Governor Bobby Jindal (R-LA) wrote an op-ed in today's Washington Post. He starts out with an observation, no doubt tempered by his own federal legislative and administrative experience: he notes the not unexpected glacially slow federal bureaucratic conglomerate to respond to any crisis, with the possible exception of public safety and national defense.
First of all, I should point out bureaucratic inertia is everywhere, and I have the battle scars to prove it. One client was a suburban Milwaukee county. The county had a fixed-bid ERP system upgrade contract with my employer; among other things, the county maintained responsibility for backing up the test servers, including databases and application software. (Ironically, at the same time, the county IT department had a disaster-recovery initiative going on.) I was maintaining the relevant databases and ERP software. We had an important testing event scheduled for the next Monday when I started noticing some vague Oracle error messages Friday afternoon, which I inferred indicated that the software was experiencing problems with the underlying hardware. The county Unix administrator had already left for the day (3PM--and the non-technical managers zealously guarded county employees free time against "overly demanding" contractors). The Unix administrator insisted that he checked the hardware and everything was fine. But for some reason he came back to the site and decided to reboot the test server around 7PM. I managed to finesse my way into the server room and watched with my eyes as virtually all the files on the RAID partition went to "lost and found" (i.e., I lost all my Oracle ERP software and database files). The county administrators were backing up only parts of the server--but not any of the Oracle ERP software, and the county DBA's, unknown to me, had been using a static database script that unrealistically assumed all database files were located in one server directory. Somehow I managed to fish out of the rubbish the missing 2GB datafile. The county DBA then refused to bring up the database (she didn't want the responsibility); I brought it up. But unfortunately, there were no backups of the software--and I had to reinstall the software from scratch, including maybe at least a solid 10 hours of rerunning file system megapatches. So I spent the entire weekend reinstalling software, and the testing went on as scheduled Monday morning. My company send the client an invoice for my services over the weekend, and the county rejected it under the well-known legal principle that "shit happens" and they had a fixed-price contract. I myself never saw a penny because my company had buried a clause in the employee handbook they didn't pay (promised) "bonuses" on fixed-bid contracts. My company hoped that the county would take it into consideration if and when there was a "Phase 2 project".
A second example occurred, I believe, on my first day as a DBA contractor at a DC-area NASA facility. I was told I needed to bring down one of 4 production databases immediately. A NASA scientist, in the spirit of exchanging scientific information, had published certain information that compromised IT security.
A third example (which I believe I mentioned in a prior post) was when I came in at National Archives and was told that a government auditor was in our racks upstairs and had "accidentally" rebooted some of the servers. I immediately went upstairs to confront the guy literally with a piece of equipment pulled out of the rack just above my production database server, asking me, "What is this?" Common sense tells you if you don't know what something is, you have no business touching it. The network management people refused to back me up, and I had to escalate the issue to my manager in St. Louis. It's a typical mentality; the government auditor worked at the convenience of his schedule; I was willing to work with him after our production window to St. Louis closed at 7PM. Interruption in service cost us over $10K an hour--but that wasn't the auditor's problem. The fact that my users in St. Louis were processing requests on behalf of military veterans didn't matter.
So when Bobby Jindal had to jawbone Washington over building barrier islands to protect the fragile Louisiana coastal ecosystems, we saw no intensity of the kind John Kerry demanded in terms of our efforts to find bin Laden in Tora Bora. Instead, we saw a familiar litany of government excuses: BP didn't say how bad the situation really was: Where was the administration in terms of having or requesting fire booms and other infrastructure and redeploying it to the Gulf region? What about the delta of existing and necessary manpower and equipment? You would think with so much of our domestic energy based in the Gulf and the fact that hurricanes frequently travel through the Gulf, the idea of a spill had to be considered, and deepwater spills presented special challenges. As the Obama Administration trotted out one excuse after another, trying to make us believe that the Interior Department under Bush consisted of nobody but double agents from Big Oil and permits were little more impossible tasks under tight deadlines, so government employees were perfectly entitled to just go through the motions of an impossible task, we clearly saw a crisis--of an administration basing its credibility that progressives could make up for the natural deficiencies of free enterprise, by heavy-handed but hopelessly incompetent bureaucrats. Yes, the same progressives who once thought the best way to control the evils of alcohol was to ban it, remain convinced that we can't be trusted to make our own informed decisions. These bureaucracies are not subject to sudden fluctuations of supply and demand. There's no natural incentive to become more efficient, to keep up with changes in technology and the competition (with the possible exceptions of defense and intelligence).
