Suspicions that most of us have had about the CIA under George W. Bush are confirmed by a recent study by the Brookings Institution.  It finds that analysts at the CIA were rewarded for having their reports included in the President's Daily Brief and that their findings were more likely ...

Understanding Government's founder and president, Charles Peters, one of the (and perhaps the) world's first blogger, is still going strong with his "Tilting at Windmills" column in The Washington Monthly. Charlie is direct. ...

Reprinted from the March/April issue of The Washington Monthly:

By Charles Peters

Obama’s stimulus promises to create or save three to four million jobs in the next two years. In the fall of 1933, a New Deal program created four million jobs in two months.

Timothy Noah and I described the miracle of the Civil Works Administration in a recent article in Slate. The CWA was the brainchild of Harry Hopkins, who received FDR’s blessing for the idea in mid-November. By mid-December, he had employed two million people, and by mid-January four million.

Hopkins had two secrets that seem not to be understood by the Obama team.

Not enough people know that Charles Peters, founder and president of Understanding Government, has been blogging for . . . oh, thirty years or so.   His monthly "Tilting at Windmills" column in The Washington Monthly has been read by thousands and shaped the outlook of hundreds of journalists.  In ...

As I've written recently in The Washington Monthly, the president needs to reach down the chain of command and outside it to learn what is really going on beneath him.  Toward that end, I have encountered no better advice than that given to Barack Obama by Senator Jack Reed during Obama's visit to Iraq in July.  According to the Wall Street Journal's Gerald Seib, Reed told Obama that "a good way to get unfiltered information about what is happening on the ground is to talk to junior officers and journalists on the scene."

Lieutenants and captains who are actually doing the fighting have firsthand knowledge of what is working and what is not.  There are analogous figures in every bureaucracy, close enough to the action but with enough command responsibility to give them an ability to generalize.  They're usually more candid about what doesn't work -- after all, they just saw one of their men die from lack of body armor -- than generals,

Barack Obama has no experience in the executive branch of government. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, our most successful modern president, had worked for eight years as assistant secretary of the Navy—the place where policymakers, career military, and civilian bureaucrats intersect. So he learned how the system works, or ...

On the staff at State (contract or otherwise) sneaking into Obama’s, Clinton’s, and McCain’s passport records:  

"It’s a classic point that I’ve made about government from the beginning of my experience with it. It’s the failure of the people at the top to know ...

The recent National Intelligence Estimate stating that Iran stopped trying to develop a nuclear weapon in 2003 has been hailed as a sign of a newly courageous intelligence community in articles in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.  I hope the articles are right, but I have ...

In a recent column in The Washington Monthly, Charlie Peters gets to the heart of the matter:

It seems incredible to me that at least thirteen Republicans wouldn't stand with the Democrats to demand that soldiers at least be given fifteen months at home before being sent back to Iraq.  Why can't they put themselves in the shoes of those soldiers?

In a recent column in The Washington Monthly, Peters notes that

I hasten to remind [the reader] that the same tendencies . . . are common to all bureaucracies, which is why they must always be scrutinized by the press and the public.  What happens is that bureaucracies gradually tend to turn from initial dedication to the performance of their mission to a dedication to their own comfort, meaning a preoccupation with job security, promotions, and pay raises, and the avoidance of accountability of any kind.