With 11 days to go until Barack Obama took over, the George W. Bush administration finally tackled the big national security issue: having the Interior Dept. write a regulation that lets people bring loaded guns into national parks and wildlife refuges. The Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin writes that the Interior Dept. will do a 90-day review of the rule, but for now the Justice Dept. says the pro-gun regulation will stand. 

The National Rifle Association has long insisted that letting loaded guns in parks (right now unloaded, disassembled guns are ok) brings needed uniformity to gun ownership laws. But what good will exactly come from packing heat at parks? Eilperin deadpans: "The national park system has a relatively low rate for crimes or for attacks by wild animals." How low? Since 2002, there have been 1.3 billion visitors to national parks resulting in 16 serious injuries and two fatalities. It’s hard to see how those numbers wouldn’t rise with the new regulation. Unless there is a looming bear attack problem I don’t know about, this regulation should be as quietly overturned as it was written.-MB

The past four days of Washington, D.C. have been one continual party with Barack Obama being celebrated more as a historical, cultural and marketing icon than a political figure. Obama is nothing if not self-aware and his inauguration speech seemed an attempt to deflect his ever growing celebrity. In a speech that ended with him calling for a "new era of responsibility," Obama continually used the language of painstaking work: toiled, endured, struggled sacrificed. The only prevailing imagery he used was that of winter, employing the almost melodramatically grim phrase "winter of our hardships."

The speech was almost deliberately forgettable as if Obama were consciously rejecting an opportunity for the millions on the mall to worship him further. The only major stumbling block was that Obama seems comfortable in describing the "war on terror" the same way George W. Bush did. "Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred," Obama said. He could have just said, "Our nation is at war with a few discrete terrorist networks, mainly Al Qaeda which attacked our country."

The part of the speech that will most inform the work of Understanding Government’s coverage of federal agencies in the Obama administration is this passage:

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works, whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.

And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account, to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day, because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.

How will Obama’s ambitious goals for the renewal of American optimism and his concretely sweeping policy agenda reconcile with line-by-line evaluations of federal agency budgets, the hiring and support of civil servants, and the execution of federal programs? It is this dichotomy– between the sweeping idea of a renewed American democracy and the seemingly mundane workings of government– that  I look forward to reporting and explaining.-MB

Washington, D.C. erupted on election night for Barack Obama. But the inauguration festivities of the past few days have been as much about George W. Bush’s exit from the White House as Obama’s arrival. The jubilation is partly cultural—a city where most of the population is either highly educated or African American or both now have a president who is unapologetically educated, African American and urban. The part frat-boy, part born-again evangelical style of Bush is now retired to Texas, where radio talk show hosts warmly greeted his return to hometown Midland, espousing that—unlike the new president—Bush wanted to kill terrorists not unborn children.

The excitement also comes from hope that the next president won’t be awful. Attempts at insta-post-mortems on Bush have largely fallen short, because it is hard to succinctly assess his failings.

One problem is that Bush has had some success situating himself as a “war president.” By simply responding that Bush was bad at doing the things war presidents do—protect the country, prosecute wars—it partly lets slide that Bush was also a bad environmental president and labor president and health care president and so on. But the Bush administration was not about presiding over several disasters. Its problems were more systemic, including the undermining of practically all 64 federal agencies—the bureaucrats who protect the environment, police the free market, and—yes—make the country safe.

In his farewell speech, Bush did not offer a defense of basing Justice Department civil servant hires on GOP loyalty or politicizing scientific reports on global warming at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association or a 75 percent drop in securities fraud prosecutions at the Securities and Exchange Commission. He mostly talked about 9//11.

“As the years passed, most Americans were able to return to life much as it had been before 9/11,” Bush said. “But I never did. Every morning I received a briefing about the threats to our nation. And I vowed to do everything in my power to keep us safe.”

The self-congratulatory image of Bush poring through intelligence so Americans could sleep and shop would be enraging if it were not so widely discredited. A misreading of intelligence has lead to the detention and torture of terrorist suspects with no links to the Al-Qaeda and the stated premise for the Iraq War. It lead to a CIA more disgraced now than it has been since agency reforms in the 1970’s.

But nailing Bush on the obvious stuff—torture, Iraq—seems almost like falling into his rhetorical trap that there has not been another terrorist attack since 9/11. Sure the Department of Homeland Security is a bureaucratic disaster by any measurement, but since its creation in 2002 the country has not been attacked.

It is this maddening logic—didn’t every Cold War president keep us more safe since there were zero domestic terrorist attacks?—that Bush predictably has staked his legacy upon. A couple liberal institutions in Washington—the American Prospect magazine and Center for American Progress think tank—have nobly catalogued his more wide-ranging failings.

