On That Terrible, Nebulous Economic Environment That's Forestalling Hiring

  You're Hired!

A few months ago, a cacophony of conservative voices began complaining about a hazy cloud of uncertainty looming on the economic horizon. Concerns over the Affordable Care Act, new regulations, and the possibility of new taxes, they claimed, explained continued high unemployment and a lagging recovery. Economist Dean Baker flags the latest example of this garbage meme in a Wall Street Journal article on the Obama administration's deliberations over new economic stimulus measures, and points out for the umpteenth time why it's wrong.

As Baker points out, "there has been no unusual increase in average weekly hours," which means that "[i]f uncertainty is holding back hiring then we should expect that firms are working their existing workforce more hours." But "[t]he length of the average workweek has increased little since its low-point last fall, which is standard for a recovery ... [and it] is still far shorter than it was before the downturn."

Unfortunately, this line of argument about uncertainty in the marketplace doesn't seem to be going anywhere despite its ridiculousness. Steve Benen over at Political Animal highlighted Sen. Mitch McConnell's remarks today to ABC News. Unsurprisingly, the Senate Minority Leader claimed, "[B]usiness is sitting there, hoarding cash because they are concerned of the health care taxes, the health care mandates, the tax increases that are coming in September potentially." Sorry, Mitch, that's just not the case.

My colleague Craig Jennings, picking apart another theory of conservatives about why unemployment is still high – that unemployment benefits make the unemployed lazy – highlighted the real reason why business isn't hiring. There's no demand for their products and services.

This isn't unsimilar to deficit hawk claims that we must cut deficits immediately – even before we're out of the economic downturn – lest some unknown, looming demanders of fiscal responsibility get upset with the U.S. debt, the downtrodden be damned.

Indeed, conservatives have tried whatever arguments they can think of to get away from the fact that demand is down and the government can do a lot by injecting further stimulus monies into the economy.

Image by Flickr user oooh.oooh used under a Creative Commons license.

(Gary Therkildsen 09/02/10; 0 comments)

Posting Federal Contracts Online: Let's Do It

 

A column in Government Executive last week recaps the debate about posting federal contracts online.

In May, the federal acquisition councils asked for public comments on how to post contracts online without disclosing protected information. The comments were posted online in July. The councils have yet to release their analysis of the comments.

As an "advance notice of proposed rulemaking", the comment period indicates that the councils anticipate amending the Federal Acquisition Regulation to facilitate posting contracts online. As strong advocates for transparency, OMB Watch supports a robust rule that efficiently maximizes disclosure. As the Project on Government Oversight said in their comments:

In order to regain public faith in the contracting system, the government must provide open public access to information on the contracting process, including actual copies of contracts rather than coded summary data, and contracting officers' decisions and justifications.
(Gavin Baker 09/02/10; 0 comments)

Deficit Commission Chair Troubled by Vets, Retirees, "Lesser People"

 

Heart of GlassNational Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (AKA "Deficit Commission") co-chair former senator Alan Simpson's latest outburst has betrayed his ignoble sensibilities and misguided priorities. (h/t DailyKos)

Former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson's comments came a day after The Associated Press reported that diabetes has become the most frequently compensated ailment among Vietnam veterans, even though decades of research has failed to find more than a possible link between the defoliant Agent Orange and diabetes.

"The irony (is) that the veterans who saved this country are now, in a way, not helping us to save the country in this fiscal mess," said Simpson...

Simpson is no backbencher congressman carping from the sidelines; he's leading President Obama's committee to save the budget. And this isn't an isolated incident.

We last heard from Simpson last week apologizing to National Older Women's League (OWL) Executive Director Ashley Carson for firing off an email to her complaining of her "babbl[ing] into the vapors about 'disgusting attempts at ageism and sexism' and all the rest of that crap." In that same missive Simpson articulated his disgust for Social Security by calling it "a milk cow with 310 million tits." And this follows a comment in June in which Simpson called Social Security recipients "lesser people."

Although I haven't read a response from the White House on Simpson's disparagement, the Obama administration stood by Simpson and refused to ask him to step down over the "tits" email.

