Maybe the Best Place to Work Shouldn't Be?

Government Executive has a piece on the 12 best small federal agencies to work at.  Topping the list is:

In 2012, the Office of Navajo and Hopi Indian Relocation topped the very small agency list with a Best Places to Work job satisfaction and commitment score of 90.1 on a scale of 100. Its mission is to assist Hopi and Navajo Indians impacted by the relocation that Congress mandated in 1974 for members of the tribes who were living on each other’s land.

 Now I applaud their accomplishment in being the best place to work in the government.  But the thought does pass through my mind: there's 39 years between the Congressional mandate and now.  While I understand relocating people is a long process, shouldn't it have been finished maybe 10 years ago?

Vilsack Stays

That's probably good news, since in my experience every new leader comes in thinking he/she has better ideas than the old leader, and at least half the time they're wrong.

Before the Days of COLA

Back in 1950 Congressmen vied to introduce bills to raise civil service salaries.  That's documented in this Post look back at its Federal column from those days.

Also back in the day Congressmen vied to expand the coverage of Social Security and to improve its payments.

Finally back in the day Congressmen vied to enact tax cuts.

Clearly those times were different than now. How so?

• we have 79 Congresswomen, rather than nine.
• civil service salaries are indexed to inflation, removing the opportunity to pass regular salary increases as inflation raises prices.
• Social Security is indexed to inflation, removing the opportunity to pass regular benefit increases as inflation raises prices.
• income tax rates are indexed to inflation, removing the opportunity to pass regular tax cuts as inflation raises people to the next tax bracket and increases the take from income taxes.

Maybe, in consideration of the last 3, being a Representative is a less attractive job, which might explain the first item.

What Prof. Mankiw Forgot to Point Out

Prof. Mankiw of Harvard notes a Wall Street Journal piece on the growth of entitlement, showing 50 percent of U.S. households now get Federal benefits.  He doesn't note this interesting bit of the article:

In current political discourse, it is common to think of the Democrats as the party of entitlements, but long-term trends seem to tell a somewhat different tale. From a purely statistical standpoint, the growth of entitlement spending over the past half-century has been distinctly greater under Republican administrations than Democratic ones. Between 1960 and 2010, the growth of entitlement spending was exponential, but in any given year, it was on the whole roughly 8% higher if the president happened to be a Republican rather than a Democrat.

Mankiw was, of course, a part of the GWBush administration.

How Congresspeople Keep Groups Happy

The Sustainable Agriculture Coalition posts about the bill coming out of Senate Ag.  They include this:

The latter [the matching grant initiative, part of SARE] was authorized by Congress, along with the rest of SARE, back in 1990, but to date it has never received an appropriation.

Pardon my cynicism, but what that tells me is for 22 years someone in Congress is doing a song and dance keeping the (few) people behind SARE and the grant idea happy, or if not happy at least supportive in terms of dollars and votes, by reauthorizing the provision each farm bill but never appropriating the money.  To quote someone in the movies: "show me the money".

"The Principal Is Your Pal"

Has no one ever heard of that? Does no one have an English teacher named Ms Murgatroyd who harped on the differences between "principal" and "principle", between "capitol" and "capital", between "its" and "it's"?

Apparently the answer in Obama's White House is "no", as witness this post from a deputy press secretary: "White House Report – The Buffett Rule: A Basic Principal of Tax Fairness"

I do wish the world weren't going to hell in a handbasket. 

Faux British Hipness

The USDA blog has a post on how a new market for cotton is being created with "Under Armour".  The company was founded by a UofMD man so has gotten some attention in the Post.  But I was struck for the first time today by the British spelling of "armor". I guess he was trying to be posh and hip and all that good stuff.  Maybe the athletes he clothes "glow" or "perspire" instead of "sweat".  Farmers sweat.

