I’ll be appearing on News Channel 8’s Federal News Tonight this evening to discuss the U.S. Postal Service’s inability to rein in contracting abuses and other misconduct by former executive Robert Bernstock. Tune in between 7:40 and 7:55 p.m. to catch my interview.
Monthly Archives: July, 2010
USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack just said that he has apologized to Shirley Sherrod and offered her a civil rights job at the agency. CNN reports Sherrod has not yet decided whether she will accept. Vilsack will also meet with the Congressional Black Caucus later today in his effort to rein in this rapidly spiraling snafu.
What a difference a day makes in the Shirley Sherrod fiasco. According to three sources who spoke to Politico’s Ben Smith, White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina praised the speed at which the administration acted, and reportedly said Tuesday morning: We could have waited all day — we could have had a media circus — but we took decisive action, and it’s a good example of how to respond in this atmosphere. And here is White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, just a few minutes ago: Without a doubt, Ms. Sherrod is owed an apology. I will do so on behalf…
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said today he is further reviewing the case of Shirley Sherrod, who resigned under pressure Monday as part of a growing racial controversy. The conservative website Biggovernment.com, run by Andrew Breitbart, on Monday posted an edited video of Sherrod, who is black, telling a story about a 1986 incident where she didn’t help a white farmer as much as she could have. But the full video shows Sherrod’s story was meant to illustrate the importance of moving beyond race. In it, she describes how she first steered the white farmer to a white lawyer who could…
UPDATE: Here’s GSA’s statement: “GSA encourages the use of social media technologies to enhance communication, collaboration and information exchange in support of GSA’s mission. GSA is currently in negotiations with NFFE to go through normal labor management processes to reach resolution. Last fall, GSA successfully completed negotiations with another labor organization representing GSA employees on this same issue.” The National Federation of Federal Employees today said negotiations with the General Services Administration have broken down over a social media policy for GSA employees. NFFE said GSA’s new rules on social media could result in an employee getting fired for posting…
CNN has an interview with Shirley Sherrod, an Agriculture Department official who stepped down yesterday after a video surfaced where she describes a 1986 incident where she didn’t help a white farmer as much as she could because of his race. The NAACP applauded her resignation, but Sherrod — who was USDA’s director of rural development in Georgia — said the comments in the video don’t tell the whole story, and said the incident took place before she joined USDA. What do you think? Did Sherrod cross the line? Or is this a puffed-up controversy?
The Energy Department today expanded its digital outreach efforts by launching a blog, a Facebook page and a Twitter account. The department already has a You Tube channel and a Flickr page, and Energy Secretary Steven Chu has more than 13,400 fans on his own Facebook page. Expanding its social networking efforts is part of a larger attempt to increase transparency, make the department more accessible to average Americans and better engage with citizens, Chu wrote in the inaugural blog post. Our goal is to use the Energy Blog and our other social media outlets to show you who we are, what…
The Washington Post this morning has a must-read story illustrating how massive, unwieldy and redundant the federal government’s post-9/11 security mission has become — and questioning whether it’s actually made us safer. Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Dana Priest and writer William Arkin’s three-part, two year investigation found that “after nine years of unprecedented spending and growth”: Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence at about 10,000 locations nationwide. About 854,000 people hold top secret security clearances. In the Washington area, 33 complexes for top secret intelligence work — the equivalent of three Pentagons…
The Obama administration has yet another dashboard on the way. Dan Gordon, head of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, told Federal Times in a statement that the administration will launch a dashboard to track agencies’ progress on acquisition reform later this summer. The administration has had its much-ballyhooed IT dashboard up and running for about a year, and is working on another dashboard to track agencies’ progress toward “high priority performance goals.” Dave McClure at GSA is also working on something called a “citizen dashboard” that we probably won’t see until sometime next year. Some agencies, apparently realizing that…
The water metaphors were flowing at yesterday’s Senate Budget Committee hearing on federal contracting. In his opening statement, Office of Federal Procurement Policy administrator Dan Gordon mentioned the massive growth in government contracting over the last decade. He said that acquisition workers “couldn’t cope with this tsunami of buying that was taking place.” Not to be outdone, Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse later said that “more than half a trillion dollars a year and climbing is clearly a geyser of taxpayer funds that needs to be carefully watched.” Either way, it sounds like taxpayers are taking a bath.