Moving Online--SSA and FSA

The FCW has a post on the problems SSA is having in moving its individual statements of accounts online. Two paragraphs:

Although the SSA is developing a new Web portal for accessing the online statement, the portal development is in the initial development phase and has not been fully tested, she said.
In addition, the SSA does not have plans in place for informing the public about the new online statements, or for ensuring access for individuals without Internet access or English proficiency.

If I remember correctly (too lazy to check), FSA has individual statements online, though I suspect there's very little access to them.  FSA has/had a different problem than SSA; FSA didn't mail individual statements on a regular basis while SSA does.  But FSA doesn't have experience with delivering services over the Internet, as witness he poor job they're doing with it.I infer from my personal reaction to the website, which I keep putting off expressing here.

Seems to me, if I were SSA, I'd include the instructions to get online with my last mailed statement.  In others, if my statement gets mailed in March 2013, it includes a notice my data is now on line, along with whatever security measures they've adopted.  Interesting question: do people opt in or opt out of the online statement?  I'd say opt out, but that's me. 

Me, the Professor, and Facebook

Chris Blattman is a professor with an interesting blog on international development, mostly Africa. It's reassuring to find that he's as puzzled by Facebook as I am.

Is USDA Listening? Twitter and Disaster

 I've previously suggested using pictures, either from digital cameras and/or cellphones, to enrich/replace the process of reporting crops and crop damage.  Based on this I suggest using Twitter as well: From a FCW post on use of social media by DHS:

DHS should look to the National Weather Service for an effective model. NWS has programmed its computers to automatically read any tweets with the hashtag #wxreport. Amateur weather watchers use that tag to report tornadoes and other extreme weather. Because Global Positioning System chips automatically report a smart phone’s location, NWS can pinpoint an event on a real-time basis and get critical situational awareness.

Crop insurance needs to know hail damage, in particular.

Coming Innovation: Robotic Transport for Apartment Complexes?

Reston is a planned community, started in the 1960's.  Among the compromises from the original plan was a downgrading of density; the developers discovered that single-family houses sold better than townhouses, which sold better than condos.  Now as the town has aged, and as Metro approaches (arriving next year on the east side of town), there's more and more planning for redevelopment, tearing down old buildings and building new ones.  In the process density is going up, which should make Matt Yglesias happy, if he ever travels from his DC apartment out to the wilds of Virginia.

Here's a post discussing planning for one of the redevelopment projects.  What strikes me is the bit about "Transit-Oriented Development".  It ties in with an observation about the Hunter Woods Fellowship House (an apartment building for seniors) which is served by a Fairfax Connector bus, although it probably adds 5 minutes to the bus route.

Seems to me in the near future it would be easy enough to have a vehicle, electric powered, controlled robotically, callable on demand, which runs only a route connecting an apartment complex like Fellowship House or the proposed Fairway Apartments to an express bus route or metro station.  Because the route would be set, it should be a relatively easy challenge to do the robotics.  By having a short route, the waiting time at either end would be minimal. By linking it in with a smartphone app, it could be response. 

The Space: On Not Doing It Right the First Time

My rule is that you never get something difficult right the first time.  Usually you can't, or I can't, get something easy right the first time.

John Holbo at Crooked Timber has a post which discusses, among other things, how long it took Western humans to start using "spaces" in their writing.  (Languages which use pictographs obviously don't have the problem.)

For example: "overthecourseoftheninecenturiesfollowingromesfallthetaskofseparatingthewordsincontinuous
writtentextwhichforhalfamillenniumhadbeenafunctionoftheindividualreadersmindandvoicebec
ameinsteadalaborofprofessionalreadersandscribestheseparationofwordsandthussilentreadingor
iginatedinmanuscriptscopiedbyirishscribesintheseventhandeighthcenturies...'

I wonder whether the space didn't contribute to the growth of productivity?

Cage Hens

US egg producers and the Humane Society are proposing a deal: if Congress will pass national standards, they can live with 144 square inches per hen, instead of 67. See this post on the Rural Blog.

The deal represents the sort of interest group bargaining we often see: in essence the big guys are working against the little guys.

[Note: I'm using Blogger's new editor, which I'm not sure I like--change is bad.   I keep forgetting labels before I post.]