When a nominally progressive president like Obama is totally OK with this kind of attitude from the captain of the Deficit Commission, sour times are ahead. If Simpson is that quick to stick a finger in the eye of the millions of Americans who served their country, chances are he's really not that interested in balancing the benefits of public protections and preserving a basic social safety net with the costs of slash-and-burn budgeting.

Image by Flickr user publicenergy used under a Creative Commons license.

(Craig Jennings 09/01/10; 0 comments)

Strong Coal Ash Rules Sought at Public Hearing

 

Witnesses from across the country yesterday urged the EPA to set strong public health standards for coal ash. In an all-day hearing in Arlington, VA, environmental and public health advocates and members of the general public asked EPA to regulate coal ash, a toxic byproduct of coal combustion that can contain arsenic, lead, and other toxics, as a hazardous waste.

“The number of people who attended the hearing today, and the distance they travelled to do so shows just how far the problem of toxic coal ash stretches,” Lyndsay Moseley from the Sierra Club said yesterday. “We need EPA to enact federally enforceable protections and to do so before more people are exposed to this toxic mess.”

In June, EPA published a notice of proposed rulemaking for coal ash that presented two regulatory options. The first option would designate coal ash as a hazardous waste, requiring special handling, transportation, disposal, and any potential reuse. The second would regulate coal ash in a way typically only used to control less toxic wastes such as household garbage – an option that would limit EPA's responsibility and authority over coal ash management.

Regulating coal ash as hazardous waste might help prevent some of the horror stories presented at the hearing and elsewhere. When coal ash escapes from currently unregulated ponds, impoundments, and landfills, it contaminates water supplies and threatens communities with cancers and other health problems.

A new report from the Environmental Integrity Project identifies 39 coal ash disposal sites that have contaminated water. The 39 are in addition to the 31 sites the group identified in a February report and 67 damage cases reported by EPA. From the newest report:

At every one of the 35 sites with groundwater monitoring wells, on-site test results show that concentrations of heavy metals like arsenic or lead exceed federal health-based standards for drinking water. For example, arsenic levels were above the 10 microgram per liter “maximum contaminant level” (MCL) at 26 of 35 sites, with concentrations reaching as high as 3,419 micrograms (over 341 times the standard) at the Hatfield’s Ferry site in Pennsylvania. 

The Arlington hearing was the first of seven EPA will hold to discuss coal ash regulation. Find out more about how you can sign up to speak or submit comments to the agency.

(Matthew Madia 08/31/10; 0 comments)

Waging War via PowerPoint

 

The tools we use, including information systems, shape our decision-making. (Consider the law of the instrument: "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.") But every tool has limitations.

Military lecture in front of a slide presentation

The NATO command in Afghanistan last week fired a staff officer for publicly criticizing the military's use of Microsoft's presentation software PowerPoint.

Lawrence Sellin, an Army Reserve colonel and commentator for United Press International, was fired from his position at the International Security Assistance Force just days after UPI published his rebuke of the military's information practices:

For headquarters staff, war consists largely of the endless tinkering with PowerPoint slides to conform with the idiosyncrasies of cognitively challenged generals in order to spoon-feed them information. ...

Each day is guided by the "battle rhythm" which is a series of PowerPoint briefings and meetings with PowerPoint presentations. It doesn't matter how inane or useless the briefing or meeting might be.

The military's PowerPoint use has been criticized before. Marine Corps Gen. James N. Mattis put it bluntly: "PowerPoint makes us stupid."

PowerPoint abuse is a common experience in a number of contexts. But in the military, the stakes are much higher than mere annoyance.

Overreliance on any tool, without being cognizant of its limits, can introduce flaws into the final analysis. For instance, a 2009 study concluded that overreliance on and misuse of spreadsheets played a role in the financial crisis,

centred around the fact that they were one of the principal technologies used in the Credit Derivatives marketplace. This market grew very quickly due to the ease with which it was possible to design and promulgate opaque financial instruments based on large spreadsheets with critical flaws in their key assumptions. Their secondary rôle is centred around their ubiquitous use ...

