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From the Top: City of Rats

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 06 May 2008 07:00:00 EDT

Washington, D.C., is lousy with rats, and not just of the human variety. I knew that before moving here—you’d always see them scampering around sidewalks and alleys when walking around town—but it took living full-time in the city to appreciate both the awe-inspiring magnitude of the infestation and the jaw-dropping indifference of a municipal government more focused on giving free money to billionaires than addressing the capital’s legendary civic rot.

On my very first trip to the supermarket as a bona fide Beltway resident, a little black rat darted between the feet of everyone in the checkout line. While the customers eeked, the Safeway employees just laughed and laughed. At my new rowhouse, I noticed packs of the critters clattering through the neighborhood’s front yards, including my own. There were scores of gaping rat-holes in the dirt, and the trees were full of day-rats (otherwise known as squirrels) during sunlight hours. Some time soon after the beginning of the Chinese Year of the Rat, my pregnant wife walked downstairs and reached for her bag on the couch, and out jumped a plump young rodent.

I began making inquiries to exterminators, colleagues, and panicky urban websites, and what came back was a Stephen King hellscape. “We can trap what’s inside right now and plug up some holes and establish a perimeter outside,” the first rat-assessor told us. “But there’s no way to keep them out of your house in this neighborhood—they just come right up through the sewers.” Yep, the old rat-in-the-toilet urban legend, only this time it was true. Another exterminator just shrugged and told us to “put pressure on the city,” though he knew it was futile.

My colleague Michael Moynihan had rats build a complicated nest inside the engine of his car, chewing through various wires and hoses. While throwing the contents of a second engine-nest into an open dumpster (D.C.’s trash-management tidiness being just a step or two above that of Naples, Italy) he noticed dozens of beady rat-eyes inside staring up at him disapprovingly. Recently, his wife slammed on her brakes in front of an intersection, and a rat plopped out from under the hood.

Vermin complaints to the city government were up 8 percent in 2007. In October of that year, self-described “rodent experts” Dale Kaukeinen and Bruce Colvin released a nationwide study naming Washington the fifth-most- vulnerable city to a major spike in rat population, a prediction that seems more likely than ever after yet another mild winter. The National Zoo has such a bad infestation that two adult pandas were killed by rat poison a few years back. “Mayor Anthony A. Williams declared war on the rats in the late 1990s,” Washington Times columnist Tom Knott wrote in February, “and the rats won.”

What made my reacquaintance with rodents much more difficult to accept was that it came during the very month that the city was congratulating itself for a gleaming new expenditure of local taxpayers’ money—a $611 million stadium to house the Washington Nationals baseball team. Actually, that figure is much too low: Eminent domain settlements with in-the-way property owners added $43 million to the cost, and a handful of outstanding cases could tack on $24 million more. There were also $32 million in municipal infrastructure improvements.

So how much is $710 million in the scheme of D.C.? More than 12 percent of the city’s annual local budget. (It receives an additional $4 billion or so from the federal government.) It’s almost as much as the $773 million that Mayor Adrian Fenty is proposing this year to spend on the District’s notoriously awful public schools. Less than 10 days before Nationals Stadium first flung open its doors, Fenty announced various remedies for a $96 million budget shortfall: postponing a tax cut on commercial property, doubling the cost of a business license, increasing ambulance fees, charging an extra 23 cents for every phone line that can call 911.

Oddly, the Washington Post and other local newspapers didn’t draw any connections to the stadium, despite the $38 million in annual debt service it requires—a figure certain to go up during the current credit crunch. Perhaps the paper was too busy with its multiple gushing special sections about the facility, including such headlines as “The City Opens the Ballpark, And the Fans Come Up Winners.”

It’s not like the non-baseball services Washington provides are famous for their effectiveness. The potholes in the roads would embarrass a Romanian. The neighborhood papers are filled with complaints that violent crimes like carjacking and assault don’t rise to the level of police interest. (In 2000, when I reported being mugged during my first visit to the city, the police told me there was nothing they could do except check the Lost and Found once in a while for my wallet.) Our local library admitted that the online book-reservation system is not tethered to physical reality, and that in fact they have no real idea at any given time whether or not they have a book.
It has taken us four visits to the Department of Motor Vehicles to come even close to registering our car locally.

Unfortunately for the rest of you, the chasm between unsexy nuts-and-bolts services and dazzling new municipal-built edifices is the rule, not the exception, of big-city governance. In Los Angeles, my former city representative, Tom LaBonge, was tolerated as an eccentric for being the only member of the 15-member City Council to express genuine interest in street repairs (though the road in front of my house still had craters large enough to hide a baby). When a coalition of black, brown, and lefty-white politicians took over city government early this decade, one local alternative weekly urged the council to “think big” and not get bogged down in mere “pothole politics.”

It’s a startling mindset to observe up close, as I did for two years of jawboning with civic leaders on the L.A. Times editorial board. Councilmen always talk of “doing deals” and “putting together projects,” by which they mean real estate. Nearly two dozen governmental authorities—city, regional, county, state—have some power of eminent domain over the area, and they use it to build five-star hotels, reward campaign contributors, and erect schools that declining enrollment levels have rendered utterly unnecessary. Civic leaders are always proposing some new property-related “moratorium”—on converting apartments into condominiums, fleabag hotels into attractive rentals, and unused patches of hillside into homes. “Thinking big” inevitably means horse-trading bits of the city’s famously onerous red tape in return for developers delivering preferred social goals, such as guaranteeing “living wage” union jobs, building “green” rooftops, and providing for “affordable housing” units.

After a while, one starts to feel like a lonely crank constantly criticizing a city for delivering ever-worse essential services while spending ever-more money on government salaries and ever-more time butting into the private sector. Especially when the private sector has given up the intellectual fight.

One of my last editorial board visits was with Tim Leiweke, who owns the Staples Center, the Los Angeles Kings hockey team, and the largest new real estate development in town, a project called L.A. Live. I expected a guy who works with the famous conservative tycoon Phil Anschutz to be at least halfway skeptical about the intersection of City Hall and private real estate development, but when I asked him about his biggest frustration with public policy downtown, he replied: “The gap between the haves and the have-nots.” If we don’t have more affordable housing and living wage union jobs, Leiweke warned, “There’s gonna be a day of reckoning here that’s not going to be pretty.”