Changing the Payment Process at Treasury

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution links to a Felix Salmon post discussing, in part, the problems Treasury faces on August 2/3, including this sentence:

"At that point — and no earlier — there would be enormous pressure on the White House to pull out the 14th Amendment and declare the debt ceiling unconstitutional, if only for practical reasons: doing so would be a lot easier than trying to reprogram the computers which are set to send out $49 billion of Social Security checks on August 3."

I know (almost) nothing about this, but when has lack of knowledge ever kept a self-respecting blogger from writing? I've two thoughts:

On the one hand, since the government hasn't done this (prioritizing payments) before, yes, the process is likely to be difficult and full of glitches. On the other hand, at least in the old manualish days, people had to certify the payment document before transmitting to Treasury for payment.  Then, moving ahead to the tape days (i.e., 1960-80's), SSA would have provided reels of 7 or 9 track mag tape containing the payment data to Treasury.  Back then, they could have just  stuck the reels in storage and waited to mount them and run the program until the debt limit was lifted.



I'd expect there's the automated equivalent of that still in place.  In others words, at some point SSA stops updating their payment file with the deaths, new retirees, corrections, and transmits the whole file to Treasury for payment of Aug 2 pensions.  I wouldn't think on the Treasury side their systems would know much about the data, except to record the payee, amount and date of payment--etc. But their system doesn't know or care whether they're printing Aug 2 checks on Aug 2, or on Sept. 2.

The Sexist Food Movement?

Sharon Astyk sends us to Harvard Magazine and a piece on restaurant food (bad) and home cooking (good). Much of it is channeling Mollie Katzen who's an adviser to Harvard cafeterias.  On page 2 I find this:

“I have friends in their forties who grew up right at the height of Mom never being in the kitchen,” says Katzen, who co-wrote Eat, Drink, and Weigh Less (2006) with Willett. “They didn’t see their mothers in the kitchen in any meaningful way—it wasn’t an integral part of life in the home. So they were opening a lot of cans, or buying fast food. In my [baby-boom] generation, our mothers lived in the kitchen; that’s where they parked themselves during the day and held court. In my family, at dinnertime, the kids would all help with the final steps: setting the table, helping Mom get the food on the table, helping clear afterwards. It was a team activity, part of what we did together as a family. My guess is that an equally, if not more, common way to gather around food now is to sit around the TV and watch Top Chef.”

 I'm a male chauvinist, due to my age, but it seems very anti-feminist to me.

Most Important for Liberals: Obama Wins in 2012

Amidst all the hullabaloo about debt ceilings and grand bargains, the one thing liberals should be most concerned about is: can Obama win in 2012? Republicans have notoriously said their goal is to make Obama a one-term President.  That's honest.  By the same token, the goal for liberals should be to make Obama a two-term President.

A one-term Presidency means the probable loss of most of the liberals gains of the past 2 1/2 years (though it'd be interesting to speculate on which are most vulnerable). It means the Supreme Court gets more conservative justices and fewer liberals.  It means years on the defensive, being hypocrites as the Dems in the Senate use the threat of filibuster in a delaying action against President Romney. It means the reopening of the debt limit deal to add further tax cuts and further spending cuts.


A two-term Presidency means protecting the liberal gains, and with the opportunity to make more gains. It means the possibility of new liberal blood on the Supreme Court.  It means the reopening of the debt limit deal to tweak the tax system (think of the changes to the welfare reform that Clinton got through in subsequent years). 

I Am a Federal Employee

Actually, I'm not, used to be, but not now.  Here's a site for people who want to rise in defense of federal employees, or at least get things off their chest.

The Commentariat Lose Weight

Matt Yglesias posts that he lost 50-70 pounds last year.  Ta-Nahesi Coates lost about the same amount in the same time.  Do two pundits make a trend?

Love This Conjunction

An MSNBC article on people who can't go with other people near, ends this way:

"Shy bladder is a real disorder," says Soifer, "not something to be snickered about or laughed at."
Want more weird [emphasis added] health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.

