Anonymous mentions the tilt toward contracting out at the
Pentagon.  It seems to me that this has been a strong
tendency of the Bush administration with the prosperity among the
Beltway Bandits becoming a major factor in the escalating prices of
Washington real estate.  The administration seems not to know or
not to care about the cons of the contractors, the money they waste and
the illusion of accomplishment that signing a contract offers. 
Anyone out there with some examples of the abuses of contracting out
please share them with us.

Charles Peters — April 2006

Another new book about our follies in Iraq, by Michael Gordon and Lt. Gen (ret.) Bernard Trainor, makes clear that both Donald Rumsfeld and Tommy Franks were obsessed with demonstrating that Baghdad could be taken faster and with smaller forces than many military experts thought prudent.  They were right about that, but unfortunately, it made them not want to face the danger of bypassing fedayeen irregulars along the way.  They were warned that these forces posed a dangerous threat by Maj. Gen. William Wallace, who was threatened with dismissal for his trouble.  Rumsfeld himself decided to cancel deployment of the First Cavalry division, which would have been of important help in preventing the chaos immediately following our “victory.”  This is of a piece with last week's item about how CIA headquarters kept pressing agents in the field to search for those WMD's long after it had become clear that they did not exist.  Headquarters did not want to hear the truth in eigher case.  And the pressure on those in the field was to preserve the fantasies of those at the top.

Charles Peters — April 2006

“By the fall of 2003, the [Baghdad CIA] station had just four officers who could speak Arabic.” This was two years after 9/11, 10 years after the first attack on the World Trade Center by terrorists whose plans wre revealed in documents possessed by the FBI since well before the attack, but which the FBI did not have the language competence to translate, and after frequent criticism by this magazine and others of the linguistic inadequacies of both the FBI and the CIA.  Furthermore, “many [of the staff] were rookies, often on their first overseas assignment .”

These facts come from James Risen's new book, State of War, which also reveals that, for the first nine monthes after we took Baghdad, instead of concentrating on intelligence, the CIA station was pressed by Washington to search for those non-existent weapons of mass destruction.  As late as January 2004, the CIA's Washington headquarters was worried about David Kay's allegations that there were no WMD in Iraq and about how George Tenet could answer McCain when Tenet testified before Congress.  This message went our from Langley to Baghdad:  “The Director is on the Hill in seven days, let's refocus on finding the WMD.”

A reader’s comment on the NSPS:

Keep up the great points and we will all realize that our government workforce and the American blood line eventually comes to the realization that human nature, unless controlled, will show up at the most inappropriate time. I will make this short with two points.

1. The “cost” of the partial NSPS (PNSPS) is contrary to the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) report for an effective, fair and well thought out implementation of any pay-for performance system including all of the possibly illegal Acquisition Demonstration Programs still ongoing today. Perhaps the theoretical 20% is at the upper end of our government starting with some folks that conducted the Food for Oil Program, where human nature showed up and greed must have overcome the responsibility of performing a job for our government. The American people have made more progress over the last 50 years than most of the world with our present legal Title 5 Pay for Performance System.

Please consider that our government staff includes civilians, military, and contractors. So, when we implement a pay for performance system we should maintain our balance between all and pay our front line foot soldiers and tank operators the pay they deserve and that may be more than some CEO’s are making in today’s world; but the CEO’s will be able to continue their work at home. The question then may be, “Can the taxpayers afford these systems?” Remember, the entire government workforces are taxpayers when answering this question. When a change is required our lawmakers should oversee the design, implementation and funding of a fair and effective system that will represent the majority of taxpayers and one that can be supported by those same taxpayers. They are in the process of accomplishing that with the government accounting office investigation on the cost of (P) NSPS due in approximately six months, and other efforts being requested by various government staff.

