What I learned in school today, or, the government is my oyster

Politicians are a necessary evil, or an evil necessity, or a fashion accessory. Can’t live with them, can’t shoot them, as the old joke goes. The people who make government hum, though, to the extent that it does, and it does to a far greater extent than many people will ever admit, are the people who know stuff.

Some government people are gate-keepers. I did several small projects for the defense department in the 1980s, helping to keep the Reagan war machine humming, which means I’m responsible for toppling the Soviets and making Grenada safe for bottom-feeding med students. You’re welcome.

Among the reasons I got the jobs was that hardly anyone else wanted to do the paperwork necessary to nail down work that wasn’t all that remunerative. I knew a contracting officer who helped me write the proposals and fill in the forms and it was still a nightmare.

So that’s a thing. It wasn’t a hostile thing, the contracting officer was always helpful and the people who commissioned the projects were great to work with, but it was a thing, just like the runaround, the Catch-22, the predatory bureaucrat and so on.

There are, however, thousands of government people whose jobs are to know stuff, often useful stuff, and make it available to people like me, i.e., anyone who cares to look or ask. And it’s getting better all the time. It used to be, 30-40 years ago, that government people who knew stuff more often wanted to hoard it than share it; the default assumption was that you didn’t need to know.

Now, you can get enormous amounts of information from government web sites without ever talking to anyone, and when you do have to actually communicate with a human the transaction is more often than not a pleasant one. At least in my experience. If they don’t know then they’ll tell you who might and how to reach them.

And you don’t even have to go to the websites to get the info. Many departments have email updates and RSS feeds covering just about all the public information they generate. I’m pretty sure that’s how I ran across the Colin Powell interview that turned into an Ambien ad: it came in the mail.

Secretary Powell: — from Panama to Nicaragua, from Nicaragua to Honduras, and that’s our air base in Honduras, Soto Cono.

So in a helicopter it’s Tegucigalpa, then back out to the — Tegucigalpa to Soto Cono, then Soto Cono to College Station last night, then I had to change all of my software and take out all of the Central American software and put in the Chinese software to give a speech this morning in Texas.

Question: So do you use sleeping tablets to organize yourself?

Secretary Powell: Yes. Well, I wouldn’t call them that. They’re a wonderful medication — not medication. How would you call it? They’re called ambien, which is very good. You don’t use ambien? Everybody here uses ambien.

I’ve never used Ambien but I have friends who sometimes do and they tell me the most amazing stories about things they did and have no recollection of doing. So ever since then I’ve had this image of Powell waking up on March 21, 2003, and going, “Fuck, we invaded Iraq???” If only it were so simple. The Ambien Administration.

So that came in the mail. I was out of the loop for a while and my mail boxes got full and started bouncing stuff back so all my email subscriptions lapsed, so I just recently subscribed to a bunch of Pentagon email updates and State news feeds.

State sends out these wonderful country-specific summaries that they call “background notes;” they’re similar to what you can find at the CIA World Factbook but with links to additional sources of information, and more oriented to travelers. I just looked at the ones for Fiji and Hong Kong. Great photos, although I am noticing what appears to be a trend: the lead photos in backgrounders for tropical and African countries often feature dancers, while not so much for European and Asian countries.

The Pentagon has a lot of cool photos too, mostly of things that go boom but other stuff too.

Among the recent news feed notifications from the State Department was one referring to this initiative:

The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL) and the Secretary’s Office of Global Women’s Issues (S/GWI) announce a Request for Proposals (RFP) from organizations interested in submitting proposals to support and address the specific challenges and needs of widows and female heads of households in Iraq, in particular poor, isolated, and/or illiterate widows and female heads of households, including but not limited to rural areas, in multiple governorates.

It tells you some things about the department and Iraq. If you’re a reporter, it’s an entree into a story. How many widows and female heads of households are there? How many were there before we rode in? What are the impacts on the women and children? What kinds of remediation are available, and what’s lacking?

