What Does Accountability Mean?

So OMB's Karen Evans is taking responsibility for the government's failure to meet a deadline of Oct. 27 to complete background checks for employees and contractors who have worked for the federal government for 15 years or less and to begin issuing new identity cards with fingerprints.

"The milestone was to hit this, and we didn't, so we're holding ourselves accountable," she says.

So what happens next? In what way, specifically, will Evans and others be held accountable? Until we find that out, this looks like the standard accountability lite.

By the way, I'm not at all sure Evans and OMB deserve all of the responsibility for this situation. But she's accepted it, and that's the beginning, not the end, of the process of true accountability.