2. With the authority delegated to a “local” pay panel pool and no real guidelines established for proper conduct and redistribution of tax dollars an accounting and reporting system will be required to insure compliance with existing laws, reporting and accountability. This will be at considerable cost as each pay pool panel that exist today uses their own guidelines that may or may not be similar to others. Should this be overlooked as it has with the existing Acquisition Demonstration Programs then the same anomalies will continue to occur as they do today. What happens when a pay pool leader selects and rewards a star performer for several raises over a few years and since the other members of the panel all work for this manager none of them speak up as they do not want to loose their pay? The star performer may or may not warrant the excessive pay increases. Now, with another year passed the Pay Pool Manager and the star performer purchase a home together and consider marriage. Is this using ones position for personal gain? How was this documented and reported? What was the final resolution? These along with many other anomalies have occurred and continue to occur with these local pay pool panels. As with the Food for Oil Program anomalies there may be cases when human nature shows up at the most unwanted time with poor results. We must protect those that are willing to speak out when laws are broken. We must proceed to any new system with both of our eyes opened and with lessons learned from our past. We do not need the American government controlled or run by one family. Oh, one last thought is that, by last reports, the NSPS staff is not our law makers, our elected officials House and Senate Members are those staff with the approval by the president or with the majority of the Congressional Members.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is refusing to release records documenting a continuing decline in America’s shrinking base of natural wetlands, according to a lawsuit filed today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).  The Corps is the principal agency overseeing development of what are supposed to be federally protected bogs, marshes, swamps, estuaries and lowlands but the suit filed contends that the Corps stopped responding to PEER requests for permit and enforcement records under the Freedom of Information Act several months ago.

“How can the Corps insist that it is doing a good job of protecting wetlands when they will not reveal just what they are doing?” asked PEER General Counsel Richard Condit who filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.  “The paper trail on the Corps ended in 2002 and that trail pointed straight downhill.”

PEER has maintained a 20-year database of agency records detailing Corps permit and enforcement performance, covering the period from 1982 through 2002.  Those numbers showed—

•    The number of wetlands restored under Corps auspices has declined by more than half since 1992;

•    The Corps permit denial rate is now miniscule.  Enforcement actions, inspections and site visits are also at their lowest levels; and

•    The Corps has doubled its reliance on Nationwide and Regional Permits (forms of relaxed regulatory review based on categorical exclusions). Meanwhile, individual permits that require in depth environmental evaluations have declined every year.

Last year, the Corps stopped providing updates of their quarterly reports for the years 2003 and 2004.  New PEER Freedom of Information Act requests for 2005 data went out earlier this year and have yet to be answered but these requests are not yet rip for litigation.

The main tool used by the Corps to approve the destruction of a naturally functioning wetland is called mitigation, the promise by a developer to lessen or compensate for the damage by creating or preserving wetlands on site or elsewhere. Relying on mitigation allows President Bush to proclaim that his administration is meeting a “no net wetland loss” goal for the Corps regulatory program. Analysis of Corps records, however, shows little follow-up to ensure that the mitigation promises are kept. 

“The Corps wetlands mitigation program is a national joke since developers know that the Corps will either fail to make a compliance inspection, or, in the best of circumstances, require some minor permit modification that legalizes the violation,” added Condit, noting that the Clean Water Act set a goal to achieve zero discharge into wetlands by 1985, a benchmark that has long since passed unfulfilled. “Confronting an agency ethic that all development must be approved, the Corps’ own specialists are among the most deeply frustrated by their inability to enforce the law.”

###

See the PEER lawsuit against the Corps:
http://www.peer.org/docs/dod/06_11_4_lawsuit.pdf

Look at the downward trend in Corps permitting and enforcement:
http://www.peer.org/news/news_id.php?row_id=308

View the 1982-2002 Corps enforcement and permitting numbers:
http://www.peer.org/docs/dod/06_11_4_report_card.pdf

Read a press release touting the Bush administration wetlands record:
http://www.epa.gov/wetlandsmitigation/