Next week, Understanding Government will be rolling out a highly entertaining and trenchant look at the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s stormy history. There might even be pictures.

The cliche about the CPSC is that they’re "the little federal agency that couldn’t" — a tiny bureaucracy that’s been politically marginalized. But that may have changed with a new law, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, that gives new resources and power to the agency.

But as the Wall Street Journal’s Melanie Trotman reports, Nancy Nord, the acting chairman of CPSC, doesn’t really like the law. She’s complaining about how confusing it will be to implement new regulations like the maximum level of lead paint in toys. And she says that Congress still hasn’t given the agency the money it needs to do things like create a database of consumer complaints.

The Democratic Congress may be stalling in passing any budget bills in the hopes they will be signed not by George W. Bush, but Barack Obama. So the money complaint may be temporarily legit. Nord’s attitude, however, isn’t. In a Washington anomaly, she’s complainng about added power and responsibility.  Maybe the next administration will have a chairman excited by the challenge of bringing CPSC back from the dead. -MB

The Wall Street Journal’s Kris Maher has a good catch today — the White House is considering whether to issue an executive order compelling government contractors to use secret ballot elections in deciding whether to unionize.

This may sound arcane, but it’s a pretty big deal. The first, second, and third legislative battles for organized labor right now are the effort to eliminate secret ballot elections in favor of employees checking off on a card if they want to join a union. In both methods, a majority of employees have to want a union for it to get started. But with card checks, organizers can approach workers several times with their union pitch.

Regardless of the merits of card check v. secret ballot, it’s morphed into a confrontation that shows politicians’ pro-labor or pro-business bona fides. The President has never been afraid to antagonize unions. This possible executive order may be his last chance to do so.-MB

Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn, known as "Dr. No" for opposing basically every non-military spending bill, has used the long Congressional recess to find a new foe — the 2.5 million federal employees. The Washington Post’s Christopher Lee reports that Coburn’s office has released a report on federal absenteeism that may say more about Coburn than civil servants.

Coburn report trots out a bunch of statistics that federal workers have missed millions of hours of work the last few years. Federal employees unions respond with counter-statistics showing their members are missing only a tiny fraction of their work time. Normally at this point in the blog post I would provide telling stats, but it’s hard to contextualize the figures from either side.

Coburn is an interesting character and his challenging "the ways of Washington" is not without merit (he actually collaborated with Barack Obama on a bunch of war contracting reform amendments before Obama ran for a president and Coburn became sort of a pariah). But he’s resurrecting tired Reaganesque tropes about the laziness of the federal bureaucrat. This makes it easier to continue starving the government — and deterring talented people from joining the civil service. -MB

Wow. The U.S. military and United Nations are known to disagree, but this is absurd.

Last Friday, the U.S. military said that an airstrike in Afghanistan killed five civilians. Buried amid coverage of the Democratic National Convention, some heads turned this week when a report by the U.N. and Afghanistan officials put the total at not five, but 90, including 60 children. But, as the Washington Post’s Ann Scott Tyson reports, a U.S. military review completed yesterday puts the total back at five.

The U.S. feels it was misled in ordering the airstrike and dutifully apologizes for the five civilian deaths. But how in the world can a country that’s been patrolled by the U.S. and NATO for more than six years now not be able to broadly agree on civilian casualty totals?.-MB

The Office of Management and Budget has a web site called Results.gov that is designed to show concrete results of the federal government’s work during the Bush Administration.

The site was last updated on March 23, 2007. 

I guess they must be . . . saving up the results.  Or maybe it’s just . . . too many results to fit on one web site?  I’m trying to think positive here.  -NH

The Washington Post’s Dana Hedgepath reports that KBR, which recently inked a 10-year, $150-billion Pentagon contract to continue giving logistics support in Iraq, has been sued for alleged human trafficking. Agnieska Fryszman, an attorney at a Washington law firm, asserts that 13 Nepali men were kidnapped by a KBR subcontractor in Jordan and then taken to Iraq. The men went to Jordan because they thought they were promised hotel and restaurant jobs in Amman. Insurgents fired at the men as they were entering Iraq, killing 12 of the 13. The lone survivor is back in Nepal.

The chilling allegations sound similar to those made against First Kuwaiti, the contractor in charge of building the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. In that case, citizens from the Philippines went to Dubai for hotel jobs. There, their passports were seized and the laborers were re-routed to Baghad.

With so many third-country nationals in Iraq, the extent of human trafficking is an unknown problem. Now the largest contractor in Iraq must contest tales of its involvement.-MB

The Washington Post’s Karen DeYoung has a very good follow-up on last week’s U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan that killed 90 civilians — 60 of them children. DeYoung reports that there’s no protocol to investigate the airstrike, or really anything else in Afghanistan, because the U.S. literally has a two-page note that governs the role of the U.S. military in Afghanistan.

But with violence spiraling, Afghan President Hamid Karzai wants a "status of forces" agreement similar to the one State Dept. diplomats are negotiating with the Iraqis. Not surprisingly, the U.S. seems less than eager to draw up a more detailed document that might limit American power. One legit quagmire is this:  of the 33,000 U.S. troops in the country, 19,000 are controlled by Central Command and 14,000 take orders from NATO.

A uniform law for all these troops will be a colossal headache. But it also would be a justified demand by Afghanistan. -MB

The Washington Post’s James V. Grimaldi was part of a coterie of reporters who broke story after story after story on super-duper-mega-uber-lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s vast web of influence peddling. Now Grimaldi’s writing a relatively more favorable Abramoff story– the Justice Dept. is seeking to reduce his prison sentence from almost six years to almost four. The reason is Abramoff has spilled the beans about Rep. Bob Ney (R-Oh.). He’s also apparently cooperating in an ongoing probe into former House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R-Tx.).

With his fedora and black trenchcoat, Abramoff often seemed to affect the style of organized criminals. So it would be fitting if he got off for ratting out his old friends in Congress.-MB

The Washington Post’s Spencer S. Hsu has a "day 3" story on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid at a Mississippi factory that rounded up a record number of almost 600 undocumented immigrants. Hsu points out that the raid occurred, even though the factory was using the federal e-verify system, which is supposed to check worker’s social security and ID info against a national database.

E-verify is currently voluntary for employers, but soon federal contractors will be forced to check hires against the database. What in the world the Mississippi plant was doing with the database is not clear. It’s also not the first time a major raid has occurred at a place that ostensibly uses the database.

Whether E-verify’s information is accurate and its good policy to expand it, is, according to Hsu, "fueling a national debate." Meanwhile, 462 immigrants rounded-up in Laurel, Miss. sit detained in Jena, Louisiana.-MB

The word "democracy" can have a numbing effect on the critical faculties.  Pardon me if I speak for more minds than my own, but I think many of us, steeped from childhood in the rhetoric of American civic ideals, succumb easily to the power of this ancient word.  I realized this as I read Pankaj Mishra’s wake-up call about the Kashmir in the New York Times. 

When we hear again and again that India is a democracy, we tend to relax – and to forget that democracies start wars, that voting rights and free speech don’t prevent democracies from violating human rights, and that democracies tend towards disproportionate defenses of their own liberties, often at the expense of the liberties of others.  If America is a democracy with much to answer for, why should India be spared scrutiny? (more…)