Love Those Free Marketers

The incentives certainly work to inspire idiocy:

Jim Massery, the government sales manager for Pittsfield, Mass.-based Lenco, dismissed critics who wonder why a town with almost no crime would need a $300,000 armored truck. "I don't think there's any place in the country where you can say, 'That isn't a likely terrorist target,'" Massery said. "How would you know? We don' t know what the terrorists are thinking. No one predicted that terrorists would take over airplanes on Sept. 11. If a group of terrorists decide to shoot up a shopping mall in a town like Keene, wouldn't you rather be prepared?" From Ta-Nehisi Coates

 “‘However, with the enormous amount of risk farmers are about to undertake by planting a new soybean crop, now is exactly the wrong time to reduce support for the federal crop insurance program,  The American Soybean Association from Farm Policy

Based on the logic of these hucksters, we need a $300,000  armored truck in every town the size of Keene, N (23,000 +) H, or larger, or about 1300 places. And because soybean farmers plant a crop every year, and risk their investment in seed and fertilizer, we can never reduce crop insurance.

131 FSA County Offices OUt?

That's from the Des Moines Register.

[Updated--here's the press release,
FSA has almost exactly half the 259 cuts being announced by Vilsack in his speech to Farm Bureau.  And here's the fact sheeton the details.  I didn't see any reference to any pre-clearance with Congress.  Since the speculation is that Obama is going to run for re-election by bashing a do-nothing Congress, maybe the plan is to put this on the table, and let Republican Congresspeople yell about closures, then attack them for being hypocrites?  Am I cynical today?]

Those Healthy School Lunches

The cynic in me gloats over this report in the LA Times, hat tip Kevin Drum, on how poorly the newly healthy lunch menus has been greeted in the LA schools.

I wonder if USDA will pull the award: "This year, L.A. Unified, which serves 650,000 meals daily, has received awards for improving its school lunches, including one last week from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and another from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine."


To be fair, some of the innovations are working well; as I've always said, it's hard if not impossible to do things right the first time.  One of the key faults is that the food which was acceptable in their tests turned unacceptable when prepared by the regular kitchens.  As Megan McArdle would say: scalability, and repeatability could when you're basing decisions on pilot tests.

[Update: McArdle picks up the story and discusses reasons why pilot tests aren't necessarily predictive.]

NASCOE Proposals I

NASCOE has a set of proposals submitted to the Administrator, FSA, and SEcretary Vilsack.  They're interesting, which is why I'll probably post multiple times.  The thing which struck me first was the proposal to combine State offices.

I remember when the Reagan administration tried that.  As a matter of fact, that's how my former boss, Sandy Penn, came to DC.  If I recall Delaware and MD were to be combined, meaning a reduction in state specialists.  I guess Sandy was the low woman on the seniority list, so she transferred to DC. The combination was all set to happen, when it was suddenly cancelled.  The scuttlebutt was that someone in New England, I think a state executive director, was the college roommate of a Congress person with serious clout, maybe membership on the Appropriations Committee? 

Anyhow, forgive my cynicism, but I don't think this is going to happen.  (Coincidentally, DOJ is trying to move some field offices, and getting big flack from the field.)

12 Percent of Emergency Response Officials Are Idiots

That's my take from this sentence, from a Government Executive post addressing the use of emergency response grants in the wake of 9/11:

And a newly released survey found that a whopping 88 percent of emergency-response officials believe that grants are allocated according to what's best for politicians, not what's best for emergency preparedness.

Perhaps I should be charitable and say 12 percent have a surplus of charity and a deficiency of cynicism.

E. Klein Funny Sentence

In the first paragraph of a post explaining why he won't see The Adjustment Bureau:
"But I can't believe in guys in suits with the ability to plan things."

The whole piece is worth reading, although it's mostly focused on Congress and the President, not the bureaucracy.

Reducing Payment Acreage

This bit from Farm Policy raises a possibility I missed earlier: reducing payment acreage.

