Tim Fernholz of the American Prospect optimistically argues that the Barack Obama administration will restore credibility to a number of federal agencies blindsided by the Bush administration.

But in recalling the bad political appointees of the Bush administration, Fernholz discounts what kind of lasting impact these appointees had on government. Fernholz spotlights four agenices: Justice Dept’s Office of Legal Counsel, the Office of Management and Budget’s office of information and regulatory affairs, the Interior Dept’s Minerals Management Service and the Education Dept’s Federal Student Aid Office.

OMB’s regulatory affairs office sounds like it was systemically perverted by the Bush administration, and now the whole mission of the office must be changed under Obama. What started as an office to streamline the issuance of federal regulations turned into a way for Bush to overrule federal agencies writing environmental and labor standards. This was the work of individual regulatory affairs directors John Graham and Susan Dudley. But the underlying cause was how the White House re-interpreted the office’s purpose. Now civil servants there will have to adjust to a new philosophy.

Elsewhere, though, Fernholz mainly reduces the Bush administration’s problems to bad apples like former Office of Legal Counsel lawyer John Yoo. He also approvingly quotes new Interior Sec. Ken Salazar who says the many, many problems at Interior can be chalked up to rogue political appointees.

But Interior’s "sex, drugs, and oil" scandal implicated 1/3 of all Minerals Management Service employees, many of them career civil servants.  Reviving MMS, OMB and other federal agenices inculcated with anti-government rhetoric requires more than just getting rid of Bush bogeymen. It means changing the mission and day-to-day work of thousands of federal employees.-MB

A crooked, unbelievable politician is gone from America’s fifth-largest state as the people speak (unanimously) through their elected representatives.  The vote emerges as a powerful — if dangerous — weapon in Iraq.  In the Old Dominion, LaTonya Reed and her colleagues at Virginia Interfaith Center are trying to get rehabilitated felons the right to vote.  The vote — one person’s voice — has a power that’s hard to define, but one that is working its way throughout political systems around the world.  It’s worth fighting for. -NH

Remember 2006 when it seemed the most pressing issue in the world (or at least kind of urgent) was that the Dept. of Homeland Security set up a computer system to check if businesses were hiring undocumented immigrants? Well, the Washington Post’s Spencer S. Hsu sort of takes us back to that time today with word that DHS is delaying the set up of such a system. "E-verify" — supposed to check new hires’ social security numbers against a national database — will be rolled out in May and used on contractors doing more than $100,000 of government business. The verification system was supposed to go in effect at the end of the Bush administration. But the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has sued the government to stop this from happening.

E-verify is not exactly the most pressing issue facing the Obama administration, but it’s a pretty interesting and unconventional policy idea. Businesses are fiercely opposed. Supporting the program, though, are not just Congress members trying to look tough on immigrants, but self-professed good-government types looking to put checks on contractors. Both Barack Obama and new DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano fall into this second category.-MB

Blackwater is out of Iraq but now the State Dept. has to find a replacement, reports the New York Times’ James Risen and Timothy Williams. The Status of Forces Agreement Iraq had signed with the U.S. meant that not only were private contractors no longer immune from the law, but they had to apply for operating licenses with the Iraq government. So when Blackwater applied, they were turned down.

Given Blackwater’s history of killing Iraq civilians, it seems more than appropriate that the Iraq government take a stand. The problem for State is that private security contractors are not exactly brands of soap. There are just two other companies, Triple Canopy and DynCorp, that have the ability to do private security details for diplomats and other dignitaries in a war zone. And even those companies have a fraction of Blackwater’s employees.

With the State Dept. unable or unwilling to do security details in-house, the next contracting scandal could be former Blackwater employees signing up for one of the two companies that have licenses to operate.-MB

The New York Times’ Peter Baker and Alissa Rubin give us a synopsis of Barack Obama’s policy choices in Iraq: either hew to his campaign pledge and withdraw all combat troops in 16 months or listen to Gen. Ray Odierno, the top commander in Iraq who recommends a slower drawdown and seeing what happens in Iraq’s elections. The differences between Obama and the military are no secret and there doesn’t appear much that’s significantly changed in Iraq since the presidential campaign.

What I find frustrating here is a prevailing belief that the military, and not Obama and Congress, should shape Iraq policy. Pentagon bureaucrats should of course be listened to but no more so than, for example, Dept. of Transportation bureaucrats when implementing fuel efficiency standards. Elections have consequences and the majority of the voting public trusts that Obama know what he’s doing in Iraq. In fact, they expect him to take action and withdraw.-MB

