Misunderstanding Farm Programs--Who is a Person II

Warning: Payment limitation rules change and are complex, so I may be wrong. See the FSA fact sheet for more. To follow on with the examples in the previous post.

Husband and wife are usually one "person", but not always. (The rule has been impacted by feminist lobbying over the years.)

For legal entities, a very general rule is that if the entity involves 2 or more people and IRS requires a tax return for the entity, it's a "person". If IRS has the entity's income pass through to the individuals, it's not. If there's an individual with majority interest, the entity and individual are one "person".

Misunderstanding Farm Programs--Who is a Person

The administration proposes to limit payments to $250,000 per person. What is a "person"?

I well remember in the late 1980's a farmer writing in to complain (probably to his Congressman) about a letter he received from his local ASCS* office saying that he had been determined to be a person! He thought he'd been one all along.

Payment limitations have been a feature of farm programs for over 30 years. Congress, in its wisdom, began writing the limitation as "xxxxx dollars per person". It seemed clear enough to them: a person is a person is a person.

But not so fast. Nothing is simple to bureaucrats, because they have to try to match simple-minded laws to complex reality (in my objective view. In your view, they may just be fulfilling their anal-obsessive compulsions and/or creating work for themselves. )

If you're a bureaucrat, you ask questions like:

Should husband and wife who operate a farm (think Grant Woods' American Gothic) count as two people?

What happens if two brothers have a partnership--are they two people?

How about a parent/son corporation, with husband, wife, and son equal shareholders?

How about the Methodist church, when a parishioner with no children wills his farm to the church?

* ASCS= Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service--the name of the agency that administered most farm programs between 1961 and 1994.

Misunderstanding Farm Programs (1 of X)

Here we go, according to a Farm Belt paper and the Grey Lady:

DesMoinesRegister.com: "President Bush wants to slash farm payments to the nation's largest farms as part of a plan to reduce federal agricultural spending by 3 percent next year.
"

NYTimes
In setting a firm overall limit of $250,000, the president's plan would tighten requirements for the recipients of such payments to be "actively engaged" in agriculture, and it would generally prevent farmers from claiming additional payments through multiple entities.

There are a lot of issues with the farm programs we currently have, but the press does not do a good job in explaining them. As President and Congress fight over this issue I plan to comment and explain. A couple things to be careful of:

"subsidy" --the last time I checked the dictionary it meant a payment, but it's often expanded to include indirect subsidies, tariff barriers, tax provisions, etc. While that's a common tactic of interest groups, the Times, at least, has not usually made the distinction when it comes to farm programs.

"farmers"/"recipients" --one of the biggest areas of confusion is between what when I was in USDA we called "warm bodies" and those who aren't. No, we weren't talking about dead people but about legal entities, such as trusts, joint ventures, partnerships, corporations, etc. The other big distinction is between those with dirt under their fingernails and those with clean hands.

More to follow

Big Computer Projects--II, The FBI

Government Executive Magazine - 12/20/02 Inspector general blames top FBI officials for technology failures

Critics of the FBI, including historians and officials who have served on committees investigating the agency’s problems, have repeatedly cited senior officials’ lack of interest in managing technology as a top cause of its failings.

Trilogy and SAIC--Big Computer Projects

In a typical piece of grandstanding back in early February, the Senate subcommittee had witnesses on the Trilogy project to grab attention, but ran out of time for the testimony from SAIC.

SAIC: Arnold Punaro's Record Testimony, Prepared for the Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, State and the Judiciary U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations: "The September 11, 2001, attacks had as profound an affect on this project as it did elsewhere in the nation. Following 9/11, the Bureau faced enormous and sometimes conflicting pressures. Prior to the attack, the Bureau was dealing with revelations that a spy, Robert Hansen, had plundered FBI secrets. Security and integrity of information is a fundamental issue for the FBI. After the attack, it faced three often conflicting demands:

* The need to share information in the post-9/11 world so authorized personnel could both see and connect the dots to analyze and exploit intelligence.
* The need, in the post-Hansen world, to prevent all but a few specifically authorized people from seeing truly sensitive information.
* The need to ensure admissibility of investigative information in court in keeping with the complex body of legal, policy, and Attorney General Guidelines under which the Bureau operates.

Thus, the FBI faces a task of great difficulty and complexity in building an information technology system that simultaneously meets all three imperatives"

Big Computer Projects--I, The FBI

This dates back to February, but I'm trying to catch up.

