FatCratz

Brought to you by the IT pros at your federal government

This is the way it works, people. You send me your stories--they might be silly, they might seem insignificant--and I post them here.

Here's a story I got today that shows how the government can screw up something as simple as getting a new office:

I work at a Federal agency that is notorious, to say the least, for having serious IT problems. Here's an example of how crazy things are. A colleague of mine, who had been the acting supervisor of her office for several months after her former boss was promoted, recently had the "acting" removed from her title and was made supervisor. She continued working in her cubicle for a while, but then finally decided to move all her stuff to the old supervisor's office. She got her phone line/voice mail moved, files, etc. 

There was just one problem: she also put in a request to have her computer (i.e., her access to network/shared drives, etc.) moved to the new office -- and it took over THREE WEEKS for the IT folks to finally get her all set up on the computer in her new office! In the meantime, she had to keep working at her computer in her old, otherwise empty cubicle, while jumping up and running to her new office whenever she heard her phone ring.  

Can you imagine this happening anywhere in the private sector -- an employee gets promoted and moved to a new office, and it takes the IT gang 3 weeks to set up her computer in the new office?

Veterans of government employment shrug our shoulders and roll our eyes. So what? That's the way government works. But people in the real world, people in the private sector, have no clue that this is business as usual for the FatCratz in DC. 

Social value of airing stories like these? Do we really want these people running our healthcare? Designing our automobiles?

For Best Service, Call Before Noon

FatCratz is currently on a west coast swing, traveling outside the beltway to gather real Americans' impressions of government waste.

So, here's a little cocktail party chatter from the shores of Lake Tahoe. Our hostess had actually been the recipient of a large grant from a federal agency. She mentioned that when conducting business with her grant administrator back in DC via telephone, she soon learned to call in before 9 am Pacific time--noon eastern--in order to catch her government grant administrator while he was still sober.

Of course, people drink on the job in any line of work, and clearly, all federal employees aren't sauced after noon. In fact, I never personally encountered a drunk in the federal workforce. The question, however, is whether it was easier to hold one's job in the public sector while hitting the juice. And, of course, how many people charged with overseeing the distribution of taxpayers' money are derelict in their duty.

FatCratz Speak Out on Swine Flu

President Obama's Secretary of Health and Human Services made the following startling comment on the Swine Flu:

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She was responding to this earlier statement, from Obama's Director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention:

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Actually, the turnover in top positions brought about by a new presidential administration is one of the few inefficiencies of the federal government that FatCratz celebrates. It's far better to get a new batch of politically appointed FatCratz in place every four years or so than to have Health Ministers for life.

And there is of course no need to worry, as Charles E. Johnson, the Acting Secretary of HHS, has over three decades of experience. In the field of accounting.

When Government Incompetence Really Matters

An investigator from the Government Accountability Office successfully secured a U.S. Passport using the Social Security number of a man who died in 1965. This happened a month after the State Department claimed to have implemented controls designed to stop precisely this kind of fraud.

GAO criticism of the passport fraud risk is not new. In 2005, the GAO reported that using stolen identities and documentation is the primary way for a criminal to get a U.S. passport. ... The State Department agreed with the GAO's recommendations and indicated some were implemented or in the process of implementation, such as using commercial databases for verifying identities. Nevertheless, the GAO questions the State Department's commitment to implementing its corrective actions.

Incompetence is one thing when the government is engaged in irrelevancies like the naming of sausages. Or when it attempts to regulate deadly toys from China and instead outlaws classic children's books printed before 1985. Intrusive and overbearing, yes, deadly, no.

But when our government is incompetent in one of its core responsibilities--keeping our people safe and secure from those who want to use deadly force on American soil--people die.

Government is doing too much when it's NOT doing what it HAS to do well.