Significant Change in Service Center Budgeting

If I understand the USDA's budget proposal, where in the past years the Office of Chief Information Officer had the funding for the "Common Computing Environment", now they've moved it back to the agencies:

"Funding of $64.2 million for certain IT operational expenses and related Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) initiatives which had previously been requested and provided for in the Common Computing Environment account managed by the Office of the Chief Information Officer, are requested in FSA’s salaries and expenses account for FY 2008. The maintenance of modern digitized databases with common land unit information, integrated with soils and crop data and other farm records and related initiatives, is vital to the development of more efficient and effective customer services at the Service Centers. In addition, FSA continues to review its county office structure consistent with Congressional guidance to obtain local input and thorough analysis to determine appropriate restructuring of its county offices."

Not sure of the significance, but interesting (inside baseball).

Faceless Bureaucrats--British Style

A Brit has a new book out, according to this.

I strongly recommend this document translating British bureaucratic jargon, showing that bureaucrats are brothers and sisters under the skin, even though British "civil servants" are more prestigious than their American cousins.

"Elephant trap" for them equates to "swamp" for us.

Earl Butz Dead

According to this and Bloomberg. (Wikipedia already has his death.) I'll be watching the obits to see if they adopt the Pollan/locavore/organic food idea of a big shift in government policy that led to high fructose corn syrup. (In my mind, a myth.)

Are Farmers Psychotic?

Megan McArdle posts an analysis of drug prices and drug R&D and why limited drug company profits would decrease R&D.

She points out that Merck could earn 5 percent on its money by investing in government bonds, and doing no drugs at all. So it needs a chance of profits over that rate. It would be "psychotic," in her estimation, for Merck to continue making drugs if they have only a 1 in 1000 chance of making big profits.

But the same logic could apply to farmers, at least those who own their land free and clear. They could earn more by selling out and investing their capital. But, unlike drug companies, they keep farming (mostly, at least until they get too old). (Of course, this is a point my mother used to make some 60 years ago.)

A Slip of the Congressional Pen

Agweb notes a delay in the dairy disaster signup, because FSA had to do regulations.
Normally in farm legislation Congress exempts USDA from complying with the usual requirements for getting public input--i.e., issuing a notice in the Federal register asking for comments, or at least doing an interim rule with provision for amending it in the final rule. Why is that important?

For speed. Requiring comment slows down the implementation process several ways:

1. First, if the regulations have to be done before the implementation, rather than concurrently with it, it's like the difference between serving concurrent sentences of 10 years versus consecutive.
2. Second, if you get comments and really consider them (two big "ifs"), then you likely end up making changes. While the change may improve the program, it's likely to slow the development of forms and software.
3. Third, distractions. Usually in FSA the same people who are working on the forms and instructions for the field are also the ones who do the regulations. That's good for coordination but poor for single-minded concentration on implementation.

Why my parenthetical in no. 2? The nitty-gritty of most farm programs is not of interest to most people. So comments often come from the usual suspects--the farm organizations which pushed the legislation in the first place. If you're trying to implement their program, then you already are trying to follow their intentions (because that's the intentions of the members of Congress), so comments don't do much. [Note: Statement true as of 10 years ago--might have changed in the interim, but I doubt it.]

Dan Morgan on the Farm Bill

Keith Good at Farmpolicy picks up a Dan Morgan piece on the current status of the farm bill. I was particularly struck by these paragraphs on the budgetary games and impact of high prices:

One irony of the congressional budget system is that the current record high commodity prices serve to protect the existing web of price supports and price guarantees. Even if Congress slashes those rainy day subsidies, CBO won’t credit savings, since CBO sees prices staying well above the existing subsidy floor most of the time. This leaves Congress with little budgetary incentive to make reforms.

(CBO projects that of the $66 billion in commodity costs between fiscal 2008 and 2017, only about $16 billion will go to traditional price supports and guarantees related to what farmers grow. The other $50 billion is accounted for by income support, known as direct payments, that goes to farmers automatically, regardless of prices.)

CBO’s new projections see federal crop insurance subsidies rising sharply, by as much as $14 billion over 10 years. (As farm prices rise, so do insurance premiums that are subsidized by USDA.) Congress could cut the subsidies and capture funds with which to pay for other priorities. But crop insurance subsidies have already been cut in the House and Senate-passed farm bills, and it isn’t clear how much more pain Congress is willing to inflict on the industry.

Greg Mankiw Beat Me to It--The Truth About Economists

See the link.

Fritterware--Google Experiments

A former co-worker called some software "fritterware" because you'd fritter away time using it. Here's Google experimental search site, for anyone with time to spare.

Saving Everything in the Government

This is an interesting endeavor:

"A new international task force will convene for the first time Tuesday to address the problem of maintaining data for future generations.

The National Science Foundation and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation are funding the Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access panel's two-year mission, with support from institutions like the Council on Library and Information Resources, Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, and the United Kingdom's Joint Information Systems Committee."

And later

"But she said the formal processes used to designate materials for storage or deletion are integral to sustainability across the globe because it is impossible to save everything."

It might well be possible to save everything. After all, Google Docs saves all the changes made to a document, just as Wikipedia does. Storage costs are going down and down and down.

But if you do save everything, will anyone be able to find what they want? Maybe. Google desktop indexes most everything.

But if you save everything, and anyone can find anything, will anyone care? The problem is the same as for wiretapping, or security cameras, you mostly can only review some stuff in real time. And humans are easily bored. As a natural born pack rat, I saved most everything from my bureaucratic career, at least after the PC landed on my desk. But no one will care. (Unlike Samuel Pepys, no one will write books about mid-level bureaucrats.)

Noted Bureaucrats--Bob Ball

See here for Josh Marshall's note on Bob Ball--the face of the Social Security system for many years. Here's the Post obit.