Editor's Notebook

So that takes care of all the poor computer users out there who don't have access to the Internet. But those who can tap into the World Wide Web have better things to do, given the opportunity to surf the world, from www.nasa.gov to www.playboy.com. God help us if they do. We need a procedure, maybe a law, to make sure they're not visiting Mars (let alone Venus or other beauties) on unofficial business while on official time. And what of personal e-mail? For sure, that's another way of wasting the taxpayers' dollars, isn't it? Lauch to the rescue!

You can tell that not everyone is gaming or surfing by reading this month's Government Executive. Throughout government, people are attempting--or resisting--better ways of doing business. Innovation is rampant, but so is the aforementioned pall of bureaucratic behavior, stifling initiative wherever it can.

Take, for example, Anne Laurent's report on the spread of plastic in the agencies. Charge cards are doing wonders in cutting the transaction costs of small purchases. But not everywhere. The Defense Department, which uses the cards more than any other agency, is only just now draining a sea of paperwork required of card users.

Elsewhere in DoD, reports Katherine McIntire Peters this month, service leaders have devised ingenious new ways to see that the Pentagon's huge inventories of goods, worth more than $60 billion, are used as efficiently as possible. Still, the General Accounting Office reports that "virtually all the problems that contributed to billions of dollars of unneeded inventory still exist."

In the personnel swamp, we learn this month, the hoary SF-171 job application, supposedly as extinct as the brontosaurus, lives on. Evolution creeps forward, however: Adventurous job-seekers may, if they wish, use a new form-the OF-612.

Our cover story details the sweep of competition into the federal arena. Managers of "franchise funds" are competing for administrative support
contracts and winning them, even against top-tier private sector bidders. These innovators are threatened not only by the bureaucratic status quo but by Congress, which has been moving to enact the "Freedom from Government Competition Act."

So there they go again, those intrepid legislators, inveighing against innovation. If they can tie down the bureaucracy with enough string, perhaps they'll so stultify the workplace that federal workers really will yearn for a round of Solitaire.