By Matthew Blake

Chicago, May 30 — Two weeks ago at a Washington panel discussion, Grover Whitehurst, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the director of Brookings’ Brown Center on Education Policy, had the task of introducing widely popular Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Whitehurst crisply summarized the conventional wisdom on Duncan. “In his position as head of the Chicago Public Schools he carried out an assertive reform agenda that included, for example, closing down underperforming schools and expanding charter schools. At the same time, he managed to stay in the good graces of powerful constituencies that might have been expected to battle for the status quo. Apropos of his ability to lead change without generating heated antagonism, The Economist notes that, ‘It is hard find anybody with a bad word to say about Arne Duncan.’”

Whitehurst then went further. Other education secretaries, he said, “come to office well liked.” But “the one thing that is clearly distinctive about Duncan is that he has a lot of discretionary funds at his proposal to drive his and the President’s education agenda.” Money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (better known as the stimulus bill) make Duncan potentially the most powerful Education Secretary since the post was created in 1979. As Whitehurst noted, Duncan has the money and the political capital to start doing nationally what he did in Chicago.

But it’s not clear that the results of Duncan’s Chicago reforms justify taking his ideas to a national platform.  In 2001, Duncan became Chief Executive Office of a bad school system. And earlier this year, he left a system that was still bad. Chicago students continue to test significantly worse than the average student in the rest of Illinois, in other large urban centers, and in the U.S. at large. Education experts see promise in Duncan’s CPS reforms. But they have yet to make a measurable difference in student achievement. (more…)

The New York Times’ Peter Baker reports that Barack Obama is using the time-honored spoils system for ambassador positions:

Mr. Obama announced his selections for 12 ambassador posts on Wednesday, on top of six announced previously. Of the 18 total nominees named to date, just five are career diplomats, tapped for Iraq, Kosovo, Iceland, Brazil and Sri Lanka. The rest are a mix of fundraisers, political figures, scholars and others from the private sector assigned desirable posts in places like Britain, France, Japan, China, Argentina, Ireland and Vatican City.

But upon closer inspection, for the ambassadorial posts that might be crucial, Obama chose candidates on their merits:

Not all of Mr. Obama’s political picks raised vast sums for him. Former Representative Timothy J. Roemer of Indiana, a Democrat who sat on the commission that investigated the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, will go to New Delhi. Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. of Utah, assigned to Beijing, is a Republican who served as co-chairman of Senator John McCain’scampaign last year and was widely seen as a potential presidential candidate in 2012.

Others bring significant national security experience to their assignments even if they were political appointees, like Susan E. Rice, the new ambassador to the United Nations, Gen. John Eikenberry, the new ambassador to Afghanistan, and Ivo Daadler, the new ambassador to NATO.

It’s hard for even the staunchest good-government advocate to have their heart in ripping Obama for hiring political moneymen to be the ambassador of France and Great Britain. The question is not whether Obama has deviated from his broad promise of change, but why these posts exist. Would the U.S., Great Britain and the world wildly benefit from a super-qualified ambassador to Great Britain? A truly austere good government reform would be a roving ambassador for all countries that are both desirable tourist destinations and will almost surely never, ever antagonize America. Maybe there could be a nationally televised talent show to compete for the appointment.-MB

Jim Tankersley of the L.A. Times reports that the Obama administration has effectively suspended logging in roadless forest areas. Before he left office, Bill Clinton signed into law the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which protected 60 million acres of U.S. forest. But the Bush administration agriculture department shockingly, just shockingly, undermined the rule and let the U.S. Forest Service issue logging permits. Ag. Secretary Tom Vilsack now wants to review enforcement of the rule before he allows further logging.-MB

Craig Whitlock and Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post have a very well reported lede piece today on how Germany will now not accept Guantanamo detainees because the U.S. Congress has balked at detainee resettlement in America. Germany had already agreed to take nine Chinese Uighur detainees at Guantanamo: people that were captured in Afghanistan after 9/11 but, according to a U.S. judge, pose no security threat. China, though, persecutes Uighurs and not only won’t take them but will get mad if another country offers them sanctuary.

