Libya? Syria? No go.

When pressed, Rickert is willing to talk about how human geography contributed to only one major military and diplomatic undertaking-the Dayton Peace Accords, which was hammered out in 1995, eight years before NGA was created.

The Defense Mapping Agency, NGA's predecessor, and the Army Topographic Engineer Center produced 3-D digital maps depicting the physical features as well as the religious and ethnic dividing lines and demographic differences among the people living in war-ravaged areas of the Balkans.

According to the NGA historian's office, mapmakers and analysts used automated cartography, computer-assisted map tailoring and spatial statistical analysis to produce 3-D maps that treaty negotiators could use to "fly" over disputed territories and see the ethnic divides. It persuaded them to draw boundaries that separated the warring Bosnians, Croats and Serbs.

In the years since the Dayton Accords, enthusiasm for incorporating human geography into geospatial intelligence has waxed and waned, Sallaway says. "We've always done some of it, though it wasn't always called 'human geography.' All good analysis looks at other parts of the picture," she says.

The point of human geography is to enhance NGA intelligence by introducing information about human factors. "I don't think it's a matter of course that it's being used all the time now," Sallaway says. "We're trying to move in that direction, but we don't necessarily have all the support needed to do that."

There are "architecture issues, education issues, data issues and governance issues. Those are the four categories of needs we've identified," she says.

The architecture issues involve computer deficiencies. Human geography education is what NGA analysts need. Data issues range from a lack of data organization to problems with data sharing. And governance involves setting common standards so that different agencies collecting and analyzing human geography data will use the same terminology so that data can be shared more easily.

NGA has established a human geography working group to begin resolving such problems with "partner agencies," including the State Department, the Census Bureau, the Army and Marine Corps, as well as with U.S. military allies. The goal is to develop standard terminology for "what we should call things," and ultimately, for what human geography data "should look like," Rickert says. "What we're attempting to do is to bring efficiency" to human geography.

So far, though, most NGA analysts have little or no formal training in human geography, Sallaway says. To change that, NGA has added three courses to the National Geospatial-Intelligence College that focus on human geography.

Tapping Academia

The agency does not plan to create a cadre of human geography specialists, but rather to introduce human geography into everyday analysis. "We're talking about regular analysts doing this work," Sallaway says. Each analyst would apply human geography to his or her work "as it makes sense."

A shortage of human geography data poses another problem. "We have a bit, but a relatively small bit, of information regarding human geography" amid the vast trove of intelligence that resides in NGA databases, Rickert says.

There's a smattering of information on the political affiliations, languages and religions of certain locations, he says, but little on economics, significant events, history and "how things have already changed over time. These are all important aspects that we need to add to GEOINT," he adds.

NGA has few of its own human geography experts, so researchers rely heavily on open source intelligence, according to Sallaway. "You can talk to experts, talk to people who know the area, people who live there, native speakers," she says. On even the most arcane topics, "there are always experts on pretty much everywhere that you can chat with," she adds.

And "you can go online," Rickert says. The Internet is a vast-if unverified-source for human geography data.

NGA's zeal for human geography is part of a broader effort by the U.S. military to apply knowledge from the social sciences to military operations.

Early in the Iraq war, the Army concluded that its soldiers needed greater understanding of local languages, customs, religious practices, ideology and way of life. The Army called it understanding the "human terrain," and by late 2003 it was sending five-member teams of anthropologists, ethnographers and other social scientists to Iraq to study local cultural environments and advise U.S. commanders.

But these human terrain teams proved controversial. The American Anthropological Association warned that participating in the teams could compromise anthropologists' ethics, undermine anthropology as an academic discipline, and endanger both researchers and their subjects.

The harshest critics charged that human terrain teams were an attempt to weaponize anthropology.

A comparable backlash to NGA's use of human geography seems unlikely, Sallaway says. "It depends on whether you're operating on a tactical level or a strategic level. The human terrain teams were in certain towns, operating at a local level." That's not how NGA envisions its analysts using human geography. Mostly they'll be at NGA sites in the United States, and human geography will be one among many factors that shape their analysis, she says.

The question is whether it will work.

Perhaps, says Jerome Dobson, a geography professor at the University of Kansas and president of the American Geographical Society. "All of Director Long's stated questions conceivably can be addressed within the intellectual framework of human geography," he says.

"The challenge, of course, is to pick the right indicators to answer any specific question," he says. In other words, just because two things happen in the same place does not mean that one caused the other.

Picking the right indicators is difficult in the field and far more difficult when working merely with aggregate data at a distance, Dobson says.

Simply gathering human geography data is likely to be hard for intelligence agencies-they're widely distrusted.

"Much of the essential information cannot be collected by the intelligence community or any academic researcher with an intelligence community label on his or her funding," Dobson says.

Another academic observer agrees. "People are nervous about it. No academics want to be portrayed as spies," says an anthropologist at a Midwestern university, who asked not to be identified. He is heading overseas for a summer research project, and says that merely being quoted in a story about NGA could discourage cooperation from local officials.

Real understanding of human geography "comes only from long-term fieldwork in foreign places," Dobson says, and the amount of that work being done by U.S. universities has dramatically shrunk.

"Before 1948, the U. S. government looked to academia for this kind of understanding, and geographers were prominent in the public arena. After 1948, the United States relied almost exclusively on intelligence agencies," he says.

But the spy agencies, some say, haven't done a good job. "American interests at home and abroad have been severely damaged by geographic ignorance about foreign places and peoples," Dobson says. "We made uninformed choices about going to war [in], for example, Vietnam and Iraq."

On the positive side, the military now recognizes its deficit of understanding foreign cultures, and "we see military and intelligence organizations increasingly recognizing human geography as a top priority," he says.

But, he argues, leaving it up to intelligence agencies is not the best way to go. "What's desperately needed is a joint thrust in which NGA and other intelligence agencies do what they do best-overhead imagery, human intelligence, analyses of massive databases-while the State Department and other civilian agencies fund a massive program to send academic researchers abroad," Dobson says.

Dobson says he and Lee Schwartz, geographer of the United States for the State Department, have been promoting an effort "to recruit and deploy academic geographers and regional experts to places around the world.

"The universal reaction has been enormously positive," he says, but there has been almost no financial support for the idea.

Whether that will change is uncertain, but it's clear that the National Geospatial- Intelligence Agency understands the potential value of human geography.

Says NGA's Long: "If we can use our GEOINT expertise to focus the national security community on an issue before it becomes a crisis, we will have given everyone the opportunity to leverage their assets more effectively, and we will have given the policymaker valuable time to consider a broader range of policy options."

William Matthews is a freelance journalist who has been covering government and technology in Washington for two decades.

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Tweaking Technology

William Matthews — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Chief information officers face tight budgets and apprehension in the push toward public access, data transparency and cloud computing.

It hasn't happened at Internet speed, but federal agencies are turning the corner on using information technology to inform citizens, protect consumers and cut costs. Chief information officers are working to boost transparency of agency operations and make IT systems more efficient, but the transition hasn't always been smooth. E-government has been championed by recent Congresses and advanced by President Obama's call to make government more transparent and accessible to citizens. But now projects are being second-guessed by a new crop of lawmakers, questioned by agency technology managers and endangered by tightening budgets. Caught squarely in the middle of this tug of war, chief information officers are struggling to find common ground.

