To Cheer You Up: Achenbach on the Disastrous Future

Just in case you need cheering up on this Monday morning, and it's not enough we've hit the debt ceiling, here's Mr. Achenbach on the future: disasters everywhere.

Bureaucratic Structure Has Advantages

Back in the 1990's, Secretary Glickman had an ad hoc structure set up to handle the "service center" initiative.  "Service centers" were the effort to consolidate USDA field offices and, possibly, to reengineer business processes and share operations among the service center agencies.  Management oversight came from a council composed of the heads of FSA, NRCS, RD, and maybe RMA.  Greg Carnill headed the effort, which eventually proposed establishing a "Support Services Bureau" providing IT and administrative services to the service center agencies in the field. See this for a Secretary Glickman speech defending the proposal in front of the National Association of Conservation Districts Spring Legislative Conference.  However, Glickman couldn't get the support on the Hill, and a few Congresspersons killed the proposal (if I remember, by a provision in the appropriations bill).

That's ancient history, but there's a point coming. The Jackson-Lewis Civil Rights Assessment says at one point they couldn't find any data where producers had previously given feedback on how well the agencies were doing.  Back in 1995-6, Len Covello, working under Greg, oversaw a survey effort.  I remember it well, to quote Gigi, because Len and I had had some problems over the years.  My point is: once the Support Services bureau was scrapped, the whole supporting structure vanished, and so did any institutional memory, as well as any likelihood of the bureaucracy repeating Len's surveys.  To the bureaucrats who were inside the agencies such surveys were NIH, something alien.

I don't know how you fix the problem.  You've got to combine the focus of a targeted effort, the speed gained by sidestepping bureaucratic hurdles, and yet get the old-line bureaucrats involved.

[Updated: corrected the name of the firm doing the assessment.]

Ag Appropriations

The Sustainable Ag Coalition says House appropriators will be working on the ag appropriations bill this week.  They foresee hard times for conservation.

Changing Federal Pensions

The Washington Post's Lori Montgomery reports that deficit reduction talks are considering changes in federal pensions, specifically requiring an increase in the employee contribution to the system. 

My memory is the Reagan administration pushed through a redo of the civil service pension system in the mid-80's.  Part of the idea was saving money, part was to make federal bureaucrats more able to change careers, part was just responding to the currents in the air (i.e, the general change from defined benefit to defined contribution retirement systems in the private sector).   I'm not aware of any followup studies to see there is more changing around  because the employee can take her TSP (aka gov. 401k) with her. I suspect that aspect was oversold.

 Her last four paragraphs:

Federal employee unions dispute the need for adjustments, arguing that FERS is already significantly less generous than its predecessor, the Civil Service Retirement System. CSRS paid retirees $2,587 per month on average in 2007, versus $944 for FERS, according to the National Treasury Employees Union, one of the largest representing federal workers. And unlike many state employee pension systems, FERS is fully funded.
“We’re sort of surprised, actually, to see the attacks on this as if it were some kind of a gold-plated system,” said Gilman, the union legislative director.
David John, a retirement expert at the Heritage Foundation, agreed that FERS “is far more responsible than most of the state and local pension plans.” But at a time when the federal government is spending drastically more than it takes in, he said, it is reasonable to ask whether taxpayers can afford it.
In the private sector, less than 20 percent of workers still have access to a traditional pension, John said. “With FERS, everyone does.”

I'm one of those CSRS retirees, living high off the hog. :-) In an ideal world, it'd be possible to reduce benefits to me in order to lessen the impact on others.  But in the real world, the only way to reduce benefits to those already receiving them is to change the COLA formula.  Hence Rep. Ryan's proposal to phase in his Medicare changes with those under 55.

Jackson Lewis Civil Rights Assessment

I tend to have enthusiasm which I don't follow through on, so fair warning: my current enthusiasm is reading and critiquing the:

Independent Assessment of the Delivery of Technical and Financial Assistance
Contract AG-3142-C-09-0049
―Civil Rights Assessment‖
FINAL REPORT
March 31, 2011
Prepared By:
Jackson Lewis LLP
Corporate Diversity Counseling Group
―Assessment Team‖

This is the report which Sec. Vilsack released this past week.  The press release cited these two items for FSA:

"

Farm Service Agency employees will be required to thoroughly explain to applicants the reasons when they deny loan or program applications and what the applicant can do to improve chances of securing approval in subsequent applications.

Farm Service Agency employees involved in the lending and/or outreach processes will learn what assistance they can and cannot provide to customers and potential customers in connection with completing their applications to avoid unequal treatment that could be construed by any customer or potential customer as discriminatory."

 Also, the return of Shirley Sherrod ties to this. I'll label posts: "CRA" for civil rights assessment.

Mom Knew Best

She always said milk and eggs were the perfect food: of course, we lived on a dairy/poultry farm so her opinion might be a bit suspect.  The NYTimes has a discussion of a forthcoming book on body size and health by Robert Fogel et. al. which included this bit:

Recent research by the anthropologist Andrea Wiley challenges some of our assumptions. She has shown that drinking more milk in childhood does make you taller.

The Return of Shirley Sherrod

Politico reports Shirley Sherrod will be working for USDA, not in USDA.

Sherrod will be a contract employee leading one of three field programs designed to bolster relations between the USDA and minority farmers and ranchers. Support for the programs is among several recommendations contained in a sweeping, two-year study released Wednesday that examined decades of discrimination claims by African Americans, Latinos, women and Native Americans.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0511/54970.html#ixzz1MKt4hgVD

Temptation

My wife and I have two cats, the senior of which was recently put on a special renal diet, or rather two renal diets: one of canned food, the other of kibbles.  This means keeping the two cats separate during meals, because the younger cat, Ginny, likes the kibbles, while Carrie likes the food she was used to having, the food Ginny still gets. 

Because neither cat cleans their plate(s), we often have to pick up the plate with the remaining food and stick it out of reach of the cat who wants it (but isn't the cat who should have it). Upon occasion, a cat outsmarts us.  Upon occasion, a cat succumbs to temptation, as shown in the slide show at this album, when the plate with kibbles was placed on top of an old popcorn popper.

The Blattman Infant Goes for World Travel Record

From a Chris Blattman bleg for travel advice:

"In case it’s relevant, between her third month and her eighth, the plan is to hit Canada, Spain, France, Turkey, and probably Ethiopia, Vietnam and Thailand."

What's Bad for the Military Is Bad for Civilians

Tom Ricks The Best Defense has a post citing a book by a Vietnam-era general:

Prudent military planners should draw the obvious conclusion that operations which span two administrations may lose their support in midstream. Very short operations like Grenada are about perfect. Long inconclusive operations like Vietnam are now known to be doomed. We may take this to be a legitimate consideration in connection with the doctrine governing operational art. It is a political refinement which is no less organic to the problem.

 I'd paraphrase this to say that prudent bureaucratic planners should draw the obvious conclusion that IT projects which span two administrations may lose their support in midstream.  (That's a conclusion reinforced by my review of the new Civil Rights Assessment report at USDA. )  It's not really a question of politics, but of Not Invented Here.  I hope they plan for MIDAS to be complete by Jan 20, 2013.