Of Bees and Guns

Years ago, writing about Jimmy Carter's budget-trimming program, I stumbled on the Beekeepers Indemnity Fund, a tiny federal program that compensated a handful of honeymen if their bees strayed into nearby pastures and were felled by neighbors' pesticides.One might think this an easy program to eliminate, but it turned out the bees had powerful friends in Congress. The fund became a small symbol of the parochialism that would doom Carter's budget.

The gun story on our cover offers another parable. You have read about the difficulties of merging 22 agencies in the Department of Homeland Security-with administrative systems, uniforms, communications, "culture," even the naming of a principal division all at issue. And now we have the example of buying handguns for DHS-a $25 million procurement, not large by government standards, but fraught with controversy (page 36).

Some of the department's 45,000 gun-toters want real heat, while others prefer lighter pieces; some like German or Austrian guns, but domestic manufacturers have gone to Congress for buy-American protection. It's a relatively small problem, but it's symptomatic of how hard it is to get things done in the federal bureaucracy.

Another example is found in efforts to improve government's dismal process for handling discrimination complaints-of which 20,000 were filed last year. There's a huge backlog of these cases at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, but reasonable efforts to speed things up have fallen afoul of powerful interests, and gridlock prevails (page 66).

Another case is reflected in the decision by the Office of Personnel Management to scrap plans to take over and consolidate security clearance processing at a Defense Department agency, where another huge backlog has arisen. It seems that OPM didn't like Defense's approach to computerizing the clearance data, and couldn't see its way clear to fixing it (page 29).

Budget is another obstacle. That's a factor with the backlog at the EEOC, where shortages nearly forced a 16-day shutdown last year.

In this time of war and red ink, budget austerity is common in many agencies. And this reflects a grievous failure in leadership, argues David Osborne, one of the most thoughtful observers of government. In 1992, Osborne published Reinventing Government (Plume), the best-known guide to government reform.

Now, Osborne and co-author Peter Hutchinson are offering a persuasive prescription for focusing resources on key objectives and bringing spending into line with available resources. His new book, important reading for those who care about the public sector, is titled The Price of Government: Getting the Results We Need in an Age of Permanent Fiscal Crisis (Basic Books, 2004).