To many CIOs, the Internet provides unprecedented opportunities to make the government work better for the people it is intended to serve. Consider the Consumer Product Safety Commission. In the decades since CPSC was created in 1973, it has taken numerous consumer complaints and sometimes coroners' findings and medical examiners' reports to compel the agency to issue safety warnings about dangerous products. The commission collected data about electric frying pans that shocked users and toys that injured and even killed children, but that information was not routinely made public.

That rankled many at the commission. "If we have information [about faulty products], we should tell people," says Patrick Weddle, the commission's chief information officer. Now, thanks to a new website, consumers can sound the safety alarm themselves. SaferProducts.gov lets users warn others about faulty products that pose a risk or have caused bodily harm. Since the website went online in March, reports have warned of laptop computers that overheat, power converters that spark and melt, construction scaffolding that collapses, and toys with small parts that fall off and can be swallowed.

Chief of the Year: Information SaferProducts.gov was mandated by the 2008 Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act. The legislation followed a rash of recalls of faulty products, many of them imports, including toys with toxic paint, lead-laced lipstick, deadly pet food and toothpaste spiked with antifreeze ingredients.

Consumer groups applaud the site. "Consumers will no longer be left in the dark about product safety," but will "have access to lifesaving information," Rachel Weintraub, director of product safety and senior counsel for the Consumer Federation of America, said when the site went online.

"I've been hopeful the database would raise the awareness of the commission" and what it does, Weddle says. It has, although not the way he had hoped.

Business organizations have joined in attempts to block SaferProducts.gov, and they have discovered new allies among conservative Republicans newly elected to the House last fall. The Consumer Electronics Association fought the website, contending that an online database of complaints about faulty products "could unduly alarm consumers." The U.S. Chamber of Commerce argued that the database would "lead to consumer confusion and give rise to lawsuits based on rumor repeated through the echo chamber of the Internet."

Unlike other consumer websites, SaferProducts.gov does not evaluate or compare products, Weddle says. The site's sole concern is product safety. "We're not looking for people's opinions about how products perform, we're looking for information where someone was injured or killed or there is a risk of harm," he adds. As CPSC Chairwoman Inez Moore Tenenbaum notes, SaferProducts.gov is intended to give consumers "access to product safety information that they have never seen before, and the information will empower them to make safer choices."

Will SaferProducts.gov will be allowed to function that way? "I have no answer to that one," Weddle says. Ultimately that is likely to be a political decision.

Dashboard Lights

Compelled by President Obama's Open Government Directive, CIOs from across the executive branch have developed websites that provide greater access to federal data and insight into spending. But now the websites themselves are in jeopardy as Congress imposes federal budget cuts. A 2010 article in Fast Company magazine proclaimed USAspending.gov was "perfect." Its dashboard of numbers, colorful pie charts and intuitive bar graphs provide "a helpful, easy-to-use tool for citizens to understand where their taxes are spent," the article said.

Ellen Miller could hardly disagree more. The website is "seriously flawed," she told a House subcommittee this spring. Her Sunlight Foundation turned up "over $1.2 trillion worth of misreported spending in 2009 alone," she said.

Since it was launched in December 2007, USAspending has been plentifully praised and roundly disparaged on a fairly regular basis-sometimes by the same people. "It's definitely the direction government should be heading in," says Joe Newman, communications director for the Project on Government Oversight. "But there are definitely some improvements that should be made. The execution hasn't been flawless, but we wouldn't want it to go away." POGO relies on USAspending data when it compiles its annual Federal Contractor Misconduct Database. "Government contract data has come a long way since the days of accessing federal contracting information via the complicated Federal Procurement Data System," POGO general counsel Scott Amey wrote in a letter to the General Services Administration. "We are pleased that the contracting information is more timely and that USAspending is user-friendly.

"That said, POGO has a few concerns," he added, citing "questionable entries" in the website's top 100 contractors list. USAspending was ordered into existence by Congress to serve as "a single, searchable website" of federal government spending. It is intended to provide the public "unprecedented visibility into the expenditure of taxpayer dollars," a White House summary says. Since the site's 2007 debut, the quality of its data has improved, says Craig Jennings, director of federal fiscal policy at OMB Watch, a government monitoring organization. And the quality would improve even more if USAspending were provided with data from the U.S. Treasury rather than from individual agencies, he adds.

Improving USAspending is a laudable goal, but not nearly ambitious enough, according to Newman. POGO wants the federal government to put much more information online in formats that are much more usable. Campaign finance records, for example, are online, but they aren't posted in a format that makes them easy to search. Creating new transparency websites-and even preserving some that already exist-will be a challenge. Annual funding for the existing e-government sites was cut from $34 million to $8 million during the battle in Congress over the fiscal 2011 federal budget.

Transparency advocates were stunned. "We are going to have to make some tough decisions around which systems are going to have to go offline versus what can be supported with $8 million in funds," federal CIO Vivek Kundra said after the cuts were made.

USAspending is required by legislation, so it will remain in operation, Kundra said in late May. Other transparency sites such as Data.gov, Performance.gov and the IT Dashboard are not mandated in law. Even some champion budget-cutters were taken aback by the possible loss of transparency websites. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, vowed to "find a way, and this is a personal pledge, to make sure they are not shut down."

Shifting to the Cloud

With $80 billion being spent by the federal government on information technology each year, budget concerns are not new. In an effort to rein in IT spending, Kundra announced a "cloud first" policy in December 2010. Essentially, Kundra wants agencies to rent IT capability from service providers rather than buy it from hardware vendors.

This means agencies would no longer own and operate their data centers but rather would acquire data center services from outside providers. Instead of buying software, they would buy software services. Agency equipment such as servers would be replaced by hardware owned and operated by a conglomeration of companies referred to collectively as "the cloud."

In a survey released in April by VMware and MeriTalk, 64 percent of federal CIOs said they believe cloud computing will reduce costs and improve services. But moving to the cloud will be a challenge. The two biggest obstacles are budget constraints and security concerns, the CIOs said. Integrating cloud services with traditional IT infrastructure is another hurdle, as are staffing and training. So far, only 15 percent of agencies have moved functions to the cloud and another 20 percent are in the process. Other agencies were still in the planning stages or are studying whether to move at all, according to the survey of 167 IT managers and CIOs.

For the agencies convinced that the cloud has a silver lining, email is often a good place to start. "It's the lowest hanging fruit," says Aileen Black, vice president for government sales at VMware. A fair number of vendors offer cloud-based services, and most managers are familiar with email platforms offered by Internet giants Google and Microsoft. "It's easy to get your head around," she says.

On Dec. 1, the General Services Administration announced it would be the first federal agency to use a cloud-based system for agencywide email. GSA signed a $6.7 million five-year task order for Google's Gmail and other Google applications including Google Docs, spreadsheets and video communication for 17,000 GSA employees.

Not to be outdone, the Agriculture Department announced a week later that it would be the first Cabinet-level agency to move its email to the cloud. That means moving 120,000 employees and contractors to a cloud-based email service provided by Microsoft. The system, like Google's, comes with collaboration tools, including a document sharing application, instant messaging and Web conferencing.

The Interior Department would have beaten both GSA and Agriculture to the cloud except that its decision last fall to use Microsoft email for its 88,000 employees was challenged by Google in court and temporarily halted. The potential for vast earnings from selling cloud-based services to government agencies has ignited intense competition between the two vendors, says Matthew Cain, vice president of research and lead email analyst at the IT research firm Gartner.

The financial lure of the cloud is strong for agencies as well. Agriculture calculates it will lower email costs from $13 per employee per month to less than $8 a month, saving up to $6 million a year, according to Chief Information Officer Christopher Smith.

