The Washington Post’s David Cho reports that Treasury Sec. Henry Paulson named Neel Kashkari, a current bureaucrat and former Goldman Sachs official to monitor the Treasury Dept’s $700 billion bailout plan. Kashkari is an interim appt. and his replacement will take the plan into the next administration.

The bailout package, which was signed into law Friday, calls for contracting out several accountants and asset managers who would determine how to spend billions of taxpayer dollars on lousy mortgage-related assets. As a former Goldman Sachs CEO, it at least is eyebrow raising that Paulson would name Kashkari for this interim position. But a more tangible conflict of interest could take root in the next couple of weeks when asset managers from companies looking to sell their assets get govt. jobs.-MB

That’s the take away from the Washington Post’s R. Jeffrey Smith, who combs through the Justice Dept. Inspector General/Office of Personal Repsonsibility report on fired U.S. Attorneys. Smith specifically looks at the case of former Missouri federal prosecutor Todd Graves.

The headline of the story reads "political warfare" and I expected to get a titillating account of how current Missouri GOP Sen. Christopher ‘Kid" Bond axed Graves. It turns out, though, to be political warfare of the most trivial kind imaginable. It’s not even worth totally getting into here, but Graves refused to call for the firing of the chief of staff of his brother Sam Graves, a Missouri Republican Congressman. Bond’s chief of staff was apparently a bitter rival of Sam Graves’s chief of staff.

Why in the world the White House and Justice Dept. decided it was worth getting into the intramural spats of Missouri politics isn’t known:  Bond, along with Karl Rove and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers didn’t cooperate with the IG/OPR investigation. But we know the White House did– since Bond called asking Graves to be fired.

I know its off-limits to compare anything with Watergate, but the U.S. Attorney scandal does at least have one Watergate quality: Why did Nixon/Bush ever think it was worth it? Just as the actions that led to Watergate quickly strayed from its original goal of re-electing Nixon, U.S. Attorneys also seems unrelated to the presumed goal of lasting Republican power in government.-MB

Marc W. Everson, a former commissioner of internal revenue, wins this blogger over with his proposal– laid out in a New York Times editorial– to get the executive branch outside of Washington, D.C. Everson argues that there’s no reason that the 1.8 million federal employees and 64 federal agencies should almost all be based in (to quote George Clinton) chocolate city and its vanilla suburbs. In fact, having everyone around D.C. is a bad idea, because the cost of living is so high. Why not move agencies to less expensive places that could revitalize local economies while also doing more to attract nationwide talent?

Everson said the four core cabinet level agencies– Defense, Justice, Treasury and State should stay close to the White House. But even sub-agencies like Justice’s Drug Enforcement Administration ought to re-locate.

To reiterate, I think this makes a lot of sense. In the internet age, I don’t see how oversight of the executive branch will be harder because DEA is in Cleveland. It might in fact empower these agencies. Maybe civil servants will have more of a sense of independence — and a feeling they’re doing something useful for the country — if they’re not working at a federal building in Washington, D.C. or Bethesda, Md.

I’d be interested to hear what readers think about this. Are their pitfalls to such a shake-up that I’m not considering?-MB

This seems really, really important. Candace Rondeaux and Javed Hamdard of the Washington Post’s Foreign Service report that U.S. military officials have once again stated that five civilians– and 30-35 Taliban insurgents– died in a Aug. 22 U.S. airstrike in western Afghanistan. Yet the Afghanistan government and the United Nations still contend that not five but 90 civilians died in the airstrike. The Post interviews a local shopkeeper who claims 13 members of his family were lost in the raid.

While the airstrike has still not made front-page headlines, its changed the dynamic in Afghanistan. President Hamid Karzai is now demanding a code of conduct for the U.S. military. Yet instead of negotiating with Karzai, the U.S. military is declaring he’s 85 deaths off-base in his assessment of the airstrike’s collateral damage.

Last night at the Republican National Convention neither Fred Thompson nor Joseph Lieberman once mentioned Afghanistan. It’s becoming increasingly clear, though, that Afghanistan will define the first year of the next president as much, if not more, than Iraq.-MB

After just three weeks, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement junked their "Operation Scheduled Departure" where 457,000 undocumented immigrants had the chance to turn themselves in exchange for….not being detained, I guess. The New York Times reports the final tally to be eight people that came clean to the Dept. of Homeland Security’s ICE officials.