First Tomato of the Year

Harvested our first tomato of the year.  Unfortunately it wasn't perfect, it'd split and something, maybe birds, had been at the flesh, but we got 3/4 of it.  Tasted great.  Today is also the day the NYTimes reviews the book on Florida tomatoes. The reviewer liked it. I suspect I'll have reservations.  July 6 to maybe Oct 15 marks the outer limits of our garden tomatoes.  For the rest of the year we have to rely on hothouse tomatoes or tomatoes which have to travel, meaning they lose some flavor.  There's always a tradeoff.

Takes the Bureaucracy a While to Catch Up

Politico runs a story saying the online application for marriage licenses in NYCity still said "groom" and "bride".  It was quickly changed.

I hate to think of all the forms and processes and databases which are going to have to be changed to handle same-sex marriage.  I can predict with great confidence there will still be "husband/wife" blocks and fields existing long after I'm dead, maybe still in 2040.

Post and Times Agree on Immigration: It's Down

They don't agree on why--according to the Post things are so terrible in Mexico potential immigrants from Central America are scared off and don't cross Mexico into the US; according to the Times things are so great in Mexico potential immigrants decide to enjoy the good life in Mexico.

They aren't exactly in conflict, but two sides of a many sided coin.

The French Do It Too

What's "it"?  Tinker with bureaucratic tricks to help, or seem to help, their farmers.  A quote from Farm Policy, emphasis on the last clause:

“The French government has, to its credit, been responsive to the problem. The state-owned railway operator, SNCF, is subsidizing the transport of cattle feed, the country’s banks are helping with solvency concerns by giving borrowers some leeway, insurance companies are postponing client payments until the situation improves, and the government has just injected €800 million ($1,162 billion) in funds into the agricultural economy, bringing the 2011 single farm payment forward.”

Back in 1981 the farm economy was tanking. One of the methods Congress and the administration used to help was to make advance deficiency payments, issuing the money before we knew what the actual payment rate would be.  Unfortunately, as is the rule with Congress, a one-time expedient often turns into a permanent tactic.  Having shown ASCS (as FSA was then) could handle making advance payments (at least we didn't wholly screw the pooch to quote "The Right Stuff"), they then made that a regular provision, first of deficiency payments then of direct payments.  The tradeoff, because there's no such thing as a free lunch, is that administrative costs went up, because some portion of the advances were unearned, either because of individual faults or unforeseen disasters which changed the average market prices, meaning we had to try to collect the money back.

Why Americans Don't Like Bureaucrats

Because we fought a revolution against them--one of our grievances against George III:

" He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance."

Happy Fourth of July

The Art of the Knife, in Academic Life

Dan Drezner was an early blogger and was also refused tenure at the University of Chicago, two facts which may or may not have been related.  He and his wife write about the denial 5 years later here.  Dan's essay ends thusly:

I don't know if the University of Chicago's department of political science would change its mind if it could go back in time. It has moved on and will no doubt soon reclaim its historical status as a great place for international relations. I have moved on as well.

Somehow the penultimate sentence casts some doubt on the ultimate one.

Great Bureaucrat: Montgomery Meigs

A rare celebration of a noted bureaucrat in the Washington Post magazine.  The bureaucrat? General Montgomery Meigs, who had a number of accomplishments, including building the acqueduct which still supplies water to the District, builder of the Pension Building, quartermaster general during the Civil War, savior of Fort Pickens in Pensacola Bay upon outbreak of the Civil War, builder of the Capitol Dome. 

The Architect and the Master Bureaucrat

Lots of people attack bureaucracy along the lines of James Scott's "Seeing Like a State", arguing that a master plan, or "scheme" as the Brits would say, is always suspect because it takes no account of local knowledge and local realities.  That line of attack can be persuasive; I'm sometimes tempted to buy it and turn in my liberal's stripes.

But then I read a post like Walter Jeffries and my temptation fades away, which is rather ironic because Walter is a fervent opponent of big bureaucracy and bureaucratic schemes like NAIS (for identifying farm animals). Walter and his family have a farm in Vermont, very energy-efficient. For maybe the last 12-16 months they've been actively engaged in building a butcher shop.  They've got the foundation and walls up, with lots of work yet to go.  Walt's post lists all the complicated factors he has to take into account, ending with the fact that all his design work will end up in concrete so he can't afford a mistake.

