But the Free Market Depends on Enlightened Self Interest

"it’s almost impossible to overstate the power of the laziness of the bond investor."

That's a quote via Kevin Drum from Felix Salmon discussing economics and risk. Enlightened self-interest implies something other than being a couch potato. That's one problem with the free market economists--they're idealists who see humans as better than we are.

Doug Caruso Has Friends

That's how he become FSA administrator --see Brownfield. (It's true in DC as elsewhere, it's who you know.) He's tight with the head of the House appropriations ag subcommittee and the Senate appropriations ag subcommittee. (That's better than being friends with Peterson and Harkin, the heads of the ag committees--the appropriations people control what's actually done. That's the reason the Ag building is the Jamie Whitten building, named after the longtime House approp man.)

A Good Sentence and a Horrible One--David Brooks

David Brooks had an op-ed on Obama's administration Tuesday with two sentences I want to note:

"If he pulls this mantle [of being the party of order, responsibility and small-town values] away from the Republicans, it would be the greatest train robbery in American politics...."

"Even F.D.R. decided to concentrate on the banking crisis in his first year and put other issues off until 1934 and beyond. "

The second sentence is simply wrong. FDR proposed a bunch of major legislation during his first hundred days, and didn't do that much legislatively in 1934.

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.