The Buzz

Hollywood And the Homeland

It was inevitable: The Homeland Security Department, like the Pentagon and other agencies, has hired a liaison to work with Hollywood moviemakers and script-writers, USA Today reported in March.

Bobbie Faye Ferguson is heading up the DHS effort, at a salary of $100,000 a year, according to the paper.

The folks over at Government Executive's sister publication, The Hotline, did some quick research showing that Ferguson brings some hands-on experience to the job. Her own acting career included stints on such stalwart 1980s TV shows as Designing Women, Remington Steele, and The Dukes of Hazzard.

Ferguson also served as director of multimedia services at NASA for seven years, handling the space agency's relations with film and television companies. That included work on the movies Space Cowboys and Armageddon.

Even before adding the position, Homeland Security helped out with some TV and movie projects, including last year's Tom Hanks film, The Terminal. Now, however, Ferguson will take on the role of reviewing scripts and deciding which projects Homeland Security will cooperate with. That strategy has proved very effective for the Defense Department over the years.

Ferguson's appointment provided an easy opportunity for critics to take potshots. "In an age when the federal deficit is soaring into the ozone, it is hard to fathom how a La-La Land liaison enhances national security," opined the San Antonio Express-News.

But demand for DHS help is apparently high. Ferguson told USA Today she's had "dozens and dozens of inquiries" about cooperating on film projects.

Gangbusters

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau announced last month that it had launched an operation to help state and local law enforcement go after the nation's most violent gangs. ICE officials said the bureau is uniquely suited for the task because it can combine immigration and customs enforcement powers to target, disrupt and, if necessary, deport members of violent gangs in the United States.

"We have incredible immigration authorities and customs authorities under one roof right now, and we're able to bring that to the table," said Assistant Secretary Michael Garcia, who heads ICE. "We not only can take them off the streets and detain them, but we can deport them from the United States, and that is an incredibly powerful tool in going after a criminal organization."

The effort, called Operation Community Shield, targets the Mara Salvatrucha 13 gang, known as MS-13. According to ICE, the operation already has netted 103 MS-13 members, including 30 in New York City and 25 in Washington. The operation initially will focus on six major cities: Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Baltimore, Newark and Washington.

White House Welcome

As a second-term innovation to more effectively integrate President Bush's Cabinet secretaries into White House operations, Chief of Staff Andrew Card recently overhauled space in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and invited Cabinet members to each spend at least two hours a week working just a stone's throw away from the Oval Office.

Heidi Marquez Smith, who was director of presidential correspondence before her promotion to special assistant to Bush, will head the five-person Cabinet Liaison Office.

Shortly after Smith took the reins on Feb. 24, Card convened the Cabinet in its new conference suite on the first floor of the EEOB and encouraged the secretaries to conduct regular business there. The conference room, with sophisticated audio-visual capabilities, seats 17. An adjoining office is sized for one visiting honcho.

The NIH Diet

House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton, R-Texas, and National Institutes of Health ,Director Elias Zerhouni are offering competing visions about how to restructure the massive biomedical research establishment.

At a March hearing, Barton said the agency's growth "has resulted in an almost random collection of structures in which largely independent institutes and centers are tasked to advance research programs not in cooperation with one another but according to diseases, organ systems, or stage of life in which they specialize."

Barton envisions giving the NIH director more authority-something Zerhouni readily agreed would help-as well as streamlining its budget. Congress has created more than 60 separate research programs and appropriators fund 26 separate line items. Instead, Barton said, Congress should consider "budget clusters" within NIH.

Zerhouni agreed that NIH must reorganize. With no change, he said, "the cost of practicing medicine . . . will become unsustainable." Doctors must intervene before illness strikes, he said, rather than after symptoms appear. But that will require research across institutes. "Right now, we have a hand with 27 fingers, but I'm not sure the palm is as strong as it ought to be," he said.

Zerhouni is proposing an Office of Portfolio Analysis and Strategic Initiatives that he said would look agencywide to identify gaps or redundancies in research.

Foreign Travel

Almost two months after the Office of Personnel Management released interim guidelines governing compensatory time off for travel, the pool of federal employees eligible for the benefit expanded. In an apparent reversal, Foreign Service officers now will be able to claim comp time for work-related travel outside normal business hours, according to the State Department's human resources department.

The new time-off regulations are in response to provisions in the 2004 Federal Workforce Flexibility Act, which Congress passed in November. In early February 2005, OPM officials held a forum to explain the interim regulations and to invite comment. A State Department official at the time expressed concern that State employees who travel regularly would quickly acquire large amounts of comp time.

In response, OPM officials said comp time would be available only to workers who are defined as employees under Title 5 personnel regulations. This definition excludes Senior Executive Service personnel and Foreign Service officers, among others.

In late February, however, the State Department's Office of Resource Management and Organization Ana-lysis released a memo saying that Foreign Service officers would in fact be allowed to request comp time. "All civil service and Foreign Service specialists and untenured officers at the GS-15/FP-01 level and below may request compensatory time off for official travel performed outside of regular duty hours that is not otherwise compensable, in accordance with the new law," the State regulations said.

Covering The Bases

As the Pentagon gears up for the submission of its base-closing hit list next month, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has dropped hints that the cuts might not be as deep as previously indicated.

In late March, Rumsfeld said at a news conference that the Defense Department's long-standing estimate that up to one-fourth of the nation's military base infrastructure consists of excess capacity is too high. He said while the Clinton administration had estimated excess base capa-city at 20 percent to 25 percent, "it looks now like the actual number will be less than the lower end of that range. How much less remains to be seen."

The reason, Rumsfeld said, is an ongoing effort to close military facilities overseas will entail moving tens of thousands of troops back to U.S. bases.

Some lawmakers previously have questioned the wisdom of shutting U.S. installations until the Pentagon determines what to do with the influx of troops returning from overseas. Following a meeting with Rumsfeld last month, Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn of Texas said the return of at least 70,000 troops from garrisons overseas would lessen the impact of the 2005 base-closing round.