I spent some time this afternoon analyzing the Postal Service’s year-to-date business, and the numbers aren’t good, to say the least. Mail revenue and volume are dropping far faster than the Postal Service expected at the beginning of the fiscal year — so postal officials could find themselves hundreds of million of dollars short of their projected $76.2 billion revenue this year. Data and graphs are after the jump. But first I should note that these numbers are a little imprecise, because they’re based on data from the first two quarters of 2009 (the third quarter ended on June 30,…
Monthly Archives: July, 2009
Alyssa Rosenberg over at Government Executive’s blog thinks it’s reasonable to get rid of the color-coding in the Homeland Security Advisory System. I would go a step further and say it’s reasonable to scrap the whole thing. The system is ineffective because the “alert level” is stuck in the middle of the scale. It has been either yellow or orange since the system was created 7 years ago — except for a few days in 2006, when it went to red because of the British airline plot (and the red level only applied to the airline industry). That’s understandable. DHS…
While researching a story on how civilian government vehicles are armored against bombs and gunfire, I stumbled upon this fascinating article about the first armored car used by the government. The day after Pearl Harbor, the Secret Service pressed Al Capone’s confiscated 1928 Cadillac into service to transport President Franklin D. Roosevelt to Congress to deliver his famous “infamy speech” asking for a declaration of war against the Axis Powers. The night of Dec. 7, 1941, the Secret Service worried that German or Japanese agents might try to assassinate FDR, so they decided to drive the president around in armored cars…
BoingBoing, the self-proclaimed “directory of wonderful things,†points out an interesting exchange in a State Department town hall meeting Sec. Hillary Clinton and Undersecretary for Management Patrick Kennedy held Friday. Here is what BoingBoing quoted from the meeting’s transcript: MS. GREENBERG: Okay. Our next question comes from Jim Finkle: Can you please let the staff use an alternative web browser called Firefox? I just – (applause) – I just moved to the State Department from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and was surprised that State doesn’t use this browser. It was approved for the entire intelligence community, so I don’t…
The Senate yesterday afternoon confirmed Robert Groves as the next director of the Census Bureau. The confirmation comes at a critical time for the Commerce Department bureau, which is about to undertake its once-a-decade tally of the U.S. population. Groves has the skills to tackle this challenge, top senators say. From 1990-1992, he was associate director for statistical design, standards and methodology at the Census Bureau. For the last eight years, he has directed the University of Michigan Survey Research Center. “Dr. Groves is a brilliant social scientist, he has impeccable credentials and the administration would have had a hard time…
The House Oversight and Government Reform committee voted last week to approve H.R. 22. And during the hearing, Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., made what sounded to me like a very questionable assertion: At each hearing the news about the state of the Postal Service’s finances has gone from bad to worse… postal officials have notified us they will have trouble making their payroll. The first part of this statement is undeniably true. But I was skeptical of the second part, about not making payroll, so I checked in with the Postal Service. And the Postal Service tells me it never…
Dr. Regina Benjamin, a family practice doctor who works with the rural poor in Alabama, is President Barack Obama’s choice for surgeon general, Obama said Monday. Obama praised Benjamin’s commitment to health care and to providing access to care for those who can’t afford insurance. She is the founder of the Bayou Le Batre Rural Health Clinic in Bayou La Batre, Ala., a fishing village, and has served as its chief exective officer since is founding in 1990. Benjamin has rebuilt the clinic several times, including after it sustain heavy damages by Hurricane Georges in 1998 and Hurricane Katrina in…
A few of you have written to me asking for a copy of the Booz Allen Hamilton report on changing government that I discussed in a story last month. You can find the report on their Web site here.
GSA announced last night that it has awarded a contract for the Recovery.gov redesign; the $18 million contract went to Smartronix, a Maryland-based IT firm. It beat out 58 other bidders. The first part of the contract is worth about $9.5 million through January; other options, which extend through January 2014, are worth another $8.5 million or so. Redesigning the recovery site is a big undertaking; it needs to be online by mid-October, when state and local governments start reporting their stimulus spending data. You’ll find more details about that in my interview with Earl Devaney from last week; we’ll…
The House Homeland Security Committee plans to mark up a bill on Thursday that would kill the Transportation Security Administration’s Performance Accountability and Standards System. In its place, HR 1881 would move roughly 45,000 screeners to the General Schedule system most federal employees are currently under. Unions criticize the PASS pay-for-performance system as unfair, and say it is driving many screeners to leave TSA. The bill would also grant collective bargaining rights to screeners, also known as transportation security officers. This would likely set off a battle between the American Federation of Government Employees and the National Treasury Employees Union…