The long saga of General Services Administrator Lurita Doan has finally come to an end - the White House fired her yesterday. We have posted extensively on Doan's short tenure at the GSA on this blog, in our press room, and in the Watcher as well. It seemed there just was never enough print space to truly capture all the corrupt, illegal, and unethical behavior of Ms. Doan (also see here, here, here, and here).

My only question at this point is, why was she fired now? It's been 11 months since the independent Office of Special Counsel recommended to President Bush that Doan be fired for blatant violations of the Hatch Act - which prohibits the use of federal resources for partisan political activities. It certainly does seem like strange timing, but I suppose I should stop being surprised by the bizarre actions of this administration.

It is time to say farewell and good luck to Administrator Doan. Thanks, Ms. Doan, for wasting our money, helping out your friends with no-bid contracts, hiding the truth by interfering with oversight investigations, attempting to intimidate an Inspector General's office, violating federal law, keeping us entertained at many congressional hearings with your poor memory and shifty ways, and generally, making life interesting here at this watchdog organization. You certainly weren't dull.

In The Checks Are Coming! The Checks Are Coming!, Stan Collender questions the efficacy of legislative measures to stimulate the economy in the short-term.

He argues that, regardless of the relative bang-for-the-buck of certain measures as opposed to others, all such measures are too slow to be effective -- not because checks or unemployment insurance boosts or food stamps are slow to work, but because the legislative process and the operations of government are themselves too slow. Witness the three months it's taken for Treasury to get the checks out the door that Congress and the President agreed to in February.

Barring legislative action providing short-term boosts to the economy, where can we turn to address oncoming recessions? Depends what you mean by "we." Unless you are the president or maybe Treasury Secretary, lots of luck to you in negotiating the requisite monetary policy with the Federal Reserve Bank. The Fed, by design (by congressional design, ironically) operates without the consent of the governed. And monetary tools are far less flexible and targeted than fiscal ones, however rapid and powerful they may be.

Maybe the solution is, as Collender suggests, improving the operations of government so that Treasury and the other agencies pre-automate legislatively (i.e., democratically) mandated means of addressing the particularities of the slowdown or recession in question.

Here's a short item reported ($) in CongressDaily yesterday afternoon that as escaped most mainstream media coverage. Apparently the federal government, specifically officials at the Customs and Border Protection office, have decided to scrap continued work on a brand new, $20 million virtual fence along the Arizona-Mexico border. The initiative, called Project 28, was awarded to Boeing, Inc., as part of a $67 million contract to provide advanced border protection technologies.

Project 28 has experienced repeated delays (in June 2007 and again in February 2008) due to technical problems and software glitches since it began about 18 months ago, and now that the government has accepted the program infrastructure from Boeing, it found out it doesn't work. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has testified before Congress that the technology provided under the contract "did not fully meet user needs and the project's design will not be used as the basis for future" development of border protection technologies.

Scott Amey over at the Project on Government Oversight reminded us on Monday that there has been a lot of long overdue action in Washington this month to hold federal contractors more accountable. Scott has a nice summary of some of the bills garnering attention in the House and a few other snipits from the past few weeks related to federal contracting. (Read Scott's summary). Two of the bills Scott mentions (H.R. 5712 and H.R. 3033 will be considered on the House floor this week. Another one, H.R. 3928 - which would require disclosure of the names and salaries of the most highly compensated officers of any contractor receiving more than 80 percent of their annual gross review from federal contracts, will also be considered on the floor this week.