So it’s a really delicate diplomatic situation and it seemed Attorney General Eric Holder solved it when Germany agreed to take some of the Uighurs if the U.S. would also take some. That’s all been ruined because Congress — particularly Virginia Rep. Frank Wolf — went hysterical shouting, "Not In My Backyard!" and declaring the detainees secretly do pose a security threat.

This is provincialism at its most offensive. Wolf doesn’t seem to care at all about the lives of these 16 detainees — who have been imprisoned, isolated and possibly abused for eight years but committed no crime — or America’s standing in the world. He just wants to tell his suburban D.C. constituents that he gave hell to the big, bad Obama administration and stopped these mysterious Uighurs from terrorizing the good folks of Virginia.-MB

Blogging has been less than thorough the last couple of days as I’ve been working a lot on a longer piece. The most interesting story today in the world of federal agencies was probably Binyamin Appelbaum and Zachary Goldfarb of the Washington Post reporting that Barack Obama might form a single agency to regulate banks. It seems to fit into the broad administration financial regulation overhaul, including last week’s report of a possible "Financial Products Safety Commission" to protect real estate, mutual fund and credit card consumers. Unless the administration has super-secret plans to let the AIG financial products division enforce regulations, the budding plan probably beats the status quo:  "Under the current system, banks can choose their regulator…The system also divides supervision of the largest financial conglomerates among multiple agencies, each with responsibility for certain subsidiaries, creating gaps in coverage that companies have exploited."-MB

The Washington Post’s Tomoeh Murakami Tse and Peter Whoriskey report on how the Obama administration might manage a General Motors company that it will possess 70 percent of after an expected bankruptcy. Even though the Treasury Dept. automotive task force has steered GM (as they did Chrysler) toward a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, the administration has insisted it doesn’t want to make company decisions for GM. But the "vast majority" of GM’s 13-member board will be made up of officials appointed or approved by the Treasury Dept.

So the Obama administration is going to control a lot of what GM does for a while. The Treasury Dept. has been accused of muddling through the economic crisis, but pushing out senior lenders and getting GM to file bankruptcy, and giving $50 billion to tide it over during the bankruptcy, is all pretty dramatic. This could be an opportunity to a create an automobile company that makes global warming-friendly cars. Or a chance to let the beleaguered United Autoworkers pitch their own ideas about corporate governance. Now, though, what happens after the bankruptcy is mostly confusing. And if the Obama administration didn’t want the awkward responsibility of running a huge car company, they could have let GM die and used the bailout money to compensate laid off GM workers.-MB

Barack Obama wants to create a task force that will have 90 days to review how the government can be more open and transparent without compromising security, reports the Washington Post’s Carrie Johnson. That sounds fine, but it doesn’t address the most pressing secrecy issue facing the White House. Here is a report from Johnson Tuesday:

The Obama administration has invoked the state-secrets privilege in resisting a lawsuit filed by an Oregon charity whose attorneys may have been subjected to warrantless wiretapping. Late Friday, Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker issued a terse order that raised the prospect of "sanctions" for government lawyers who have not responded to his order for a plan for how the case should proceed. The sanctions may include awarding monetary damages to the charity, the al-Haramain Islamic Foundation.

The document amounts to "Judge Walker’s enough-is-enough order," said Jon Eisenberg, an attorney for the now-defunct charity.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on the judge’s order, which requires the government to respond in court by Friday.

