But Did They Lose Any Alcohol or Tobacco?

An audit has found that the Justice Department's Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Bureau has lost quite a few weapons (ATF lost 76 weapons).

(AP) The ATF lost 76 weapons and hundreds of laptops over five years, the Justice Department reported Wednesday, blaming carelessness and sloppy record-keeping.

Thirty-five of the missing handguns, rifles, Tasers and other weapons were stolen, as were 50 laptops, the internal audit found. Two of the stolen weapons were used in crimes.

The audit by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine found "inadequate" oversight of weapons and laptops resulted in "significant rates of losses" at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

"It is especially troubling that that ATF's rate of loss for weapons was nearly double that of the FBI and DEA, and that ATF did not even know whether most of its lost, stolen, or missing laptop computers contained sensitive or classified information," he added.

What's going on over there at ATF? Guys, this is embarrassing. If one of the firearms dealers you regulate 'lost' that many weapons you would yank his licence.

Half a Million of my Fellow Civil Servants are Deadbeats

It seems that The Honorable Congressman Charles B. Rangel (D-New York) isn't the only civil servant with a low regard for the Internal Revenue Service. According to WTOP News, there were 171,549 current federal workers who did not voluntarily pay their federal income taxes in 2007, and nearly half a million federal employees of all types - both active and retired, military and civilian - who are delinquent (see Federal workers owe billions in unpaid taxes).

WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service is trying to collect billions of dollars in late taxes from nearly half a million federal employees.

Documents obtained by WTOP radio through the Freedom of Information Act show the federal employees and retirees did not pay more than $3.5 billion in taxes owed last year. The agency with the most delinquent employees was the U.S. Postal Service. Nearly 4.2 percent of its 747,000 workers are delinquent.

The IRS would not provide comparable data for the general population. The Executive Office of the President, which includes the White House, has 58 employees who did not pay more than $319,000. More than 1,000 Capitol Hill workers are on the list. About 152,000 of the delinquent federal workers have entered into payment plans.

The most interesting thing about this story is that the IRS tracks federal worker non-payment by agency. According to the agency-by-agency breakdown that is linked to the WTOP report, the biggest deadbeats are at the General Printing Office, at 7.23%. Guys, get your heads out of those books and file a 1040! The lowest rates of delinquency were among those goody-two-shoes at the Justice (1.72%) and Treasury (1.13%) Departments.

My own agency, the [REDACTED] [the foreign affairs department] was reasonably law-abiding with only 3.03% non-payers, and I'm sure they all had good excuses, like being deployed to Iraq. The Defense Department delinquency rate was up there, at 5.0%, and the rates for the CIA and FBI were mysteriously unlisted.

Another Government Shutdown Coming?

Recent stories in both the Washington Post [Is a Government Shutdown Ahead?] and the Washington Times [GOP: Lift drilling ban or risk shutdown] make me think that my fellow civil servants and I should be preparing for another long shutdown of the federal government. With the 2008 election coming to a head at the same time we have tight partisan gridlock in the Congress and a lameduck President, the political stars are coming into alignment for a shutdown that will rival the one of November 1995-January 1996.

In 1995/96, I had to continue coming to work during the government shutdown because I was then a contractor employee, so my salary was already paid. It was a lonely existence, just a handful of us contractors, plus a few essential State Department staffers, roaming around an otherwise empty office building. No phones rang, no taskings came in, and the streets around our Rosslyn office annex were almost as deserted as Manhattan in I Am Legend. But the loneliness had its compensations; we had abundant free time, no crowds in the restaurants for our extra-long lunch hours, and all the parking spots we could possibly want.

This time around, I'm looking forward to a few weeks off. My plan is to do a little substitute teaching to keep reasonably busy, and catch the fall schedule of performances at the Blackfriars Playhouse. Life will be good.

As a government contractor during the 95-96 shutdown, I was actually an employee of a private sector company, and was fully accustomed to having no job security whatsoever. But most of my direct-hire fellow government workers had never experienced a lay-off, and I noticed that the least suggestion they might, just possibly, by some huge stretch of the imagination, not get their next paycheck sent them into a panic.

To my fellow bureaucrats who haven't been through a shutdown before, I say: don't worry, be happy! You've never missed a paycheck before, and you won't now. That's simply not how the USG operates. Besides, does anyone remember what happened on the very first work day after the shutdown was resolved in January 1996? It snowed in Washington, and government offices were closed yet again. Sweet!!

Czar Peter (Principle)

I've been looking over Barack Obama's foreign policy advisers lately, to get an idea of who will be running the [redacted] [the foreign affairs department of the largest employer in the washington, DC area] in the next administration if he wins the election. Foreign Policy in Focus had this run-down of the likely suspects:

Senator Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisers, who on average tend to be younger than those of the former first lady, include mainstream strategic analysts who have worked with previous Democratic administrations, such as former national security advisors Zbigniew Brzezinski and Anthony Lake, former assistant secretary of state Susan Rice, and former navy secretary Richard Danzig. They have also included some of the more enlightened and creative members of the Democratic Party establishment, such as Joseph Cirincione and Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress, and former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke.

That last name alarms me. Richard Clarke was a professional bureaucrat from 1973 to 2003, and he was without peer as a self-promoter and empire-builder [I'm not counting J. Edgar Hoover, since Hoover was sui generis]. Clarke held all sorts of important-sounding jobs in the last stage of his career, during which he evidently convinced many big Washington players that he was actually in charge of some national function or other related to counterterorrism, even though he was really just a staff weenie with no line responsibility for anything at all. As White House 'Counterterrorism Czar,' Clarke could probably have ordered an intern to make a Starbucks run, but that would have been about the limit of his authority.

Clarke's career is a perfect illustration of the Peter Principle. He was a bright functionary who worked his way up the hierarchical food chain until he was over-promoted into a job he couldn't perform, and then, having reached his level of incompetence, there he stayed.

Those staff functions he should have performed - like threat analysis, policy coordination, or budget prioritizing - he did poorly or not at all. He had so little substance to show, yet was so full of himself, when he briefed Congressman Shays's subcommittee after 9/11 that Shays unloaded on him in a series of scathing letters to Clarke himself, to the 911 Commission, and to Condoleezza Rice urging her not to retain Clarke for a senior position in the Bush Administration. After his run-in with Shays, Clarke was lucky to have Rice throw him a bone in the form of the Cyberterrorism Czar job. [What an irony it is that the press calls these powerless bureaucrats 'Czars.' A more descriptive term would be 'Alpha Wonk.']

In the event Obama is elected, I hope he'll accept some adult supervision from the old foreign policy hands, like Zbigniew Brzezinski, and leave Czar Peter the Powerless in his well-deserved exile.