Maybe that’s why local politicians line the pockets of billionaire sports tycoons like Leiweke: Give ’em enough money, and intrude enough into their business, and they’re almost bound to go native. Now if only they could be trained to care a little less about stadiums and a little more about rats.

Matt Welch is reason’s editor in chief.

Office of Thrift Supervision: Now With More Thrift!

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:08:00 EDT

Walking by the large, ugly Office of Thrift Supervision, situated on some prime real estate near the White House on G Street, I always figured it was one of those edifices to irony--like the little notice about the Paperwork Reduction Act that's printed at the bottom of umpteen billion sheets of government paper.

Turns out they're actually in charge of thrifts over there--savings and loans and the like. Still, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson seems to think it's just as useless as my imagined lumpy government-owned structure dedicated to efficiency.

Among changes, Treasury wants to merge the Securities and Exchange Commission, the U.S. markets watchdog, with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that is charged with overseeing the activities of the nation's futures market.
It also recommends getting rid of a Depression-era charter for thrifts that was intended to make it easier to obtain mortgage loans, saying it is no longer necessary. That would mean closing the Office of Thrift Supervision and transferring its duties to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency that oversees national banks.

Thrifty, indeed.

Regulate it and They Will Lobby

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 08:32:00 EDT

Writing in New Hampshire's Union Leader, 20/20 star and friend o' reason John Stossel makes a familiar-to-reason-readers yet always underappreciated point about the influence of lobbyists and perversity of reform. Clip 'n' save for the Naderite (or McCainiac, or Obamaphile) in your family.

The Public Choice school of economics calls this the problem of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. Individual members of relatively small interest groups stand to gain huge rewards when they lobby for government favors, but each taxpayer will pay only a tiny portion of the cost of any particular program, making opposition pointless. [...]
"Good government" types rightly abhor this influence-peddling, but they propose pointless reforms like bans on lobbyist-sponsored gifts, junkets and rides on corporate jets. They also back a vicious assault on free speech: campaign-finance restrictions designed to reduce the influence of lobbyists in political campaigns. Despite all these "reforms," influence-peddling goes on.
For good reason. None of the reforms gets near root of the problem.
The root is government power. When government is free to meddle in every corner of our lives and regulate the economy through taxes, regulation and subsidies, then "special interests" have every incentive to work on the politicians to preserve their turf or gain an advantage. [...]
The irony is that the "good government" types favor big government, so they undermine their own efforts to eliminate corruption. [...]
There is one way to rid the political system of this sort of corruption: severely restrict government power as the founders intended. Only when we eliminate the state's ability to meddle in business will business will stop meddling in government.

Whole thing here. Stossel in reason here.

Being in Congress Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry...

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 15:48:00 EST

Rep. Henry Waxman, the mastermind behind the latest waste of congressional time (and taxpayers' money), says that he's sorry about this week's idiotic foray into whether Major League Baseball players, most notably Roger "The Rocket" Clemens, used performance-enhancing drugs.

Then again, it's not the Congressman's fault:

"I'm sorry we had the hearing. I regret that we had the hearing. And the only reason we had the hearing was because Roger Clemens and his lawyers insisted on it," Waxman said.

Clemens' lawyer says that Waxman is dishing junk:

Clemens' lawyer, Rusty Hardin, disputes Waxman's claims, calling the congressman's statements, "unbelievable, disingenuous and outrageous."
"He is the one who created this circus in the first place," Hardin said.

More here.

And some recent reason stuff on the matter here.

Here, Matt Welch raises the question of why Congress was wondering if Clemens' buttocks ever hosted a "palpable mass," which sounds like something that happens between confession and Easter services

Once More, with FEMA

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 07:21:00 EST

Mike "Brownie" Brown's past agency is still doing a heckuva job, says the AP. Trailers supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency literally stink--with the fumes of formaldehyde:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency came under new withering criticism Thursday after tests found dangerous levels of formaldehyde fumes in many of the trailers the agency used to house hurricane victims in Louisiana and Mississippi....
FEMA Administrator R. David Paulison said Thursday the agency would rush to find temporary housing for roughly 35,000 families now in its trailers. "We're moving as fast as we can," he said.
The agency was forced to act after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that formaldehyde fumes from hundreds of trailers and mobile homes were, on average, about five times what people are exposed to in most modern homes.

More here.

I've got no idea whether five times the fumes of "most modern homes" really means anything--I'm assuming the baseline in the latter is effectively zero. Or what health risks are associated with the formaldehyde. I do know that thousands more trailers have gone unused because FEMA didn't realize the ground they'd be on was too soft for such structures.

In the go-go world, where we eat standing up and are always on the run, looking to save time and do more, more, more in less time, can we agree to this: Let's start saying FEMA instead of SNAFU or FUBAR. We save a letter in each case, and it's clear that the one acronym will do the work of the two other words.

Why Jeff Flake is No Flake

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 15:39:00 EST

The scurvy scourge (?!?) of bipartisanship has returned to the nation's not-quite-paper-of-record. From the Wash Post:

Exploiting a deep well of voter revulsion over partisan gridlock in Washington, Sen. Barack Obama is promising to do something that has not been done in modern U.S. politics: unite a coalition of Democrats, Republicans and independents behind an agenda of sweeping change....
In Washington, bipartisanship for decades has been synonymous with compromise and incrementalism....
Obama is promising something very different, what skeptics call an oxymoron: sweeping bipartisan change.
"I think the American people are hungry for something different and can be mobilized around big changes, not incremental changes, not small changes," Obama said Saturday night. "I think that there are a whole host of Republicans, and certainly independents, who have lost trust in their government, who don't believe anybody is listening to them, who are staggering under rising costs of health care, college education, don't believe what politicians say. And we can draw those independents and some Republicans into a working coalition, a working majority for change."

The voice of reason in the story is Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who notes:

Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said bipartisanship tends to produce the worst that Washington has to offer -- transactional politics where lawmakers scratch one other's backs without regard to the bigger picture. Pork-barrel spending goes unchallenged because members of both political parties know that by objecting to one project, they jeopardize their own, Flake said.
"Partisanship is underrated. There is a time and place for it, and more time and place than we realize," he said.

You said it, brother. Whole thing here.

