March 12, 2008
A summary of daily news relevant to the federal workforce produced by the Partnership for Public Service.
- GAO: Defense Contractors Not Held to Conflict-of-Interest Rules
- Crackdown on Illegal Aliens Stretches Marshals to Limit
- Federal Diary: Senior Ranks at DHS Face Scrutiny for Lack of Diversity
- Celebrate Public Service with the Washington Capitals!
GAO: Defense Contractors Not Held to Conflict-of-Interest Rules
Federal Times
By Elise Castelli
The Defense Department's increasing use of
contractors in key decision-making roles is putting the integrity of
government spending at risk, according to the Government Accountability
Office.
Contractors don't have to follow most conflict-of-interest and ethics
rules that guide the conduct of federal employees, GAO said.
Contractors outnumber federal employees in 15 of the 21 DoD offices GAO
reviewed. Only one law designed to prevent personal conflicts of
interest applies to both federal and contractor employees: a ban on
accepting bribes or kickbacks. Other federal laws and Defense rules do
not apply to contractors, according to a GAO report released March 10.
Federal laws and regulations prohibit federal employees from:
- Participating in matters affecting personal financial interests;
- Showing partiality when performing duties;
- Accepting travel and gifts;
- Using nonpublic information for personal gain; and
- Giving preferential treatment to a private interest.
Contractor employees are also exempt from disclosing their financial
interests and future employment contacts to the government, GAO said.
"Given
the magnitude of DoD's contractor employee use, ... we believe that DoD
needs departmentwide personal conflict of interest safeguards for
certain contractor employees," GAO said in the report.
Contractors make up as much as 88 percent of the work force in those 15
Defense offices. This means they are doing the bulk of the work and
have a hand in making key governmental decisions, such as which company
wins a contract or what products an agency should buy.
Those
contractors develop contract requirements, advise source selection and
assist in award-fee determinations, but never have to tell the
government what companies they invest in or what firm they have a
pending job offer with. Only three of the 23 contractors working in the
offices had policies requiring employees to disclose such conflicts to
the government, GAO found.
While
few cases of improper conduct by contractors have been publicly
identified, making contractors adhere to federal conflict-of-interest
rules would mitigate the risk that contractor employees would make
decisions based on their personal gain, GAO said.
"The
costs of contractor employees constructing options for their personal
gain -- an outcome increasingly likely based on sheer numbers -- would
likely never be known, let alone calculable as long as there is no
transparency," GAO said.
Some
Defense program managers worried that adding more safeguards would
drive up the cost of doing business, according to GAO. But senior
Defense and Office of Government Ethics officials agreed with GAO that
current rules were inadequate to prevent conflicts of interest among
contractors. The risks of conflict were too great not to enact
safeguards, they told GAO.
Crackdown on Illegal Aliens Stretches Marshals to Limit
Bloomberg
News
By Jeff Bliss
Richard Tracy used to help ensure that Southwest Airlines
Co. planes stayed on schedule. Nowadays, he's directing traffic of a different
sort: a surge of illegal immigrants into the criminal justice system.
Tracy supervises 21 deputy marshals in the federal
courthouse in Tucson, Arizona, where they guard a growing number of people
facing criminal charges for illegally entering the U.S. "We are in a pinch
every day," said Tracy, 43, who tracks his officers' movement with magnets on
a white board in the lobby.
Two months after the Bush administration expanded a program
to haul undocumented residents off to jail instead of shipping them home, the
U.S. Marshals Service is overwhelmed.
The 600 marshals stationed on the border with Mexico are
dealing with as many as 6,000 new defendants a month. That's taking them away
from other tasks such as capturing escaped prisoners and rounding up sex offenders,
according to Justice Department documents obtained by Bloomberg News.
David Gonzales, the head marshal in Arizona, said "Operation
Streamline" shows how a well-intentioned program to crack down on illegal
aliens can be undermined by inadequate funding and the strain it places on all
layers of the criminal- justice system.
"You can only stretch people so far," Gonzales said.
