All about sequestration

The ugly comes after sequestration, after March 27 we will need a new continuing resolution.

Courtesy of GovLoop:
DoD program managers can talk sequestration with contractors
Sequestration affecting congressional hiring, so at least they are feeling some of the pain on Capitol Hill.

Sequestration treadmill picking up steam across DoD

Are contractors exaggerating sequestration impact?

The entire sequestration process is completely opaque.

Of course congress could simply repeal the Budget Act of 2011, pass a new continuing resolution and be done with it.

Crashing the congressional server

Constituent e-mails to House clog system

Overwhelming interest in the debate over healthcare legislation has clogged the House system that allows constituents to send e-mails to their members directly through the House website and lawmaker Web pages.

Congressional staff can easily discern the difference between individual citizens using the web contact form and advocacy groups using bulk email. The weekly mail reports indicate not just the number of contacts on a given issue pro and con, but also the number of individual citizens versus bulk email. If you want your communication to make a difference, use the member's web contact form. Advocacy groups use bulk delivery systems to monitor how many contacts they mobilized, but it is not useful from the point of view of influencing a member.

The anonymice go after Rep. Jane Harman

We love smearing people. Not only is it fun, it is a great way to distract the public and avoid accountability.



CQ had an article alleging a prid pro quo between Rep. Harman and AIPAC.

Two former senior national security officials, one who has read a transcript of the wiretap and a second who was briefed on its contents, said Harman agreed during the conversation to “waddle into” the AIPAC case “if you think it’ll make a difference.” Their accounts were confirmed by a third source with knowledge of the wiretapped conversation and subsequent events.

First of all, why are the contents of this transcript being leaked? What public interest is being served? If this is part of a legitimate investigation (that is, authorized by a warrant), then it has been compromised. If there is no warrant, than this is the politicization of the NSA. Harman seems to think it might be the latter.

Ron Kampeas at Capitol J has a good run down of all the problems with this article.

Notice how these disasters invariably involve anonymous sources? How long before one of your clients gets smeared in such a manner?

Never be an anonymous source.

Edit - Why the anonymice might have gone after Harman.

How not to lobby Congress

It seems that a trade association, America’s Health Insurance Plans, told Congressman Pete Stark that a trio of TV reporters were on its speaker list. The only problem: it wasn't true.

From Representatives Stark's office:

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- “On Friday I sent a press release suggesting that three journalists, Nancy Snyderman and Robert Bazell of NBC News and Susan Dentzer of the PBS' NewsHour, participate in America’s Health Insurance Plans’ (AHIP) Speakers Network,” said Stark. “According to these journalists, AHIP and/or the Leading Authorities Speakers Bureau added them to this network without their approval and without their knowledge. I therefore apologize to each for suggesting that they contracted with the insurance lobby.”

“Again, my apologies to the three journalists for associating them with this reprehensible lobby. But as is often the case, AHIP’s actions speaker louder than my words. That the insurance lobby would add journalists to their speakers network without approval smacks of the kind of dishonesty they regularly employ. Not only does AHIP lie about health care policy, they also besmirch the reputations of journalists.”

Brillant AHIP, not only have you offended the chair of the subcommittee with jurisdiction over legislation affecting your members, you have also offended three very high profile journalists. How do you justify the dues your members pay?

e-Discovery; not just for email anymore!

The Big Picture has been following the House Committee on Government Oversight and unearths this little Instant Messaging gem from S&P analysts:

Rahul Dilip Shah: btw: that deal is ridiculous

Shannon Mooney: I know right ... model def does not capture half of the risk

Rahul Dilip Shah: we should not be rating it

Shannon Mooney: we rate every deal

Shannon Mooney: it could be structured by cows and we would rate it

Instant Messaging and social media are going to add a whole new element to records management and e-discovery.

PR lessons from the bail out blunder

Misread

From a PR perspective, the question arises of how the President and Speaker could have miscounted so badly. How could they have assumed that the House would go along with a bill that enraged millions of Americans?

From the point of view of our democracy, it is a very bad sign that they would attempt to railroad through legislation that is so clearly unacceptable to the vast majority of their constituents. This is not over, there will be a re-vote this week, so they may yet succeed in subverting the public will. This is not a proud moment for our country.

Angry constituents crash the congressional server

DorobekInsider: House.gov overwhelmed

AP is reporting that the House of Representative’s Web site was brought to its knees yesterday as people flooded the site seeking information on the vote to reject the Wall Street rescue plan.

The numbers must have been astronomical, as the server is designed for waves of public pressure. The worker bees of Capitol Hill IT have been working very hard indeed.

