USDA Does PrePackaged News

USDA has been criticized for its practice of doing, or contracting for, reports on its activities that only at the end say they've been done by USDA. TV stations then snip the end and pass it off as their product. I've previously posted that I think the stations are wrong, not USDA, but this rider in the Ag. Appropriations bill would stop the practice:

"SEC. 765. Unless otherwise authorized by existing law, none of the funds provided in this Act, may be used by an executive branch agency to produce any prepackaged news story intended for broadcast or distribution in the United States unless the story includes a clear notification within the text or audio of the prepackaged news story that the prepackaged news story was prepared or funded by that executive branch agency."

You Can't Keep a Good Legend Down

Toni Bentley reviewed a new biography of Mary Wollstonecraft in the NY Times Book World on May 29. In discussing women's status at that time, she threw in a parenthetical statement that is false.

"(In all fairness, a new law in 1782 stated that a husband should not beat his wife with a stick wider than his thumb.)"

One thing we can say for sure is that there was no "new law" in England that said such a thing.
http://tafkac.org/language/etymology/rule_of_thumb.html

http://research.umbc.edu/~korenman/wmst/ruleofthumb.html

http://www.europrofem.org/02.info/22contri/2.04.en/4en.viol/28en_vio.htm

Credit to the Bookworld, yesterday they published a long letter that included a rebuttal of this legend.

A Conservative, as Defined by a Liberal

A conservative is a person who believes that federal support of a family on welfare should be time limited, but there should be no time limit for our troops in Iraq.

Taxpayer Bill of Rights

The Wall Street Journal editorializes and blogs come alive: Professor Bainbridge and Greg Anrig at TPM Cafe both have takes on TABOR. It's an interesting approach to spin. "Rights" are always good. Most people are taxpayers (though the bill of rights tends to favor those who pay taxes on property or income, as opposed to sales tax and FICA?)

Bainbridge says: ?"A federal TABOR doesn't seem like such a bad idea either." Unfortunately, if you Google on Taxpayer Bill Rights you find this reference: "Almost 20 years in the making, the Taxpayer Bill of Rights is now codified into the Internal Revenue Code." I suspect we're talking different things--the federal TABOR was based on the idea IRS agents abused their power. The WSJ (I don't subscribe) is probably talking a Howard Jarvis type limitation on taxes.

More to come.

Reinventing the Wheel--A Defense

I often find myself ambivalent (reminds me of the Truman joke about wanting a one-armed economist--the economists he had always said: "on the one hand..., on the other hand...).

Having attacked the "creation fallacy" yesterday, today I should defend the idea of reinventing the wheel. The defense is simple: people learn by doing, often better than by any other way. Every baby born has to reinvent the way to walk. So too there are times when it's better to reinvent the wheel just to educate the policy makers. I'm using "educate" here both in the sense of learning facts but also investing or committing to the venture.

Having put this market out, I'll try to keep alert for situations in which people are accused of reinventing the wheel to see if the above is correct.

The Creation Fallacy

No, I'm not talking creationism, but a fallacy that's related to NIH--"not invented here". The fallacy clouds the minds of politicians new to office, though like many fallacies there's some truth in it.

The fallacy takes the form of:

• politicians have objective X. They may legislate a program to achieve X, or they may just want the executive branch to achieve X.
  
• there is a bureaucracy that has existed for a while. It has staff, budgeting and accounting procedures, offices, computers, photocopiers, an organization and a culture.
• the politicians look at the bureaucracy and say (to themselves): "No, we can't entrust our baby, our precious, to this existing bureaucracy. They wouldn't understand it, they don't share our view of its importance, they won't work hard to achieve the objective. What we really need is a new organization. We can pick the people who run it, getting those who believe in the objective, we can dispense with the old bureaucratic rules, we can get something done.
• and they do so, except the new organization has no cohesion, no procedures, no memory. Everything, and I mean everything, is new to it. What does any organization do when it faces something new--it has a meeting, to elicit ideas, to get everyone on board, to see if anyone has an answer to the question of how to turn on the lights. Net result--the new organization staggers along.
  

This post is prompted by the resignation of the head of the Millenium Challenge Corporation. It was proposed by Bush in March 2002. Three years and 2 months later it's just starting to make grants. I don't know when the actual money will hit the ground in the receiving countries. (See this pdf review.Also see the Corporations home page for a more optimistic view.)

