FatCratz

Stimulus Fraud in 34 States Deemed Irrelevant

The Washington Post reports that the Government Accountability Office (henceforth on FatCratz, GAO) is asking for help from Americans in reporting waste related to the $787 billion economic recovery package, because "Experience tells us that the risk of fraud and abuse grows when large sums are spent quickly." Apparently, the normal federal spending rate of about $8.5 billion a day is far more manageable.

Unfortunately, it seems that tracking fraud and abuse in the (rapid) spending of $787 billion is too big a job even for government. So they're only going to try to keep track of two-thirds of it:

The agency will track Washington, D.C. and 16 other states that account for 65 percent of the U.S. population and are expected to receive at least two-thirds of the stimulus funding: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas.

Apparently, GAO isn't interested in stimulus fraud in the remaining 34 states and 5 territories. 

In the interest of good government, FatCratz is looking to take up the slack. We're asking for help from Americans in reporting stimulus waste in Alabama, Alaska, American Samoa, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Guam, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Northern Marianas Islands, Oklahoma, Oregon, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Virgin Islands, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

Oh, if you're from one of the important states and think GAO might miss an abuse or two, feel free to let us know. 

Our First Contribution! [UPDATE]

Our first contributor has gotten back to me with a follow-up regarding the onerous printing and archiving of government emails:

I saw you ran my post about printing emails. Believe it or not, after consuming untold amounts of paper and toner cartridges printing out my old emails, I was told recently that the boxes and boxes of emails I printed were mostly discarded upon my departure. 

Unfortunately, there is nothing funny about this story. Just absurd. 

Size Doesn't Matter

At FatCratz, good things come in small packages. 

One of the reasons that misdeeds in the government workplace are under-reported is because there is a tacit assumption that only large scale fraud, waste, and abuse are newsworthy, or criminal. 

Think for a moment what this means. The operating assumption is that the government workplace is inefficient. Journalists, Inspectors General, and the Government Accountability Office are too busy chasing down the billion dollar excesses of TARP or Medicare fraud to care whether your boss plays solitaire all day long.

But small can be funny, as Danny DeVito taught us in twins. 

And truth be told, the myriad small inefficiencies of a bureaucracy may be more damaging than the large bungles we read about in the newspaper. They are the fine grit that chokes the engine of government.

FatCratz is a filter for the grit.

Why Contribute to FatCratz? II

It's your civic duty. 

A few weeks ago, Sara Goo reported in the Washington Post's "Federal Diary" that while 52% of federal employees reported observing misconduct, only 6% disclosed it to anyone outside their agency. The good news is that the vast majority of these employees told a supervisor. 

Unfortunately, if my experience is any guide, all too often it's in the supervisor's interest to ensure that such misdeeds are handled, shall we say, "discretely." And complaints to Inspector Generals are too often ignored, or stymied. 

Send your story to FatCratz. You'll be able to unburden your conscience while remaining anonymous. And perhaps we'll shine a light on some of the worst abuses in government. 

One Word: Solitaire

If you work for the government, you've seen a colleague playing solitaire. That's not news.
What I want are especially egregious examples.

The Joys of Government Travel

In a piece in today's Wall Street Journal, Victoria Toensing illustrates the FatCratz impulse with a few stories from government travel hell:

The government rules allowed no flexibility. If you traveled on a plane that served food en route, as was the case on my late afternoon flight from D.C. to New Orleans, you could not get reimbursed for eating after you landed. It mattered not that the food looked spoiled, and that you really did spend money on a restaurant meal. There would be no, albeit meager, $20 reimbursement for that dinner.

FatCratz doesn't deny the need for ethics regulations. But since all most Americans ever hear about are flagrant ethical violations, we have a constant call for more of them. Without any sense of how inflexibly they are applied, or what it is like to live under their sway. 

But not for long.

Our First Contribution!

Well, that was fast. 

Here's our first contribution. Perhaps we'll file this one under "Separation Anxiety."

I just wrapped up a tour at a small federal agency, and was happily enduring my final ethics briefing covering all matters of my separation. I had no plans to lobby my former agency, so I figured this would be simple enough. And then the subject turned to government records.

I was told by our ethics officer that all "government records" that I had generated during my tenure needed to be filed and stored for posterity -- fair enough. 

But then I was next told that our agency was incapable of storing electronic records, including emails. Any email or outlook appointment that touched on a matter of policy was considered a government record, and would have to be printed, filed, and boxed in an orderly fashion. 

I started doing the math. I had roughly 140,000 messages stored in my sent and received folders, only a handful of which had seemed important enough to print and file. Wading through them to decide which to print would take months. Printing them all would be incredibly wasteful... a ballpark estimate was half a million pages, which is staggeringly expensive. They would have filled over one hundred filing boxes. 

All of this expense, not to mention environmental mayhem, could have been spared if I had simply been allowed to burn a DVD with all my emails on it, which, by the way, would have created a searchable database far more valuable to historians, muckraking journalists, etc. 

I'd be curious to know if this is government-wide, or if my former agency was uniquely in the dark ages. 

By the way, do you offer advice? I was really torn by this predicament. 

FatCratz doesn't do advice. 

A Confession

I am a recovering FatCrat. 

I've spent most of the last five years working in government. From day one, aspects of the government workplace were shocking to me. I started keeping mental files on a few quirks and idiosyncrasies.

And then it happened. Not all at once, but gradually. I realized that I had become a FatCrat. The government bureaucracy had absorbed me, and my actions -- though entirely my own -- were not entirely rational.

The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. Look in the mirror. Recognize your inner FatCrat. And then, let it all out. Confession is good for the soul. 

We're all FatCratz now. 

  

Why Contribute to FatCratz?

Because you want to, that's why.

Every government employee I ever met has a humorous story or two -- or ten -- about government incompetence.

Working within a bureaucracy can be oppressive and dehumanizing -- and government bureaucracies are uniquely oppressive. Swapping these stories is a way of blowing off steam. Humor keeps us human. 

But why would government employees contribute to a blog that at least in part makes fun of government employees?

FatCratz stories are not only funny, they contain a great deal of collective wisdom. My hunch is that most government employees realize the system in which they toil is deeply flawed, and they want it to work better than it does. 

Shining light on government's failings holds forth the promise of making it a more efficient machine. But reports of bureaucratic bumbling mostly state the obvious, and are typically boring and stale. A spoonful of humor helps the medicine go down. Maybe, just maybe, enough people will pay attention long enough that they'll demand something different. 

We'll see. 

The Idea Behind FatCratz

Now more than ever, we need to understand how our government works, and how it doesn’t. 

And we need a good laugh. 

We all know that government isn’t omnicompetent. Think DMV.

But few of us understand how or why it doesn’t work; what it does well, what it doesn't. 

I'm convinced that the only people who really understand government incompetence are government employees.

Ergo, FatCratz. 

FatCratz is a clearing house for government bureaucratic follies, a forum where government employees get to vent a little bit about the system in which they toil. 

And we all get to laugh, and learn more about our government.