Office Supplies: A Tangled Web from Gore?

Just noted a Politico post on the Obama cabinet meeting, mocking the idea that DHS can save money by buying office supplies in bulk. The following is pure speculation:

Long ago, when I was a new Federal employee, it was explained to me that the General Services Administration essentially had a monopoly on government procurements. I believe it was a FEDSTRIP program, operated using 80 column IBM punch cards. 80 characters was enough to identify the supply item from the GSA catalog, the quantity, and the destination. For some items, GSA had supply contracts the agency had to order from (like typewriters, etc.).

Over the years the GSA monopoly eroded. A major contributor was Vice President Gore, who pushed for the "reengineering of government procurement", much of it by giving government credit cards to employees who could then go to the local Office Depot store to shop for supplies.

So, DHS may be in the process of reinventing the wheel again, deciding it's cheaper to do centralized purchases than decentralized.

(BTW, for what it's worth, which is nothing, it's possible all the changes were rational. If you compare an existing process, encumbered by lots of junk inherited from the past, to a new process, rationally designed, the new may always win. Of course, rational designs often don't allow for human weaknesses, like fraud, or irrational purchases.)

NYTimes Reports the End of the World

But they buried the information inside the business section. I'm referring to an article with this lede:

Lockheed Martin will accept the Pentagon’s plans to phase out the F-22 fighter jet and will not lobby Congress to build more of the expensive planes, a top executive said on Tuesday.

This news, if true, is in the "hell freezes over" category.

White Smoke--We Have an FSA Administrator-Designate

Doug Caruso, former Wisconsin SED, has been named

Payment Limitation Twists

John Phipps seems to report a reaction to the FSA forms.

Pigford Returns

I'm not sure what the Pigford case has to do with food, but Obamafoodorama posts about its current and near future status:

Most of the post is given over to a history, rather inaccurate IMHO, of USDA's discrimination against black farmers and to a rally at USDA announced by John Boyd, National Black Farmers Association President (and mentioned at one time as a candidate for Secretary of Agriculture) for April 28, which is the date on the NBFA website. (The post said March 28, which must be a typo.) There's an impressive list of speakers for a followup conference on April 29. It will be interesting to see which of the invitees show up.

To continue my snark, I'd note sections of the NBFA website haven't been recently updated. However, there's some interesting recent messages on the message board, including one from a USDA retiree dissing the California people, particularly NRCS and RCD.

But, back to Obamafoodorama--its post links to an AP piece by Ben Evans, but skims its summary. Evans's piece includes this:

"With pressure to hold down costs, lawmakers set an artificially low $100 million budget. They called it a first step and said more money could be approved later.

But with 25,000 new claims and counting, the Obama administration is now arguing that the $100 million budget should be considered a cap to be split among the successful cases.

The position - spelled out in a legal motion filed in February and reiterated in recent settlement talks - would leave payments as low as $2,000 or $3,000 per farmer. Boyd called that "insulting."

So that position is the stimulus for Boyd's rally and conference.

Saving Money at USDA

From Obama's cabinet meeting comes the savings at USDA, the first item of which shouldn't really count for anything, since it was underway before the meeting (and, I strongly suspect, before Obama was sworn in, because the GAO audit probably triggered the change in procedure and that was last year.) (From a Post article of yesterday, see the preceding post.)

Improper Payments – USDA has worked with the Treasury Department to identify potential fraud and improper payments in farm programs. Beginning with the 2009 crop year and in successive years, all farm program payment recipients will be required to sign a form which grants the Treasury Department the authority to provide income information to USDA for verification purposes. The reform proposal would render those out of compliance ineligible for USDA payments. Savings under this proposal could reach $16 million a year.

Office Leases – USDA is working to combine 1,500 USDA employees from seven leased locations into a single facility in early 2011, saving $62 million over a 15-year lease term.

Training – The Rural Development office has been utilizing Internet training in place of in-person training with projected annual savings of $1.3 million.

An Answer on Publishing Official Notices

I blogged the other day on publishing official notices. From a Post piece on Obama's money-saving campaign:

In a blow to the newspaper industry, the U.S. Attorneys and the U.S. Marshals Offices’ Asset Forfeiture program will stop publishing judicial forfeiture notices in print and will do so online only, saving $6.7 million over the first five years of the move.

The World Is Overrun by the Young

Just saw Josh Marshall on the TPM RSS feed misspell Nikita Khrushchev's name twice. Not that I miss the Cold War, you understand.

Bureaucrat Brokaw

Tom Brokaw reveals his inner bureaucrat in today's NYTimes.

When I write "bureaucrat", I'm referring to the idea that reason and rationality are the supreme considerations, that order is important and history is not.

Brokaw points out the abundance of county and local governmental bodies in various states. He points to the abundance of higher educational institutions in the Dakotas. He suggests, as I think Gov. Corzine of NJ did a while back and a panel reviewing NY local government did, if we rationalized and consolidated functions we would save money.

No doubt it would, and no doubt we won't. Schools, governments, and similar bodies tend to die only when there's no bodies left to populate them or when a superior paradigm comes along. (I added the last phrase as a hat tip to my father, who was part of the "central school" movement in NY back in the 1920's. The movement got rid of the one-room schools by consigning pupils to bus rides to the "central school".

Words to Live By

"In other words, why procrastinate when you can perendinate? " From A.Word.A.Day from wordsmith.org.