George Soros is half right

Paulson cannot be allowed a blank cheque

By George Soros

The bill submitted to Congress even had language in it that would exempt the secretary’s decisions from review by any court or administrative agency – the ultimate fulfillment of the Bush administration’s dream of a unitary executive.

Mr Paulson’s record does not inspire the confidence necessary to give him discretion over $700bn. His actions last week brought on the crisis that makes rescue necessary. On Monday he allowed Lehman Brothers to fail and refused to make government funds available to save AIG.

In my opinion, the management of Lehman Brothers and AIG are responsible for the failure of their companies. It will be a very good thing if it is made clear that there is no such animal as too big to fail. In my never-was-humble-opinion nothing else will serve to cure the hubris that played such a large role in the present debacle.

Soros' book, The Age of Fallibility: The Consequences of the War on Terror, is filled with insight and highly recommended.

Edit -
Soros proposes an alternative plan, I am not sure I like it; but it is certainly superior to what the Senate passed last night.

The Wall Street crisis and its lessons for net neutrality

Art Brodsky

The laws regulating the telecommunications world and those regulating the financial world have a joint history. The Communications Act of 1934 wasn’t passed in a vacuum. It was part of a new generation of laws that passed after the Depression, including the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. A law was passed in 1935 giving the Federal government the power to regulate interstate electricity, which updated a 1920 law governing water power much as the Communications Act updated the Federal Radio Act of 1927.

The Communications Act, as with the laws of the same era, was passed with the intent of protecting the public from the abuses of private industry. The basic tenets of non-discrimination were written into that law. If regulators do their jobs, everyone wins – the industry makes money and provides services, and consumers aren’t harmed. If regulators don’t do their jobs, and/or if a compliant Congress passes laws allowing for an industry to run wild by taking away federal regulation, then it’s a different story. That’s what happened in financial services and in telecommunications the last few years, and now we’re suffering the results.

We’re seeing that last scenario play out now on Wall Street, as firms acted unwisely with no government oversight, and the public ends up losing, whether from the taxpayer perspective, the loss of jobs, or the dumping into the toilet of retirement plans based on the stock market.

I am very concerned that the whole Web 2.0 crowd and the entire tech community are way too complacent about net neutrality. It is true that articles about net neutrality are regularly featured on Slashdot's front page and tech publications have done some great reporting on this, but I think too many people take the point-to-point architecture of the Web for granted and don't realize the entire basis of their business model could be destroyed.

Congressional hearing blues

Lehman’s Fuld called to Capitol Hill

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has scheduled a hearing to examine the regulatory mistakes and financial excesses that led to the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

There is a whole speciality within PR crisis communications that consists of preparing clients for congressional testimony. Unfortunately Presto Vivace does not offer this because these practitioners are going to earn a bundle in the next twelve months and very likely beyond.

The coming boom market in crisis commiunications and litigation support

Exposing Bush's historic abuse of power

July 23, 2008 | WASHINGTON -- The last several years have brought a parade of dark revelations about the George W. Bush administration, from the manipulation of intelligence to torture to extrajudicial spying inside the United States. But there are growing indications that these known abuses of power may only be the tip of the iceberg. Now, in the twilight of the Bush presidency, a movement is stirring in Washington for a sweeping new inquiry into White House malfeasance that would be modeled after the famous Church Committee congressional investigation of the 1970s.

There is a specialty within crisis communications PR that trains clients for testifying before congress. Those people are going to be very rich.

We are going to spend the next twenty years examining the misconduct of the Bush administration. Look for major advances in content management, enterprise search, litigation support, e-discovery, and evidence recovery.

Great moments in rank hypocrisy

Bush Looks to His (Secret) Legacy

George W. Bush, who has expanded his power to access the e-mails and other electronic communications of Americans, is resisting congressional demands that White House e-mails be saved for later research by historians.

Electronic Communications Preservation Act

Bill targets messy e-records

A bill introduced by House Democrats would preserve e-mail messages whose loss could create gaps in the country’s historical record and leave agencies vulnerable to legal actions, some policy observers say.

The legislation introduced last month would require federal agencies to preserve electronic communications in an electronic format and put the National Archives and Records Administration in charge of overseeing compliance.

Putting NARA in charge of records administration is the key to preventing the fox from guarding the hen house.

Preserving Government Records

Panel would reform records storage

“Too often over the past several years, our investigations have revealed weaknesses in government preservation of e-mail that could leave substantial gaps as future historians examine White House and agency decision-making,” said Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the committee's chairman and one of the bill’s sponsors, in announcing the legislation.

In a related development, preliminary findings from the Government Accountability Office released today summarized a survey of recordkeeping processes at four agencies. Although the agencies generally met NARA's statutory requirements, its policies were not always followed, GAO auditors said.

