June 6, 2008

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

1. Gates ousts Air Force Leaders in Historic Shake-Up
2. Federal Diary: Pressing for Stronger Protections for Whistle-Blowers
   
3. Collaborative Internet Tools Making Inroads Into Intel Agencies
4. TSA: Airport Screeners Leaving in High Numbers

Gates ousts Air Force Leaders in Historic Shake-Up

By Robert Burns 

Defense Secretary Robert Gates ousted the Air Force's top military and civilian leaders Thursday, holding them to account in a historic Pentagon shake-up after embarrassing nuclear mix-ups.

Gates announced at a news conference that he had accepted the resignations of Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Moseley and Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne _ a highly unusual double firing.

Gates said his decision was based mainly on the damning conclusions of an internal report on the mistaken shipment to Taiwan of four Air Force electrical fuses for ballistic missile warheads. And he linked the underlying causes of that slip-up to another startling incident: the flight last August of a B-52 bomber that was mistakenly armed with six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.

The report drew the stunning conclusion that the Air Force's nuclear standards have been in a long decline, a "problem that has been identified but not effectively addressed for over a decade."

Gates said an internal investigation found a common theme in the B-52 and Taiwan incidents: "a decline in the Air Force's nuclear mission focus and performance" and a failure by Air Force leaders to respond effectively.

In a reflection of his concern about the state of nuclear security, Gates said he had asked a former defense secretary, James Schlesinger, to lead a task force that will recommend ways to ensure that the highest levels of accountability and control are maintained in Air Force handling of nuclear weapons.

In somber tones, Gates told reporters his decision to remove Wynne and Moseley was based on the findings of an investigation of the Taiwan debacle by Adm. Kirkland Donald. The admiral found a "lack of a critical self-assessment culture" in the Air Force nuclear program, making it unlikely that weaknesses in the way critical materials such as nuclear weapons are handled could be corrected, Gates said.

Gates said Donald concluded that many of the problems that led to the B-52 and the Taiwan sale incidents "have been known or should have been known."

The Donald report is classified; Gates provided an oral summary.

"The Taiwan incident clearly was the trigger," Gates said when asked whether Moseley and Wynne would have retained their positions in the absence of the mistaken shipment of fuses. He also said that Donald found a "lack of effective Air Force leadership oversight" of its nuclear mission.

The investigation found a declining trend in Air Force nuclear expertise _ not the first time that has been raised as a problem, Gates said _ and a drifting of the Air Force's focus away from its nuclear mission, which includes stewardship of the land-based missile component of the nation's nuclear arsenal, as well as missiles and bombs assigned for nuclear missions aboard B-52 and B-2 long-range bombers.

Gates also announced that "a substantial number" of Air Force general officers and colonels were identified in the Donald report as potentially subject to disciplinary measures that range from removal from command to letters of reprimand. He said he would direct the yet-to-be-named successors to Wynne and Moseley to evaluate those identified culprits and decide what disciplinary actions are warranted "or whether they can be part of the solution" to the problems found by Donald.

White House press secretary Dana Perino said President Bush knew about the resignations but that the White House had "not played any role" in the shake-up.

Early reaction from Capitol Hill was favorable to drastic action.

"Secretary Gates' focus on accountability is essential and had been absent from the office of the secretary of defense for too long," said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "The safety and security of America' nuclear weapons must receive the highest priority, just as it must in other countries."

Gates said he would make recommendations to Bush shortly on a new Air Force chief of staff and civilian secretary. Gates has settled on candidates for both jobs but has not yet formally recommended them, one official said.

Gen. Duncan J. McNabb is the current Air Force vice chief of staff.

Moseley, who commanded coalition air forces during the initial invasion of Iraq in March 2003, became Air Force chief in September 2005; Wynne, a former General Dynamics executive, took office in November 2005.

Wynne is the second civilian chief of a military service to be forced out by Gates. In March 2007 the defense secretary pushed out Francis Harvey, the Army secretary, because Gates was dissatisfied with Harvey's handling of revelations of inadequate housing conditions and bureaucratic delays for troops recovering from war wounds at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Wynne and Moseley issued their own written statements.

"As the Air Force's senior uniformed leader, I take full responsibility for events which have hurt the Air Force's reputation or raised a question of every airman's commitment to our core values," Moseley said.

Wynne said he "read with regret" the findings of the Donald report.

Pressing for Stronger Protections for Whistle-Blowers

The Washington Post

By Stephen Barr 

A coalition of 112 organizations is urging House and Senate negotiators to move quickly to resolve differences over legislation that would strengthen the protections afforded federal employees who blow the whistle on waste, fraud and abuse.

The House approved a bill, 331 to 94, to broaden whistle-blower rights 15 months ago, and the Senate approved its version on a voice vote in December. But the bills contain different provisions, and advocates for whistle-blowers are concerned that election-year campaigns may cut short the time that Congress has to get a compromise version to the White House.