But the department's gains are more than financial, Smith's office said in a March report. Agriculture is replacing 21 separate email systems operated by various agency branches. According to the report, a single cloud-based system should eliminate problems with sending emails to all employees in a timely fashion, compiling an accurate global contact list of employees, and ensuring that meeting invitations automatically populate recipients' calendars.

Meanwhile at GSA, CIO Casey Coleman says email in the cloud will cost half as much providing email service in-house. GSA plans to offer cloud-based email services to other agencies as well, at $11 per mailbox per month. At that price, agencies would save $1 million for every 7,500 email users, David McClure, associate administrator of GSA's Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies, told a Senate committee in April. That's 44 percent cheaper than existing on-premise email, he added.

The April survey found 42 percent of CIOs would consider moving email to the cloud. By contrast, only 27 percent said they would consider moving administrative applications or collaboration tools to the cloud. And plans for other cloud-based services diminished from there.

Such hesitation doesn't discourage Smith. "We're seeing the very beginning of this," he says. "I think we will see a continued push toward the cloud." But like other government IT endeavors confronting budget constraints and apprehension about new technology, he says, "progress is likely to come in fits and starts."

William Matthews is a freelance journalist who has covered government and technology in Washington for two decades.

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Chief of the Year: Information

William Matthews — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

On June 15, Government Executive is featuring the government's chief officers of finance, human capital, information and information security in a special issue of the magazine. This year, for the second time, we've identified individuals to highlight as Chiefs of the Year. In challenging times, these individuals are leading the way in coming up with innovative solutions, providing a shining example to their peers.

Christopher Smith
Chief Information Officer
Agriculture Department

Sometimes the cloud can seem like the weather: Everybody talks about it, but no one does anything about it.

Except for Christopher Smith.

As chief information officer at the Agriculture Department, Smith is leading the largest federal migration to the cloud. He is in the midst of moving email service for 120,000 employees and contractors from 21 email systems run by the agency to a cloud run by Microsoft.

Amid the hype and some security concerns that swirl around the cloud, Smith offers a clear-eyed business case for making the move. "We looked at our portfolio and asked, 'How do we meet the business needs of our organization?' " says Smith, who became CIO in 2009.

Email at Agriculture was an obvious problem. There were more than 27 systems that were expensive to maintain and balky to operate. Finding employee email addresses in the scattered system was a problem. So was sending agencywide messages in a timely manner.

Smith decided the systems must be consolidated. He got the number still operated in-house down to 21 and was aiming for even fewer. "But as we were doing that, the cloud space was maturing," he says. "We were constantly monitoring it," and the cloud became increasingly attractive.

"Vendors were meeting our cost points and hitting all key business drivers," he says. The cloud offered better email service and collaboration tools at a better price than Agriculture could purchase for itself. With email storage on the cloud, Agriculture is also able to get rid of some costly data centers. It's consolidating from 43 to seven, and will "repurpose software licenses and hardware from the centers it is closing, he says.

With the email service come Microsoft collaboration tools including instant messaging, file sharing that enables people in different locations to work together on the same files, and videoconferencing. Smith expects those features to increase productivity and reduce travel costs. And when software upgrades are needed, they are delivered via the cloud.

Cool as it seems, moving to the cloud "has got to be a thoughtful business-driven effort. You don't want the technology to be leading the discussion," Smith says. "How can we be more efficient and effective? The cloud is one of the options."

Some cloud critics worry about security in the cloud, but Smith contends that if "appropriate security is baked in upfront," email in the cloud is as secure as in-house systems. "We were very rigorous" about security, he says.

Once the email move is complete, according to Smith, Agriculture will start moving customer relationship management functions to remote service providers.

"We have a clear modernization roadmap, and the cloud dovetails very neatly with that," he says.

Chiefs of the Year 2011 main page

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Oil and Water

William Matthews — Sun, 01 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

A new regulator is caught between industry and safety.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement has been sued by the oil industry and the governor of Alaska for failing to approve offshore oil drilling permits fast enough, and by environmental organizations for approving them too fast. Lawmakers have accused it of pushing up gasoline prices, and government watchdogs have assailed it for keeping secret the details of drilling company safety plans.

And the bureau is less than a year old. BOEMRE exists "in a fishbowl-no, in a blender," says Randall Luthi, president of the National Ocean Industries Association. "It's being attacked from all sides." That's not surprising, considering the bureau was born in the midst of a national emergency-the blowout of the Macondo oil well, the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, and the largest oil spill in U.S. history. For almost three months, oil gushed from the broken, mile-deep well in the Gulf of Mexico, 41 miles off the Louisiana coast. Before it was plugged, the well spewed 4.9 million barrels into the Gulf, coating Louisiana marshes, staining beaches in Alabama and Florida, poisoning vast fishing areas, killing birds, turtles, dolphins and other creatures, and crippling the Gulf Coast's tourist-driven economy.

BOEMRE's job is to make sure that never happens again, and at the same time, enable oil companies to get back to the business of finding and extracting oil from beneath the sea. The nascent bureau's efforts to manage these often-conflicting goals have earned the Obama administration enmity from many in the offshore oil industry, which is seething over a five-month moratorium on deepwater drilling, followed by another five-month period during which no new drilling permits were approved.

Samuel A. Giberga, chief lawyer for Hornbeck Offshore Services, a Louisiana firm that provides supplies and services to offshore drilling rigs, gave Congress an earful in March: "We have fought this administration in the federal courts. We have fought this administration in Congress. We have fought this administration in the media."

In June 2010, Hornbeck sued the Interior Department, BOEMRE's parent agency, to overturn the drilling moratorium. He won, only to have Interior Secretary Ken Salazar impose another moratorium.

While drilling was at a standstill, BOEMRE was busy making "broad and lasting changes to the way we regulate oil and gas drilling," says Michael R. Bromwich, BOEMRE's director.

The bureau has imposed more safeguards and standards for oil wells, and drilling projects now must meet new standards for well design, casing and cementing, and be independently certified by a professional engineer. It also imposed new requirements on well operators to develop safety and environmental management plans and risk-reduction strategies. Now drilling companies must demonstrate they will be able to respond effectively to worst-case accidents.

To Giberga, BOEMRE's accomplishments mean "significant regulatory, environmental compliance and other hurdles have been placed in the path of the resumption of offshore drilling activity."

Not so, says Bromwich. "We are working hard to ensure that this important industry continues to be able to operate fully and successfully," he recently told Harvard University's Center for the Environment. But for offshore drilling to be safe, "the oil and natural gas industry needs to be just as aggressive about reform as we have been," he says.

BOEMRE issued its first deepwater drilling permit Feb. 28, and seven more by early April.

"We continue to believe new deepwater drilling will be approved in the coming months," Bromwich says. "That said, one thing that the secretary and I believe firmly is that a retreat on drilling safety is not an option."

When oil was gushing into the Gulf, "a broad consensus quickly emerged-in government and industry-that there was an urgent need for upgrading the safety rules and practices within the oil and gas industry," Bromwich says.

The consensus didn't last. After the leak was stopped, industry cooperation began to dry up, too, "with speed," Bromwich says. Some offshore operators "have seemed all-too-ready to shrug off Deepwater Horizon as a complete aberration," he notes. Now they argue the new regulations are "an overreaction and were unnecessary."

Salazar also recognizes the industry's shift. "As the oil spill fades from the headlines and our collective memory, pressure is growing in some corners to roll back the safety and environmental protection standards we have put in place since April 2010," he said in an address to the National Council for Science and the Environment. "We will not succumb to pressure to roll back the clock on our reforms."