If you're desperate for bipartisanship, then remember the Medicare prescription drug benefit and No Child Left Behind, and a thousand other feel-good legislative acts that passed in the just-passed age of bitter partisanship. Note too that the big "bipartisan" successes of the Clinton years, ranging from NAFTA to welfare reform to balanced budgets, were the result of hyper-partisan campaigns and arm-twisting, not any calls to buddy-buddy change.

In 2006, Flake, who does propose annually a bipartisan bill to end the Cuba embargo, explained in reason why the Republicans don't deserve libertarian votes: "There's nothing we've done as Republicans that ought to make libertarians excited about our record." No wonder, then, that the GOP purged him from his post on a big committee in January '07.

Slate's Jack Shafer pours some cold water on bipartisanship too, noting the advantages of its opposite number:

Gridlock was built into our political system to prevent the hasty passage of laws based on someone's good (or bad) intentions. (When Congress does nothing, at least it does nothing wrong.) Political rifts are wonderfully useful. Just as branches of government are supposed to watch other branches, political candidates are supposed to check and balance those they oppose.

In our Feb. 2007 issue, reason prophesied "what to expect from the long-awaited, much-anticipated return of gridlock."

Teaching Kids How City Hall Really Works

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 11:16:00 EST

Eric Dondero hips us to a pretty funny ad for Travis Irvine, who ran for mayor of Bexley, Ohio, and actually pulled in the mid-single digits in this week's elections.

Click below to view the commerical at Reason.tv:

A Simple Plea for Federalism

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 09:11:00 EDT

Columnist Ron Hart looks at the desires of some folks in Vermont and some in the Southern League who want to secede from the U.S. and each other. He proposes a federalist solution:

My solution to the unworkable yet appealing idea of secession is to devolve more powers to the states and fewer to Washington. It is what our Founding Fathers intended. And if you read the Federalist Papers, you will realize that they never intended our central government in Washington to be this expansive and overbearing.

If you want an abortion, then move to a state that allows it. If you want to smoke weed, then go to California. If you think that we should pay for everything a lazy welfare person demands, then go to a state that gives them flat-screen TVs and, instead of government cheese, offers an assortment of French cheeses that are both delicious and presented in a pleasing manner.
The basic reason that we fought for our independence is to do what we damn well please as long as it does not harm others. Yet at every turn, the federal government seems to want to make us do as they think we should, even if it comes down to using windmills, driving a Toyota Prius, or now, being forced to join the Hillary Health Care Plan....

Our free-spending federal government thinks it is doing things well, and is filled with enough hubris to believe that it should tell other countries what to do - it calls it foreign policy. The real answer is that less money and power need to be vested with them and more at the state level.

Generally speaking, I couldn't agree more. Now, how do we get there?

His whole column here.

Nothing to See, Here

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 09:23:00 EDT

Josh Marshall reports that the State Department outsourced investigation of the Blackwater incident in Iraq.

To Blackwater.

Calling All Presidential Candidates: Who Will Stand Up and Be Transparent?

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 11:51:00 EDT

Presidential aspirants Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), and Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) don't agree on very much.

When it comes to immigration, stem-cell research, abortion, health care, trade--you name it, basically--these three get along about as well as Reggie Jackson, Billy Martin, and George Steinbrenner did during the Yankees' legendarily fractious 1977 season.

But they alone among would-be White House occupants have signed a trans-partisan initiative that has the potential to radically transform not just the presidency but the way the federal government does business. Obama, Brownback, and Paul have all signed The Oath of Presidential Transparency, a pledge to follow through on two actions.

First, signatories agree to conduct "THE most transparent Administration in American history--a lofty, laudable, far-reaching goal. This oath signals that whether it's earmarks, directives, or ongoing management of taxpayer expenditures, the goal of transparency will be evident throughout all policy making aspects of your Administration."

Second, signatories commit their presidential administrations "to full and robust implementation of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (FFAT Act) of 2006." The heart of that legislation, co-sponsored by Obama and Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) in the Senate and signed into law last year by President Bush, is the creation of a free, searchable website that will list every recipient of every federal award.

Regardless of ideology or partisan affiliation, this is something that every American--with the possible exception of lawmakers who prefer to shroud their activities out of guilt, shame, fear, or some combination of the same--can get behind. Estimated to cost a relatively measly $15 million between now and 2011, the searchable database will give watchdog groups, government reformers, and regular citizens unprecedented amounts of information about where taxpayer dollars are going and how their elected representatives are behaving.

"Knowledge is power," said Francis Bacon. And knowledge of how the federal government is spending our money is a crucial step forward in empowering voters and improving the functioning of American democracy.

The FFAT- authorized database, which will be operated by the Office of Management and Budget, is supposed to be up and running by January 1, 2008. But it's one thing to pass well-intentioned legislation and another thing entirely to implement and enforce it.

Hence, The Oath of Presidential Transparency, a project spearheaded by the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes the print and online editions of reason. Joining together three dozen diverse groups ranging from the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons to the Electronic Frontier Foundation to the voter-rights outfit Velvet Revolution, the Oath provides voters with a crystal-clear understanding of the candidates' priorities when it comes to government spending. (Go here for a complete list of participating organizations.)

"Signing the Oath of Presidential Transparency was a no brainer for me," says Rep. Paul, the first candidate to put his name on the pledge. " I will aggressively pursue full openness and accountability within my administration if elected president."

"Every American has the right to know how the government spends their tax dollars, but for too long that information has been largely hidden from public view," says Sen. Obama, whose role in creating FFAT can't be overstated. "This historic law will lift the veil of secrecy in Washington and ensure that our government is transparent and accountable to the American people. And I will be proud to fully implement and enforce this law as president."

"Americans need to feel they can trust their government," says Sen. Brownback. "As president I will continue my record of supporting policies that increase government transparency and boost confidence in our democratic system."

The Reason Foundation's director of policy development, Amanda K. Hydro, tells me that she has repeatedly contacted the campaigns of every declared presidential candidate in the Republican and Democratic parties who met Federal Election Commission filing requirements.

So far, only Obama, Brownback, and Paul stand in the sunlight by supporting transparency in government spending. As the 2008 race for the White House shifts into high gear, perhaps Hillary Clinton, Rudolph Giuliani, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, and the other candidates will take the pledge for transparency (if and when they do, you'll read about it on Reason Online).