In January, the Bush administration -- impressed with the
program's success near Del Rio, Texas, where it started in 2005 -- began a
version of it in Tucson, and plans to bring it to other parts of the border in
the next few years.
Support in Congress
Congressional supporters said the program's been so
effective that they want to implement it along the entire 1,952- mile border
with Mexico, where about 1 million undocumented immigrants are apprehended
every year, most to be quickly returned to their native countries.
"The uncontrolled flood of illegal immigrants is
unacceptable," said Representative John Culberson, a Texas Republican who has
fought to increase the program's funding.
Ron Colburn, deputy chief of the Border Patrol, which
arrests the immigrants who are later detained by the marshals, said Operation
Streamline was designed to work within the limited resources of the
criminal-justice system.
"We would probably freeze the entire court system in one
day" if every illegal immigrant was prosecuted, Colburn said. "It's selective
prosecution."
Desperate for Resources
Yet if Culberson and his allies have their way, the border
court and detention system, already overburdened by drug, sex and violent crime
cases, will buckle without more resources, defense lawyers say.
The lawyers said the program processes so many defendants so
fast -- which is how Operation Streamline got its name -- that some may not get
fair trials.
"Things are moving so quickly, somebody may slip between the
cracks," said Heather Williams, supervisor of the public defender's office in
Tucson.
An internal report in January by the Marshals Service said, "The
sheer number of prisoners" along the border "makes finding sufficient
detention space on a daily basis particularly challenging."
Operation Streamline's defenders said it's been effective at
low cost, requiring only about $4 million in fiscal 2008.
Before the program started, illegal crossers had so little
to fear from prosecution that hundreds would walk up to Border Patrol agents
daily asking for notices to appear in court, officials said. The immigrants
would then fail to show up for the hearings, disappearing into the country's
interior.
Crime Fighting
White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said the program is
aimed at clamping down on crime, adding that Bush wants to spend $100 million
next fiscal year for border anti-crime efforts, including prosecuting illegal
crossers. "That request is supporting the administration's commitment to reduce
illegal immigration," Stanzel said.
That commitment is played out every day in Del Rio, where
convicted immigrants are jailed an average of 30 days before being deported. If
caught again, they can be tried as felons.
Now, only a trickle of immigrants hazard the crossing at Del
Rio, according to the Border Patrol, which has expanded the program to Laredo,
Texas, and Yuma, Arizona.
'Years Away'
In Yuma, arrests dropped 70 percent in the first 12 months
after Operation Streamline was expanded there in 2006, as immigrants turned
back or looked for other areas to cross, the Border Patrol said. Homeland
Security Secretary Michael Chertoff is hiring 5,000 more Border Patrol agents
in 2008.
Congress, however, hasn't provided enough resources to
process all the people picked up, said Gonzales, Arizona's head marshal.
"We're years away from dealing with the large numbers" of
agents at the border, he said. "It's a whole system you have to think about."
In Tucson last week, 50 defendants sat in a courtroom with
earphones as an interpreter relayed the charges. They answered the judge's
questions in unison until they received sentences ranging from time served to
180 days, depending on whether they had previously attempted to cross.
For the marshals under Tracy, who once helped run Southwest
Air's ground operations, cell phones and BlackBerry e-mail devices are as
essential as firearms, since they must dash between courtrooms while
communicating with each other. Space is at a premium in the courthouse
cellblock.
To read the entire article,
click here.
Senior Ranks at DHS Face Scrutiny for Lack of Diversity
The Washington
Post
By Stephen Barr
The career senior ranks at the Department of Homeland Security
are less diverse than in the government overall, and less diverse than
the department's own workforce, according to a congressional report.
African
Americans, for example, made up 8.5 percent of the career Senior
Executive Service in the government last year but were 6.5 percent of
the career SES at Homeland Security.
The report was prepared by the Democratic staff of the House Homeland Security Committee, chaired by Rep. Bennie Thompson
(D-Miss.). "The makeup of the department's senior leadership must be
reflective of the face of America," Thompson said when releasing the
report.