Now building a butcher shop is complex, but not nearly as complex as building say the Freedom Tower in lower Manhattan, or any other large building or development.  But we expect architects and building engineers to be able to pull it off, and they do, normally.  So too I expect Walter to pull it off.  The success of architects and Walter renews my faith in the idea that human reason and sweat can actually create things which work, things which can include bureaucracies.

Israel and Dairy

Via Marginal Revolution, an interesting post on cottage cheese in Israel.  It says the early settlers saw dairy as challenging, since cows weren't expected to thrive there.  It reminded of two other articles: one on the revival of farming in Gaza--although the Israeli settlers' greenhouses were looted after Israel withdrew from Gaza, some of the land is now growing vegetables; the other on growing tomatoes in Florida in the winter.  The common thread is that the soil and maybe climate aren't well-adapted for the agriculture, but it's possible to do well financially because of their location.  In the Israel/Gaza cases you've got the advantage of serving a local populace and being much closer than rival sources of the products.  In the case of Florida tomatoes, you've got the advantage of winter in the North.

A Field Is a Field Is a Pothole?

This from FarmPolicy was a blast from the past for me:

In other developments, a program announcement yesterday from USDA’s Risk Management Agency (RMA) stated that, “[RMA] Administrator William Murphy today announced a change in qualification requirements for farmers in ‘prairie pothole states’ who want to obtain prevented planting insurance. The change is intended to assist farmers who have experienced difficulties due to excessive moisture in their fields over recent years. Beginning with the 2012 crop year, a crop must be grown on the acreage at least one of the previous four years if a farmer wishes to qualify. The states of Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota are covered by the change. All other policy provisions must also be met.
“‘The requirement to be able to bring an insured crop to harvest in one of four years improves program integrity,’ said Administrator Murphy. ‘It also helps to meet the needs of farmers in the Prairie Pothole region, where some acreage has not been available to plant since the 2008 crop year due to flooding and excessive moisture conditions.’”

 Way back when (1981 I think) the North Dakota state specialist called in to be sure we meant a change in our procedures pertaining to potholes.  (Potholes result when a retreating glacier leaves a block of ice behind with glacial till around it.  The result is a low area which will fill with more or less water depending on the water table. ) In the early 80's the weather had been dry, the potholes shrank, the farmers farmed the dry margins, and they wanted it eligible to be designated as out of production for our production adjustment program (i.e., set-aside/ACR). Now the weather's been wet, the potholes expand, the farmers can't farm the wet margins, and they want it to be eligible for prevented planting payments.

From the viewpoint of people like Ducks Unlimited, this is all crap.  Farmers should not be encouraged to plant around potholes--the land should be in permanent conservation cover because the potholes are indispensable habitat for wildlife.  It's the modern version of the sheepmen versus the cattlemen wars of the 19th century.

Clinton Rossiter and the Roles of the American President

Clinton Rossiter was an interesting man, a professor of mine.  He wrote a book called "The American Presidency" and taught a course on it.  One of the themes was that the President had many different roles.  I think that's being ignored in the liberal angst over Obama's deficiencies as what I think Rossiter called: "Chief Legislator".  The meme is that Obama is not a good negotiator; he doesn't play hard ball well enough; he gives away the farm too early in the negotiations. People cite LBJ as the polar opposite; someone who played the game very well, always searching for an edge and a master of persuasion.

The meme may well be true, but one thing worth remembering is the many (16 maybe?) roles of the President.  Not every person will do every role well.  Nor is a person's performance under his own control, much is dependent on circumstances.  Beating up Obama may feel good to liberals, but they ought to stick pins in their Sarah Palin doll instead.

Cultural Transformation in FSA II

I wonder why I thought of FSA when I read this post from Chris Blattman?

Astounding Blog Post

I'm astounded, not by the idea women wearing red are most apt to be picked up when they hitchhike, but by the idea people are still hitchhiking.  I haven't seen a hitchhiker in many many years.

How To Avoid Cheating on Exams--the French Way

The always interesting Dirk Beauregarde discusses the handling of the big French exams, although his discussion is just a bit opaque.  He includes this factoid:

"Once the exam is over, the various appointed correctors (teachers) will head to their appointed exam centre and retrive their exam scripts. Teachers never correct in the same town where they live or teach, therefore on the day that they have to retrive the scripts, the drive, or take the train to a different town. In the case of my better half, she took a 200 kilometre round train journey to get her scripts from Orleans. The teachers from Orleans will either have gone to Tours or Bourges."