Or perhaps they will see fit to stay in the shadows.

Which, in its own way, will tell prospective voters all they need to know come November 2008.

Nick Gillespie is editor-in-chief of reason.

Honest and Open Thievery

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 06:49:00 EDT

In a letter posted at Congress.org, a constituent praises Rep. Harry Mitchell (D-Ariz.) for his "brilliant intellect." As evidence, Mitchell's admirer cites the congressman's vote for the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007.

The margin by which the act passed—411 to 8 in the House, 83 to 14 in the Senate—takes some of the shine off Mitchell's brilliance. Still, he's probably smart enough to realize what his colleagues evidently understand: Congress's new honesty and openness are not what they're cracked up to be.

The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act requires that special appropriations added by individual legislators be listed in an online database at least 48 hours before they come to a vote. Critics such as Sens. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) complained bitterly about a loophole: Congressional leaders can certify that a bill contains no earmarks, and there's no way to challenge that determination.

A deeper problem is that publicity does not deter wasteful, parochial spending that legislators want to publicize. Consider what happened last month when Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) challenged a $100,000 appropriation for a prison museum near Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

The earmark's sponsor, Rep. Nancy Boyda (D-Kan.), defended the honor of Leavenworth County, bragging that "we probably have more prisons...than any other county in the United States." She indignantly added that "the local residents are proud of their heritage and rightly so," since Leavenworth has hosted the likes of George "Machine Gun" Kelly and Nazi spy Fritz Duquesne.

The House approved Boyda's earmark by a vote of 317 to 112. Later she told The New York Times, "Democracy is a contact sport, and I'm not going to be shy about asking for money for my community."

So far this year the Democratic House has approved spending bills that include some 6,500 earmarks, not quite keeping pace with the Republicans' record of nearly 16,000 in 2005 but more than twice the whole-year total of a decade ago. Far from shaming legislators into fiscal restraint, the Times reports, "the new transparency has raised the value of earmarks as a measure of members' clout" and "intensified competition for projects by letting each member see exactly how many everyone else is receiving."

Congressional shamelessness likewise may undermine the goals of the new Senate ban on anonymous holds. A hold occurs when a senator refuses to let a bill or nomination proceed by unanimous consent, thereby requiring the measure's supporters to muster 60 votes to allow consideration of the measure.

Holds obviously can be used for purposes that offend supporters of limited government—to extort pork, for example, or obstruct fiscal reform. But any tool that blocks legislation is apt to do more good than harm. Notably, the hold's defenders include fiscal conservatives such as Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) as well as big spenders such as Robert Byrd (D-W.V.).

Still, it's hard to find fault with the new requirement that senators publicly identify themselves and state their reasons when they block legislation. We just shouldn't expect too much as a result of this openness. As with earmarks, legislators don't try to hide their actions when they're proud of them, even if they shouldn't be. Interestingly, no one put a secret hold on the secret hold ban.

Transparency may also prove overrated as a way of preventing lobbyists from influencing legislators by arranging campaign contributions. The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act requires public disclosure of "bundles" totaling $15,000 or more in a six-month period. Like the new attention to earmarks, highlighting these donations may simply spur competition, as K Street's denizens strive to keep up with their neighbors.

Although honesty and openness are surely preferable to dishonesty and secrecy (in politics, at least), they're not an adequate solution to a government that does too much and is therefore a magnet for people seeking gifts and favors. If a pickpocket becomes a mugger, he becomes more open and honest, but that doesn't make him more admirable.

Will Someone Put a Secret Hold on the Abolition of Secret Holds?

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 12:14:00 EDT

The Senate version of the ethics bill that Katherine Mangu-Ward mentioned earlier today includes a rule change that would abolish anonymous "holds" on legislation. "Over the past 50 years," says The New York Times, "the Senate hold—one of the most secretive backroom weapons in Congress—[has] been used to tie the chamber in knots by allowing senators to block legislation and nominations anonymously, and to do so for reasons as simple as pique or payback." That sounds pretty bad, but a hold is simply a senator's refusal to go along with legislation to which he objects. By preventing a bill from advancing by consensus, he forces his colleagues to muster 60 votes in its favor. "Though leaders can break a hold with a 60-vote majority," says the Times, "they have often been reluctant to do so out of respect for the tradition—and the chance they might want to impose a hold of their own some day."

Holds obviously can be used for purposes that offend supporters of limited government—to block earmark reform or to extort pork, for example. The Times notes that in 2003 "Senator Larry E. Craig, Republican of Idaho, openly put holds on 850 Air Force promotions while he demanded cargo planes for the Air National Guard in his state." But any maneuver that helps block legislation is apt to do more good than harm. Notably, both fiscal conservatives like Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and big spenders like Robert Byrd (D-W.V.) are fans of the hold.

Still, it's hard to see how requiring senators to publicly identify themselves and state their reasons for blocking a bill can hurt, although it may not help much. The abolition of secret holds suffers from the same weakness as the abolition of secret earmarks. As the Craig example illustrates, legislators don't try to hide their actions when they're proud of them, even if they shouldn't be.

Congress: Now With More Ethics!

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 10:50:00 EDT

The House just passed a "sweeping" ethics bill, and the Senate plans to do the same this week. (Question: Why are ethics bills always "sweeping"? Is there something about ethics that brings to mine pre-vacuum housekeeping in particular?) Dems say the bill was aimed at "repairing Congress' corruption-sullied image." The bill requires disclosure of "bundled contributions," where lobbyists raise and take credit for many individual contributions that are currently reported separately. It also requires disclosure for earmarks, ending the practice of congressman adding pork without attaching their names.

Apparently, almost everyone wants more ethics:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., all but dared Republicans to try to block the proposal when it comes to a vote as early as Thursday. "With that resounding vote in the House, 411-8, I think people ought to be concerned about voting against it," he said.

The unethical eight:

Democratic Reps. Lacy Clay (Mo.), Allen Boyd (Fla.), John Tanner (Tenn.), Emanuel Cleaver (Mo.), Neil Abercrombie (Hawaii) and John Murtha (Pa.) opposed the measure. GOP Reps. Jeff Flake (Ariz.) and Joe Barton (Texas) also voted against the bill. Murtha, who has gotten into ethical scrapes with one lawmaker this year, routinely has opposed ethics changes.

