June 3, 2008
 
A summary of daily news relevant to the federal workforce produced by the Partnership for Public Service.

1. Federal Diary: Past the Time for Tinkering on Public Service
2. Climate Findings Were Distorted, Probe Finds
3. Mars Lander Is Poised to Begin Digging for Ice
4. Army Honors Internal Inventors
   

Past the Time for Tinkering on Public Service

The Washington Post
By Stephen Barr

If federal employees are lucky, an enterprising aide to the next president will make sure that a new book by Paul C. Light, the longtime expert on public service, gets on the agenda for the inevitable Oval Office discussion on what to do about the federal government.

The government's problems are in plain view -- the sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina, the outpatient scandal at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, lax oversight by the Federal Aviation Administration, the backlog of benefits claims at the Social Security Administration. To mention a few.

Light, a professor at New York University and a former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, turned to Alexander Hamilton for the title of the book, "A Government Ill Executed: The Decline of the Federal Service and How to Reverse It."

In the Federalist papers, Hamilton argued, "A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be, in practice, a bad government."

The book's title does not mean Light views today's government as a failure (in 2002, he wrote a book celebrating the government's greatest achievements), but he is concerned that the government "is not uniformly well executed" and may not be able to rise to the tasks ahead.

"Federal employees know they do not have enough capacity to do their jobs, and are hungry for change," Light writes. "They also know the time for tinkering is long past.

"Improving the hiring process will not suffice if new recruits do not have the opportunity to grow; enhancing retention will not help if it produces more layers of management; providing new resources will not matter if they are spread too thin; and setting priorities will not generate clarity if appointees are not in office long enough to make the decisions stick," Light says.

Big problems demand big answers, according to Light, and he proposes that the White House and Congress overhaul the government to a degree not seen since the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act.

He contends that the baby-boom retirements give Congress and the next president "the ability to reenergize the federal service without inflicting great pain."

The generational turnover will create gaps in programs and services, but the retirements also create an opportunity to "thin government, shift resources downward to the front lines where government services are delivered" and "abandon needless reform," Light writes.

Light calls for a sorting out of programs and services to eliminate duplication and overlap. His first recommendation is for the government to "decide what it should keep and what it should drop."

He would reduce the number and layers of managers by half at all levels, then shift those jobs to the front lines. "Such redistribution would address complaints from lower-level staff that their organizations simply have too few employees to succeed" and should reduce some of the pressure to contract out federal work, he says.

Light also proposes to cut the number of political appointees by half, and to abolish any political position that is not filled within six months of it becoming open. That would force a new president to do more planning and push the Senate to move nominations quickly, he believes.

He recommends more training for federal employees and says agencies need to better focus on upgrading technology and speeding up hiring.

To attract young workers into government, Light suggests that agencies use nonprofit organizations as a model, because many young people see them as workplaces where they can find a trusting, innovative and helpful environment that helps them flourish.

The proposals in the book grow out of research that Light has conducted over the past decade. He acknowledges that many of his recommendations will not be easy to implement.

Unions, contractors, grantees and some members of Congress will object to "top-to-bottom reform," and the White House will likely balk at cutting the number of political appointees, Light says.

To overcome opposition, Light calls for creation of a national commission on government restructuring, which "just might be able to create the will to act."

Light is optimistic that federal employees will embrace "radical reform," because surveys show they see the need for improvements in staffing, budgeting and training that would permit their agencies to better serve the public and carry out the nation's laws.

"With the baby-boom retirements looming, there is one great opportunity to restructure the entire concept of federal employment," Light writes. "It is an opportunity that cannot be ignored."

 

Climate Findings Were Distorted, Probe Finds

The Washington Post
By Juliet Eilperin

An investigation by the NASA inspector general found that political appointees in the space agency's public affairs office worked to control and distort public accounts of its researchers' findings about climate change for at least two years, the inspector general's office said yesterday.

