Another Reason to Encourage Immigration

Tom Ricks at Best Defense has a short post on the problems of creating a cover story in the age of the Internet for undercover intelligence work.   Any native-born American has a Facebook page by the age of 13 or younger. That means the only people for whom we can create a good cover story is an immigrant.

Bureaucratic Palimpsest

In the old days, the really old days, they'd take the parchment on which some guy, such as Plato or Aristotle, had written his thoughts, scrape off the ink, and reuse the parchment for something more important, like a to-do list for one's better half. But sometimes you could still read the original writing--a palimpsest.

When I was at ASCS/FSA you could still sense the presence of the old Agricultural Conservation Agency (which was a predecessor of ASCS specializing, as one might think, in the old Agricultural Conservation Program.  And now, reading the Jackson Lewis Civil Rights Assessment, you can see the carryover of the Farmers' Home Administration/Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service divide, even after 15 years.

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

More on Supply Side Solutions for Healthcare

I posted earlier on some measures to increase the supply of healthcare professionals.  The Post has an article today; seems the Republicans refuse to fund a measure in the Obamacare law to increase the supply.

Federal Salaries

Apparently doctors and lawyers in the federal service make lots of money.  Federal Computer Week links to a USA Today story on those making over $180,000:

•Doctors held roughly eight out of 10 of the top-salaried jobs. Attorneys accounted for nearly 6%, followed by dentists, with almost 3%, and financial institution examiners, with nearly 2%.

•Nearly two out of three were men. Almost nine out of 10 were 40 or older. And more than half had at least 10 years of federal service.

•California, Maryland, the District of Columbia, New York and Texas had both the highest numbers of the high-salary jobs and the highest number of all federal posts.

 To me, $180K is lots of money but I know to most conservatives, $250K is not.

On the other hand, here's a report IT workers make more in the government.

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.