“Congress may also wish to consider reducing the portion of a farm’s acres eligible for direct payments. In 2009, GAO reported that reducing the portion of eligible acres to 80 percent from 83.3 percent might save millions of dollars annually. Further reducing the portion of eligible acres to 75 percent could save millions more each year. Such an across-the­ board reduction would affect all recipients. Moreover, Congress may wish to consider terminating the payments. Some agriculture organizations, including the National Farmers Union and the Iowa Farm Bureau, have recommended phasing out or terminating the payments altogether and using the savings to bolster other farm programs.”

This would perpetuate a device Congress first use way back in history: achieving budget savings by reducing the payment acreage and/or payment yield formulas.  Instead of being obvious what they're doing, they do it the sneaky way.  Never underestimate the capacity of a politician to be sneaky.
 

Fantasy Documents

Thanks to Dan Drezner, who was commenting on NY's manual for law in the midst of disasters as described in the Times today, I'm introduced to the concept of "fantasy documents".  From the Amazon product description for the book:

How does the government or a business plan for an unimaginable disaster-a meltdown at a nuclear power plant, a gigantic oil spill, or a nuclear attack? Lee Clarke examines actual attempts to "prepare" for these catastrophes and finds that the policies adopted by corporations and government agencies are fundamentally rhetorical: the plans have no chance to succeed, yet they serve both the organizations and the public as symbols of control, order, and stability. These "fantasy documents" attempt to inspire confidence in organizations, but for Clarke they are disturbing persuasions, soothing our perception that we ultimately cannot control our own technological advances.

For example, Clarke studies corporations' plans for cleaning up oil spills in Prince William Sound prior to the Exxon Valdez debacle, and he finds that the accepted strategies were not just unrealistic but completely untenable. Although different organizations were required to have a cleanup plan for huge spills in the sound, a really massive spill was unprecedented, and the accepted policy was little more than a patchwork of guesses based on (mostly unsuccessful) cleanups after smaller accidents.

While we are increasingly skeptical of big organizations, we still have no choice but to depend on them for protection from large-scale disasters. We expect their specialists to tell the truth, and yet, as Clarke points out, reassuring rhetoric (under the guise of expert prediction) may have no basis in fact or truth because no such basis is attainable.

 It rings true to me, and I might add other documents to the fantasy category: strategic plans, for example. I've always thought those were paper exercises divorced from reality.  Environmental assessments and economic impact statements also might fall into the category.

Dairy Management Answers Back

The Post carries a letter today from the chief executive of Dairy Management, defending their position.  One point he affirms, which I thought I got from the AMS website but which wasn't clear, is:

"The Post objects that the program wastes "government authority" by being administered by the Agriculture Department. But even here, dairy farmers actually pay USDA for all its costs of administering the program. It costs taxpayers nothing, which is as it should be."

 Of course, the tobacco program ran into a public buzzsaw, which resulted in a "no net cost" program.  But that never inhibited tobacco's critics from blasting the government for "subsidizing tobacco".  Similarly, I fully expect the food movement to blast the government for subsidizing obesity by promoting cheese.

This Is Sick

Assuming the post is correct, because the crime rate has been failing since the Clinton administration (or thereabouts--no causal relationship implied but Dems are happy to take credit) the supply of prisoners for private prisons is down.  So what should be done to renew the supply: crack down on illegal immigration, as in the Arizona law, which seems to have been pushed by the private prison lobby.

Work for FSA--Michael Roberts Predicts Disaster

Roberts has a take on the corn situation, and observes it's likely the good weather we've had in the Corn Belt the last 15 years won't hold.  That means more disaster work for FSA.

The Great American Tradition: Hypocrisy

So thinks Kevin Drum, who argues everyone wants to cut government spending, except on the things they like.

I agree.

Mankiw's Error of Perception

Greg Mankiw, Harvard economics prof, found The Social Network to be an enjoyable movie, but thought it unfairly portrayed Harvard undergrads as snobs, instead of the likable types he encounters. I hate  love to snark at Harvard, but there may not be a conflict. here: Harvard undergrads are so capable they can appear snobbish to the world outside and likable to those in authority over them, like a professor.