Kelo-a-Go-Go

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 11:09:00 EDT

Here's good news on the eminent domain front in Ohio:

Cincinnati must pay $335,000 in attorney and witness fees to the owners of two fast-food restaurants in Clifton Heights who successfully challenged Cincinnati's right to use eminent domain.
That's the ruling by Hamilton County Common Pleas Judge Ralph Winkler, whose written decision included a stern scolding of Cincinnati for the way it tried to take the owners' properties.
"The City of Cincinnati should in the future be very careful when it initiates eminent domain proceedings against private-property owners," he wrote. "In this case, the city lost taxpayers' money to legal fees and expenses."

The city was trying to demolish an Arby's and a Hardee's in an area they bogusly claimed was blighted. More here.

Read reason's interview with Scott Bullock, the attorney who argued Kelo v. New London in front of the U.S. Supreme Court here.

And here's our whole megillah on eminent domain abuse.

Is This Anyway To Run the War on Terrorism?

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 13:55:00 EDT

Hoo-larious hijinks from the Maxwell Smarts at Transportation Security Adminstration. Turns out when they're not seizing breast milk from airline passengers, they're throwing out sensitive documents improperly:

Homeland Security officials are being warned not to toss secret documents that could compromise transportation security into the ordinary trash after hundreds of such papers marked "sensitive" reportedly were found in a city trash container near the Orlando International Airport in Florida.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) used its most recent newsletter to tell employees not to throw away outdated materials stamped as "Sensitive Security Information" (SSI).
"There have been recent news stories about a young person who went Dumpster diving near a major airport and found an airport binder that contained documents marked as [SSI]", the newsletter said.

More here.

TSA Follies in detail here.

Hillary Clinton: Liberaltarian?

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 20:03:00 EDT

It hurt just typing that. And it's really just a shameful ploy to get you to read this post.

But NTU reports :

Presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton (D-NY) has proposed cutting 500,000 government contractors and saving taxpayers $18 billion a year.

Senator Clinton also wants to create a government database that would track the effectives of government agencies. The federal government, to some extent, already performs this service. But, there’s always room for more accountability and less spending.

Taxpayers should be happy that the Democratic frontrunner has called for more accountability and an $18 billion cut in federal spending. We’ll be waiting patiently for her tax reform and entitlement overhaul proposals.

I've heard some policy people suggest we establish a BRAC -like commission to hunt down anachroisitc and ineffective government agencies and programs for elimination. Seems like a good idea.

The obvious question with Hillary's proposal is if the jobs those contractors perform would also be eliminated, or if they'd merely be transfered back to full-time federal employees. And take any calls from Mrs. Clinton for "more transparent" government with a fistful of salt. On the other hand, Al Gore's "Reinventing Government" program actually did quite a bit of good.

Hurricane Katrina: A Full Employment Act for Federal Fraud-Busters

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 06:59:00 EDT

More than 18 months after Hurricane Katrina decimated the Gulf Coast, authorities are chipping away at a mountain of fraud cases that, by some estimates, involve thousands of people who bilked the federal government and charities out of hundreds of millions of dollars intended to aid storm victims.
The full scope of Katrina fraud may never be known, but this much is clear: It stretches far beyond the Gulf Coast, like the hurricane evacuees themselves. So far, more than 600 people have been charged in federal cases in 22 states - from Florida to Oregon - and the District of Columbia.
The frauds range in value from a few thousand dollars to more than $700,000. Complaints are still pouring in and several thousand possible cases are in the pipeline - enough work to keep authorities busy for five to eight years, maybe more.

The AP reports that 150 to 250 new cases continue to be referred to investigators a week and that some 9,600 cases are being investigated. More here.

In a special section in our December 2005 issue, Reason looked at Katrina and the failure of public policy. And in our December 2006 issue, Neille Ilel looked at how unconventional groups plugged the gap left by traditional aid groups in New Orleans. Read all about it here.

Reformers vs. the Old Guard

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 12:09:00 EDT

"Since November 7, we really have three groups of Republicans," says Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.). "We have the born again, who are fiscally conservative and remember what it means to be a Republican. We have the unmoved, those who've got gavels and positions they like and slots they're happy with. Then we have the tired. They're tired of trying to move the unmoved."

Kingston considers himself one of the born again. He also considers himself outnumbered. He has watched morosely as his increasingly statist party resisted reform since losing control of Congress in 2006.

Many libertarians and pro-market conservatives had hoped the election would jolt the GOP and give it a chance to rebuild-just as Newt Gingrich and his allies rebuilt the party after it lost the presidency in 1992, girding it to take over the House of Representatives for the first time in four decades. "I think what brought them down was a tin-earedness to what the public was looking for," says Erick Erickson, the managing editor of RedState.com. After the election, Erickson's blockbuster blog and its Republican readers campaigned for the party to shake up its leadership and adopt a new policy path: to "control spending, restrain the growth of government, and be good public stewards."

Instead the party re-elected its frustrating leaders. In the Senate, big-spending Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott was given the powerful whip job, four years after his praise of Strom Thurmond's segregationist presidential campaign had apparently killed his career. Early in 2007, House Republicans kicked Arizona's libertarian-leaning congressman Jeff Flake off the powerful Judiciary Committee after he criticized the party's drift on CBS.

Washington's Republicans are divided between a minority that wants to reform the party and a majority that doesn't think the GOP's defeat had anything to do with its addiction to spending. If you want to see which faction takes the lead, here are four legislators to keep an eye on, at least until 2008: two reformers and two from the old guard, two in the House and two in the Senate.

Sen. Jim DeMint (S.C.)
After Election Day but before the new Congress took office, the leaders of the lame-duck House and Senate planned to quietly pass the bills left on the docket and slither back to their districts. Then DeMint and a fellow freshman senator, Oklahoma's Tom Coburn, blocked the year's remaining spending bills and successfully kept spending at its previous levels until the new Congress was sworn in.

DeMint is at his best frustrating both parties' bad ideas about fiscal, regulatory, and entitlement issues. In 2005, when the president's campaign for Social Security privatization went on its long, slow journey into the reef, the party winced and waited for the debate to end. DeMint introduced legislation to put Social Security taxes into hypothetical GROW (Growing Real Ownership for Workers) accounts, preventing the money from being spent on other programs and creating the potential for total privatization. He even got a vote on the idea in March 2006, though only 45 fellow Republicans supported it.