Nor is BOEMRE acceding to demands from opposing quarters to permit greater scrutiny of future drilling plans by making them public.

Days after the bureau issued its first deepwater drilling permit, the organization OMB Watch complained of "lack of transparency" at BOEMRE. "Without adequate disclosure of key permit information, environmental advocates worry that plans to prevent or manage emergencies on oil rigs may be insufficient or missing entirely," the watchdog says.

Between the two extremes stands Elgie Holstein. BOEMRE "is doing exactly what needs to be done-building a new framework for permitting offshore drilling," says Holstein, senior director of strategic planning at the Environmental Defense Fund. The new safety and environmental protections BOEMRE requires do, indeed, "represent higher hurdles for the industry to clear," he says. And despite the hostility from some, "on the whole, I think, the industry understands that it has to play by a new set of rules."

But the responsibility to reform isn't industry's alone, Holstein adds. "The government has to demonstrate that it's prepared to be a responsible steward of resources. The government clearly has a duty to protect natural resources and the lives of workers," he says.

For the government, BOEMRE is only part of the solution. The Interior Department has created the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement to enforce new regulations and the Office of Natural Resources Revenue to oversee oil royalties. All three functions-issuing permits, enforcing safety regulations and collecting royalties-were performed by the Minerals Management Service. Many believe MMS failed because it had conflicting missions. "It was expected to promote resource development, to enforce safety regulations and to maximize revenues from offshore operations," Bromwich says.

"Separating leasing from policing needed to be done," Holstein says. But that alone won't prevent future oil drilling disasters. "What will make a difference in the long run is whether future administrations put worker safety and environmental protection first, ahead of revenue goals."

William Matthews is a freelance journalist who has covered government and technology in Washington for two decades.

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Tough summer ahead in Afghanistan, says Joint Chiefs chair

William Matthews — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

"This year's going to be a very, very difficult year" because Taliban forces are expected to mount a major effort to reclaim territory they lost in 2010, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a wide-ranging, hour-long interview at a Government Executive Leadership Briefing at the National Press Club. (A video of the event is available here.)

Mullen also said the United States does not plan to send ground troops into Libya or to undertake military action in Syria.

And after a decade in which military spending nearly doubled, he said, defense budget cuts seem inevitable. But cuts must be made in a way that does not create a hollow force, Mullen said during an interview conducted by Timothy B. Clark, editor at large of Government Executive.

If Taliban forces launch the expected offensive, U.S. military commanders will be in the unusual position of mounting a strong counteroffensive while also beginning to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. "We will start to withdraw troops this summer," Mullen said. "There is no question that we will; we just don't know how many or from what parts" of Afghanistan.

When President Obama decided to send 30,000 extra troops into Afghanistan in 2009, he vowed to begin bringing them home this July. Beginning the drawdown as promised is important to Obama as public support for the war wanes and the 2012 presidential campaign gets under way.

The drawdown also delivers an "important message of transition" to the Afghan government, Mullen said. The U.S. aim is to have Afghan forces adequately trained and equipped to provide for their own defense by the end of 2014. "I think we can meet that goal," he said.

But the effort is likely to be arduous. "It has already started out to be a tough year. We had tragic losses yesterday," Mullen said, referring to the killing of eight U.S. airmen and a U.S. contractor by an Afghan military pilot.

"Every loss is tragic, but this is particularly difficult because it comes from an inside threat," Mullen said. The Afghan pilot was among Afghan security forces being trained by U.S. forces.

Even before the drawdown from Afghanistan begins, the Obama administration and the Iraqi government must decide whether U.S. troops in Iraq are going to remain there past the end of this year.

Because of the scale of the task of moving U.S. troops and equipment out of Iraq, "we have weeks, not months to decide" whether any of the 47,000 troops now in Iraq will remain after December, Mullen said.

On one hand, "the security environment is good," he said. On the other hand, "that doesn't mean we don't have any challenges or that the Iraqi government doesn't have challenges." And if U.S. forces depart on schedule, "there will be gaps" in Iraq's military capabilities, particularly in intelligence, aviation and logistics, he said.

But violence in Iraq "is the lowest since 2003," when the United States invaded and deposed Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein. "I'm comfortable with the development of Iraqi security forces," Mullen said.

In recent weeks, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has raised the possibility that some U.S. troops would remain after 2011. Gates said some Iraqi officials are interested in extending the U.S. military stay, but others, including Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, have said it is time for U.S. forces to go.

"We'll have to see what the political leaders do," Mullen said.

On Libya, Mullen said there is no plan to send U.S. ground troops. "The president has made it very clear to me -- no boots on the ground in Libya," he said.

Nonetheless, Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi "needs to be out," Mullen said. But removing him "is really the political strategy." The military strategy continues to be limited to protecting the Libyan people from Gadhafi's military.

Mullen praised NATO, which took over leadership of Libyan operations in March after the United States had led them for about two weeks. The international coalition did "in 18 days what it took 18 months to do in Bosnia," he said. That is, NATO rounded up multinational forces and began operations to protect the Libyan people.

"I believe we prevented a massive humanitarian disaster that Gadhafi would have wreaked on his citizens," Mullen said. "I think NATO's been very, very effective."

And in the end, "I actually do believe [Gadhafi's] days are numbered. If you ask me how many, I don't know the answer."

Mullen dismissed the idea that intervention in Libya might set a precedent for intervention in Syria. "Syria is a different country in a different place," he said. "We abhor the violence and the killing," but do not intend to intervene. Domestically, Mullen said, he worries about the effect of 10 years of war, repeated deployments and prolonged absences are having on troops and their families. Even some spouses and children are exhibiting symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, he said.

He also worries about impending budget cuts. Although Mullen has described the national debt as the greatest threat to national security, he said budget cuts are coming at a particularly difficult time for the military. Weapons bought during the military buildup of the 1980s, especially aircraft, are at the end of their lives and need to be replaced, he said.

And the demands on the military are not diminishing. "Most military leaders believe we live in a time of persistent conflict," he said. Two months ago, Mullen said, he could not have predicted that today U.S. forces would be involved in Libya or that 20,000 personnel and 18 ships would be delivering humanitarian aid to Japan.

"Demand will continue," and it cannot be met with a hollow force, he said. "I've been in a hollow military before, and I won't lead a hollow military. I know what one is and what it can and can't do, and I think it would be particularly dangerous in the world that we're living in now to hollow it out."

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From Nextgov.com: New tools calculate your tax dollars at work

William Matthews — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Read the whole story on Nextgov.com.

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Transparency websites hit by budget ax

William Matthews — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The $34 million Electronic Government Fund was slashed to $8 million in the deal struck late last Friday to avert a government shutdown. The e-government fund supports websites such as USASpending.gov and the IT Dashboard, which provide public access to vast amounts of information on how the government spends money.

Another transparency site, Data.gov, also is endangered, transparency advocates said. Data.gov offers access to 380,000 government agency data sets as diverse as climate change statistics and export licensing records.

The sites are part of the Obama administration's effort to create unprecedented openness in the federal government. But the funding cuts might eliminate some or all of the sites, said Daniel Schuman of the nonprofit transparency advocacy group called the Sunlight Foundation. "We're trying to find out how much money each site needs to survive," he said. "My best guess is that this is not enough money."

Which sites survive may be decided by U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra. "The electronic government fund is a bucket of money spent on federal transparency programs at Kundra's discretion," Schuman said. "He will have to make the tough decisions about where to cut."

