Older Feds Aren't Playing to Their Strengths
Is It Too Hard to Fire Misbehaving Feds?
Americans Still Like the Postal Service
A Forced 4-Day Weekend for Many Feds
No More Tax-Cheating Feds, Senators Say
Video: The Daily Show on Apple's Taxes
AUTHOR ARCHIVES
Why An Agency Blinked
April 7, 1997 The Census Bureau blinked. Under pressure to be more customer-friendly--and to spend less public money than it did in its 1990 head count--the Census Bureau plans to scale back the number of subjects covered by its census 2000 questionnaires. Big users of census statistics have mixed reactions to the plans, ...
Dod at Cracking Point?
March 31, 1997 "Dear Boss: Well, this is it. I'm done. I'm putting in my papers and getting out." This opening to a widely circulated good-bye letter from an Air Force pilot has sent shivers down the backs of Pentagon leaders. Frustrated and disillusioned with a military in decline, the mid-career pilot emitted ...
Appointments: Plodding Pace
March 31, 1997 It was your basic Washington pseudo-event. On a patch of the Capitol lawn, nine members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus took turns at a movable rostrum and complained to a thin arc of reporters and political supporters on March 20 that the Clinton Administration is dissing Hispanics in filling its ...
Striking Out
March 31, 1997 The great Detroit newspaper strike may be over, but the hard feelings are not, and neither are the legal battles. After 19 bitter months on the picket line, the 2,000-plus workers who were striking against the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press offered in mid-February to go back to work. ...
Grants Database Urged
March 28, 1997 Picking up where the House's new "Truth in Testimony" rule left off, the Heritage Foundation is urging freshman Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, to sponsor legislation that would create an Internet database of all federal grants and procurement contracts. The Truth in Testimony rule requires that witnesses who are slated to ...
Gored by an Old Law
March 11, 1997 "The Executive Mansion is besieged, if not sacked," a gaggle of critics in the Senate declared, "and its corridors and chambers are crowded each day with the ever-changing, but never-ending, throng." No, this purplish declaration didn't come from anybody in a lather over the courting of money givers by Bill ...
Crashing Computers
March 3, 1997 In the mid-1980s, officials at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), prompted by the need to handle an ever-growing mountain of tax returns more efficiently, decided to overhaul the agency's aging computers. Give us enough money, they told Congress, and we'll not only bring in $40 billion in extra tax revenues ...
Keeping the Revolution Alive
February 10, 1997 Did someone say the Republican fervor for revolution is fading in Congress? That's certainly not happening in the Senate, where members of the classes of 1994 and 1996 continue to storm the barricades. On Jan. 29, Rod Grams of Minnesota reintroduced a bill to eliminate the Energy Department. The next ...
Rare Reports on the Web
January 13, 1997 If anyone other than a Member of Congress asked the Congressional Research Service (CRS) for copies of the reports the agency writes, the answer would be an emphatic "no." But a Washington-based science interest group called the Committee for the National Institute for the Environment somehow has managed to make ...
Sen. Thompson's Busy Month
December 23, 1996 It's been a busy month for Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., the incoming chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee. Assigned to chair hearings into alleged campaign finance violations during the presidential campaign, Thompson has been picking his top aides and preparing to go public with the investigation as early as February, ...