So is the Obama administration going to respond by tomorrow? Or will they use the task force announcement as evidence they are still reviewing the issue? More review shouldn’t be necessary to just return invocation of state secrets to the limited use it had before George W. Bush. And it would be a little arrogant if the administration flouts the judge’s order and says they can proceed with the case when they see fit.-MB

Last week Elizabeth Bumiller of the New York Times had a pretty big scoop: she obtained a Defense Intelligence Agency report that said 1 in 7 prisoners released from Guantanamo Bay promptly returned to a life in terrorism. It was the story of the day, adding a wrinkle to the debate about shutting down Guantanamo Bay as well Barack Obama’s address on counterterrorism.

But the Pentagon has now released the report and it shows that Bumiller’s reporting was misleading. As Justin Elliot of Talking Points Memo flags, 1 in 7, or 14 percent, of the 530 released Guantanamo prisoners were "confirmed or suspected" of re-engaging in terrorism. But nine percent — or 47 former detainees — were suspected — meaning only five percent — or 27 detainees — were confirmed. And of these 74 confirmed or suspected terrorists, the Pentagon doesn’t even bother to name 45 of them.

Elliot also points out that the report doesn’t consider if brutal, isolated Guantanamo detention may have possibly radicalized prisoners, increasing their chances of turning to terrorism upon release.

Bumiller amplyifying a somewhat confusing and poorly done Pentagon report is not an apocalyptic breach of journalist ethics. But, to a limited extent, it’s reminiscent of the Times‘ Judith Miller scandal: Both were fed reports no other journalist got warning of a national security danger and ran with them. And the sources that provided the reports in turn were able to distort the debate in Washington over national security policy.-MB

Sure all the big papers put the impending bankruptcy of General Motors on the front page today. But only the New York Times gives us this corny lede:

In better times, many employees of General Motors called their company “Generous Motors” because of its rich benefits.

Now G.M. may stand for something else: Government Motors.

David Sanger and Michelle Maynard explain that 70 percent of GM will be government-owned after a bankruptcy Monday. The United Auto Workers will control 20 percent. Current shareholders will control about zero percent.

The Obama administration is adamant that despite owning the vast majority of the company they won’t have a hand in GM’s day-to-day operations. But why not? The administration thinks GM is so important that they’re giving it another $50 billion to make it through bankruptcy. It seems irresponsible to then not make sure GM has a more consumer- and environmentally-friendly product. It’s also the administration’s job to see that the company uses its bailout cash to avert more layoffs. But it looks like Obama will take the unprecedented step of walking GM through bankruptcy and then declare it a bridge too far to impose a few demands on the restructured automaker. -MB

This blog would like to endorse Washington Post "Federal Dairy" columnist Joe Davidson’s view on Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court Justice nomination: at least she’ll either be confirmed or denied by the U.S. Senate. The visibility of the Supreme Court post means Sotomayor will not suffer the fate of hundreds of nominees for Obama administration executive branch positions who are still waiting for a Senate confirmation vote. Overall, of the 490 politically appointed executive branch positions, only 22 percent have been filled. It’s been pretty well-documented that the Treasury Dept. is trying to save the world with Tim Geithner, the active intervention of Rahm Emanuel and a few Bush administration holdovers. But many other agencies — like the Interior Dept. and like the Food and Drug Administration, who just last week had their no. 1 position filled — are trying to implement new laws and regulations with no one in charge of the implementation.

This problem could be partly taken care of if we gave more power to civil servants. The Democratic Leadership Council suggests that only cabinet secretaries, heads of independent agencies, and inspector generals need Senate confirmation. Positions like deputy secretary could turn into career civil servant posts. Alternatively, the newly confirmed agency head could be empowered to name their own leadership team without needing Senate approval.

Even these solutions, though, don’t address that there are still heads of independent agencies — like Inez Tennenbaum at the Consumer Product Safety Commission — whose nomination the Senate has not yet considered. Ideally, the full Senate and the relevant Senate committee would have just a month  after a presidential nomination to scrutinize said nominee and then vote on her or his confirmation.

Of course, as Davidson points out, these reforms will happen if the Senate passes a law to make them happen. The Senate may be institutionally incapable of such farsighted lawmaking.-MB