The Prospect looks at how under Bush more than a dozen federal agencies politicized science, privatized inherently government functions, prioritized political loyalty, changed laws without consulting Congress, and even broke the separation between church and state. Bureaucratic dissenters saw their lines of communication cut off and their agencies de-funded. Meanwhile, Center for American Progress’s ThinkProgress has an almost playful review of the Bush legacy—a ranking of the 43rd president’s 43 worst political appointees.

Both are valuable starting guides, but after the list of 43 I immediately thought of five who didn’t make the cut. That will be my lasting assessment of Bush—reading a list of 43 awful people in his government and then thinking about five other awful people apparently not terrible enough to be ranked. For the sake of posterity, here they are:

1. Tom Ridge: Ridge was the first director of the Department of Homeland Security. During the creation of DHS he seemed most passionate about making sure DHS civil servants wouldn’t be able to unionize. The stated reason was that employees needed to be "as agile and aggressive as the terrorists themselves."

Ridge issued dire threats of terrorist attacks right before elections, which officially politicized the "war on terror." And he introduced a counterintuitive system of color-coded alerts which officially made the "war on terror" funny.

2. Christine Todd Whitman: Stephen Johnson will be remembered as the Bush administration’s worst Environmental Protection Agency administrator. But Bush’s first EPA head did something more singularly egregious than any Johnson capitulation: after 9/11 she said the air around the fallen World Trade Center was safe to breathe. “"The good news,” Whitman said Sep. 14, 2001, “continues to be that air samples we have taken have all been at levels that cause us no concern."

3. Susan Dudley: Dudley was the head of the Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where she consistently overruled Stephen Johnson’s EPA. This most famously included telling Johnson to reverse a stricter ozone standard the EPA administrator had already announced.

4. Dirk Kempthorne. Kempthorne headed the Interior Department, which under the Bush administration listed 59 species as endangered. Bush’s father listed 59 species as endangered in each of his four years. Kempthorne also denied that global warming was endangering the polar bear. And he presided over the Interior’s “sex, drugs and oil” scandal, which, I supposed, raised the otherwise dormant agency’s profile

5. Harold Stratton. Stratton was chairman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission between 2002 and 2006 where his non-work laid the foundation for the tainted toy scandals of 2007. Stratton was best known for taking industry-sponsored trips and rarely appearing before his employees except to play acoustic guitar.

It was, as Bush proclaimed, a presidency of consequence.-MB

Understanding Government’s final of four articles on the Barack Obama presidential transition

By Matthew Blake

Washington, January 18, 2008 — The election of Barack Obama was a transformative moment that marked an astonishing psychic break from the George W. Bush administration.

His inauguration Tuesday could be just as memorable. Millions will descend on Washington, D.C. in what should be the most epic party the city has ever hosted.

But as the Bush administration mercifully ends, its consequences endure. Barack Obama inherits multiple disasters: the worst economy since the Great Depression, a quagmire in Afghanistan, a slightly less terrible quagmire in Iraq, the Israeli invasion of Gaza, the subversion of the rule of law, accelerating global warming, addiction to foreign oil, 47 million Americans without health care, and a war on terror that has left the masterminds of 9/11 still at large.

Each of the above predicaments is greater than anything Bush faced when he became president in 2001. As a result, sweeping problems – from the evisceration of the federal regulatory system to a broken food industry to a hobbled safety system for medicines and imported consumer goods – may be relegated to the backburner.

The Obama presidential transition – the 77-day reality check between his election and his inauguration – indicates how the Obama administration might leverage its momentum to manage a country in crisis. 

Obama named a cabinet in almost record time and expanded an already broad coalition by appointing people with diverse political ideologies. He reached out to a marginalized Republican Party. And he avoided using the economic crisis as an excuse to back off from an ambitious domestic agenda.

Something, though, is missing. The management team he assembled and policies he has proposed are sensible and practical. But what is needed is radical action that fundamentally changes the economy, foreign policy, and the federal government. Obama must rapidly evolve as president to meet the occasion. (more…)

The Los Angeles Times’ Jim Tankersley covered the feel-good hearing of nominated Interior Dept. Secretary Ken Salazar before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Senators mostly waxed on about how they would miss their colleague who is currently a Colorado Senator and member of the energy committee. But Salazar didn’t do a great deal to assure environmentalists or any advocate of good-government that he can repair the broken beyond belief Interior Department. A Salazar-led Interior should mark an improvement on conservation matters from current Sec. Dirk Kempthorne. But Nicole Rosmarino of WildEarth Guardians seems justified in wondering if the good-natured Senator is "up to the task."-MB

The Senate Judiciary Committee is nearing completion with their second day of confirmation hearings for attorney general-designate Eric Holder. The build-up to the Holder confirmation hearings was unlike any other as Republicans had vowed to go after Holder’s record in both the Clinton administration and private practice. But as the Washington Post’s Carrie Johnson has reported, the first day of hearings were not marked by fierce confrontation.