Because senators have more autonomy than their counterparts in the House, DeMint has been able to challenge Democratic leaders on reforming earmarks, the legislative add-ons that members of Congress use to designate revenue for pet projects in their states and districts. DeMint actually beat Majority Leader Harry Reid in a January vote by pushing for the House Democrats' version of the earmark reform bill over the weaker Senate version, which excluded most earmarks from disclosure rules.

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (Texas)
"A couple of years ago Bo Derek was coming up here, campaigning for the bill to ban horse slaughter," remembers Jack Kingston. "Here's a woman who deserved the title of 10 in her day; now she's at least a 9.7. Jeb looked this beautiful woman in the eye and said, ‘Listen, I understand where you're coming from, but this is a free country. An animal is property, and its owner has the right to do what he wants with that property. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean we should ban it.'"

Hensarling, the newly elected chairman of the anti-tax, anti-spending Republican Study Committee, is a man obsessed with the budget. In the waning days of the Republican majority, Hensarling supported "alternative" budgets that were smaller than the GOP's own, including one with $103 billion in highway spending cuts, $630 billion in tax cuts, and a phase-out of Medicaid.

"When he was in the majority he was willing to vote against the rules, which is the absolute defiance of GOP leadership," says Redstate.com's Erickson. "If you think they're willing to spend that much money, taking that kind of a stand against them is something you can only do if you're willing to be not liked."

In his first term, Hensarling co-sponsored the Family Budget Protection Act, which would have mandated caps on both mandatory and discretionary federal spending. It included the creation of an anti-spending, anti-waste commission that would have proposed budget cuts for Congress to approve or reject in a single vote.

As leader of the party's small-government caucus, Hensarling has been tasked to, as his allies say, "recover the Republican Party brand." That mission is hampered by two pols from the "unmoved" wing of the party.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (Texas)
Next to the re-election of House leaders John Boehner and Roy Blunt and the comeback of Trent Lott, no maneuver disheartened fiscal conservatives as much as the elevation of Texas' senior senator to the Republican Policy Committee, which sets the party's congressional agenda. Hutchison is known for her hardball campaign skills but not for her policy smarts.

"I know a lot of people on the Hill who said it would be disastrous," says Brandon Arnold, government affairs director at the Cato Institute. "She was following Sen. John Kyl [of Arizona], who had hired smart people from think tanks, turned the RPC into a reliable resource, turned out good stuff. People were saying, ‘This will come to an end.'"

In power, Hutchison hasn't shown interest in using the committee as a fulcrum to move the party toward spending, tax, and government cuts. While other Republicans wanted to fight a minimum wage increase this year, for example, she suggested passing it with some business tax cuts to sweeten the deal.

Rep. Jerry Lewis (Calif.)
The highlight of the former chairman's tenure at the Appropriations Committee was his campaign for the job. In 2004 Lewis traveled the country and emptied his coffers to support Republicans; he pledged that as chairman he would support small-government values.

Instead, he presided over the Appropriations Committee as Congress broke records for attaching earmarks to bills. As the 2006 elections approached and voters raged about congressional corruption, Lewis scuttled Republican earmark reforms that, among other things, would have revealed which members were larding up which bills. At the same time, contractors were working with Lewis' lobbyist friend Bill Lowery to make sure their projects were greenlighted. That attracted the attention of the FBI. Lewis' response to being investigated? He fired 60 investigators who had worked for the Appropriations Committee.

Unlike DeMint, Hensarling, and Hutchison, Lewis lost power when the new Congress was sworn in. But don't write him off as a has-been. He remains the highest-ranking Republican on the Appropriations Committee; if the GOP retakes power in 2008, he will almost certainly snatch back the gavel. He also represents the Republican majority that re-elected the party's leadership. "He's not someone people look at and get confidence that the Republicans are going to limit spending or run the government in a fiscally responsible way," says David Keating of the pro-market Club for Growth.

Another way of putting it: Lewis and Hutchison are not people who make libertarians want to vote Republican. Whether the party rediscovers the fiscally conservative side of its soul depends on whether it is politicians like them, or like DeMint and Hensarling, who take the lead.

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

Why It Is More Blessed to Give: Campaign Contributions

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 17:10:00 EDT

Michael Brush at MSN's "Money Central" reports on an academic paper that tries to quantify the benefits businesses get from giving to government. Some of the findings, as he reports them:

Corporations that give the most have beaten the market by 2.5 percentage points a year over the past 25 years.......
What is surprising is how much companies get for so little money. The public companies that do give money, on average, fork out just $1,700 to $2,000 per campaign and support an average of 56 federal candidates in each two-year cycle.
......The best approach to giving, for instance, isn't to buy a single lawmaker. Rather, companies that contribute to the largest number of political campaigns get the biggest benefit.
"Much like a venture capital portfolio of many startups, a few of the supported candidates will 'pay off big' and result in increases in firm shareholder wealth," says the study, which tracked the impact of more than 1 million corporate campaign contributions by about 2,000 companies from 1979 to 2004.

The study is called "Corporate Political Contributions and Stock Returns," issued in October 2006 by Michael J. Cooper at the University of Utah and Huseyin Gulen and Alexei Ovtchinnikov, both of Virginia Tech. It finds the best-leveraged investments in politicians are to more powerful ones (such as committee heads), to home-state candidates, and to House candidates generally--who are in charge of launching tax and budget law. Also:

Though companies support Republicans more than Democrats ($43,000 per election cycle compared with $31,000, on average), they get a bigger payoff by supporting Democrats. Companies that tilt their contributions to the left, and to home-state candidates, outperform the market by 3 percentage points a year, on average.

Brush's full story here .

Full study about which Brush was reporting here .

Heckuva' Job

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 08:50:00 EDT

The Washington Post reports :

Stored in such places as the vacant land near an airfield in Hope, Ark., an industrial park in Cumberland, Md., and a warehouse in Edison, N.J., are the results of one of the federal government's costliest stumbles in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina -- tens of thousands of empty trailers.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency hurriedly bought 145,000 trailers and mobile homes just before and after Katrina hit, spending $2.7 billion largely through no-bid contracts. Now, it is selling off as many as 41,000 of the homes, netting, so far, about 40 cents on each dollar spent by taxpayers.
Thousands more of the homes -- critics say more than 8,000 -- have never been used and cannot be sold immediately, even though scores of people in the South have been made homeless by recent storms.