"We will certainly see some kind of scaling back," agreed Sam Rosen-Amy, a federal budget policy analyst at OMBWatch, a monitoring nonprofit.

Even if the funding cuts don't mean transparency websites disappear, they seem certain to eliminate any possibility of improving them, which "is bad news for the transparency movement," he said.

"At a time when everyone is wondering how the government is spending money, Congress just cut funding for tools that tell you," Rosen-Amy said. "It's sort of like cutting [Internal Revenue Service] enforcement" to save money.

The deep reductions are a bit surprising because the transparency websites seemed to have enjoyed support from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, he said.

Little is known yet about why lawmakers cut so deeply into the transparency budget because "much of the budget negotiation process was almost entirely done in secret," the Sunlight Foundation said in a statement on Tuesday.

Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Ky., chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said in a statement, "When this agreement is signed into law, Congress will have taken the unprecedented step of passing the largest nondefense spending cut in the history of our nation -- tens of billions larger than any other nondefense reduction, and the biggest overall reduction since World War II."

Transparency wasn't the only technology target for budget-cutters. Other cuts include:

$24 million from the Agriculture Department's chief information officer's budget;
$2 million from Agriculture distance learning, telemedicine and broadband program loans and grants;
$45 million from the Technology Innovation Program at the National Institutes of Standards and Technology;
$120 million from Justice Department information sharing technology;
$444 million from National Science Foundation research;
$14 million from the National Archives and Records Administration electronic record collection
$6 million from Customs and Border Patrol information technology modernization;
$11 million from Immigration and Customs Enforcement IT modernization;
$178 million from Homeland Security Department science and technology;
$160 million from Veterans Affairs information technology.

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From Nextgov: Agencies scamble to define critical functions

William Matthews — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Read the full story on Nextgov.

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White House says critical websites won’t be affected by shutdown

William Matthews — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

This story has been updated.

In the event of a government shutdown, federal websites "would remain operational" if they are deemed "necessary to avoid significant damage to the execution of authorized or accepted activities," a White House official told Nextgov in an email message late Wednesday.

Websites deemed critical would keep operating even if the cost of doing so comes from appropriations that have lapsed, she said.

After days of confusion, the fate of federal websites in the event of a government shutdown became a bit clearer as senior Obama administration officials scrambled to prepare for the possibility that the federal government will run out of money at midnight on Friday.

In 1996, the last time Congress failed to pass a budget, forcing a shutdown, agencies' online presence and dependence on the Web was minimal. Today, virtually every government agency has a website, if not several websites, and many use them to conduct mission-related business with the public. Most are packed with news and information and some enable citizens to ask questions and conduct transactions, such as applying for Social Security benefits, participating in federal drug trials, or reporting suspicious activity in an age of terrorism.

One website likely to keep operating despite a shutdown is IRS.gov, which "may be necessary to allow for tax filings and tax collection, which are activities that continue during an appropriations lapse," the official said.

The U.S. Postal Service also is expected to keep its website up and running despite a shutdown. Since USPS is no longer funded by Congress, its site won't be affected, said spokesman Greg Frey.

At the Department of Health and Human Services, an official said Thursday afternoon that decisions about agency websites remain in flux. "Our plans are truly not final yet," he said, but it is likely that HHS websites will be updated less often.

Some web services may run more slowly. "Services for beneficiaries, such as 1-800 Medicare, the Medicare and You handbook, could be limited, with longer hold and wait times," he said.

During the shutdown, HHS websites that handle Medicare and Medicaid matters "would be unable to process system corrections in beneficiary records, potentially jeopardizing beneficiaries' access to care."

Also, HHS "may be forced to disable the Online Enrollment Center for Medicare's private plans, meaning beneficiaries would have to directly contact health plans to enroll," the official said. And the agency "would be unable to respond to requests for assistance regarding beneficiary issues that come through States and Partner Organizations."

The Veterans Affairs Department website also will be kept functioning. A list of steps VA will take during a shutdown included this advice to veterans, "Keep monitoring VA's website for additional information, including frequently asked questions and correspondence from the leadership team."

For the duration of a shutdown, agency-operated websites that are not judged to be critical "would not remain active," the official said. That doesn't mean they will necessarily vanish from the Internet. Rather, if they remain available, the information on them might not be up to date, and transactions submitted to agencies through the sites might not be processed until the shutdown ends. Similarly, agency officials aren't likely to respond to inquiries submitted through websites until Congress passes a budget, the official said.

As of Thursday evening, the Commerce Department was planning to close five of its websites and keep two open, a department official said. Decisions on other sites were still pending, an agency spokesman said.

Sites to be closed include the International Trade Administration, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Economics and Statistics Administration, the Economic Development Administration and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The National Weather Service website will continue to operate, and the Patent and Trademark Office will operate for the first six days of a shutdown, the Commerce official said. PTO has six days worth of money left from the 2010 budget, he said. After that, if the shutdown continues, the PTO website will shut down.

Visitors to Commerce Department sites will probably be redirected to a page telling them that the websites are have been closed by the government shutdown, he said.

Gregg Bailey, a former chief information officer at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, said, "The key will be what does the website do and how much work will it take to keep it running." Agencies with websites that handle transactions, for example, might want to shut the websites down so that work that can't be completed doesn't pile up, he said.

Informative, but nonessential websites, such as USASpending.gov, ITDashboard.gov and Data.gov are likely candidates for being shut down, he said. They provide transparency and visibility into government operations, so "if they're shut down, it will be more difficult to see what the government is doing," he said. "But on the other hand, if the government is shut down, it won't be doing much."

Agencies are expected to post notices on their Web home pages about which online features will work and which won't during the shutdown.

For the duration of a shutdown, support for websites and other information technology systems "will be the minimum necessary to maintain functionality and ensure the security and integrity of the system during a funding lapse," the official said.

It will be up to each agency to determine whether website employees are essential and thus exempt from the shutdown, she said.

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From Nextgov.com: Furloughed feds cannot telework or use BlackBerrys

William Matthews — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Capitol Hill staffers won't be allowed to use government-issued BlackBerrys, laptops or cellphones, the Committee on House Administration said in 10 pages of guidance issued as Republicans and Democrats remain deadlocked over how much to cut the 2011 federal budget.

Read the whole story at Nextgov.com.

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Pentagon Prophecies

William Matthews — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

When military spending leans more toward supply than demand.

After three decades covering the U.S. military, journalist Andrew Cockburn has seen it often enough to recognize the pattern: The Air Force spends $100 million to build an EC-130H aircraft with ground-penetrating radar to hunt for $25 homemade bombs buried along Afghan roadways-and after hundreds of flights, finds nothing.

The question "first and foremost in the mind of anyone looking into this or any military initiative," he says, should be "who profits?"

In this case it's aircraft maker Lockheed Martin Corp., Cockburn says in a new book, The Pentagon Labyrinth (Center for Defense Information, 2011). Defense contractors, and the senior military officers, and the civilian bureaucrats who eventually go to work for them, often benefit more than the troops, he notes.

A series of essays by 10 authors steeped in Pentagon culture, the book is intended as a guide on how the U.S. military works.

"Today, 20 years after the end of the Cold War and the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the United States spends more on defense than at any time since the end of World War II," writes Franklin Spinney, who spent 33 years as a civilian Pentagon employee, most of them as a whistleblowing budget analyst. "This gigantic defense budget is not producing a greater sense of security for most Americans."