“The loss of documents and information through indifference should be viewed with as much alarm as their loss through a system breach,” said Patrice McDermott, director of OpenTheGovernment.org, in her opening statement for a hearing set for today by a subcommittee that deals with federal information policies and issues. After a series of votes delayed lawmakers, the session was postponed indefinitely.

Little progress has been made in electronic records management across the federal government, McDermott said, and “we repeatedly have to relearn the lesson, apparently, that servers and backup tapes are not appropriate records management systems.”

It is unclear whether we need to relearn that lesson or whether the Bush White House chose not to learn that lesson.

Manual data collection for the 2010 Census

Census abandons handheld devices for 2010 count

After years of trying to ramp up a system for collecting data for the 2010 census using handheld computers, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez told Congress on Thursday that the department was giving up on the plan.

The Field Data Collection Automation project “has experienced significant schedule, performance and cost issues,” Gutierrez told the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice and Science. He added that “a lack of effective communication with one of our key contractors has significantly contributed to the challenges.”

GCN has not yet been able to reach the contractor — Harris Corp. — for comment.

When you bid on something as high profile as the census, you need to arrange for good communication with the government contracting officer.

When you mess up a high profile contract, your flack needs to be available for comment. Directly you hear that the Government Accountability Office is looking into your contract, and that Congress will be holding hearings, you need to prepare your response. You can’t hide under a bed in a situation like this.

Census counts on paper for 2010

The 2010 census was to be the first paperless population count, but problems emerged early on. Initial tests with commercial handheld devices revealed difficulties, so the bureau turned to Harris for help, awarding the company a five-year, cost-plus-award-fee contract in 2006 to automate field data-collection activities. The contract was initially worth $595 million but later increased to $624 million.

The partnership quickly ran into trouble. The Government Accountability Office and independent evaluator Mitre found that Census’ delivery times and requirements differed from those of Harris. In January, Census officials sent 400 new and revised technical requirements to Harris.

“We had underestimated how difficult it would be to communicate our business model,” Census Director Steve Murdock said. “We really didn’t manage it correctly.”

One of the main sources of the cost increase was the need to maintain a help desk to respond to problems that might arise with the handheld devices. The original contract allocated $5 million for the support, which was not enough. The bureau now wants to pay Harris $217 million to $220 million to run it.

Was Harris retained as part of a competitive bid? If so, did the original request for bid specify delivery dates? Did the original contract specify delivery dates? Why did Harris agree if they could not make delivery deadlines? Why did they agree to an unrealistic help desk budget? I look forward to additional coverage.

Email retention in the era of accountability

E-mail Scandal Drives Storage Lesson Home

As the saga of whether the Bush administration properly saved or illegally deleted e-mail continues to unfold, experts are advising companies to review and confirm that corporate e-mail policies are not only in place but are meeting regulatory requirements.

"It's one thing to back up and archive e-mail, but it's a whole other thing to make sure it's there and you're able to retrieve it," said Matt Smith, president of LiveOffice, a provider of message managing and archiving services.

These investigations will continue and it is only a question of time before government contractors are drawn in.

Department of what are you talking about?

Public Knowledge has a post about a proposed law that will increase penalties for copyright violations ('cause suing their customers is working so well for industry). What is the name of the law? Which committee is considering the law? What is the current status? The post does not say, nor does it provide links.

It is called the "Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (“PRO IP”) Act of 2007", and Slashdot has a vigorous discussion about the act.

When you are an expert and talk about an issue all the time it is easy to forget that most people do not have the basic information. One of the strengths of blogging as a medium is that you can write for your fellow expert and provide links for those who need additional information.

New to me government blog

Congressional Budget Office Director’s Blog

Added to the Tech on the Potomac RSS reader.

Great moments in content management, Congressional edition

D'Oh: House Panel Screw-Up Reveals Whistleblower Email Addresses

This summer the House Judiciary Committee launched an effort to collect tips from would-be whistleblowers in the Justice Department. The U.S. attorney firings scandal had shown that much was amiss in the Department, and with the danger of retaliation very real, the committee had set up a form on the committee's website for people to blow the whistle privately about abuses there. Although the panel said it would not accept anonymous tips, it assured those who came forward that their identity would be held in the "strictest confidence."

Vendors are going to have to make their products more intuitive.

The coming controversy over federal contracting

Systems integrators fall from grace, but many doubt that government can run without them

Major setbacks for the Coast Guard’s $24 billion Deepwater program are casting a shadow over the use of lead systems integrators on other large federal contracts and could result in a reduction in that contracting approach.

Clearly federal contractors are going to come under increased scrutiny and changes are going to be made. My advice to federal contractors is to make change your friend, not your enemy.

I would also advise primary integrators to increase their public relations efforts including new media strategies.