The Imaginary Adventures of the U.S. Senate

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 12:20:00 EST

On June 8, 2006, as Congress mulled a measure to repeal the estate tax, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California rose to oppose the proposal. "Now is not the time," the Democrat declared, "to place the interests of a small number of millionaires ahead of millions of working families." She continued in this vein for over 1,100 words, then yielded the floor to Sen. Mitch McConnell. The Kentucky Republican took the opposite point of view, declaring the levy "one of the most destructive, unfair taxes ever conceived by government." Then more senators took their turns at the microphone, arguing one side or the other: Mike Enzi, Tom Harkin, Lamar Alexander, Carl Levin, John Kerry, Orrin Hatch, Conrad Burns, Gordon Smith, Barbara Mikulski, John McCain. Barack Obama called the proposal "the Paris Hilton tax break," which probably prompted some chuckles in the gallery.

Or would have, had he actually said it. Though all that activity appears in the Congressional Record, none of it really occurred. Only eight senators participated in the debate; the others -- everyone listed above -- pasted their remarks in later. What looks like a long exchange of ideas is in effect a series of press releases composed by the senators or their staffs, dropped into the Record to look like they were spoken aloud on the floor. In theory, such additions are supposed to be underlined or marked with a black dot -- a rule added after Rep. Hale Boggs (D-La.) somehow managed to give a speech on the House floor while he was dying in an Alaska plane crash. But if you go to the Congressional Record's website and examine its account of June 8, you will find no dot, no understroke, no change in typeface, no sign at all that when Sen. Feinstein begins to speak you have exited history and entered a loquacious fantasy.

In the grand scheme of Washington's deceits, this may seem like small potatoes. But it's blocking an effort to make Congress' proceedings more accessible to ordinary citizens.

Click.TV is a small Internet company launched last year; its product is, in effect, a new form of digital editing. Users can mark any part of a video clip with text comments, then click to any section that they've tagged. So where 20 years ago a family might have shot an hour of home-movie footage then gathered 'round a projection screen to watch the whole thing, and five years ago might have edited the footage into a 10-minute highlight reel, now anyone in the family can mark his own highlights and flip freely from one indexed moment to another, like skipping pages in a book. Obviously, this has applications beyond home movies: The liberals at ThinkProgress used it, for example, to make an annotated version of this year's State of the Union Address. "The player is designed to be blogged and emailed," says Perla Ni, special projects advisor at the company.

To show the product's potential, Click.TV launched a nonprofit demonstration project on the side. Metavid, an open-source effort at UC-Santa Cruz, has been building an impressive online archive of all the House and Senate floor proceedings from January 2006 forward, with a function that allows you to look for the terms that interest you -- "surge," "McCain," "bituminous coal," whatever -- by searching the accompanying closed-caption feed and jumping to the appropriate clip. The Click.TV crew thought they could improve the interface by adding their Flash-based software to it; they also thought they could improve the search function by using the official transcript of the debate rather than the typo-ridden, poorly synchronized captions, which frequently miss words or display them at the wrong times.

Ni and her colleagues assumed this would be a simple task. Then they discovered the transcripts didn't match the tapes -- and that the government wasn't willing to provide them with a pre-edited version of the daily Record. "If we have a clean transcript, it's not at all hard to synchronize it," she explains. "We did it with Steve Jobs' speech in about 10 minutes." (In another demonstration project, Click.TV created a searchable indexed edition of Jobs' keynote address at MacWorld 2007.) "The time and cost is creating a clean transcript. The only way to do it is to manually watch the video and cut out the portions of the Congressional Record that did not take place." Ni expects it to take about 4,000 man-hours to clean up their 2006 footage alone -- and at the moment, they only have two people on the job.

They may manage to pull it off: They're creating a nonprofit group to handle the project and, with outside funding, get more transcriptionists at work. (The options being considered range from outsourcing the alternate Record to typists in the Philippines to establishing an open wiki that relies on dispersed volunteer labor.) Meanwhile, Metavid itself is constantly improving its archive. "We have advanced searches in which you can search 'what is being said,' 'who is saying it,' and 'when it was said,'" notes Abram "Aphid" Stern, co-creator of the project. They have also introduced an interface that overlays outside data on the video -- letting you see, say, each congressman's campaign donors as he speaks.

But in the meantime, Click.TV's project has slowed to a crawl. A useful tool for anyone who wants to keep an eye on the government -- reporters, bloggers, activists, everyday constituents -- has been withheld, and completing it has become ridiculously labor-intensive. (A beta version, covering just the day of the estate-tax vote, can be found on the Click.TV site.)

That isn't the only problem with letting members of Congress rewrite history. The Congressional Record doesn't just exist for journalists and curious voters. If there's a dispute about how to interpret a law, courts often look at the debate that preceded the vote to discern the legislators' intent. But if the Record includes arguments that weren't actually made and, thus, did not affect any other congressman's vote, the additions can distort more than just a transcript.

For an example, look at Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the military commissions established to try the Guantanamo detainees violate the Geneva Conventions. During the runup to the decision, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) filed a brief arguing that the court shouldn't be able to judge the plaintiff's complaints, since the "text, history, and purpose of the Detainee Treatment Act confirm that Congress intended to withdraw federal-court jurisdiction to review the detention-related claims of Guantanamo detainees." This intent, they argued, was "confirmed" by the legislative history of the act, which featured an "extensive colloquy" between Sens. Graham and Kyl on the subject.

Alas, the colloquy was as fictional as Feinstein's fulminations against repealing the estate tax. It was inserted into the Record after the fact but was written to give the impression that it wasn't, complete with lines like "I have just been handed a memorandum on this subject" and even an imaginary interruption by Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.). Slate's Emily Bazelon contacted Brownback's office to ask about his cameo, and got an interesting response:

I called Brownback's office to ask if he'd given this testimony live on the Senate floor. "Yes, it was live," an aide told me. I said that I'd been told otherwise by Senate staffers and mentioned the C-SPAN tape. "Let me call you back," the aide said. She never did.