 Imagine if that happened in the US.  I can't.
[Updated to add the link]

Budget Savings from Cutting Direct Payments

Chris Clayton reports on a study by FAPRI:

"If direct payments are eliminated and there isn't a rush to ACRE, there would be a 10-year budget savings of about $41.7 billion from FY 2012 to 2012.

Yet, if everyone jumped into the ACRE program, assuming it stayed as is, then the budget savings over 10 years would likely fall to about $18.9 billion, FAPRI stated.

Cultural Transformation in FSA

Secretary Vilsack's "Cultural Transformation" has now become a mandatory training module, as outlined in this notice. 

I noted in a recent newspaper article on lessons of Secretary Gates, based on what he's learned working for 8 Presidents, he said: My experience has been over the years that if you try to impose change on an organization, you will fail,” he said.  The context was the need for the Army to become better at and focus more on training foreign militaries (like the Iraqi and Afghan armies), but he figured forcing it on the Army would become Gates' idea which would evaporate when he left DOD.

So, does Vilsack's cultural transformation have a chance?  I don't know.  It would be nice to see the training and the supporting documents, but they're only on the FSA intranet. Based on my experience with past mandatory civil rights, disability, and sexual harassment training I've some doubts.  The training sessions I remember best were on dealing with unions and disability.  That's because of the instructors: one was a retired government manager, the other a lawyer in a wheelchair. (Actually most memorable session was in the Jefferson Auditorium with the infamous "penis" flap, but I won't go into that.) I've my doubts that on-line training can be effective, given the resistance old white males (like me) will have to the subject.

I think there's a bigger chance of doing cultural transformation by redoing the business processes, to pick up jargon from the 1990's.  If your database tracks things like all contacts with customers and their outcomes, and your employee evaluation system rewards outcomes, you can change the agency. (Think of how Amazon or Netflix has tweaked its systems over the years.  Amazon can look at your aborted purchases, shopping carts abandoned in mid process, and react to them.  I keep getting emails from them offering me deals in areas where I went halfway and stopped.  That's very impressive organizationally.)

The other way to change the culture is to change the way you recruit your employees.  When I first went to the program division in 1978, there were 2 professionals who were women, both in the analysis side.  The operations types were almost totally male former county executive directors.  I think the culture at the county level was for the mostly male directors to do the PR and handle relations with the farmers, while the mostly female clerks/program assistants handled the detail work, the paper-pushing.  That often meant, when the males came to DC and had to design processes they weren't as good as the women would have been.  These days it seems the pendulum has swung so women are in the majority. I wonder how that's changed the culture in DC.

Can You Sneak Beets?

Obamafoodorama has a post of an interview with Sam Kass, the chef/gardener czar at the White House.  Despite the Obamas disdain for beets, he still plans to sneak them into a meal.

That's what he says, meaning he's either incredibly stupid or incredibly skillful. 

I like beets well enough, though beyond buttered, pickled, and souped I don't know what you do with them.  But beets are to me the vegetable least likely to be snuck anywhere. What other vegetable is there which will stain a deep red everything it comes in contact with?  You just can't do it without the diner's knowledge.  It's like saying in 1960 you're going to sneak Marilyn Monroe into a meeting of Catholic clergy. 

Rotate NRCS and FSA Employees?

In order to get the national security types, the FBI's and ATF's and so forth, to talk to each over, some Senators are saying, let's do what we did in DOD with the "purple" reforms of Goldwater: require employees of the different agencies to rotate among them.  Maybe Congress should require the same sort of rotation among employees of USDA in the field offices?

Kudos and Brickbats FSA County Offices: Strongly Recommended

Mr. Blankenship, a wheat grower from Washington, testified before the Senate Ag committee last week.  Excerpts from his testimony

"In my case, FSA is the easiest local office to deal with. FSA personnel are better trained
than others and more familiar with the actual impacts of changes to program eligibility, payment
limits, etc."

"All in all, the partners in Blankenship Brothers probably make 10 separate visits of several hours to our FSA office per year, minimum, for sign-ups, certification of acreages, CRP status checks, SURE eligibility questions and returning paperwork once proper signatures are collected."

