The Thunderlizard Factor

hen Republicans on Capitol Hill combed White House documents for evidence of a politically motivated push to add immigrants to the voter rolls this year, they turned up some intriguing nuggets from the pen of a career civil servant named Doug Farbrother, who works at the National Performance Review.

Farbrother, who's on loan to the NPR from the Defense Department, protests that "I'm hardly a political operative or a senior Gore aide." But he's not exactly your ordinary government bureaucrat, either. If you don't believe it, just check his business card, on which he lists his White House title as "Raging Inexorable Thunderlizard of Reinvention."

Although he's a charter member of the Senior Executive Service and has spent 23 years toiling in the administrative jungles of the Pentagon, the 52-year-old Farbrother views himself as an agent of change. A former professional musician, Farbrother eschews the standard coat-and-tie uniform of the bureaucracy, opting instead for blue jeans and sports shirts.

But Farbrother's penchant for writing breezy internal memos, combined with his take-no-prisoners approach to cutting red tape and laying waste to "stupid rules and regulations," provided GOP investigators with ammunition for questioning the Administration's motives for speeding up the processing of citizenship applications in an election year.

Designated last March as an NPR troubleshooter for an Immigration and Naturalization Service initiative called Citizenship USA, Farbrother became a central figure in a memo trail that leaves little doubt that the White House wanted maximum results in time to register new citizens for November's elections.

On March 21, after repeated complaints by immigrant advocacy groups and ethnic politicos about backlogs of naturalization cases, senior Gore policy adviser Elaine Kamarck sent Farbrother a message saying "the President is sick of this and wants action. If nothing moves today, we'll have to take some pretty drastic measures." Farbrother shot back, "I favor drastic measures. . . . If I don't get what we need, I will call for heavy artillery."

A day later, Farbrother sent e-mail to Gore noting, "I bet Elaine $10 that the [INS'] L.A. manager won't get what he needs Tuesday. Do you want in on the action?" The following week, the INS delegated hiring authority to officials in the key city and authorized increased spending for naturalization. But an unhappy Farbrother complained that the new order failed to permit the use of "temporary service agencies (like Kelly Girls)."

A seemingly bemused Gore, e-mailed back on March 27 inquiring, "Was that $10 bet about Kelly Girls?" Farbrother's response couldn't have been more explicit: "No sir, the bet was not just about Kelly Girls. I had bet Elaine that INS would not give managers in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Miami enough authority, in general, to make me confident they could produce a million new citizens before Election Day."

Farbrother concluded his note to Gore with the assertion that "unless we blast INS headquarters loose from their grip on the front-line managers, we are going to have way too many people still waiting for citizenship in November."

On March 28, in an e-mail memo to Kamarck and Stone, the irrepressible Farbrother suggested: "Make me the INS deputy commissioner. From there, I could do more, faster." By way of justification, he argued: "We should be putting proven reinventors into lots of agencies anyway. Having people who don't 'get it' in top jobs has turned out to be [reinvention's] No. 1 stumbling block."

Farbrother also suggested that "to blunt any charge that we are running a citizenship/Clinton voter mill, I am working with the FBI to tighten up the ridiculously loose fingerprint check system. . . . A breakthrough here will look good to the anti-alien lobby."

Another Farbrother document that raised eyebrows on Capitol Hill was a proposed decision memo for President Clinton, laying out options "to expedite the naturalization of nearly a million legal aliens who have applied to become citizens." One of the options: "Lower the standards for citizenship" by training INS naturalization adjudicators to "be more liberal" in exercising their "broad latitude" to interpret the statutory standards for citizenship and to decide who meets them. Kamarck says the paper never reached Clinton or Gore.

Interviewed after the election, Farbrother insisted that the option of lowering citizenship standards was never meant to be taken seriously. The idea, he said, was "Let's get it out on the table and have everybody say, 'No. No. We don't want to do that shit. Let's do something smart.' "

Farbrother attributed the impatient-if not downright pushy-tone of his memos to his years of battling against centralized bureaucracies that stifle creativity at the point where services are delivered. "I guess that's why I get frustrated in such a hurry." But he quickly added, "I haven't lost my zest for the fight."

So, who won the $10 bet? "I thought for a while that Elaine owed me 10 bucks. But since they got all these people processed and the backlog down, I think I owe her," he said.