Government Budgeting

 Was alerted to this substack post going back in history to efforts in federal budgeting and spending.

As I commented, I didn't follow some of the argument, but it triggered memories.  Back in the old days ASCS could use CCC funds as a piggy bank and its status to bypass some restrictions.  For example, if we had a rush print job for program signup involving the notices of bases and yields and the signup form, the print branch could justify bypassing the Government Printing Office's rules by claiming the material was to implement CCC programs, enabling them to go directly to a printer. 

Details of interest only to oddball types like moi.

The Honor System for Records Management

 A recent newspaper article (Times or Post?) noted that enforcement of the Federal Records Act is entrusted to the honor system. What does that mean?

 When I joined ASCS it had a Records Management Branch in its Administrative Services Division. It had been strengthened as a result of Congressional scrutiny of the Billie Sol Estes scandal.  (The investigators found that ASCS didn't have a good system for filing correspondence and policy papers.) 

The focus of the branch's work was establishing and maintaining a system for filing correspondence, and prescribing a filing system for offices originating policy decisions. Once established the routine was almost self-executing.  New secretaries would be shown what to do: original and carbons, yellow is official record, green is addressee folder, etc.  In my view there wasn't any explanation of the rationale for the way it was designed.

The records management people in the agency were effectively outsiders, people who might show up occasionally, but without any day-to-day contact with the workers   If that was true for fellow employees of ASCS, it was doubly true for the people involved with records management at the departmental level, and quadruply true for the employees of the National Archives and Records Adminstration.

How might this translate to the Executive Office of the President? On the one hand there must be a greater consciousness of the importance of records, given the constant scrutiny by journalists and investigators and the looming historians.  On the other hand the office has a lot more going on than any agency.  On the third hand, at the end of an administration I imagine it's like when you decide to retire, you zero in on the future and care much less about the wrapping up. Finally, your boss couldn't care less about records. 

[Update: given the discovery of more documents in Biden's places and today's discovery of documents in Pence's place, I think my "third hand" is well supported. I suspect you'd find a few classified documents in possession of a lot of high, and not so high, officials.]

Bar/CR Codes for Classified Documents?

 I had very limited exposure to the classification system for government documents during my time in ASCS/FSA.  IIRC ASCS did get some classified documents as part of the distribution system for the agricultural attaches stationed in some embassies.  I'm not sure why some, a few I think, were classified; perhaps the attaches had a report on the status of a nation's crops which were obtained by befriending a statistician--I don't know.  Anyhow, a management analyst in Records Management had a clearance and handled them.  I suspect the whole setup was a carryover from New Deal days, before USDA silos were built up, possibly before Foreign Agricultural Service was formed.

Anyhow, I'm not surprised by problems in handling and tracking classified documents.  You might be able to have secure handling if you used a dedicated database with no ability to copy, download, or print.  That way you could track the user ids anytime a document was read.  But, with the possible exception of the most highly classified, that's not practical.  (It does seem that when documents are viewed in a SCIF that while they could be printed, nothing could be taken out of the facility. 

For the more ordinary classified documents, I wonder if they have a system of bar coding or CR coding for them. The problem of course would still be the copying, printing, downloading--how do you assign a unique identifier to the copy, printout, or downloaded document?  If election officials and USPS can assign a unique code to a ballot so it can be tracked, but they don't deal with  duplication.

Earl Butz Was Wrong (on Cover)

 When my first boss in ASCS sent me to NC for a month to get a taste what state and county offices did, and farmer fieldmen (as district directors were called then), I spent a week in Halifax county IIRC.  The CED was sharp. It was fall so operations were slower. One day he took me out into the field, perhaps doing a spot check, don't remember.  But we stopped at a sawmill.  It had a machine, a lathe perhaps, for shaving a thin layer of wood from a rotating log. Fascinating, as I'd never seen it before.  I think the wood shavings were cut into strips which were then woven into wooden baskets.