"This GPS-based data management system meshes very well with the GPS-based mapping
recently adopted by my FSA office"  (But otherwise interaction is all paper, with FSA dataloading.)

"The differences between administrative perspectives of offices have caused
some producers to go so far as to buy a small parcel of land in a neighboring county in order to
transfer all of their acres to that county’s FSA office."

I strongly recommend it.  NASCOE will be pleased with it, as he leans towards FSA administering programs.  What he may not fully appreciate are the limitations on making programs operate the same way.

It's good to learn that the effort people like Kevin Wickey (NRCS) and Carol Ernst (FSA) (among many others) put into GIS so many years ago has finally paid off, at least for one operator in one county office.

Inefficient Government: If I Were Dictator

USA.gov has a post on changing your address if you're moving. It's a link to a page with a (short) list of links to sites where you can change your address (USPS, SSA, IRS, VA, USCIS.). 

Now if I were dictator, the government would have one place to change your address.

Global Warming: Northwest Passage for Whales and Plankton

This story from MSNBC suggests that the Northwest Passage is now available not only for cargo ships, but for whales and plankton.

School-End Poems

Dirk Beauregarde has school-end poems, including one familiar to me:


No more pencils
No more books
No more teacher's dirty looks

But I don't know the others.

Liberals Destroy Everything

Not only do liberal historians eat vigorously away at the foundations of our American history (see this link for the most recent attack on one of our Founding Fathers), now a liberal blogger is talking of blowing up the moon!  Is there no end to their destructiveness? Have they no shame?

Peter Falk, Government Efficiency Expert, Dies

After a long and brilliant career, the famed government efficiency expert, Peter Falk, has died at age 83.  For further details, see the obits in the Post and Times.

Unmeasured Improvements in Productivity

Charles Kenny talks about the importance of spreading corrective lenses to the third world.  But how about the improvement in life from lasik eye surgery over corrective lenses?  Does that show up in the CPI?

How about the change from chemical to digital photography?  Or I'm reading "The Emperor of All Maladies, A Biography of Cancer", by Siddharta Mukherjee.  Still early, but it's good and I'd recommend it.  He comments on the the amazing jump in the number of effective medicines between 1940 and 1950.  Where does the reduction of pain and the curing of illnesses get counted in measurements of productivity?

2010 Payments in EWG Database

EWG has updated their database with 2010 payments. As they note, they aren't getting the data they used to, because Congress changed a "shall" to "may" and USDA knows enough to follow the wink.  As I think I've said before [in the comments on the post], the $6.7 million estimate of the cost strikes me as bogus.  The only justification I could think of would be if KCMO has redone the file structures on the mainframes to accommodate the changes in the payment limitation provisions in the 2008 Farm Bill (attributing payments to members).  If the mainframe files changed, that would require changing the programs you run against them. 

To my mind, the EWG database should be a USDA database.

It All Depends on Whose Ox Is Gored

Or James Fallows wrote a famous Washington Monthly article many years ago saying the same thing as reported in this Monkey Cage post by John Sides on scholarly research: if you were subject to the draft and going to Vietnam, there was a (slight) tendency to make you more liberal and more anti-war.

Bureaucracy at CitiBank

This Technology Review post blames bureaucracy at CitiBank for permitting a breach of security which exposed customer data.  It's so simple anyone could do it.

Acton Was Right

Lord Acton is famous for having said: "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely."  That's the lesson from prisons, where as Tyler Cowen passes on, most sexual abuse originates with the staff. 

I'd add, when you have young troops in a foreign land with weapons, there's a power imbalance with the local civilians, so abuse should be expected.

Flash: Half of Americans Below Average

This prompted by this post at Roving Bandit.

Props to Fed Bureaucrats

Kevin Drum posts a chart comparing the accuracy in processing health care claims.  Which organization is best?

HHS--Medicare.

DOD and USDA

The Post this morning has an article on the completion of the reconstruction of the Pentagon. Took 17 years because they redid the structure without closing it down.  I mention this only because USDA's South Building is about 10 years older than the Pentagon and is also being renovated.  I don't know where they are with the project, but I did see the House ag appropriations process raided the USDA building fund for various favorite programs.  

