Nextgov

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Reporting for Duty.

October 25, 2004 The Associated Press reports that the Bush administration has deployed a "platoon of federal employees" to "trumpet" the president's accomplishments in the closing days of the campaign. Well, not exactly a platoon--it's mostly the same cadre of Cabinet officers that often hits the road to campaign for the boss at ...

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Layer Hater.

October 22, 2004 Note to CIA managers: Watch your backs. The Washington Post got its hands on a speech by new CIA Director Porter Goss in which he declares, "we must collapse bureaucratic layers. I say this with fervor." The layers headed for imminent collapse don't include the one Congress is about to ...

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You Da Manager!

October 22, 2004 Today, the American Enterprise Institute takes on the issue of how John Kerry would govern. Consensus: pretty hard to tell at this point. Interesting, though, that more than one panelist essentially endorsed a Bush campaign theme: Kerry's not much of a legislator. On the Hill, he's been more interested in ...

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And the National Book Award Goes To...

October 22, 2004 Margo Hammond, the book editor of the St. Petersburg Times, isn't too thrilled about the nomination of the on the 9/11 commission report for a National Book Award. Sure, the report is novelistic and all, she writes on the Web site of the Poynter Institute (a school for journalists), "but ...

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Second-Term Blues.

October 21, 2004 Pretty interesting panel discussion at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington today on "How Would George W. Bush Govern in a Second Term?" The Brookings Institution's Tom Mann pointed out that in policy terms, second-term records in the modern presidency are less than spectacular. Even those presidents who aren't sidetracked ...

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Nameless and Faceless

October 15, 2004 Why do federal officials hide behind the cloak of anonymity-and why does the news industry indulge them? Is that cherished Washington institution, the anonymous background briefing, about to go the way of the dinosaur? Don't bet on it. For those who are blessedly unfamiliar with the anonymous backgrounder, it works ...

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Goodbye, Newman

October 1, 2004 Hollywood gets over its obsession with bureaucratic ineptitude and corruption. Time was, the irritating, obnoxious, moronic postal carrier Newman from Seinfeld was about the best federal employees could hope to see of their kind on television. After all, Newman was merely a comic foil. Plots centered around, for example, his ...

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Trivial Pursuit

September 15, 2004 The quixotic effort to give managers more leeway to make minor workplace decisions. In late August, the National Treasury Employees Union joined with its sometime rival, the American Federation of Government Employees, to file a friend-of-the-court brief asking a federal appeals court to overturn a Federal Labor Relations Authority ruling ...

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Kerry backs 'Department of Wellness'

September 9, 2004 Throughout the presidential race, John Kerry has assiduously avoided proposals that might taint him as a traditional big-government liberal. His campaign documents are remarkably free of bureaucracy-building proposals. And in August, Kerry moved to pick up former President Bill Clinton's new-Democrat reinventing government mantle, unveiling a proposal to cut management ...

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Call to Action

September 1, 2004 Nothing is more pressing than the need to rationalize the counter-terrorism bureaucracy. Members of Congress and Bush administration officials did what they least wanted to do this long, hot summer: return to Washington. And they did so for one of their least favorite reasons: to try to figure out how ...