"We offer our support to expeditiously conclude the process of reconciling House and Senate passed versions of this vital good government legislation," the coalition said in a letter sent Wednesday to members of the House and Senate who will put together a final bill.

Some groups in the coalition have worked on expanded whistle-blower protections for eight years. They contend that the Merit Systems Protection Board and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit have wrongfully interpreted or taken a too narrow view of whistle-blower rights provided in a 1989 law.

There are 400 to 500 whistle-blower cases in the government every year, and advocacy groups argue that federal agencies often try to silence or discredit employees who speak out about waste and mismanagement.

The letter was organized by the Government Accountability Project, Public Citizen, the Project on Government Oversight and the Union of Concerned Scientists. Members of the coalition include religious, consumer, civil liberties, environmental and other groups.

Any compromise, the coalition said, should retain key proposals in the House and Senate bills, including providing federal whistle-blowers with the right to a jury trial in federal court and stronger safeguards for federal scientists who report efforts to misrepresent or suppress research.

Collaborative Internet Tools Making Inroads Into Intel Agencies

NextGov

By Annie Laurent

A top official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said on Tuesday that the intelligence community was moving inexorably toward embracing online collaboration tools, known as Web 2.0 applications, which hold the promise of improving U.S. intelligence efforts.

"The last frontier used to be the acquisition of information," said Michael Wertheimer, ODNI assistant deputy director for analysis. Now "the last frontier is collaboration. We're not getting incremental gains [in intelligence] on the amount of information we collect. It is the degree we can link up people and collaborate."

Before the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created in 2004, the president's daily intelligence briefing was produced solely by the CIA. Now, it is a collaborative product of the 16 agencies that make up the intelligence community. State Department employees once sent vital information about foreign governments back to headquarters via cables and then later by e-mail, both of which were visible only within the agency. Now, those messages are published online so intelligence agencies also can view them, which greatly increases situational awareness, said Wertheimer, a vocal advocate for cross-agency communication and cooperation. He calls such steps toward greater collaboration "big wins."

Wertheimer, who spoke at the Web 2.0 and the Future of Government conference sponsored by consulting firm Deloitte and the National Academy of Public Administration on Tuesday in Washington, also outlined other efforts that analysts once viewed with suspicion. For example, all 16 intelligence agencies have agreed to follow standards of tradecraft that require alternative views, and the sources and logic that led to them must be codified and included in all intelligence assessments.

Last summer's hard problem session, a monthlong off-site gathering where analysts worked on especially difficult intelligence challenges, for the first time included state and local law enforcement officers, private specialists, psychologists, biologists and others along with intelligence community participants. They met to study to how terrorist activities overseas might become a domestic law enforcement problem and how to handle them.

Wertheimer and others often argue that intelligence agencies have no choice but to become more open, collaborate and adopt Web 2.0 tools, such as wikis and blogs, now that 60 percent of their analysts have been hired within the last five years and are relatively young. The growth of the internal intelligence wiki, Intellipedia, which allows analysts across the community to post and edit each others' findings, has been phenomenal, he said.

But the zeal of some early adopters of such tools concerns him. "The bloggers worry less about the mission than about getting more bloggers. Intellipedia is more interested in getting more users than in contributing to the mission," Wertheimer said. "We're not yet nudging the early adopters to tinker with the iPhone to see how the adversary will use it to subvert the intelligence community."

Wertheimer also said many analysts still are skeptical about new technology and Web 2.0. Analysts distrust technology staffs, believing they deliver only tools and toys rather than greater capability. His answer to the problem, of course, is collaboration. "We need courses [that include] both of them," he said. "We need to integrate tools. . . . Neurons need to talk to other neurons."

In addition, fear and distrust are impediments on the agency level, he said, noting that ODNI's efforts to convince agencies to share information and people often founder on the ambiguous legislative authority with which the officewas created. Each agency is content to discuss other agencies' problems with ODNI officials, but unwilling to examine its own problems, he said. And few willingly follow actions recommended by the director's office for fear that cooperation will lead to more requests for change. "There isn't a sense of common purpose," Wertheimer added.

Countercollaborative skirmishing will diminish, he said, "when we deliver the goods as multiple agencies and people notice."

Wertheimer is excited about this year's hard problem session, where analysts will familiarize themselves with virtual worlds and his boss, Thomas Fingar, deputy director of National Intelligence.

To allay the fears of denizens of synthetic worlds, Wertheimer said the ODNI legal and civil liberties protection offices are working through questions such as whether intelligence analysts can join Second Life or other worlds "just to play," and whether, if they do, they must identify themselves as federal employees.

Wertheimer said of the upcoming gathering, "We're going to have fun. We need to have more fun. It's fun to break codes. An analytic coup is fun. When you make things fun, people want to do more."

TSA: Airport Screeners Leaving in High Numbers

By Stephen Losey