The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration is reportedly investigating more than 70 jokes or inappropriate statements that IRS agents felt were threatening since the Feb. 18 attack on an IRS building. Colleen Kelley, national president of the National Treasury Employees Union, told reporters on Tuesday that dozens of taxpayers have made jokes or comments about attacking the IRS since disgruntled taxpayer Joe Stack flew an airplane into the IRS’ Austin office. Some have cracked wise about wanting to take flying lessons while talking to the IRS about their audit, Kelley said, but TIGTA isn’t laughing. IRS employees “didn’t think it was…
Former Democratic Rep. Eric Massa’s bizarre explanations for his departure from Congress have been an endless source of entertainment this week. Any conspiracy involving health care reform, nude Rahm Emanuel, tickle fights, and Navy rituals likened to Caligula is just too good to be true. But what I love most is that because Massa first claimed the extent of his inappropriate behavior was grabbing a male staffer and saying “What I really ought to be doing is frakking you,” the sci-fi show Battlestar Galactica’s fictional profanity is now being used on the nightly news.* For those of you who are confused, here’s BSG…
Cass Sunstein, the Obama administration’s “regulatory czar,” gave a speech at the Brookings Institution this afternoon. Regular readers are probably familiar with most of its content — the open government directive, OMB’s dashboards for transparency and IT projects. But Sunstein made a couple of interesting points on the limits of open government initiatives.
Many agencies use a single e-mail messaging system across all departments and offices. That’s not the case at the Agriculture Department, which operates 27 different e-mail systems, USDA Chief Information Officer Christopher Smith told a House Agriculture subcommittee Wednesday. Only the largest departments within the USDA have modernized and use shared e-mail systems. The other departments and agencies operate as they have for years — separately and without collaboration. Each office is responsible for monitoring and maintaining its own e-mail system, which is time consuming and slows down the USDA’s modernization, Smith said. This fragmented approach has hampered USDA’s ability…
In another outstanding piece of investigative journalism, the Daily Show’s Jason Jones uncovers the vast conspiracy linking the U.S. Postal Service, the Catholic Church, and Reservoir Dogs star Harvey Keitel. Read between the lines, people. [HTML1]
UPDATE: The White House has formally announced Harding’s selection. From President Obama’s statement: I am confident that Bob’s talent and expertise will make him a tremendous asset in our ongoing efforts to bolster security and screening measures at our airports. I can think of no one more qualified than Bob to take on this important job, and I look forward to working with him in the months and years ahead. ORIGINAL POST: CNN and other news organizations are reporting that the White House is going to tap retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert Harding to head the Transportation Security Administration. Under…
FBI employees now scattered in four locations in the Phoenix area will move into a new 200,000-square-foot office building about two years from now. The General Services Administration announced Wednesday it has selected the Phoenix office of construction firm Ryan Companies to build the $62 million facility. The building will be owned by Ryan and leased to GSA for use by the FBI under a 20-year lease. Many companies apparently competed for the build-to-suit lease project, indicating the high level of interest in government projects in a time of economic uncertainty in the construction industry. John Strittmatter, president of Ryan’s…
Here’s a story crying out for the sound of a sad trombone. The Federal Aviation Administration yesterday suspended an air traffic controller at JFK Airport and his supervisor for allowing two children visiting the airport’s tower last month to direct at least five planes. The FAA has suspended all unofficial visits to towers and radar rooms while the incident is being investigated, and Administrator Randy Babbitt stressed that “this lapse in judgment not only violated FAA’s own policies, but common sense standards … [and] does not reflect the true caliber of our workforce.” And in case anyone thought otherwise, the National Air Traffic Controllers…
Roughly 2,000 Transportation Department employees who had been furloughed earlier this week were ordered to return to work Wednesday morning. The order came late Tuesday night after Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., relented and allowed a vote on a bill that would extend unemployment benefits and provide transportation funding. Bunning objected that the bill would add $10 billion to the deficit and wanted Congress to find a way to pay it, and began blocking it Feb. 25. The blockage meant Transportation didn’t have the funds to pay employees at the Federal Highway Administration, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, National Highway Traffic…
The White House has declassified much of a cybersecurity initiative developed during the George W. Bush administration. The release of Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative’s 12 key goals is part of the Obama administration’s quest for transparency, said Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt in a March 2 White House blog post announcing the declassification. Bush created the initiative in 2008 and few details were available about it before the March 2 release. Schmidt wrote: We will not defeat our cyber adversaries because they are weakening, we will defeat them by becoming collectively stronger, through stronger technology, a stronger cadre of security professionals,…