FBI's Trilogy automation project has run into problems, with the Virtual Case File system being scrapped at a cost of $100+ million. FRom the SAIC statement:

"Probably the most damaging aspect of this development environment was the ever-shifting nature of the requirements. SAIC development teams would meet with the FBI agents assigned to the project to elicit system requirements, then SAIC would translate that into software designs. Often, however, the agents would look at the development product and reject it. They would then demand more changes to the design in a trial-and-error, "we-will-know-it-when-we-see-it" approach to development. The turbulence was not limited to the immediate changes demanded. They would ripple though the related parts of the software design. This cycle was repeated over and over again and prevented SAIC from defining system acceptance criteria and suitable test standards until requirements were finally agreed under VCF IOC this past summer. SAIC expressed concern over the affect of these changes on cost and schedule; however, we clearly failed to get the cumulative effect of these changes across to the FBI customer. We accept responsibility for this failure to elevate our concerns."

This sounds very familiar, from my experience in USDA. I suspect SAIC was trying to get requirements from agents who weren't used to self-examination, or to automation projects, or both. It's also likely that the agents the FBI assigned to the project were not the stars; you wouldn't become a hero in the FBI by knowing software, you'd become a hero by getting Dillinger or a capo.

I'd also say this shows a set of problems in contracting out work, specifically illusions/delusions on both sides. The government believes they know what they want, and believes the contractor can read their mind and do anything. The contractor/bidder believes they understand the government and is willing for the money to promise to do anything. The incentives are to enter into the contract, hoping one can get by.

In this case it appears that "mission creep" is the villain--SAIC was on board before 9/11 when the concern was partially to protect against more Robert Hansens, and stayed on board after 9/11 when the concern was to share information across the agency. Sharing information is also not a virtue in the FBI history.

On Timetables (Jim Lindgren on Volokh.com)

"Jim Lindgren, at Volokh.com says:

When People Urge a Timetable, What are They Talking About?—

I frankly admit that I have no expertise in military strategy, yet I have been feeling particularly dense lately. When I read the calls for a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, I can't for the life of me figure out what the heck they are talking about.

The time to talk about a timetable for withdrawal is when the mission is over. Then you start asking: Why are we still there? Should we set a timetable for withdrawal? But our troops are sorely needed right now. Things are still pretty dodgy, as Harry Reid and Ted Kennedy surely realize..."

I don't know much about military strategy either, but as a (retired) bureaucrat I was familiar with doing timetables.

"Timetable" is a metaphor--a railroad timetable has three features; the destination, the sequence of stops, and the scheduled times of arrival and departure at each. My timetables started with Congress passing a law for a farm program--we had to sign up farmers and pay them X billion by date Y. To create the timetable you had to work backward from that destination.

The problem with the timetable metaphor (the "roadmap" has similar problems) is that Americans don't agree on goals and the situation. What is "winning the war"? Is the goal a democracy like Switzerland (also divided by religion and ethnicity) because we are dealing with a straightforward conflict with remnants of Hussein's regime, that will end with the killing or capture of the insurgents? Is the goal simply a state that is not friendly to Islamic fundamentalists, because Iraq is currently a battleground in the worldwide war on terror? Could we live with a Shia dictator like Mubarak or Musharraf?

Or are we dealing with an incipient Sunni-Shia civil war, somewhere on the continuum between the Catholic-Protestant clashes in Northern Ireland since 1968, the Balkans during the 90's and the Tamil insurgency in Sri Lanka? Can the US successfully be a neutral third party or will we end up like the British Army in Ulster?

If statistics show the number of insurgents increasing, is that because foreigners are flowing in for jihad, because Sunnis are getting pissed off at the disorder and destruction and holding the US responsible or because we're getting better at counting?

I suggest that if Jim Lindgren and the Democrats agreed on the answers to these questions they'd agree on whether a timetable is wise. By the way, Democrats could point to President Nixon for a precedent in setting a timetable in the midst of combat. In his national speech on November 3, 1969

" We have adopted a plan which we have worked out in cooperation with the South Vietnamese for the complete withdrawal of all U.S. combat ground forces, and their replacement by South Vietnamese forces on an orderly scheduled timetable.[emphasis added] This withdrawal will be made from strength and not from weakness. As South Vietnamese forces become stronger, the rate of American withdrawal can become greater. "

Alternatively, a cynic might say Kennedy et.al. is simply what Congressional opponents of a President do to score points. Everyone likes timetables, it's a quick sound bite without taking a position where you might be wrong. After all, not only did the Republicans beat up on Clinton about a timetable for Bosnia, they put it in the law. (See Section 1205 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 1998 http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c105:6:./temp/~c105yKpRva:: Also, see Senator Hutchison http://hutchison.senate.gov/ccbosn2.htm ) It flows from the Constitution--Congress can posture and pout while the President has to exercise energy in managing war and foreign policy, just as the founders intended.

Or, going back to bureaucracy, one could look to the latent function of my timetables. They were distributed to our field offices. Field employees liked them, I was never sure whether it was the information or because they gave the impression bigshots in Washington knew what they were doing (always a dubious assumption to field level bureaucrats). From that standpoint, Democrats have little faith in Bush, just as Republicans had little faith in Clinton, so timetables seem useful.