Interestingly, the Graham/Kyl brief notes that the text of the Congressional Record "is presumed to reflect live debate except when the statements therein are followed by a bullet...or are underlined." Since the text in question was not bulleted or underlined, the senators seem to be implying, it must have happened as written.

The good news is that it has become less difficult to spot such abuses. "It's not as easy to slip things in as it used to be," says Bernadine Abbott Hoduski, who spent 21 years as a staffer at the Joint Committee on Printing, which oversees the office that produces the Congressional Record. One reason reformers brought TV cameras into Congress, she recalls, was a belief that they "would keep members from making things up and would force them to more accurately reflect what's going on on the floor. And I think that did happen. I am more optimistic than I was in the '70s, when I saw a lot of abuses."

Yes, things could be better. "If you look at the Canadian parliament, right there on their homepage there are live webcasts, there are verbatim transcripts, there are transcripts for all the committees," says Ni. But the U.S. Congress isn't interested in adopting that much transparancy. "If we were fundraising for Click.TV to do this service for parliamentary proceedings in Russia," she notes wryly, "it would be so easy to get USAID money. But there's very little government money to do this in the United States."

Fortunately, forces outside the government haven't been so reluctant. C-SPAN has gone online, and has declared just this week that it is loosening its copyright policy to "allow non-commercial copying, sharing and posting of C-SPAN video," making the visual record even more accessible. And programmers keep creating tools to search, index, edit, quote, remix, and retransmit that footage. As that happens, it won't just get easier to find deceptions in the Congressional Record. If the official account of our leaders' behavior remains unreliable, the video record of what actually happened may simply supplant the printed record of what our solons wish had happened.

Jesse Walker is reason's managing editor.

The Government Makes Stuff Up

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 10:28:00 EST

If you find this surprising , you haven't been paying attention:

Nearly all of the terrorism-related statistics reported by the U.S. Justice Department and the FBI from the September 11 attacks until early 2005 had some inaccuracies, the department's inspector general said on Tuesday.
[...]
The report found that only two out of 26 statistics were accurate after reviewing the number of terrorism convictions in the 2003 and 2004 financial years, the number of convictions or guilty pleas from September 11, 2001, through February 3, 2005, and the number of terrorist threats tracked by the FBI in 2003 and 2004.
"We found many cases involving offenses such as immigration violations, marriage fraud, or drug trafficking where department officials provided no evidence to link the subject of the case to terrorist activity," the report said.

Looks like it may be time to fire the inspector general.

Shifting Government for Shrinking Cities

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 13:18:00 EST

The November issue of Governing has a very interesting article by Christopher Swope--and I note it not because of the libertarian bonafides of either the magazine, which has none, or of the article in and of itself--about how governments like that of Youngstown, Ohio, are coping with the fact that everyone with any sense is running like hell out of town.

It involves giving up on some traditional government programs like low-income housing tax credits and subsidies--as Youngstown Mayor Jay Williams said, "A brand-new house constructed between two houses that need to be demolished — we’re not doing anybody a favor"--in favor of some new ones, like spending lots of local government bucks on demolishing abandoned properties. Also, some taking advantage of federal mandates such as those that require developers to create new wetlands for old wetlands their development destroys--Youngstown is full of land just begging to be turned back into swamp, and thanks to government mandates, that can be worth gold to developers.

The summation of the problem that many governments of smaller (and getting even smaller) industrial cities in the midwest are facing:

Instead of accepting decline and trying to manage it in a deliberate way, mayors tend to gravitate toward revitalization plans that involve building convention centers and sports arenas and subsidizing hotels and shopping malls. They also get into desperate fights with the Census Bureau over population estimates and counting methodology. “How many politicians in America will stand on a soapbox and say, ’I’m going to lead this city and we’re going to shrink it?’ ” asks Joseph Schilling, a professor at Virginia Tech’s Metropolitan Institute.

The point of the story is: a lot of them are going to have to. As a study of how bureaucrats try to adjust to changing circumstances, well worth a read.

Least Surprising News of the Day

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 16:41:00 EST

A survey of federal workers finds that just 22 percent agree with the statement "Pay raises depend on how well employees perform their jobs."

The employee survey was conducted during the summer of 2006. More than 221,400 employees completed it, for a response rate of 57 percent. The pay-and-performance question received the highest negative rating in the survey, OPM said.

But it was not the only troublesome response in the survey. About 35 percent of the federal employees said promotions are not based on merit, 36 percent did not see differences in performance "recognized in a meaningful way," and 33 percent said bonuses do not depend on how well employees perform their jobs.

Cato's Chris Edwards, who recently endured the wrath of the civil service mafia for daring to suggest federal employees might—just might—be overpaid, provides the standard libertarian talking points. The response from labor leaders is worth a spit take:

John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said the survey results say less about the current pay system and more about why a performance-based system would not work in federal agencies.
"I think the survey response indicates most federal workers don't trust a system by which they would be compensated or receive raises based on how they are judged on their performance by their managers," Gage said. "Federal workers don't believe that they are compensated based on their performance but on other more subjective factors."

What other "more subjective factors" could possibly be a better determinant of what a federal worker's salary ought to be than his actual performance? His looks? His taste in music?

On a related note, happy "National Return Your Shopping Cart to the Supermarket Month." Here's a public service announcement , courtesy of your salary-commensurate-with-subjective-factors-other-than-performance civil servants at the Census Bureau. Don't forget bread trays and milk crates, too!

Rip-Off in the Heartland

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 09:36:00 EST

It's good (non) work if you can get it. And then there's the severance package!

One city of Cincinnati employee received a $25,662 payout last year - for days off she earned despite not showing up to work for almost a decade, city documents show.
Christine M. Hicks was able to keep her $40,000-a-year job as a cleaning supervisor for nine years, until a whistleblower alerted the city manager's office to the ghost job in late 2005.
City Council held hearings, the city manager demoted the Public Services director, and Hicks retired with a disability pension in April 2005. Case closed - until she received the $25,662 cash-out in June.
All told, Hicks received nearly $350,000 from city taxpayers for not working.

That from a Cincy Enquirer account. Here's the punchline:

Hicks' unusual severance might not have come to light at all - except that she's now complaining to City Council that her payment wasn't big enough...."I am not able to get the wheels of justice to move without your powerful assistance and attention," she wrote in a letter to council members Dec. 26.

Whole thing here.