Neglecting the limitations of any information system can lead to flawed decision-making. Monocultures are especially dangerous, because they inbreed the system's weaknesses.

A hallmark of transparency is that people have a right to know how the government made a decision. When even military leaders are concerned that their procedures may be inadequate, the public has reason to worry. If the military is planning the war via PowerPoint, we ought to know about it.

Image by Angelica Golindano for the U.S. Army. In the public domain.

(Gavin Baker 08/31/10; 1 comment)

It's the Lack of Jobs that Causes Unemployment

 

Last week, in a post on the how dreadful the job market is, I mentioned that "some" argue that the 99-week limit on Unemployment Insurance is actually creating unemployment. One of those "some" is Robert Barro, an economics professor at Harvard University and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, who articulates this claim in a Wall Street Journal op-ed (where else?) yesterday.

The unemployment-insurance program involves a balance between compassion--providing for persons temporarily without work--and efficiency. The loss in efficiency results partly because the program subsidizes unemployment, causing insufficient job-search, job-acceptance and levels of employment. A further inefficiency concerns the distortions from the increases in taxes required to pay for the program.

Barro sums it all by saying that if it weren't for this overly generous safety net, the unemployment rate would be 6.8% instead of today's 9.5%.

But, as Bob Williams at the Tax Policy Center notes, a new study by two researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco paints a totally different picture.
Research by Rob Valletta and Katherine Kuan at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco suggests that the effect of extended benefits would be much smaller than Barro’s estimate, probably less than half a percentage point. They found only small differences between how quickly job losers (who qualify for unemployment benefits) and job quitters (who don’t) find new jobs, suggesting that duration of benefits has only a small effect on today’s high unemployment rate.

Valletta's and Kuan's study also conveniently makes sense when you consider that for every job opening there are five potential applicants.


(via Daniel Indiviglio at The Atlantic, click to enlarge)

(Craig Jennings 08/31/10; 0 comments)

FEC Approves Coordination Rule

 

With a 5-1 vote, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) approved a rule on coordinated communications, to regulate messages that are the "functional equivalent of express advocacy" for or against candidates. This "functional equivalent" language comes from the 2007 Supreme Court decision in Wisconsin Right to Life Inc. v. FEC. A separate provision was voted down and would have covered all messages that "promote, support, attack or oppose" candidates. The final rule does not include a proposed safe harbor for communications where federal candidates endorse or solicit support for 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations, and the policies of those organizations.

The FEC's coordination rule address when spending on political communications by outside groups is considered coordinated with a candidate, and therefore subject to certain restrictions. Messages that are deemed independent of a campaign are not subject to FEC rules. BNA Money and Politics ($$) reports; "It remained unclear, however, how much real guidance the FEC rule would provide to political groups in determining whether and how their spending will be subject to FEC regulation."

Commissioners could not agree on examples of messages that would be regulated under the new rule. "FEC commissioners acknowledged that the agency could be sued yet again over the so-called coordination rule, which has been challenged three times since it was written to implement the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act."

The FEC also approved a rule to define regulated federal election activity. The new rule requires the use of hard money for voter registration activity in federal elections which is "encouraging or urging" a group of potential voters to register and vote. Both rulemakings were required by a 2008 federal appeals court decision in Shays v. FEC (Shays III).

(Amanda Adams* 08/27/10; 2 comments)

Is Standard Coding Just Around the Corner?

 

It wasn't three weeks ago that Earl Devaney, head of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency (RAT) Board, told Congress that conducting oversight of Recovery Act funds was unnecessarily burdensome due to the lack of a standardized coding system for government contracts, and now the procurement regulating arm of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has proposed a solution.

That was fast

Last week, Federal Computer Week reported on OMB's Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) Councils issuing a proposed rule in the Federal Register to standardize the use of unique procurement instrument identifiers (PIID) across government. A PIID is a series of alpha and alphanumeric characters that provide a unique identifier to a government contract.