The Times editorializes that cynical Bush administration officials designed Scheduled Departure to fail– as they sought to prove that undocumented immigrants are dishonest criminals. Maybe. But it could just be another example of how directionless immigration policy has become. ICE agents are supposed to prioritize undocumented immigrants who may actually have a criminal past and pose a danger. But their raids indiscriminately seek to boost the number of rounded-up immigrants. Unfortunately for ICE, Scheduled Departure didn’t do much to bolster those figures.-MB

The Washington Post’s Dana Hedgepath reports that Boeing may not bid on a $35 billion Air Force contract to build midair refueling tankers. The Pentagon is currently finalizing the terms of the bidding, which was expected to put Boeing up against the combo of Northrop Grunman and a subsidiary of the European Aeronautics Defense Space Co. 

Boeing’s gripe appears to be that they want six months to put together their proposal and the Pentagon is expected to provide 45-60 days. The extra time is needed because Boeing might need to use a different, bigger plane than expected to provide the Air Force’s "gas stations in the sky."

As Understanding Government has outlined, the battle over the midair refueling tankers could make a very long, and actually pretty entertaining, book. It involves John McCain in full-out maverick mode investigating Boeing and John McCain in full-out K Street mode helping European Aeronautics lobbyists. It also includes lawmakers who need to produce Boeing jobs for their constituents, two lawsuits before the World Trade Organization, and whether the Air Force can ever do anything right again. Stayed tuned.-MB

The New York Times’ Eric Lichtblau reports that the President is entrusting the FBI to open a criminal investigation against somebody "without any clear basis for suspicion." Attorney General Michael Mukasey promises, however, that the FBI would still need a "valid purpose" for any investigation. Mukasey’s vague assurance has unsurprisingly not satiated Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who are convening a September hearing on the FBI’s expanded powers.

What’s not clear is what extra power the FBI is getting and whether they will use it in a way that either helps solving a crime or undermines someone’s civil liberties. Lichtblau does helpfully lay out some of the controversial new powers the Bush administration has given federal investigators. Hopefully journalists and the public will know sooner than later how these tools are being used.-MB

The Washington Post’s Del Quentin Wilber reports that a federal appeals court struck down a 2004 Environmental Protection Agency ruling that states and local govt. cannot have their own air pollution monitoring. The EPA rule had said that since the federal govt. already has standards under the Clean Air Act to monitor pollution from power plants, factories, and oil refineries, local govt’s couldn’t make their own rules. Four environmental groups brought the suit to court.

The courts have been almost as disdainful toward the Bush administration’s interpretation of the Clean Air Act as enviros. Judges have thrown out past industry-friendly rules on mercury emissions and controlling air pollution, comparing EPA with the capricious Queen of Hearts, and saying the agency is living in a humpty-dumpty world. Hopefully the next administration can put the Clean Air Act back together again.-MB

Sort of. The Washington Post’s Marc Kaufmann gives as detailed a look as one can about the two presidential candidates’ plan for NASA. Both candidates were once lukewarm about more NASA funding, but now support an additional $2 billion or so in new cash.

The differences lie in the fact that Obama is proactively supporting President Bush’s unfunded vision to build a new generation of spacecraft by 2015 and (gasp) explore Mars by 2020. McCain, meanwhile, seems more interested in calling Obama a hypocrite than focusing attention on NASA’s needs.

All in all, neither candidate is equating NASA with a wasteful federal government, which has occasionally been the case in the past. This may have more to do with wooing Florida voters, though, than a deep comittment to the space agency.

For more on NASA stick with Understanding Government. For more on Obama, McCain tune in elsewhere.-MB

The Washington Post editorializes this morning against a dubious sounding labor regulation proposed by the Office of Management and Budget. OMB would strip Occupation Safety and Health Administration scientists from their duties of assessing the risk of workplace. Instead, workplaces would only be monitored by the Dept. of Labor after the existence of a toxin there has been proven.

If you think this sounds like too late in the process, then you have a friend at the Washington Post. You don’t have any friends, however, at OMB, which has proposed a series of end of the administration regulations that do away with scientific assessment panels. The Bush administration’s battles with scientists live on.-MB