The moratorium, affecting regional payrolls in amounts of millions of dollars, not to mention the risk of some rigs going off contract and shipping out to deploy elsewhere, particularly angered Jindal, with Salazar disingenuously reformulating a more judicial-proof moratorium. Jindal rightly notes that the Obama Administration is applying a broad-based restriction, without regard to specific operators and their drilling particulars, disregarding risks associated with unnecessary shutdowns, not to mention the economic costs to the US of having import more foreign-produced supplies to make up for the losses in Gulf production. Jindal's approach, of course, would be consistent with risk-based evaluations, e.g., as practiced by accountants in attesting to corporate financial statements.
There are some curious lines drawn by the Obama Administration on matters of principle--they pick unnecessary battles on the KSM trial, they needlessly get into a turf battle with Arizona over illegal immigration, and in a difficult economy where the administration is all but begging businesses to hire new workers, they essentially throw thousands of Gulf region employees out of work. Maybe this plays well among the 20% of Americans whom consider themselves liberal or progressive. Obama never had the 40-odd% whom consider themselves conservative. But these kinds of issues are absolutely toxic to moderates and independents.
Schwarzenegger and Paying California State Employees
I have a nuanced view of the Governator. I think ever since the unions led efforts to defeat modest reform referendums, Schwarzenegger has come to a place where he shills for pro-gay marriage and Obama's stimulus, health care, environment and immigration policies. I do understand the fact that he has to deal pragmatically with a strongly Democratic legislature, but this puts him to the left of almost every national Republican figure with the possible exception of the Maine senators.
I'm particularly fascinated by a battle going on between the governor's office and the state comptroller's office regarding pay without a budget to state employees (whom earn a BASE average pay of $65K). The California Supreme Court ruled in 2003 that the government cannot pay normal wages without a budget. So Schwarzenegger has been insisting that the state comptroller cover minimum wage for employees. The state comptroller office, obviously headed by Dems, refuse, using technology as their excuse for not complying with the governor, saying the arcane state financial system can't handle such a radical change in pay. That's right: the state that is home to Cisco, Intel, HP, Apple, and Oracle, a roster of most of the top blue-chip corporations in technology claims its payroll departments can't handle a temporary downsizing of pay, despite of the fact that the Supreme Court ruling is 7 years old. But they can handle thousands of new state employees and a lavish, unaffordable pension system... In any event, a judge recently ruled that the state must continue to pay full salary--which I can't imagine would be upheld if it returns to the California Supreme Court.
Speaking of California's pension system, Adam Summers of (libertarian) Reason wrote an interesting analysis on how to fix it. He proposes a number of common-sense reforms--e.g., putting new employees on defined-contribution systems, eliminating double-dipping, averaging multi-year bases for payouts to discourage final-year spiking, phasing out unfunded pension liabilities, providing periodic comparative reviews of state and private sector retirement packages, and empowering state voters (versus legislators) to decide benefit increases.
Political Cartoon
IBD cartoonist Michael Ramirez is wondering whether the BP oil containment cap, which as of this writing is still holding, can also halt Obama's bleeding poll numbers. However, the leaks continue, such as Robert Gibbs' unforced admission that (gasp!) there is a chance the GOP could recapture the House in this fall's election. Obama has thrown everything he can at the leaks--the biggest "stimulus" in American history, the health care "reform" bill, financial "reform", ... Um, let's see if I remember the magic words: 'Yes, I can'.... Hope and change...It's all George W. Bush's fault.
Quote of the Day
All profoundly original work looks ugly at first.
Clement Greenberg
Musical Interlude: Chart Hits of 1997
Bruce Springsteen, "Secret Garden" (movie mix: this version is the BEST)
Michael Bolton, "Go the Distance"
Eric Clapton, "Change the World"
Elton John, "Candles in the Wind/Goodbye England's Rose"
Backstreet Boys, "Quit Playing Games With My Heart"
