Fire Bureaucrats for Terminal Stupidity

On the one hand, Michelle Singletary of the Post has a column entitled "Don't Be Afraid of the Taxman" (taxperson?)  On the other hand, the Post's Federal Eye discusses a move in the House by Republicans to fire any federal employee who owes back taxes.  Put the two together and I reach a position which may be surprising: fire federal employees (and DC councilmen, are you listening Marion Barry) who owe back taxes without getting a repayment agreement within 6 months.

A failure to get an agreement is prima facie evidence of terminal stupidity.

I'd hasten to add, I don't think the House Reps are going about it the right way, no hearings, no full consideration. But federal employees are civil servants and should meet a higher standard than ordinary mortals.

Those Overpaid Bureaucrats at CIA

Seem to be taking their knowledges, skills and abilities to find ( lower-paid ?) jobs in the private sector according to the Washington Post.

The Return of Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Thanks to Obama

25 years ago when we were also concerned about deficits, one of the instruments was Gramm-Rudman-Hollings,which provided for automatic cuts in expenditures if deficits exceeded a pre-determined level. 

President Obama makes a return of GRH an important part of his deficit program.  See Keith Hennessey's summary [See this Yglesias post for more discussion.]

GRH is burned in my memory, given the problems it caused us to administer it. If it returns, I wish FSA luck.

Erosion, NRCS, andConservation Compliance

NYTimes has an article on erosion, focused on Iowa erosion rates.  Hits the highlights: the rates of erosion, the impact of high crop prices, land coming out of the Conservation Reserve Program, strip cropping and contour farming as incompatible with big equipment,  renters possibly sacrificing the long range health of the land for short range profit, NRCS enforcement of conservation compliance rules, etc. It even includes the hit to NRCS administrative budget in the new Continuing Resolution. The only thing it didn't mention was the similiarity of the current situtation with that in 1973 (and Earl Butz, when the economic situation

What's not clear to me is how much of Iowa is considered to be highly erodible.  I remember visiting Sherman County, KS for Infoshare in 1991 and farmers were still bitching about the classification of most of their land as HE.

Dependence on Foreign Imports

Alex Tabarrok seems to think this is funny, but coffee is serious business. I'm sure FSA would be able to implement a program to encourage the growing of coffee.

Was MIDAS Hit?

From a Federal Computer Week post on the budget resolution:

More directly, the Agriculture Department’s CIO office would get $40 million, which is $22 million less than in 2010 and $24 million less than the president wanted.

Michelle's School Lunches--a Chink in His Armor?

Just skimmed a piece about a school district banning lunches brought from home, which included a reference to kids tossing lunches mostly uneaten.  Made me wonder: if there's 10 million school children by next year who are unhappy with their lunches, does that mean there will be millions of parents who are unhappy with Obama? After all, her school lunch campaign is probably the one effort of the administration which is obvious and impacts the lives of Americans 5 days a week.  Here's a related post at Obamafoodorama.

Bureaucrat of the Day: Walt Whitman

Whitman was a clerk in DC during part of the Civil War (his day job--more famously he visited the wounded in hospitals). He was a copyist, or bureaucrat, a human copying machine and some of his output has now been discovered according to this Post piece.  The article ends:

“Honesty is the prevailing atmosphere,” Whitman, in previously discovered documents, said of his colleagues in the bureaucracy.
“I do not refer to swell officials, the men who wear the decorations, get fat salaries,” he said. “I refer to the average clerks, the obscure crowd, who, after all, run the government. They are on the square.”

Personal Lobbying and NASCOE

For some time I had kept a post in either Crooked Timber or Monkey Cage unread, because I wanted to link to it.  That's a way of saying I don't have the URL handy.  The post reported on some research into what tactics were most effective in swaying Congresspeople.  As I remember, email campaigns, even letter writing campaigns, were of little use.  At the other end of the continuum was personal lobbying by someone the Congresswoman knew.

I mention this because I just read the latest update from NASCOE, the association of FSA employees, which reported on their annual legislative session, meaning they bring in people to walk the halls of Congress and lobby the aides and members.  Included in the reports was a lament from one of the officers saying NASCOE used to have someone in every (rural) Congressional district who knew the Congressperson and could get through to them when it was time to lobby.  The lament was that retirements in recent years had depleted the ranks so they no longer have such contacts.

Now NASCOE isn't unique; I'd wager every big widespread Federal bureaucracy has employee groups with the same approach.  It's such influence which makes it hard to do things: for example, to reorganize NRCS and FSA because the rival employee groups tend to neutralize each other.  So the known present becomes the enemy of the possible future.

Good Legal Writing: Fish and Kagan

Here's the end of a Stanley Fish post discussing Justice Kagan's style:

Nothing flashy here. Just a steady unrolling of point after obvious point in a relatively tranquil and moderate prose punctuated by an occasional flaring of amiable wit — “not really,” “what ordinary people would appreciate the Court’s case law also recognizes.” (Sometimes even the Supreme Court rises to the level of common sense.) If I am right, what we are seeing here is the emergence of a powerfully understated style of argument, inexorable without being aggressive, comprehensive without claiming to be so, regnant even when it is on the losing side. I look forward to more of the same.