Or, it's simply a rhetorical device, like the pose of not understanding an issue in order better to attack one's opponents.

Bureaucratic Chutzpah--Catch 22

Re the post on bureaucratic chutzpah: It's been decades since I read Catch 22 (is it still popular). My memory is that "catch-22" fits my previous discussion--two bureaucracies with separate rules intersecting. One bureaucracy is the Army Air Force (see James Q. Wilson's Bureaucracy for the view that the military is just another bureaucracy). It says--pilots must be sane. Makes sense to me. The other bureaucracy is the medicos. It says--anyone who fears combat missions and wants out is sane. Also makes sense, at least on first impression. Put the two together and you have catch-22.

Bureaucratic Chutzpah

Israel Seizes Palestinian Land in Jerusalem Cut Off by Barrier (washingtonpost.com)

"Israel has quietly seized large tracts of Jerusalem land owned by Palestinian residents of the West Bank after they were cut off from their property by Israel's separation barrier, attorneys for the landowners said.

The land was taken after the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided several months ago to enforce a long-dormant law that allows Israel to seize lands of Palestinians who fled or were driven out during the 1948-49 war that followed the establishment of the Jewish state. "

Based on the report, this strikes me as a early contender for bureaucratic chutzpah of the year. The implication in the article is that the "landowner" is present, but legally "absentee" because he can't cross the separation barrier. (You remember the definition of "chutzpah"--the son kills his parents then begs for mercy because he's an orphan.)

But, what may really be going on is two different bureaucracies at work--one the Israeli military/security system determining the path and rules for the barrier and the other the justice system rousing* itself to enforce a law. That would be consistent with the chutzpah definition: we have rules for what an "orphan" is and how an orphan is to be treated, we also have rules for handling murderers. Put the two sets of rules together and you have a joke, the sort of joke that often occurs at the intersection of two bureaucracies.

(*Update: The New York Times has more detail. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/25/international/middleeast/25mideast.html?oref=login
Apparently "rousing" isn't correct, the law is being stretched. )

(Updated II: The NYTimes says Israel's Attorney General has nixed this. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/02/international/middleeast/02mideast.html?oref=login

Making Sense of the News

[Warning–this piece applies stereotypes from my school days, close to 50 years ago. A nod to the late Meg Greenfield, Washington Post editor, who observed all Washington was variation on high school.]

Items from today's (2-1-05) NYTimes and Post: Bernie Ebbers is on trial, immature teenage brains don't mature until the mid-20's, religions compete for adherents, and the former science editor of the NYTimes recounts her unpleasant experiences as a woman in male-dominated science.

Scientists have shown by MRI's that teenage brains are awash in a sea of emotions, ungoverned by wisdom and thought, highly susceptible to peer influences, aiming for eminence and distinction, yet dependent on the comfort of the group. Now they're saying we don't mature until 25 or so (some people, humorists especially are never mature).

Mr. Ebbers is reported to have denied any accounting expertise by pointing out that he was a phys ed major in college. This is intended to distance himself from responsibility for the accounting frauds that took MCI-Worldcom into bankruptcy.

Take yourself back to the 60's–the young Bernie Ebbers in high school is one of the jocks, who are the apex of the social pyramid. The jocks look down on the brains, who are interested in such things as math and science. Some of the jocks have brains, some of the brains can jock, but to occupy safe and secure social niches they minimize similarities and accentuate the differences. The male brains, being in a lower position, then become macho, although in a suitably subtle way, in pursuing their interest in math and science, thereby marking off their turf from being invaded by females. (50 years ago the female brains were genetically programed towards marriage, that mutations have since disabled that gene and the one that made females throw from the elbow.)

The women, who've been discouraged from math and science all along, have been winnowed down to a small number. That means the theory of the "tipping point" applies, the intellectual neighborhood has gone to the dogs, and the few remaining women flee to more comfortable intellectual pursuits.

Years pass, and Bernie (do we use the diminutive at his request, or to express our own resentment) has money and position. But he's still maintaining the distinction between him–he's the glorious leader able to hire and fire the brains, who know those accounting mysteries. Real men don't count, they lead. (Thinking of the new personnel system proposed for the Homeland Security department–wouldn't Ebbers have done Sullivan's performance evaluation, so wouldn't he be responsible regardless of how well he understands accounting? )

Take a wider picture–the jocks and nerds and women have settled into ruts, but some miss something, something that a church, a religious belief can fill. Searching for an answer, they look for churches with clear identities, as clear as the identities of the groups in high school. One way for a church to make a mark is to capitalize on anxieties caused by scientific and technological advances. Where some on the left go for radical environmentalism and opposition to genetic modifications, others take the course of attacking Darwin and evolution. It's a rewarding course–there's no need to give up any of the benefits of modern science. But it's easy to take modern science as claiming the high ground of knowledge, and very human to believe anything that will undermine that claim.