With the kickoff of the holiday shopping season this weekend, I’ve been hearing a lot about how we all need to spend, spend, spend to keep the economy afloat. It appears the government has taken that message to heart. Some early procurement figures reported by the Project on Government Oversight today show the government spent more than $510 billion on procurements in fiscal 2008. That number is likely to grow as agencies are still reporting their 2008 spending. The final 2007 spending number was between $440 billion to $465 billion, depending on which government procurement information website you choose: the…
Yearly Archives: 2008
No surprises from the president-elect’s press conference this morning. You can read about Obama’s national security team, and watch the conference, on the transition Web site. But there was an interesting bit of language in Obama’s introduction of Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, his nomination for Homeland Security secretary: She understands the need for a homeland security department that can respond to terrorist attacks and respond to catastrophes. What’s interesting is the part about “respond[ing] to catastrophes.” That’s the responsibility of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. And there’s been a lot of talk about removing FEMA from DHS and restoring it…
Hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving weekend! (Back to reality, now.) A quick heads-up: The president-elect will hold his fourth news conference in a week at 10:40 this morning. He’ll announce his national security team, which is expected to include Sen. Hillary Clinton at State and Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano at the Homeland Security Department. Both have received strong praise from experts and colleagues — and their management styles are profiled in this week’s Federal Times. We’ll have a full rundown of Obama’s national security picks after the press conference.
An obscure provision in the U.S. Constitution poses a potential roadblock on Sen. Hillary Clinton’s path to becoming Secretary of State. It turns out that the Constitution (specifically Article I, Section 6) prohibits a lawmaker from taking any goverment job for which the salary was raised during the lawmaker’s elected term. As the Washington Post and numerous bloggers have noted, this would effectively preclude Clinton from taking the State Department gig. Salaries for Cabinet secretaries have been increased twice since Clinton started her second term as the junior New York senator in January 2007: to $191,300 in January 2008 and…
Thanksgiving is tomorrow. Let’s talk turkey shall we? How about 271 million turkeys for starters? That’s the number of turkeys that were raised in the U.S. since last Turkey Day, according to the Census Bureau, the keeper of all fun facts. According to Census the average American consumes 13.3 pounds annually. Here’s what else Census has to say about other Thanksgiving eats: The U.S. cranberry industry produced 689 million pounds of cranberries this year, up 5 percent from last year. And surprise, Wisconsin, not Massachusetts, leads the nation in cranberry production. Approximately 1.8 million pounds of sweet potatoes were harvested…
Attention government travelers, buyers and drivers: You may be immersed in the presidential transition (and have plans to flee work for the holiday weekend), but don’t forget this weekend is another transition…to the new government purchase, travel and fleet charge cards. At 11:59 p.m. Nov. 29 your old SmartPay cards will be useless, so be sure to have the new cards at the ready. That’s what David Shea, director of the General Services Administration’s SmartPay 2 program, tells us here at FedLine. Shea has these tips for feds who may be working this holiday weekend and need to use their…
MSNBC is reporting that John Brennan has just taken his name out of the running to be the next Director of Central Intelligence. Speculation that Brennan, a member of president-elect Barack Obama’s transition team, was a leading candidate to run the CIA sparked serious criticism from some who believed Brennan supported torturing terrorism suspects. In today’s letter to Obama, Brennan firmly denied those accusations: It has been immaterial to the critics that I have been a strong opponent of many of the policies of the Bush Administration such as the preemptive war in Iraq and coercive interrogation tactics, to include waterboarding. The…
12:06 PM: Obama reiterated his pledge to go “line-by-line” through the federal budget looking for failed programs: Budget reform is not an option. It’s a necessity. We can’t sustain a system that bleeds billions of taxpayer dollars on programs that have outlived their usefulness. We simply can’t afford it. 12:00 PM: On top of yesterday’s economic team announcements, the president-elect made two more official nominations today: As expected, Congressional Budget Office director Peter Orszag will take over as head of the Office of Management and Budget; Rob Nabors, the staff director of the House Appropriations committee, will be Orszag’s deputy…
This morning’s meeting of the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board brought some sobering statistics on the Thrift Savings Plan’s performance in October. And investors continue to pull their money out of plummeting stock-based funds for the safety of the securities-backed G Fund, just as they have for most of 2008. Unfortunately, there’s no certain relief in sight for the economic troubles that are dragging the TSP down. Yesterday Citigroup became the latest bank to receive financial assistance from the federal government. Stocks rose today with the news of Citigroup’s bailout, as well as president-elect Barack Obama’s proposal for a $700 billion…
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., has introduced a bill which would freeze the “midnight rulemaking” that takes place at the end of an administration. The bill, H.R. 7296, would impact any regulation adopted in the final 90 days of a presidency. It would prevent those rules from taking effect until 90 days after the new president appoints a new agency head. So if the incoming president doesn’t like a new rule at, say, the Interior Department, his new Interior secretary could cancel the rule within 90 days of taking office. It’s an interesting idea, though it seems to us a bit…