Understanding Government has a modest request: could all major media outlets hereby vow not to refer to everything Barack Obama does as a "victory" or a "defeat"?  The Washington Post today said in their newsprint version that the House’s approval of President Obama’s stimulus package "marked the biggest victory of his presidency a little more than a week into his term."  Hello?  A week into his term the president can’t have "biggest victories." (The present online version calls it "a big victory.")  Moreover, this wasn’t any kind of victory; it was a piece of legislation that passed one house of Congress.  It won’t be a victory for Obama when it’s approved by the Senate.  It will only be a victory — for Obama and for all of us — if it helps energize the economy and gets people back to work again.  And this "victory" stuff sort of misses the point of Obama’s whole venture to change Washington.  So let’s hope the Post and other "powers that be" don’t waste their power on this kind of hook. -NH

The Wall Street Journal’s Jonathan Weisman, Greg Hitt and Naftali Bendavid have a good round-up of the 677-page stimulus bill the House passed yesterday. While the bill will surely change before it gets to President Obama’s desk, it’s clear that several federal agencies will see a lot more money and a greatly expanded mission:

The House bill expands access to health care for the unemployed, represents perhaps the largest expansion of the federal government’s role in education financing ever and begins what Mr. Obama has promised will be a push toward renewable energy that will continue throughout his presidential tenure.

Also tucked inside is $335 million for programs that help prevent sexually transmitted diseases, and $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts. The Senate version includes $70 million for a supercomputer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and $75 million for smoking-cessation programs.

The bill provides $125 billion in federal education programs from renovations of college buildings to aid intended to avoid teacher layoffs.  The plan also weighs in favor of "net neutrality," the most contentious issue at the Federal Communications Commission– whether internet broadband should be open to any content provider. And the bill calls for $5 billion in public housing, an area that Housing and Urban Development has lately left up to the states.

There is some sniffing in the Journal piece about whether these programs are more about enacting a liberal domestic policy agenda than narrowly stimulating the economy. That’s clearly the suspicion of Republicans who unanimously opposed the House bill. In the end, though, what might matter most is not how directly correlated the programs are to stimulus but if they’re executed properly.

It is now up to agencies like HUD and the Dept. of Education to competently manage this new federal money. The consequences if they don’t may be 30 more years of reflexive opposition to government spending.-MB

The Food and Drug Administration ordered everyone yesterday to trash any product with peanut paste from the Peanut Corporation of America’s Blakely, Georgia plant. The Washington Post’s Lyndsey Layton reports that the Peanut Corporation has knowingly shipped products with salmonella 12 times in the past two years. The result is 8 deaths, 500 illnesses across 43 states and Canada, and the chance that everything from ice cream to snack crackers might be poisoned.

If the Peanut Corporation (their factories "had mold growing on its ceiling and walls, and it has foot-long gaps in its roof" according to the New York Times’ Gardiner Harris) was such an egregious violator why didn’t the FDA stop them earlier? The answer is that the cash-strapped agency outsourced their inspection work to the Georgia Department of Agriculture. In 2008, the Georgia agency did not even inspect for salmonella.

Meanwhile, the FDA’s 14 visits to Georgia this month were its first inspection of the peanut plant since 2001. Due to the numerous violations uncovered, the Justice Department might press charges against the peanut corporation. But a large part of the blame goes to the FDA being off the beat. There were reports of poisoned peanuts as early as last summer. The agency, though, lacked either the resources or inclination to intervene when the outbreak could have been better contained.-MB

The New York Times’ Nina Bernstein grimly recounts the tale of Guido Newburgh, a German immigrant who died while detained by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. The Dept. of Homeland Security’s ICE ignored Newburgh’s cries for medical care and threw him in an isolation cell at the Piedmont Regional Jail in Farmville, Virginia. Newburgh died in November from a staph infection that could have been cured with antibiotics.

Newburgh’s case once again spotlights the gruesome medical practices in "a patchwork of county jails, private prisons and federal detention centers under contract to hold non-citizens while the government tries to deport them." There have been incidents nearly identical to Newburgh’s as chronicled in a 2006 ICE report withheld from the public. Last year the Times and the ACLU got their hands on that report, leading to Congressional hearings and promises by ICE to treat detainees humanely . ICE, though, seems less intent on reform and more interested in building more detention centers.-MB

The New York Times’ Gardiner Harris reports on nine dissident scientists at the Food and Drug Administration: "Nine scientists have banded together and charged that agency officials have acted illegally and that patients are routinely put at risk from high-risk medical devices that are approved for sale even though manufacturers have never proved that the products are either safe or effective." The scientists have taken their charge that the FDA is approving high-risk medical devices to Congress, where the House Energy and Commerce Committee continues an investigation.

So what has FDA management done to respond? They’re criminally investigating the dissident scientists. The charge could be that the scientists shared confidential company documents with Congress as well as Barack Obama’s transition team. The scientists have now written a "you’re not going to believe this #$%!" letter to President Obama essentially alleging retaliation by the FDA.

The scientists’ case seems bolstered by a GAO report released two weeks ago that the agency still hasn’t developed an appropriate system to test complex medical devices like pacemakers and heart valves. The agency also hasn’t gotten new management to replace the Bush administration crew that is filing internal charges against the scientists.-MB