Though retired now, Spinney is still blowing the whistle, this time at President Obama. He faults the president for putting military spending off limits in the effort to reduce federal spending.

And there are chapters on weapons buying. Fighter plane designer Pierre Sprey writes, "Cheap $15 million close air support planes will clearly contribute far more to saving American troops in trouble and to winning wars than $2.2 billion B-2s, or $160-plus million 'multipurpose' fighters like the F-35."

The Pentagon Labyrinth is loaded with familiar, and often discouraging, examples of the military, Congress and the defense industry gone awry. And, said Spinney at a book debut in March, "it's only getting worse."

The book's editor and author, Winslow Wheeler, who heads the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information, says the stories needed to be told because "I kept running into people who totally misunderstand the problem."

Wheeler describes Pentagon practices that understate costs, such as separating the base budget from money spent to fight wars, ignoring development costs when calculating weapons prices and rebaselining programs to hide cost growth. And the press is part of the problem, according to Cockburn. Instead of questioning costs, journalists too often simply accept them, he says.

The book now can be downloaded for free at www.cdi.org and sells for $10 at Amazon.com.

William Matthews is a freelance journalist who has been covering government and technology in Washington for two decades.

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Doctors Go Digital

William Matthews — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Stimulus payments are putting e-records within reach for many health care providers.

For more than a decade, federal health officials have tried to persuade doctors and hospitals to abandon paper and switch to electronic health records, but it's been a tough sell. The cost of equipment and training, the hassle of digitizing paper records, and uncertainty about how well information technology systems actually will work have stymied progress.

But financial incentives for doctors who take the electronic records plunge could be turning the tide.

Two recent surveys indicate that 41 percent of doctors and 95 percent of hospitals are ready to give electronic records a try. The reason: $27 billion in payments is available for those who make the switch.

The payments to doctors, which could be as much as $63,750, are part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. "Never before have there been incentives like this," says Melinda Buntin, chief economist for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.

She warns health care providers, "This is a one-time opportunity-we're not going to have another stimulus bill. If you want to bring your practice into the 21st century, now is the time to act."

Indeed, the law calls for financial penalties for those who fail to do so.

Doctors and hospitals that don't opt in will face a 1 percent reduction in Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements per year starting in 2015. That penalty goes to 3 percent by 2017, and the Health and Human Services secretary has the option of increasing the cuts to 5 percent by 2019.

Medical providers seem to be getting the message.

A survey by the National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates that 41 percent of office-based physicians "intend to take advantage of federal incentive payments" and switch to electronic records, the Office of the National Coordinator announced in January.

Then in February, the American Hospital Association said 95 percent of 1,297 hospitals it surveyed "want to participate" in the incentive program. The survey also indicates that fewer than 2 percent of those hospitals now have electronic records systems that meet the requirements to qualify for incentive payments.

Dr. David Blumenthal, the national coordinator for health information technology, hailed the survey results as a reversal of the low interest in EHR adoption in previous years. "I believe we are seeing the tide turn toward widespread and accelerating adoption and use of health IT," he says.

The payments, which started going out this year, are worth up to $44,000 for doctors who treat Medicare patients and up to $63,750 for those who treat Medicaid patients.

"Information technology has the potential to transform health care as it has transformed many parts of our economy and society in recent decades," the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology said in a December 2010 report.

Electronic health records promise to reduce mistakes, increase efficiency, cut costs and improve the quality of care for individual patients and patient populations. But getting to that point won't be easy, even with incentive payments, e-records experts say.

For electronic health records to deliver on their promises, the economics of health care will have to change. "We will have to move away from a fee-for-service model" to one where pay is based more on outcomes-good health, says Christine Bechtel, vice president of the National Partnership for Women and Families, a longtime supporter of electronic health records.

"Fee for service pays for volume. The more stuff you do under fee for service, the more money you can make," she says. More tests, more office visits, more surgeries all mean more money for doctors, laboratories and hospitals.

By contrast, electronic health records aim to increase information sharing and collaboration. On a basic level that means test results and X-ray images will be entered into an electronic record once and will be instantly available to any doctor who needs them. There will be no need for multiple tests-or for multiple billings.

Beyond these sorts of cost-savings, e-records facilitate information-sharing-between primary care physicians and specialists, for example. The expected result is better care, but for medical providers, the economics of switching to such a model remains uncertain.

Electronic records systems will have to "support two universes," says Dr. Steven Waldren, director of the American Academy of Family Physicians' Center for Health IT. One is the current world, which focuses on the volume of procedures and provider productivity, he notes.

The other is a future in which doctors are motivated to boost patient care, quality and cost-effectiveness, Waldren says.

That future features efficient exchanges of patient information among doctors, hospitals and researchers; automated decision support to aid diagnosis and treatments; online portals through which patients can participate in their own health care; and electronic prescriptions-all while protecting patient privacy.

For the most part, neither the electronic health records systems nor the doctors who would use them are there yet. And despite the recent surge of interest in incentive payments, doctors might discover they don't stack up to the cost of launching electronic records systems.

Medical practices can expect to pay $30,000 to $50,000 per doctor for electronic records systems during the first year, and 10 percent to 15 percent of that each year thereafter, Waldren says. Buying Internet-based e-medical records services might be a cheaper way to go-some services cost as little as $250 to $1,000 per doctor per month, he adds.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology has set up regional extension centers to help doctors and hospitals select e-records systems and train their staffs to use them.

But Waldren says he has seen enthusiasm for e-records wax and wane. A 2003 survey indicated that 80 percent of family physicians expected to be using electronic records within two years. In fact, about 30 percent did, he adds.

"We've been encouraging our members to adopt electronic records since 2000," Waldren says. "But for some practices, the right decision is not to do it today."

William Matthews is a freelance journalist who has covered government and technology in Washington for two decades.

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Facebook-using federal managers “surge,” survey finds

William Matthews — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Government Executive provided names from its readership database for use in conducting the study. Twenty-six percent of the federal workers who responded said they use Facebook to communicate with colleagues, 17 percent said they use it to communicate with the public, 8 percent said they use it to communicate with other agencies and 4 percent said they use it to recruit. In addition, 26 percent said they use Facebook for conducting research. Federal workers use other social media to a lesser degree: 34 percent said they use YouTube, 18 percent use LinkedIn and 9 percent use Twitter. Five percent use GovLoop, a social media site that calls itself "Facebook for government," and 2 percent use GovTwit, a directory of government social media. Forty-six percent said they are allowed to use social media while at work -- a big increase from a year ago, when only 20 percent said they were allowed, Dezzutti said. The Media and Marketing Study aims to provide vendors who sell goods and services to the government a clearer picture of the types of media their intended customers prefer. Especially now, "with limited marketing budgets, you've got to be laser-focused" on how to deliver information to potential customers, Dezzutti told a gathering of vendors Tuesday morning. The survey also is intended to help publications, broadcasters and websites understand evolving trends in media preference. For $3,850, Market Connections offers its customers access to an online analytical tool that sorts through data from the survey to provide insight into the media preferences of more specific groups of managers. For example, data can be displayed according to agency, by the age of survey respondents, by the goods and services they buy, and by numerous other criteria. The idea is to "target the right audience and maximize media effectiveness based on actual usage," a paper flyer from Market Connections says. Those surveyed were mid-to-senior-level decision-makers who wield a degree of influence over what the government buys -- from aircraft to office supplies to information technology equipment and services, said Dezzutti and survey partner Sara Leiman, vice president of TMP Government, a government-oriented communications firm. About 60 percent of those surveyed work for the military, and about 40 percent work for civilian government agencies. They are well-educated -- 31 percent have master's degrees, 26 percent have college degrees, 21 percent have some college education and 7 percent have doctorates. Many of them are older -- 35 percent are between 45 and 54 years old, and 33 percent are older than 55. Even among those 55 and older, 40 percent said they use Facebook. Among the 21- to 34-year-olds, 74 percent use Facebook. Among other survey findings:

Print media is not dead yet. Forty percent of those surveyed said they still prefer print for trade publications. Twenty-nine percent said the read both print and online. Only 1 percent preferred reading trade publications on a mobile device.
Weather.com was the most viewed website, followed by CNN.com and Fox.com.
Military respondents preferred Fox.com, while civilian employees turned more often to CNN.com.
Trade shows remain more popular than webinars.
Laptop computers are by far the preferred mobile device for receiving email and viewing news websites. BlackBerrys are a distant second, followed even more distantly by iPhones and Android smartphones.
In the Washington area news radio dominates all other radio programming.