We weren't there to look at the operation, but to get one of the workers to sign up for cost-sharing under the then Agricultural Conservation Program.  What was the practice?  A cover crop.   (Cover crops were, I think, particularly popular in the South, where there had been a lot of erosion of worn-out cotton land.)

ACP was established in the New Deal, but by 1969 it was under attack.  Republicans, led by Secretary of Agriculture Butz, argued that some, or perhaps all of the practices, increased the productivity of farms, and, therefore the farmers could and should find the practices worthwhile enough to finance and install on their own, without the carrot of a government cost-share. They also argued that items such as liming were the result of lobbying by the industry. 

There was a lot of back and forth over the fate of ACP between the Nixon administration and Congress, where the House was controlled by Democrats throughout. In the end the program was cut back, both by reducing appropriations and by inflation, and the cover crop practice and liming were eliminated. 

IMO the Butz expectation that rational self-interest would be sufficient to perpetuate widespread cover crops was disproved by the results. 

The Paperless Office

 I remember when Felix Foss came around to talk about the "paperless office" which implementing the System/36 would enable.

The other day I got on the Facebook group for current and retired FSA employees.  146 messages on the subject of what office equipment should be purchased for the coming year.  It seems that most of the messages concern equipment for handling paper and folders.https://www.facebook.com/groups/54686876198

Should I Apologize?

 Reading comments in the FSA Employees Group in Facebook. One noted the proliferation of programs, arguing that Congress should restrain itself.  

One of the things I tried to do during my time on the program side was to make things more efficient, particularly on the software side.  I also got involved in crash efforts when Congress or the administration came up with new programs (1983 payment-in-kind and 1986 disaster I remember particularly). I think I was reasonably successful, so why might I need to apologize?

Isn't there a parable of the  beast of burden which is always able to handle the loads which it's given, until one day the master adds the last straw? (Can't find it in wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_that_broke_the_camel%27s_back, but it seems as if there should be one.)

My point: I was just part of a long tradition in AAA/ASCS/FSA of employees taking pride in implementing programs quickly, which created a reputation among policy makers, which led to more and more programs. 

To some extent this is democratic policy making--IRS, SBA, etc. had similar problems in responding to the economic impact of the pandemic. 

But the reality is if we had been screwing up programs in the 1980s and 90s, the employees today won't be overloaded. 

What Really Matters to Congress: Policy or Offices?

 David Brooks on Newshour Friday said he'd learned, contrary to the assumptions of political scientists,  that people don't want power.  He was talking about Congress not being willing to write specific authorities in legislation, as SCOTUS in this week's decision, says they ought to, rather than relying on agencies like EPA to decide and act.

It sort of fits with something I learned from "The First Congress", a book by Fergus Bordewich on the wheelings and dealings during 1789-91.  I've learned the Bill of Rights was not the Congressional version of the Ten Commandments, words of wisdom widely debated and finally etched in stone.  Some legislators saw them as rather meaningless, sops thrown to the Anti-Federalists who'd extracted the promise of amendments as part of state ratification of the Constitution.

Much more important to Congress was the location of the national capital.  It took months of maneuvering and deliberations before the final compromise which settled it.   

That also fits with another action this week: Congress blew up efforts to rationalize and modernize the Veterans Administrations healthcare facilities.  That reminded me of a similar attempt back in the early 1980's to rationalize ASCS offices. It ended badly.

So my bottom line: Congress doesn't do well on difficult policy questions; it's much more interested in offices and jobs and will never delegate authority to agencies to change them.

Nostalgia for the System/36

 Brent Orr posted on Facebook about the System/36, which evoked a lot nostalgia from old-timers. Given the amount of cursing from the counties in 1985-90 it's a bit amusing to hear about how reliable the software and system were, etc. etc.  Lots of complaints early on which now faded away in memory.

I must admit it's rather satisfying though, because I and others invested a lot of time and energy, sweat and tears in it.  (I don't remember any blood being shed, but I remember a number of occasions where I drove my employees to tears.) 