The probe came at the request of 14 senators after The Washington Post and other news outlets reported in 2006 that Bush administration officials had monitored and impeded communications between NASA climate scientists and reporters.

James E. Hansen, who directs NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and has campaigned publicly for more stringent limits on greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, told The Post and the New York Times in September 2006 that he had been censored by NASA press officers, and several other agency climate scientists reported similar experiences. NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are two of the government's lead agencies on climate change issues.

From the fall of 2004 through 2006, the report said, NASA's public affairs office "managed the topic of climate change in a manner that reduced, marginalized, or mischaracterized climate change science made available to the general public." It noted elsewhere that "news releases in the areas of climate change suffered from inaccuracy, factual insufficiency, and scientific dilution."

Officials of the Office of Public Affairs told investigators that they regulated communication by NASA scientists for technical rather than political reasons, but the report found "by a preponderance of the evidence, that the claims of inappropriate political interference made by the climate change scientists and career public affairs officers were more persuasive than the arguments of the senior public affairs officials that their actions were due to the volume and poor quality of the draft news releases."

The political interference did not extend to the research itself or its dissemination through scientific journals and conferences, the investigators said. "We found no evidence indicating NASA blocked or interfered with the actual research activities of its climate scientists," the report said, but as a result of the actions of the political appointees, "trust was lost, at least temporarily, between the agency and some of its key employees and perhaps the public it serves."

Kristin Scuderi, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in an e-mail that director John H. Marburger III "would not comment until he's reviewed the report, and he has not yet done so yet. Therefore, OSTP has no comment at this time."

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), one of the senators who pressed for the investigation, said in a statement that the report showed that citizens had been denied access to critical scientific information that should inform public policy.

"Global warming is the most serious environmental threat we face -- but this report is more evidence that the Bush Administration's appointees have put political ideology ahead of science," Lautenberg said. "Our government's response to global warming must be based on science, and the Bush Administration's manipulation of that information violates the public trust."

Mars Lander Is Poised to Begin Digging for Ice

The New York Times
By Kenneth Chang

After a couple of days of playing in the dirt, the Phoenix Mars lander is to begin its scientific work in earnest on Tuesday or Wednesday, looking for ice and hints of past liquid water in the planet's far north.

The scoop on the Phoenix's 7.7-foot-long robotic arm will dig three trenches side by side and carry the dirt samples to instruments on the lander. The first analysis will be done by an instrument called the thermal and evolved gas analyzer, or TEGA, which heats and vaporizes the soil and then identifies the vapors.

"Five years ago when we started this mission, I was somewhat worried that we didn't have wheels," Peter H. Smith, the NASA mission's principal investigator, said at a news conference on Monday at the University of Arizona, which is handling the spacecraft's science operations.

But now, Dr. Smith said, "we're in a really great place for doing the science we plan to do."

Mission scientists said they had overcome a short circuit in the TEGA instrument, the only significant glitch so far. The short circuit occurred in a high-voltage filament that adds an electrical charge to the vapor molecules. Switching to a backup filament solved the problem.

The primary mission of the Phoenix is to dig into an ice layer believed to exist a few inches below the surface. Temperatures at the site are frigid, between minus-112 and minus-22 degrees Fahrenheit. But, in the past, the Martian climate might have been warm enough at times for the ice to melt and transform the region into a habitable environment.

Already, photographs show several bright, smooth patches beneath the Phoenix, where the lander's thrusters might have blown off the surface soil. The patches look "for all the world like ice," Dr. Smith said.

The scientists said they named the icelike patches Holy Cow, because that is what they said when they saw them.

On Saturday, the lander tested its robotic arm and, pressing the scoop against the soil, produced a footlike impression that the scientists named Yeti. On Sunday, it scooped up some soil and dumped it out.

Photographs of the test scoop showed white specks in the soil, which could be salt or ice.

 

Army Honors Internal Inventors

Government Executive

By Bob Brewin