Government Executive was listed as the top publication that focuses on the federal government among those surveyed -- 39 percent said they read it. The GovExec.com website was the third most popular after Weather.com and CNN.com among civilian government workers. It was 10th among military employees. Nextgov.com ranked 10th among the websites civilian workers read. ]]>

From Nextgov.com: Spending on geothermal technologies is riddled with improper payments, IG says

William Matthews — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Read the whole story at Nextgov.com.

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Japanese radiation levels could have triggered larger evacuation area under U.S. guidelines

William Matthews — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0400

report this week said. Protective action could consist of staying indoors during a small, short-term release of radiation, but likely would involve evacuating areas before a major release, said Roger Hannah, a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. A day before the monitoring began, NRC already had urged U.S. citizens and military personnel to move at least 50 miles away from the Fukushima plant. Japanese authorities ordered people within 12 miles of the plant to evacuate. "Our recommendations are usually very conservative," Hannah said. So while protective action can mean "sheltering indoors" if a minor radiation release is expected, evacuation is the most effective way to ensure that people are not exposed to radiation during a prolonged release, he said. Japanese emergency workers have been struggling to regain control over the Fukishima nuclear plant since it was severely damaged during the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. Energy sent 33 radiation experts from its National Nuclear Security Administration to Japan on March 15. They joined six others already there to begin sampling for radiation using sensors aboard U.S. military planes and at numerous locations on the ground. The monitors discovered radiation readings of less than 1.19 millirems per hour along the coast and as far south as Tokyo and Kawasaki, as well as due west of the stricken power plant. But in a swath stretching northwest from the plant, they gathered readings of greater than 12.5 millirems per hour. The high radiation readings were discovered in an area northwest of the 12-mile evacuation zone. "Given the circumstances, we would have recommended a larger evacuation area," Hannah said. Energy gathered radiation levels near the Japanese power plant from March 17-19, according to the department's report. Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration announced that its inspectors might block imports of dairy products, fresh produce and infant formula that come from areas around the Fukushima power plant. Japanese health officials said March 19 they had discovered radioactive iodine at five times acceptable levels in those products during screening March 16-18. In an unrelated radiation scare on March 22, the American Federation of Government Employees called for the Transportation Security Administration to begin nationwide monitoring of TSA workers for exposure to radiation from X-ray machines used to inspect airline passengers' luggage. AFGE president John Gage said TSA workers should be given dosimeters, devices that to would track their radiation exposure. He said he made the request after learning TSA has ordered new tests on radiation-emitting equipment after finding errors in earlier results. ]]>

Interior approves first Gulf oil exploration plan since BP spill

William Matthews — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said on Monday that approval for an exploration plan submitted by Shell Offshore Inc. hinged on the company's ability to demonstrate that it could contain a deepwater well blowout and pass an environmental assessment.

The offshore drilling industry "has made significant progress on oil containment systems," Salazar said during an afternoon press conference. Groups of drilling companies have developed two undersea containment systems of valves and pipes that can be lowered onto a blown-out well to contain the escaping oil.

Approval of the exploration plan does not mean that Shell can begin to drill immediately. It now must apply for separate drilling permits. Rather, the exploration plan spells out in detail where the company plans to explore, what drilling vessels it plans to use and how it plans to meet safety and environmental standards.

Shell plans to drill three exploratory wells in 2,950 feet of water about 130 miles off the Louisiana coast.

"Protection of people and the environment is fundamental," Salazar said. In the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon spill, the nation's worst, the Interior Department created two new agencies to oversee offshore drilling safety -- the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, or BOEMRE, and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement.

The agency also wrote tougher environmental regulations that have substantially slowed the process for issuing drilling permits. That has prompted loud complaints from the drilling industry and accusations from its allies in Congress that the Obama administration had imposed a "de facto moratorium" on deepwater drilling in the Gulf.

But Michael Bromwich, BOEMRE director, said on Monday that Shell's successful completion of an exploration plan demonstrates that oil and gas companies can meet the new, higher environmental and safety standards.

As for how his agency can effectively evaluate untested oil containment technology, Bromwich said it used "an analytic tool developed by us and industry."

Since new environmental regulations were announced last June, Salazar said, the Interior Department has approved 38 drilling permits for shallow water and three for deep water. Thirteen more deepwater permits are pending, he said.

Approval of Shell's exploration plan "is certainly welcome news for the offshore industry," said Randall Luthi, president of the National Ocean Industries Association. "This decision is a huge first step in a process which we hope will successfully lead to new operations and a rapid return to work for the thousands of people employed by our member companies."

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Top court to weigh privacy against government data needs

William Matthews — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0400

From their squad cars, officers can tap a network of government and private databases and in a matter of minutes retrieve a wealth of personal data well beyond name, address and driver status -- including Social Security numbers, telephone numbers, past arrests, employment eligibility, immigration status, photos, fingerprints, tattoos, medical conditions and more.

But there's a big problem with this instant access to information: A lot of what's in the databases is wrong, says Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

In a brief filed for a case the U.S. Supreme Court will hear March 21, Rotenberg cataloged the errors he discovered in databases ranging from the FBI's National Crime Information Center to the Homeland Security Department's E-Verify system to intelligence data that commercial vendors collect and sell to federal and state agencies.

The FBI's parent organization, the Justice Department, has cautioned that some of the data that the National Crime Information Center holds is incomplete and inaccurate enough to cause users "to make an incorrect or misguided decision," including unjustified arrests, Rotenberg wrote in the brief filed with the Supreme Court on Jan. 19.

Errors in the E-Verify system are "so egregious and their effects so significant that a federal judge cited them in an opinion granting a temporary restraining order against the Department of Homeland Security," Rotenberg said.

Commercial databases are no better. A check of one man's ChoicePoint record disclosed that the intelligence-collecting firm listed him variously as being a female prostitute in Florida, a prison inmate in Texas, a dealer of stolen goods in New Mexico, a witness tamperer in Oregon, and a sex offender in Nevada.

He was none of those, Rotenberg said, but federal and state law enforcement agencies routinely use error-plagued databases that ChoicePoint and other data brokers compile. Rotenberg hopes to convince the Supreme Court to overturn the conviction of Jose Tolentino, who was stopped by police at 7:40 p.m. on New Year's Day 2005 for playing music too loudly as he drove down a street in New York City.

A police computer check of motor vehicle records disclosed that Tolentino's driver's license had been suspended at least 10 times, and was suspended at the time he was stopped, so he was arrested.