Making Government More Efficient

Paul Light has another report out on how to make government more efficient.  IMHO it's a mixed bag.  One of Light's idee fixes is flattening the bureaucracy, cutting out all the deputy assistant under secretaries.  While that's valid, I'm reminded of Al Gore's similar efforts back in the 1990's.  He wanted to cut out layers of management, but what really happened was that "section chiefs" got called "team leaders" or some such nonsense.  That was a response to the reality that if you have 3 GS-13's supervised by a GS-14 who's in turn supervised by a GS-15, you can't simply fire the GS-14 and downgrade the GS-15.     I think many of Light's proposals suffer from a similar problem: they state a goal, but fall short on the nitty-gritty of how you reach it.

When in Washington, Redefine

When is an "earmark" not an earmark?

Answer: when it's a "programmatic request", also known as an earmark from the past which has now been incorporated into routines.

BTW, it should be noted the first time Congress decided to tap DOD funds for research was in 1992, I believe at the instance of Dems.

Mr. Pincus as always is good on the nitty-gritty.

[Updated: Project on Government has a post providing more detail.]

Walmart and Pigford

The Supreme Court decided a case involving Walmart yesterday.  Ann Althouse has a summary of the case which is clearer than what I've seen or heard elsewhere.

I thought of Pigford.  

I wonder if it would have been recognized as a class action lawsuit if the Walmart case had been decided before Pigford.  To me, though not a lawyer, the cases seem similar.  In both a national organization is being sued for discrimination. In both cases there's some decision making done at the national level and some at the local (regional or store for Walmart, state or county for FSA).

If Walmart had been decided first, USDA/FSA could have argued that there was no national discriminatory policy in effect, therefore there was no "class" to file a class-action suit.  That would have required the aggrieved parties to file suits at the state or county level.

Of course, Congress could have stepped in, I guess.  They stepped in to extend the statute of limitations because Pigford hadn't been filed timely so I guess they could have waived their wand and said that black farmers/potential farmers were a class.

Of course, if Walmart had been raised back in the early 90's, Sandra Day O'Connor would have been on the Court and so the verdict likely would have been 5-4 the other way.  Does the different result yesterday reflect 8 years of Republican Presidents or a change in the national climate of opinion, or maybe just chance? 

RMA Screws the Pooch

From Farm Policy today:

A program announcement from USDA’s Risk Management Agency (RMA) yesterday stated that, “RMA has released ‘Climate Change Impacts on Crop Insurance,’ a study completed in May 2010.
“This report was recommended by the General Accounting Office in its 2007 report, ‘Climate Change—Financial Risks to Federal and Private Insurers in Coming Decades Are Potentially Significant.’ The GAO recommended that RMA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s National Flood Insurance Program separately analyze their Agency’s potential long-term fiscal implications of climate change and report their findings to Congress.”
(FarmPolicy Note: The report does not appear to be available electronically- directions for obtaining a copy of the report can be found here).

I mean--you're announcing a study a year after it was completed and you don't have it available on line?  That's a violation of some law and/or executive order.  Of course, the fact they're studying climate change would also be illegal, if the *(*S*#E Republicans in the House of Representatives have their way.  See Chris Clayton.

The War Powers Act and Libya

Congress and the President are in a fight over the application of the War Powers Act to Libya.  A thought strayed through my increasingly empty mind the other day: I wonder if the flyers are getting combat pay.

This morning the paper reveals they aren't, they're getting "imminent danger pay", something of which I've never heard and something which apparently applies to military in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other places. It may oversimplify things, but until they get combat pay, I'm okay with not calling it "hostilities".  And meanwhile I suggest Congress look into the need for "imminent danger pay".  We haven't had many troops killed in Turkey in the last few years that I can remember.

A Second Look at Vertical Farms

Treehugger has devoted two posts to Gordon Graff's MA thesis designing what they call a "vertical farm."  Having been critical of past vertical farm enthusiasm, I have to admit this one looks more reasonable.  I'm mostly impressed by the fact there's no reliance on sunlight, but instead they rely on good old fluorescent bulbs, using a drum . Graff seems to have accounted for a lot of the costs and there's no claim for organic agriculture.    The biggest problem would be the economic justification: could a lettuce farm, that's what it grows, make as much money as uses of the same amount of capital applied to the same site?  (That's pointed out in the comments found on the second link.)