The post is also based on my experience at USDA, where we spent years and millions trying to integrate operations of the agencies that service farmers. And when we get the books on the post-war Iraq, I suspect we'll find the creation fallacy operating both at DOD and State.

Bureaucratic Blinkers and Learning

A letter to the editor in today's Washington Post notes that it's been a year since the World War II memorial was opened on the Mall, but Metro's signage has not been updated. From the comfort of my chair, without researching, it shows the problem with bureaucracy. Presumably either the Metro person responsible for signs and maps in the subway or a PR type in the Parks Service might have acted. But each person each day likely focused on immediate concerns within their sphere of responsibility, not on a broader focus. (Popular office sign: It's hard to remember your goal was to drain the swamp when you're up to your ass in alligators.)

It's like commuting--you drive a route a hundred times and you put on blinkers and turn off your mind. You take the route for granted, it fades to be part of the environment you ignore. For the Metro person, even in DC new tourist attractions don't open that often, it's not like you go into the office each day and ask what's new. Similarly for the National Parks PR person--she/he would seldom have occasion to ask Metro to update its maps.

Bureaucrats are capable of learning. Consider the heads of NASA. Daniel Goldin (1992-2001) learned that his motto (something like: "better, faster, cheaper") had problems, notably when NASA lost a couple Mars missions, one when the unit of measure of botched between a European contractor and the US one (another instance of environments taken for granted) Sean O'Keefe (2001-5) learned from Challenger. In both cases I'd expect the learning to be bone deep--you don't fail so drastically and publically without it sinking deep. Now we have a new administrator of NASA, Michael Griffin, with new plans, firing O'Keefe's people and putting in his own. One thing we can be sure of, Griffin surely knows of Goldin and O'Keefe's mistakes, but it's book knowledge, not bone deep. Griffin will try to avoid his predecessor's mistakes, but will make his own. I hope they won't be traumatic.

The problem with Metro signage, though, is the relative rarity of the opening of a new tourist site. Bureaucrats change position and don't learn from rare untraumatic events. (Of course, I could be wrong. It could be that Metro delayed changing its signs because of the expense. When Congress changed the name of National Airport, a particularly vociferous Representative forced Metro to spend a few hundred thousand dollars to update its signs with the new name. What Metro hasn't learned is to replace its signs with LCD screens.)

Feinberg, Bureaucrat Extraordinaire

Kenneth Feinberg has a book out. He's the master of the special fund to compensate 9/11 victims, meaning he had both the bureaucrat's creative role, that of building a system interpreting Congressional intent in a law, and an operational role, that of applying his system to all applicants. The book should be interesting.

Data Mining in Medicare Data?

The LA Times editorial page thinks it would be a good idea to mine the health care data accumulated by Medicare for research purposes:

Medicare's Bright Idea: "Somehow it always comes as a surprise when a huge government bureaucracy proposes something sensible, efficient and geared to the public good. This time the happy shock comes from Medicare.

Smart people at the agency have put forth the idea of using its massive databank of patient information to spot potential problems with drugs more quickly. So why is the Food and Drug Administration, which oversees drug approval and safety, dragging its feet?"

I'm almost always for more knowledge but... Even though it's probably possible to separate data on medical problems and treatments from personal information, my perception is that it's a tough sell in this country. We aren't like Finland, which is more homogenous and more "regimented" (in the sense of having national ID cards and national databases). I wait with interest to see if the FDA agrees to this and gets it by Congress. It only takes one person in Congress to stick a provision in the appropriations bill to kill it.

Appropriations--Back and Forth We Go

Another item from the Justice Appropriations bill (from http://thomas.loc.gov):

" SEC. 103. None of the funds appropriated under this title shall be used to require any person to perform, or facilitate in any way the performance of, any abortion.

SEC. 104. Nothing in the preceding section shall remove the obligation of the Director of the Bureau of Prisons to provide escort services necessary for a female inmate to receive such service outside the Federal facility: Provided, That nothing in this section in any way diminishes the effect of section 103 intended to address the philosophical beliefs of individual employees of the Bureau of Prisons."

I'm curious whether Sec. 103 was added to the appropriations bill one year, then later a case came up that caused Sec. 104 to be added in the next go-round. Sec. 103 says "require", so conceivably a prison doctor could opt to perform an abortion without violating it. However, if the prison doctor does not perform abortions, then you'd have to transport a pregnant inmate whose life was being threatened by the pregnancy.