Reducing Fraud, Waste and Abuse in Government

One of the ways Presidential candidates propose to finance their promises is through reducing fraud, waste and abuse.

GAO estimates $124.7 billion in improper payment in FY2014 in testimony here. 

The Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported that section 281 of the Department of Agriculture Reorganization Act of 1994 precluded the use of recovery auditing techniques>Specifically, the agency reported that section 281 provides that 90 days after the decision of a state, a county, or an area committee is final, no action may be taken to recover the amounts found to have been erroneously disbursed as a result of the decision, unless the participant had reason to believe that the decision was erroneous. This statute is commonly referred to as the Finality Rule, and according to USDA, it affects the Farm Service Agency’s ability to recover overpayments.

In 2013 GAO dinged NRCS and RMA for not checking SSA death files.  Situation hadn't changed by March 2015.

The bulk of the testimony points out problems relative to the SSA death files.

Seems to me Congress could fix many of the problems by changing the laws in several instances: permit SSA to pass on state-provided death data (eliminating the need for separate files), easing the ability to share the data with agencies, forcing state agencies to use the data (in the case of TANF)

Spring and the Garden Calls

Reston's been in the 60's the last two days, so it's time to work in the garden, spreading manure, digging the beds, trying to get peas in timely.

That caused me to google for the White House garden news.  Not a lot.  The latest I found was a June 2015 piece on doing a harvest, segueing to planting a pollinator garden, including for monarch butterflies.  Doubt they'll take credit for the rebound in monarch numbers recently reported.

Cottonseed Yet Again

I've blogged on the issue of making cottonseed an oilseed before.  Here's a good backgrounder by Keith Good on the issue. 

Short summary: bowing to Brazil's victory on cotton programs at the WTO, Congress took cotton out of the other farm programs in the 2014 farm bill.  Didn't touch authority on oilseed designation.

Y2K as Metaphor: International Date Line

From a NYTimes piece reporting on a DOD study raising problems with potential autonomous weaponry, which selects its own targets.

The Center for a New American Security report focuses on a range of unexpected behavior in highly computerized systems like system failures and bugs, as well as unanticipated interactions with the environment.

“On their first deployment to the Pacific, eight F-22 fighter jets experienced a Y2K-like total computer failure when crossing the international date line,” the report states. “All onboard computer systems shut down, and the result was nearly a catastrophic loss of the aircraft. While the existence of the international date line could clearly be anticipated, the interaction of the date line with the software was not identified in testing.”

 I guess the Y2K may work as a metaphor because it refers to a fact which existed and should have been accounted for in system design, but wasn't.  I'd add it to the failure of a Mars mission because of interfacing systems, one of which used metric, and one of which used American.

How the English Were Fooled by Geography

In the Age of Exploration sailors could establish their latitude (ie. how much north or south of the equator they were).  So English sailors knew the latitude of London was 51 degrees north.  Naturally when they first visited what they'd call New England, they figured that since the latitude was 41 degrees, or about 700 miles south of London, the weather should be warmer.  But Bartholomew Gosnold writes his father:

it is the latitude of 41 degrees, and one third part; which albeit it be so much to the southward, yet it is more cold than those parts of Europe, which are situated under the same parallel: but one thing is worth the noting, that notwithstanding the place is not so much subject to cold as England is, yet did we find the spring to be later there, than it is with us here, by almost a month: this whether it happened accidentally this last spring to be so, or whether it be so of course, I am not very certain; the latter seems most likely, whereof also there may be given some sufficient reason, which now I omit; as for the acorns we saw gathered on heaps, they were of the last year, but doubtless their summer continues longer than ours.

 Of course he was wrong--the New England summer is shorter and hotter.  Because the Gulf Stream had not yet been discovered as a thing affecting climate, Gosnold was fooled by geography and logic: similar latitudes should have similar climates.  According to my logic, this ignorance probably meant colonizing expeditions were less well prepared than they would have been if climate had been understood.

How To Comply With All Laws

Finally two professors have published the answer to the problem.

Less Equality Everywhere, Including Math

Atlantic has a nice piece on increasing achievement by American teenagers in math.  Why?  "problem solving", outside class programs, STEM parents.  But these things are available to the richer among us.

"National achievement data reflect this access gap in math instruction all too clearly. The ratio of rich math whizzes to poor ones is 3 to 1 in South Korea and 3.7 to 1 in Canada, to take two representative developed countries. In the U.S., it is 8 to 1. And while the proportion of American students scoring at advanced levels in math is rising, those gains are almost entirely limited to the children of the highly educated, and largely exclude the children of the poor."

Once upon a time I was good in math.  Participated in a state-wide test (the Mathematical Olympiad) in my junior year, did well, again my senior year, not so well.  It's been downhill from there.

Vietnam Wall Replicas

I never would have thought of replicas of the Vietnam Wall, much less that there were traveling exhibits of it.  But GovExec has an article on the replicas, and DOD"s RFP for another in preparation for the 50th anniversary of the war.  I'm not sure what they're using as the starting date, certainly the first person on the Wall preceded 1966.  Thanks to wikipedia we learn it was 10 years earlier, and he was killed by "friendly fire", so to speak.  A fitting opening to a very complex and confused episode in history.

My personal 50th anniversary won't be for another 16 months or so.

The Lady in the Van

Enjoyed this movie very much.  I see on Rottentomatoes that the critics liked it better than the public (92 percent to 75). I suspect the difference is because it's not the heartwarming story you might expect.  I laughed a lot, perhaps because I'm old enough to enjoy some black humor, perhaps because I just carried over a reflex from watching Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey.  As usual, she's very convincing.

A Tear for Justice Douglas

Nathan Yau at Flowing Data has a chart of the liberal/conservative scores of all justices since 1937.  The point is to show how replacing Scalia will make a big change in the median justice.  It's fine for that.

But for me, a person who remembers the days of "Impeach Earl Warren", it's fun to look toback over history.  Liberals today are more tightly grouped than in the last 50 years.  But look at the outliers over time.  Justice Thomas is one, but the real outlier is Justice Douglas.  The metrics used run from -6 to +4 with minus being liberal and plus being conservative.    So, during the years shown (1937-2015) the outliers are:

• Douglas (-6)  (eyeballed) who wanders ever more "liberal" until the end
• Rehnquist (-4.5) who's most conservative in 1975 but grows more and more moderate, particularly after becoming chief.
• Marshall (-4.3) who becomes more liberal
• Brennan (I think) (-3.9) who becomes more liberal
• Thomas (+3.5) who's pretty consistent, a bit more moderate in recent years
• Scalia (+3.5) who's amazingly changeable, starting off at +1.2, going to +3.5 in 2000 and back to +2

The conservatives get frustrated with the Court.  A clue to why might lie in an eyeball comparison of liberals and conservative justices since Nixon--the conservative paths seem to be more scattered and variable than do the liberal ones (particularly after discounting Brennan and Marshall).  The variability probably means they're less effective in joining to form a majority.

[updated--the reason for the title of the post--Justice Douglas was talented, but he became seriously odd in his later years.)