Tolentino's lawyers argued that Tolentino was stopped despite violating no traffic laws or noise ordinances, therefore the search of his motor vehicle records was illegal.

The Supreme Court is interested because the traffic stop has become a Fourth Amendment case. The amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures, and it requires law enforcement authorities to show that they have probable cause before conducting a search.

Rotenberg said communications technology and databases have made unreasonable searches far too easy for police.

In his brief, he argued, "Government databases give police officers access to an extraordinary range of detailed personal information. No longer does the stop of a vehicle provide access to simple information about the status of the car.

"Given a few minutes, police officers can search from their squad cars an increasingly sophisticated network of government data systems and obtain personal information once scattered across municipal, state and federal criminal databases that would never have been available in the context of a routine car stop."

Due to the power of technology, he says, the courts must step in to protect the right to privacy. He quoted Associate Justice Samuel Alito as writing: "We sense a great threat to privacy in modern America; we all believe that privacy is too often sacrificed to other values; we all believe that the threat to privacy is steadily and rapidly mounting; we all believe that action must be taken on many fronts now to preserve privacy."

That was 1971, when Alito was a student at Princeton University, before police could tap vast databases from their squad cars, search through 70 million fingerprints in a matter of minutes, and comb files of digital photos, immigration records, watch lists and commercial intelligence files.

With so much information so readily available, "the risk is real that car stops will increasingly become pretextual because of the opportunity to search a government database for data unrelated to the reason that gave rise to the original stop," Rotenberg wrote.

As for Tolentino, he was charged with first-degree aggravated unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle, and he pleaded guilty in exchange for a sentence of five years' probation. Later, however, he appealed, arguing that the police stop and the search of his driving record were illegal. When the New York Court of Appeals disagreed, Tolentino took his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed last November to hear it.

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From Nextgov.com: Private sector not adequately defending U.S. cyberspace, security expert warns

William Matthews — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Read the whole story in Nextgov.com.

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From Nextgov.com: Agencies are failing to maintain critical electronic records, survey says

William Matthews — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Read the whole story on Nextgov.com.

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Buying less with more at the Pentagon; a guide for newcomers

William Matthews — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

The winner in this project: aircraft maker Lockheed Martin Corp., Cockburn says in a new book, The Pentagon Labyrinth. Written as a series of essays by 10 authors steeped in Pentagon culture, the book is intended as a guide for military officers, journalists, congressional staffers and anyone else who wants or needs to understand how the U.S. military works.

The question "first and foremost in the mind of anyone looking into this or any military initiative" Cockburn says, "[should be] who profits?"

And the answer, according to the book, is defense contractors, the senior military officers who eventually go to work for them and the lesser civilian bureaucrats and careerist military personnel who burrow in to comfortable and generally unproductive sinecures.

"Today, 20 years after the end of the Cold War and the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the United States spends more on defense than at any time since the end of World War II," writes Franklin Spinney. Yet "this gigantic defense budget is not producing a greater sense of security for most Americans," says Spinney, who spent 33 years as a civilian Pentagon employee, most of them as a whistleblowing budget analyst.

Now retired, Spinney is still blowing the whistle, this time at President Obama.

He faults the president for "continuing his predecessors' war-centric foreign policy," and for putting military spending off limits in the effort to reduce federal spending.

There is a chapter by former Senate staffer Winslow Wheeler on Congress' aversion to serious oversight of the military, and senior military officers' polished ability to avoid answering tough questions.

And there are chapters on weapons buying. Writes fighter plane designer Pierre Sprey, "cheap $15 million close air support planes will clearly contribute far more to saving American troops in trouble and to winning wars than $2.2 billion B-2s, or $160-plus million 'multipurpose' fighters like the F-35."

The Pentagon Labyrinth is loaded with familiar -- and often discouraging -- examples of the military, Congress and the defense industry gone awry. And, said Spinney at a book debut in the officers' club at Fort Myer in Virginia on March 2, "It's only getting worse."

Wheeler, who organized and edited the book and wrote two of its chapters, said he concluded it was necessary because "I kept running into people who totally misunderstand the problem."

In his chapter, "Decoding the Defense Budget," Wheeler describes Pentagon practices that consistently understate costs -- separating the "base budget" from the money spent to fight wars, ignoring development costs when calculating weapons prices, "rebaselining" programs to hide weapons cost growth, and on and on.

A more accurate -- but much harder to understand -- version of the defense budget is published annually by the Office of Management and Budget, Wheeler says. "Unfortunately, the DoD press corps routinely ignores the more complete OMB materials."

The press is part of the problem in other ways as well, according to Cockburn. Instead of questioning costs, journalists too often simply accept them. For example, a 2010 New York Times article on the enormous cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan attributed part of it to the high cost of '21st century technology,' as if that were a sufficient explanation and also unavoidable," Cockburn wrote.

Sprey said the book is an attempt to provide young officers, congressional aides and news reporters with perspective to counter the "mountain of misinformation" that the Pentagon presents.

He said he particularly hopes young officers will read it, perhaps as required reading at the military academies. "I have much more hope for second lieutenants than for generals," Sprey said.

Wheeler said the book is available free on the Internet and sells for $10 on Amazon.com. It was published by the Straus Military Reform Project, which Wheeler heads at the Center for Defense Information.

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From Nextgov.com: New portable DNA screener to debut this summer

William Matthews — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Read the full story on Nextgov.com.

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U.S.-funded Arabic TV might have affected events in Egypt

William Matthews — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

The finding, which is based on a poll, puts Alhurra ahead of TV broadcasters BBC, CNN and al Jazeera, although behind four other broadcasters. The most watched channel was Dubai-based al Arabia.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee had questioned Alhurra's effectiveness in a 2010 report, calling it "little watched" and expensive.

"The survey results confirm what we had been hearing throughout the last three weeks, that Alhurra was a prominent source of news and information for the Egyptian people," said Brian Conniff, president of the U.S. government's Middle East Broadcasting Network, which operates Alhurra.

Conniff said Alhurra reporters covered the sometimes violent demonstrations in Cairo and Alexandria despite threats against them. In addition to interviews with protesters, the channel provided Egyptians an American perspective of the uprising, and it was the first to report that Mubarak would resign.

The poll, conducted Feb. 4-Feb. 10 by telephone, asked 500 randomly selected adults in Cairo and Alexandria about their most important sources for information about the uprising. The poll was commissioned by the Broadcasting Board of Governors, a U.S. government agency that funds the Middle East Broadcasting Network.

In a report on the poll, BBG said, "Among the more surprising aspects of the survey results is the comparatively low ranking of al Jazeera," which previously had a large following in Egypt.

Al Jazeera's poor showing might have been due to Egyptian government efforts to block its broadcasts, BBG said.

Television was by far the most important source for information, according to those polled. Ninety-eight percent said they got some information from TV, and 86 percent said it was their most important source.

Thirty-three percent said they got some information from the Internet, with 7 percent saying it was their most important source. The Egyptian government also tried to block access to the Internet, text messaging, social networking and e-mail, the Middle East Broadcasting Network said.

Alhurra's $90 million-a-year budget is far larger than other U.S.-funded broadcast operations, such as the $37 million Radio Free Asia; the $30 million Radio/TV Marti, which targets Cuba; and the $17 million Persian News Network Television, the Senate committee report said.

Unless viewership is increased, the Senate report said, "Policymakers will have to decide if continuing Alhurra's operations are worth the cost."

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