FatCratz

Door-to-Door Shuttle Buses

Did you know that shuttle buses operate in the nation's capital ferrying federal employees free of charge door-to-door from building to building? According to this article, there are over 158 of them operating on behalf of 18 federal agencies.

And they are mostly empty. Having ridden on the DoD system, I can attest to that fact, having almost always been one of a handful of people on mini or full-sized buses that ran every 15 or 30 minutes. Apparently, most of the buses operate within a 2.5 square mile near the mall downtown.

Apparently, tourist-taxpayers can afford to walk or take a public bus point to point in this area, but those whose salaries they pay need a free shuttle. 

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?

Local Couple Probed

Federal grant money is used for the most remarkable things.

Eleanor and James Moss are not the kind of people who usually make the history books, but they have stories worth remembering. ... Sally Thomas, an adult services librarian at the Hayward Public Library, probed the couple on Tuesday at their home, culling stories about the local milkman, battling housing bias and a neighbor's professed UFO sighting. ... The state library this year awarded $345,000 in "California of the Past" digital storytelling grants to public libraries. The grants are supported by the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services.

And you wonder why we can't balance the budget.

This used to be called "oral history," but apparently that phrase doesn't test well. "It's not an oral history," said state library consultant Ira Bray. "These are short little snippets that illuminate an experience these folks have had."

Apparently, when oral history consists of "short little snippets" and is posted online, it becomes "digital storytelling," and is a different thing altogether.

With the advent of YouTube and other online services, recording and sharing videos has become an increasingly common mode of communication and expression. The librarians involved in the "California of the Past" project said they want to take advantage of that trend to record history and make it more accessible.

The big difference between this and YouTube, of course, is that people record short little snippets and post them on YouTube for free. And they don't need to hire consultants to do so.

FatCratz Spend $440 Million a Year Printing Documents They Don't Need

The most dangerous waste in government is so small that most people have never thought of it. Like how bureaucrats use their printers in the office.

The government can generate substantial savings by reining in superfluous printing, according to a study released on Tuesday. ... the government spends nearly $1.3 billion annually on printing. Of that, about $440 million -- more than four times the amount President Obama recently asked agency managers collectively to eliminate from their administrative budgets -- is spent on pages that don't need to be printed, the survey found.

Over a third of pages printed are thrown out the same day they come off the printer.

Is the government more wasteful than the private sector? If you work for a company in the real economy, ask yourself if your boss would let you waste 35% of your printing budget. There's your answer.

Hat tip to Senator Coburn's "Pork Report."

Assurbanipal's Library Finally Online!

It seems Google is digitizing a bunch of books and putting them online. A number of libraries at major research universities have agreed to give them access to their stacks. 

For some odd reason, though, they haven't yet gotten around to the library of King Assurbanipal of Assyria (668-630 BC).

Fortunately, Uncle Sam is stepping into the breach. The National Endowment for the Humanities is ponying up $254,000* for a grant to get those cuneiform tablets digitized and online:

Digitization of lexical texts (bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian dictionaries, synonym lists, and sign lists) found in the library of the Assyrian king Assurbanipal (668-630 B.C.). The project would make available cataloging information and images of all cuneiform tablets coupled with transliterations and translations of the texts.

There is a compelling argument to be made that government needs to step in and support the private sector when the marketplace fails to provide crucial goods and services. This isn't it.

*Link opens PDF of recent grant announcements covering the states Alabama to Maryland. The grant in question is on the bottom of the first page.

I Want That Job

We all have a little FatCrat in us... Who, after all, if offered this job, could turn it down:

The Education Department will eliminate a Bush-era "education policy attaché" based in Paris -- the one in France -- whose annual salary, housing allowance and business expenses exceed $630,000.

The good news is that the position is being cut. The bad news is that it existed in the first place.

Bureaucrats can't be trusted to be frugal with other people's money. Not because they are evil, but because they are human. It's not a question of additional review or accountability or systems. It's the question of the inherent logic of the public expenditure. Bigger budgets are a sign of bureaucratic success, and the Department of Education has gone from $14 billion in 1980 to as much as $100 billion in this decade. Even if you correct for inflation and population growth, more than double.

The good news in this article is that it seems someone at the Washington Post is reading FatCratz (see our earlier post):

The Department of Homeland Security has started buying its supplies in bulk and -- to the surprise and delight of bureaucrats -- discovered it's much cheaper that way.

We'll take that as a complement, though it could also mean our humor is so obvious that even the Post can come up with it on their own. At least we beat them to it.

How Many People Work for the Government?

George Will's column today digs up this great nugget from a January interview with the new Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack:

Vilsack . . . learned that his new workplace contains a post office, fitness centers, cafeterias and 6,900 employees. But he remained uncertain about exactly how many employees he supervises nationwide. 'I asked how many employees work at USDA, and nobody really knows,' he said."

Granted, this was on Vilsack's first day. But I doubt any corporate head in the private sector would admit not only that he didn't know how many people worked for him, but that nobody really knows.

To be even more fair to Vilsack, the USDA is a sprawling beast.

As a federal employee, my paycheck actually was processed by the USDA-run National Finance Center, in New Orleans. They also manage most of the government employee health benefits. When you get your first check from the USDA, it seems strange. Then you get used to it. Go figure.

"Feds Waking Up To Nightmare Of Bedbugs"

When I first saw this story, I thought I had to link to it simply because the headline was so funny.

Faced with rising numbers of complaints to city information lines and increasingly frustrated landlords, hotel chains and housing authorities, the Environmental Protection Agency is hosting its first-ever bed bug summit on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Then when I read the above paragraph, I figured as a bonus I could talk about the intrusive nanny state. What on earth does the federal government have to do with keeping bugs out of my bed?

At this point, I considered and passed on numerous bad jokes about NSA and warrantless wiretapping.

Finally, I realized I had a true FatCratz trifecta. It seems that one of the leading causes of the bedbug resurgence is... government regulation:

The EPA, out of concern for the environment and the effects on public health, has pulled many of the chemicals that were most effective in eradicating the bugs from the U.S. over the last 50 years - such as DDT - off of shelves.

How to Cut Government Waste

Blogger Conor Friedersdorf makes the following suggestion on how to cut government waste, seconded by Andrew Sullivan:

...allow federal bureaucrats to anonymously submit egregious and otherwise unknown examples of government waste, and give them a sizable monetary reward should an act of Congress end the wasteful practice due to information they provided.

FatCratz is currently accepting anonymous submissions of government waste. We normally keep identifying details out of our posts, but we're happy to identify any sources of waste our readers wish to make known.

Seriously, I don't know why this needs to be a government program. In fact, it's better if it's not. Speak up. Publicize waste. Improve our government.

No word yet from our sponsors on the sizable monetary reward.

Memo to FatCratz: Buying in Bulk Saves Money!

Often, in the alternate universe that is the government workplace, solutions are more instructive than the problems they seek to address.

President Obama's first cabinet meeting focused on cutting $100 million* from the budget, resulting in the announcement that the Department of Homeland Security can save $52 million over five years by purchasing office supplies in bulk.

Buying in bulk saves money? This is truly groundbreaking news. I imagine once this gets out the retail industry will be transformed by massive stores selling 136 rolls of toilet paper in a single giant package. Think of the money Americans of every sort will save.

Seriously, though, were they getting their printer paper a ream at a time at the corner CVS? This is progress in the war on government waste?

*or about 15 minutes worth of government activity at the FY10 proposed spend rate of $9.7 billion/day.