Instead, the news was that Holder differentiated himself from current AG Mike Mukasey by unequivocally calling waterboarding torture. He also seemed to be able to effectively contextualize his past misdeeds (i.e. assisting the pardon of Marc Rich) with the greater evils of the Bush administration Justice Department. And lawmakers even favorably brought up the historic nature of Holder’s nomination: he would be the first African American attorney general.

If this was the most acrimonious confirmation hearing, it looks like Obama’s cabinet picks will be approved quickly and painlessly.-MB

The groundwork is being laid for Barack Obama’s early agenda as president. The New York TImes’ David Hersenhorn reports that the Senate voted yesterday to release the second $350 billion of the finance industry bailout. Also, the House collaborated with Obama to write an $825 billion economic stimulus bill that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said needs to pass by mid-February.

The 52-42 Senate vote marks a big victory for Obama before he even becomes president. The first $350 billion of the bailout money was badly managed and also turned into a handout to major banks not a fund to buy toxic mortgage assets or assist homeowners who face forcelosure. Larry Summers promised, of course, the cash would be managed better and that $50-100 billion of the money will go to mortgage relief.

The $825 House bill– previewed yesterday– amounts to $550 billion in spending and $275 billion in tax cuts. No one program gets a huge piece of the spending pie as the money is divided up between funds for local districts, aid to states for Medicaid costs, temporary increases in food stamp and jobless benefits, infrastructure projects, andrenewable energy projects. The tax cuts include an income tax cut for every American earning less than $200,000.

The House bill would seem to contain few deeply objectionable measures but Republicans nonetheless objected. Will a plan that already is 1/3 tax cuts that economists say won’t stimulate the economy become even less stimulating once it goes through the legislative process?-MB

The Washington Post’s Paul Kane reports that Democrats in Congress will unveil their economic stimulus bill tomorrow. Barack Obama will be at a wind turbine plant in Ohio to promote the bill.

The bill now looks to be both big and modest. The cost is now put at $850 billion, which Kane notes is "equal to the annual cost of funding all federal agencies." At the same time, while Obama will speak at a wind turbine plant, there’s not a lot of cash for more experimental renewable energy projects. The unpopular business tax credits were scrapped, but still $300 billion of the bill is tax cuts, many which are tax breaks to businesses. Around $450 billion is emergency money to states to pay for medicaid and education projects. In fact, there is almost as much money to be spent on education ($90 billion) as the much publicized infrastructure programs ($85 billon).

The measure of the bill’s modesty is that states can choose how to spend this $450 billion. So the signal is clear that the bill is to put state and local governments on the road back to fiscal solvency, not to start ambitious new federal programs. This stimulus bill is not the second "New Deal."-MB

At least the 1,000 people polled by the Wall Street Journal and NBC. The Wall Street Journal’s Laura Meckler reports that 43 percent of those polled support Barack Obama’s economic stimulus bill while 27 percent oppose it (the opposition was overtaken by a late run by "no opinion" which got 30 percent). Also, 68 percent of Republicans and independents thought that the GOP should compromise with Obama while just 20 percent believed they should stick with GOP principles of fiscal austerity and oppose the stimulus.

So the take away is that the country supports Obama’s stimulus bill. But what’s most interesting is that the people surveyed want Obama to think big. They vast majority want him to spend more government money to create jobs instead enacting tax cuts. And 89 percent surveyed want him to spend money on renewable energy projects. The public is generally not scared of "big government" or the $800 billion stimulus price tag. They’re scared that Obama won’t dramatically reverse the Bush administration.-MB

The New York Times’ Elisabeth Bumiller and Thom Shanker report that Barack Obama is working with top Pentagon people to get all combat troops out of Iraq by May 2010. This would fulfill Obama’s campaign pledge of a 16-month withdrawal from the country but go against the stated military plans of just withdrawing about 7,000 troops every six months.

But just because Obama is sticking with his campaign pledge and getting troops out of a war zone is no occasion to break out the champagne. The first 30,000 troops taken out of Iraq will almost surely be re-deployed to Afghanistan. which Bumiller and Shanker call "an increasingly violent, ungovernable country that military says presents even more problems than Iraq."-MB