Encouraging Cover Crops

 Secretary Vilsack is trying to encourage the use of cover crops by providing incentive payments.

In 1969 I was in North Carolina trying to get a little exposure to state and county operations.  I remember the CED in one county took me on a visit to a sawmill operation.  IIRC they were shaving the logs to create the slices of wood used in making baskets when we visited.  While there he signed up a worker for an Agricultural Conservation Program practice for cover crops on his land. I think he knew the worker, his sawmill job, and his farming operation (perhaps tobacco?) well enough to make that trip.

In the 1970's the Nixon/Butz regime targeted the program using the argument that good farmers would use good farming practices which were profitable; the corollary is that a practice which isn't profitable isn't good and ignoring the issue of differing time periods.

[updated with link]

Bob Dole: Detail Oriented

 When I was hired at ASCS in 1968 I became familiar with the handbook (17-AS) which had the distribution schedules for all ASCS handbooks. There was a form listing all the ASCS offices: state offices, commodity offices, and aerial photo labs, with the quantity to be sent to each.  Some states wanted a skinny distribution, allowing 1 copy per county office and a few for the state; others would allow for multiple copies per county.  Occasionally we have to create a schedule for new printed material, since the same schedule might be used for some related form or pamphlet.  All of that got me familiar with the number of counties (actually county offices) in the states. 

In addition to the preformated schedule, for some handbooks there might be one or two additional offices which wanted a copy for some reason, perhaps OIG, FCIC, or AMS.  The only Congressional office down to receive any handbook was Bob Dole's office, which wanted 25-GR, the designation for the wheat and feed grain programs.   The dedication to detail of the Congressman, or more likely required by him of his policy person, impressed me. 

I hadn't heard of him before joining ASCS, but he was elected to the Senate the next year. 

Modern Farmer Is Confused

Modern Farmer has a post on the new loan program intended to help in establishing title to heir property.  It has some problems, and I feel nitpicky today so I've bolded the errors I find:

"For instance, if a land owner died without a will, that land would be divided up among the owner’s heirs. Once they passed on, the land would be further divided among their heirs. While property might be in a single family’s control for generations, they don’t have legal title or claim to the land. That means they cannot easily sell the land or consolidate fractured acreages...."  [My comment: usually it's the father dying intestate, with the children inheriting the land in common, not divided. When a child dies, her ownership share is inherited by her children, and so on. One of the owners can appeal to the court to force a sale of the land and divide the proceeds among the heirs. That is a way whites have used to buy land cheaply: forced sales. Even when there's no forced sale, the person farming on the land doesn't have clear title, a prerequisite to mortgaging the land.]

"After the Civil War, the federal Homestead Act gave Black families land, mainly across the South, and many of them became land holders for the first time.... [The Homestead Act and  the Southern Homestead Act weren't effective in getting black farmers land. "Gave" is wrong--the charge was $50 for 40 acres, which was a significant sum in 1866 (perhaps $700 to 12,000 in todays money). I know of no statistics or study showing the relative importance of the different ways in which blacks accumulated land, but my impression is that hard work, scrimping, and good relations with selected white owners were key.]

"That became a bigger problem after President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Services came into effect. At the time, the USDA established a loan program to help farmers..." [ASCS had nothing to do with the loan program, which had originated in the New Deal, and was by 1961 administered by the Farmers Home Administration. The current day Farm Service Agency is the successor to ASCS and to the farmer loan programs of FmHA.]

 I don't trust the rest of the writer's facts, based on her errors in these portions. 

The Bureaucrat's Necessity: Forms in the UK

 I designed and redesigned a fair number of forms during my career. We had a Forms Management Branch in ASCS when I started.  The program specialist would take his problem to them and together they'd work together to get a master for the printer. 

Overtime I started to design forms in Wordperfect tables.  Got quite good at it, if I do say so. I think Forms eventually got most forms converted to Wordperfect. I haven't checked the online forms in years so I don't know whether they've now converted to PDF fill-ins or to HTML.  