And so on. It’s good information on its own and it’s a roadmap to more. It’s astonishing, when you think about it. What’s more annoying than astonishing is that last time I checked, no one in the institutional press had written about it.

Along with what’s available through the RSS feeds, the State web site hosts hundreds of Congressional Research Service reports. The CRS is like one of those term paper-writing services but for senators and representatives. You ask them questions and they produce these plainly written and very informative reports. Sometimes there’s an occasional credulity problem, as in a couple of Iraq-related reports that cited as authoritative some anonymously-sourced newspaper stories were later exposed as plants by Bush administration officials, but usually they’re pretty thorough.

And these things cover everything. Here’s a sample from December of 2003:

12/22/03 Terrorism and National Security: Issues and Trends — Updated
-12/22/03 The Islamic Traditions of Wahhabism and Salafiyya — NEW!
-12/15/03 Campaign Finance — Updated
-12/05/03 Drug Trafficking and North Korea: Issues for U.S. Policy — NEW!
-12/03/03 India-U.S. Relations — Updated
-12/03/03 India: Chronology of Events — Updated
-12/02/03 Pakistan-U.S. Relations — Updated
-12/02/03 Pakistan: Chronology of Events — Updated

Like that, and they just keep coming.

I also get stuff from the Government Accountability Office. This used to be the Government Accounting Office. You know the Woodward/Bernstein/Deep Throat mantra? “Follow the money?” This is one of the places you go to follow the money. It’s also the place to go to find out how well the money’s spent and how to spend it better.

Why GAO Did This Study

On May 7, 2009, the Government Printing Office (GPO) published a 266-page document on its Web site that provided detailed information on civilian nuclear sites, locations, facilities, and activities in the United States. At the request of the Speaker of the House, this report determines (1) which U.S. agencies were responsible for the public release of this information and why the disclosure occurred, and (2) what impact, if any, the release of the information has had on U.S. national security. In performing this work, GAO analyzed policies, procedures, and guidance for safeguarding sensitive information and met with officials from four executive branch agencies involved in preparing the document, the White House, the House of Representatives, and GPO.

You learn things you might not already have known. Maybe you’ll want to do something with it, maybe you’ll just tuck it away, but it’s good to know that it happened and someone did something about it. GAO was, for instance, where I ran across the expense reports on the most amazing ever Independent Counsel investigation.

[David M.] Barrett was appointed on May 24, 1995, to investigate allegations that [former Clinton HUD secretary Henry] Cisneros lied to the FBI about payments he made to his mistress before taking office. Cisneros pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor count nearly five years and $10 million later, but Barrett–whom I have come to call “Bartleby“–continued to chug along. In 2003, the federal judge panel overseeing his investigation ordered him to close it out, and after another three years and roughly $6 million, he issued the public version of his final report in January of this year. The ultimate tab for the investigation is approaching $20 million.

That was from early in 2006. I had no idea Barrett’s investigation was still running until one of the semi-annual GAO audits of his office turned hit my inbox sometime in 2003. (In fairness to me, neither did the Washington Post).

But this is fucking epic: a 12-year, $20 million investigation that continued on for six years after producing its only conviction, on a misdemeanor charge with a small fine, even though three federal judges were telling the guy every six months for three years to knock it off.

And if not for the GAO’s homebody outreach program, I would’ve missed it. I think Barrett should get his own national holiday. The guy pulled down close to six figures a month for 70 months after everyone but the judges who appointed him forgot he was there. Eerily, there is not a trace of him in the public record after 2007.

The Justice department has a raft of feeds as well, including several FBI ones. Not every department is up to speed; they don’t all have RSS feeds, and some of them don’t offer email subscriptions either.

But no matter where your interests lie, the chances are really good that you can find an easy way to keep on top of related government news, and that if you can’t find something online then you can reach someone by email or telephone who will be genuinely pleased to help you. If you’re an information junkie then that way lies heroin.

Hey: They’re the government, and they’re here to help.