The Senior Executive Service is the top rung of the civil
service. There are about 6,400 career members of the SES, who help
manage a federal workforce of nearly 2 million. At Homeland Security,
there were 446 career executives as of March 2007, out of a workforce
of more than 168,000 civilian employees.
Many SES members help
run the government's day-to-day operations, filling the top
non-political jobs in agencies and assuring continuity during
presidential transitions.
Diversity is a somewhat sensitive issue at Homeland Security these days. Last Wednesday, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee pointed out that
none of the 10 aides accompanying Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff at a hearing were African American or women.
Russ Knocke, a department spokesman, called the House report "outdated and
opportunistic" and said it was "a little too coincidental" that "this
report suddenly pops up" at the Judiciary Committee hearing. Knocke said he did not have a "point-by-point analysis" to challenge the data.
A spokeswoman for Thompson, Dena Graziano,
said that the timing of the report's release was not connected to the
hearing and that it had been in the works since the summer of 2007.
The
report explains that it uses a March 2007 snapshot of the Homeland
Security workforce because it was the most current information
available to the Government Accountability Office and the best match for data pulled from the Office of Personnel Management and the Transportation
Security Administration, a part of Homeland Security.
Thompson is not the only House chairman to be paying attention to diversity issues. Rep. Danny K. Davis (D-Ill.) and Sen. Daniel K. Akaka (D-Hawaii),
chairmen of the House and Senate federal workforce subcommittees, have
introduced legislation aimed at promoting diversity in the government's
executive ranks.
According to the Thompson report, the bureaus at Homeland Security vary considerably in terms of race, ethnicity and gender.
African
Americans ranged from a high of 21.5 percent in the TSA to a low of 5.5
percent in the directorate for science and technology. Hispanics ranged
from a high of 30.7 percent in Customs and Border Protection to a low
of 2.7 percent in the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office. Women made up
60 percent of the Citizenship and Immigration Services workforce and 24 percent of Customs and Border Protection.
In
March 2007, the department's headquarters staff was one of the least
diverse offices, with only one African American and one Hispanic among
46 members of the career SES, the report said.
The lack of
diversity in the department's career executive corps, the report said,
suggests "that relatively few members of minority groups and women rise
into the DHS career SES leadership ranks."
African Americans are
14.5 percent of Homeland Security employees but 6.5 percent of the
career SES at the department. Asians make up 4.2 percent of the
department but 1.8 percent of the career executives. Hispanics make up
16.4 percent of the workforce but only 5.4 percent of the career
executives, the report said.
Hispanics, though, are one group
where the department is not under-represented. The percentage of
Hispanics employed by Homeland Security is more than double the
government-wide rate.
The department, created by Congress to help
defend the nation against terrorism, celebrates its fifth anniversary
this month. As part of an effort to improve management practices,
Knocke said the department in fiscal 2007 drafted its first "corporate
diversity strategy."
The strategy includes participation in job
fairs that focus on minority students and partnerships with the Urban
League's Black Executive Exchange Program and the National Association
of Hispanic Federal Executives.
This year, officials will launch an intern program in Mississippi, Louisiana and nearby states that will work with high school and college students
to ready them for careers in the department.
The
department also has an effort underway to recruit more employees with
disabilities and veterans with disabilities, Knocke said. Between
February 2004 and October 2007, the number of employees with
disabilities increased from 50 to 191 at the department's headquarters.
Celebrate Public Service with the Washington Capitals!
Join the Washington Capitals and the Partnership for Public Service as
they celebrate America's dedicated public servants, and cheer the
Capitals on
to victory as they square off against the Atlanta Thrashers on March
14.
In appreciation of the dedicated service of our federal employees, the Washington Capitals are offering discounted tickets. Click here to buy tickets through the Partnership for Public
Service. You do not need
to be a federal employee to receive this discount.
Date: Friday, March 14
Time: 7:00 p.m.
Location: Verizon Center, Washington, D.C.
Cost:
Mezzanine Corners: $19 (Normally $22)
Mezzanine Center: $34 (Normally $50)
Lower Level Loge: $45 (Normally $75)