Anyway, the UK also has forms.  This post says they're doing 6 percent a year (I hope that's not true, though if they have the sort of expansion of programs we've had in agriculture in recent years they might be expanding the number that fast).  They would like to have all HTML forms.  It's interesting to see how differently their government works than ours, as I believe I've noted before. 

Grade Creep and the GS- System

 This GovExec piece discusses the problem of job classification in the government, using the term "grade creep", which brings back old memories. Back in the late 1970's the Personnel Management Division (now HR) did a classification review of the branch I was heading (we had directives and records management responsibilities). They down graded the analyst positions.  

As the dust was settling, I was offered a job on the program side of ASCS, which allowed me to maintain my GS-13 grade. 

The classification standards for management analysts at the time were, IMHO, developed based on work in the New Deal days.  To get the highest grade levels you had to be creating new organizations and new processes.  I could see the logic of that.  The impact of the people involved in creating the AAA back in the 1930's was more impactful than the work of people making ASCS work reasonably well in the 1970's.  That didn't mean I liked the results. 

Note: the GovExec piece argues for using computer algorithms for job classification--I have strong doubts about that.

Bureaucracy Extremes

Started reading "Midnight at Chernobyl" today.  It's been around the house for a while since we saw the TV series based on it,  but hadn't gotten to it until today.

Then I just got off the Facebook group for current and retired FSA employees (mostly field employees but some DC and retirees). I like to keep up with what's happening there. 

There's a big contrast between the rigid bureaucracy of the Soviet Union and the more free floating discussion of issues and techniques in the Facebook group. I wonder how much of that is American versus Russian and how much is technology enabling exchange of ideas. 

I think it was true in the old days of ASCS that there was pretty good sharing of ideas within a state, and perhaps some across state lines based on personal connections.  Back in the 90's we tried to develop the sharing by having "train the trainer" courses with county people mixed in with the state people.  Having the internet and Facebook now facilitates the exchange even more.  

Interesting FSA Notice For Farmers.gov Positions

 Some 35 years ago ASCS advertised 2-year positions in DC called "SCOAPers".  IIRC the acronym stood for "state and county office automation project".  Leroy Mitchell was, I think the Kansas City Management Office person who pushed it.  He was recognizing that the job of converting our manual and batch processing operations in the field to applications running on our new IBM System/36s couldn't be handled by the personnel on hand in DC. He had also been very impressed by the program assistants KCMO had worked with in the guinea pig counties (first one county--IIRC Osage Kansas, and then a group of 6 or so counties.

The DC office had big problems in hiring field people the way we had done in the past--i.e., hiring county executive directors for permanent positions.  Typically they'd get a grade increase to GS-11 or 12, with the possibility of getting to GS-13. In the old days that may have been a good enough carrot for an ambitious type, but as DC area housing prices soared in the 70's and early 80's due to inflation and a housing boom, it just didn't work.

Another problem, which I don't think most of us realized, was CED's could be at a loss in trying to handle automation.  A lot, most IMHO, were used to being the public face of the county office, relying on their clerks/program assistants to handle the nuts and bolts, the paperwork.

So the bosses worked out a deal with the Civil Service Commission and USDA's Office of Personnel to offer 2-year positions to program assistants and CED's to work on the automation from the DC side. The key to the deal was that they would technically still be county employees, not federal, so they didn't count against federal personnel ceilings. 

The program turned out to be key in changing the ASCS DC workforce from almost male-only.  In the end many of the SCOAPers stayed in DC, converting to GS status and advancing up the ladder to management.  There was another batch in 1987-8.

It sounds to me as if FSA is taking a similar approach to staff the farmers.gov initiative, as outlined in this notice.  Good luck to them. 

I note some differences:  it's a 2-year minimum with possible extensions up to 5 year max. And there's the possibility of relocation allowances. Despite the innovation of locality differences in pay, I suspect the problem of attracting field employees to DC remains, possibly not improving any since 1997. I also suspect management has underestimated the problems of implementing the farmers.gov.