The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler calls the U.S. Office of Special Counsel an “obscure agency” narrowly in charge of protecting federal workers, particularly those who blow the whistle against their employers. But office head Scott Bloch has been a colorful character in the fired U.S. Attorney’s scandal and is in the news again for tangling with the Justice Department. Bloch wrote a scathing letter to Department Inspector General Glenn Fine saying Fine has ignored his inquiries into the fired attorneys. Kessler documents how Bloch’s crusade against Justice is complicated by the fact that he is being investigated for his own personal misconduct.  Read Kessler here.

It is hard to keep track of all the Justice Department investigations alleging abuses by contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. Glenn R. Simpson of the Wall Street Journal writes that the Pentagon is targeting a lesser-known scandal — food contractors overcharging for the meals they serve military personnel. It seems that the main military food supplier, the Kuwait-based Public Warehousing Company, is collecting major discounts from food distributing subcontractors connected to them. Public Warehouse is then neglecting to share the savings with the U.S. Government.  Read Glenn Simpson here.

Matthew Wald of the New York Times summarizes the controversy in determining what caused last summer’s Minneapolis bridge collapse. The usually credible National Transportation Safety Board is arguing that the collapse was caused by the mid-1960’s design. A Minnesota state agency, Congressman and much of the public are skeptical that a decades-old construction flaw was a bigger factor than government’s failure to pay for bridge maintenance. Wald nicely captures the conflict between locals looking for answers and federal bureaucrats not giving them the answers they want.  Read Matthew Wald here.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing today on a Government Accountability Office report detailing problems with the Food and Drug Administration. Gardiner Harris of the New York Times obtains an early copy and focuses on the problem of backlogs caused by under-staffing and outdated computer systems. Among other tidbits, at its current pace the FDA would need 1,900 years to inspect every food plant brought into the United States.   Read Harris here.

President Bush used part his final State of the Union to denounce Congressional earmarks. But instead of demanding Congress change its behavior, the President wants to attack earmarks through federal agencies. The Washington Post’s Jonathan Weisman analyses his promise to issue an executive order that agencies don’t follow through with pet projects tucked into laws without being voted on. Weisman reports that this could be confusing.   Read Weisman here.

Federal bureaucracies are often accused of being a step slow in integrating new technology. But as the Washington Post’s Stephen Barr reports, the Office of Management and Budget has done much with the information-sharing technology used to create Wikipedia. Last year, OMB worked with other federal agencies to create a database of all Congressional earmarks. The Wiki has since expanded from earmark information to a place where agencies can exchange information and ideas. And they’ve even changed the name from “Budget Community” to the relatively more exciting, and inclusive, “The Max Federal Community".   Read Stephen Barr’s article here.

Last fall the Labor Department’s Mine Safety and Health Administration got into deep trouble for its lack of oversight at the Crandall Canyon Mine in Utah. Richard Stickler, the Acting Assistant Labor Secretary in Charge of MSHA, has subsequently promoted increased inspections, citations and fines as signs of a reborn, robust agency. But a story Sunday by Ken Ward, a staff writer for the Charleston, West Virginia’s Charleston Gazette, unveils that for years those fines have not been collected.  Read Ken Ward here.

Today’s Washington Post has a story by Maria Glod headlined “U.S. Wants Their $15 million back.” The bold, take-charge "U.S." in this case is the Department of Education, whose Inspector General found that the Pennsylvania Higher Education Agency exploited a federal subsidy program to the tune of $34 million. The agency took advantage of an outdated program that guarantees a 9.5 percent interest rate on loans. Now it is payback time and House Education Committee chair George Miller praised the department for “finally taking its role as steward of the nation’s federal student aid programs seriously.”  Read Maria Glod here.

The New York Times also covers the DOE confrontation…only from a diametrically opposed angle. In a piece titled “U.S. Ignores Finding on Student Lender” Jonathan Glater notes that the Department disputed the Inspector General’s $34 million number and merely suggests the Pennsylvania agency should pay back $15 million. It is ultimately up to the Pennsylvania agency, however, to calculate what they owe.  Not only is the DOE portrayed differently — so are yesterday’s statements from George Miller. Miller is said to have actually “lashed out” at the administration’s continued failure to recoup millions from manipulative student lenders.  Read Jonathan Glater here.

The Associated Press story on the Department’s letter to the Pennsylvania agency takes a more neutral tone on the DOE and focuses more on the overall context of lenders bilking the government. The piece doesn’t mention that the agency decides how much lenders overcharged the government.  Read  the AP Story here.