FAR currently requires agencies to use a PIID that "is unique, Governmentwide [sic], and will remain so for at least 20 years from the date of contract award" when reporting to the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS), the government's clearinghouse for all contracts over $3,000.

The current regulations, however, do "not clearly articulate the specific policies and procedures necessary to ensure standardization of contract data beyond FPDS," which "causes numerous issues" within government contracting and financial systems, and results "in duplication, errors, and discrepancies." These problems only increase "for [multiple-award] contract vehicles ... used by more than one agency."

These duplications, errors, and discrepancies bring into question the contract data provided to end users, including government employees, contractors, and the public, who may receive "duplicate, overlapping, or conflicting information from the different Federal [sic] agencies."

The new rule would extend "the requirement for using PIIDs to all solicitations, contracts, and related procurement instruments" across the federal government, and to all contract actions, including actions "shared with supporting procurement, finance, logistics, and reporting systems," i.e. FPDS, and the Past Performance Information Retrieval System (PPIRS), which feeds the soon-to-be-public Federal Awardee Performance and Integrity Information System (FAPIIS).

Much of this effort to standardize, as the notice states, comes from the exacting reporting requirements of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA), which created USASpending.gov, and the Recovery Act, which has been a watershed for transparency in government spending.

Comments are due by Oct. 18, and the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP), which houses the FAR Councils, could offer a final proposed rule as soon as early next year.

Image by Flickr user Zoltan Papp used under a Creative Commons license.

(Gary Therkildsen 08/26/10; 0 comments)

The Recovery Act Failed! Or Not

 

If one were to listen to most conservative politicians and pundits these days, you'd come away with the impression that the Recovery Act has failed. It hasn't created any jobs and it hasn't helped the economy, so the narrative goes. For instance, here are a few quotes from the past couple weeks:

"All this 'stimulus' spending has gotten us nowhere." -House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH)
"[The stimulus] is simply not working." -Greta Van Susteren
"Everyone understands it was a payoff, not a jobs-creator." -Charles Krauthammer
"More people believe that Elvis Presley is alive than the stimulus created jobs." -Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)
"[The Recovery Act] increased the number of full-time-equivalent jobs by 2.0 million to 4.8 million compared with what would have occurred otherwise." -Congressional Budget Office

Whoops, sorry, that last one was actually a quote from the CBO's new report on the Act's effects on the economy. The independent, non-partisan institution reported that, contrary to what many seem to think, the Recovery Act raised real GDP by between 1.7 and 4.5 percent, lowered unemployment by between .7 and 1.8 percentage points, and increased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million. And that was just looking at what happened between April and June 2010.

In other words, the Recovery Act hasn't failed; on the contrary, it's had an immense effect on the nation's economy. The fact that we're still plagued by high unemployment and a faltering economy indicates that the Act wasn't nearly big enough, not that it hasn't worked.

Oh, and for those keeping score at home, the CBO report also revised downwards the cost of the Recovery Act. The total price tag will be about $814 billion, down from the CBO's earlier estimate of $867 billion.

Image by Flickr user calamity1 used under a Creative Commons license.

(Sam Rosen-Amy 08/26/10; 2 comments)

Religious Groups Seek to Continue Faith-Based Hiring Practices

 

In 2001 then President Bush launched his "faith-based" initiative by establishing a White House office to assist and encourage faith-based organizations seeking federal funds to combat problems like drug addiction and homelessness.  Faith based organizations have always served their communities, providing a wide range of services, what continues to make the issue contentious is that some religious groups want to base their hiring policies on the religion one practices, effectively using tax payer funds to selectively discriminate.  Yesterday leaders from over 100 religious organizations sent a press release urging Congress against tampering with what they call "freedom of religion", contending that pending legislation would deny religious charities receiving federal grants their fundamental right to hire people who share their faith.   The groups recent activity appears to be aimed at a provision in legislation to reauthorize the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration H.R. 5466, that would prohibit them from receiving federal money if they consider a job applicants religion when hiring.

The groups maintain that "contrary to a common misconception, the right of religious organizations to compete for federal grants while retaining the opportunity to hire people of like-minded faith is not a policy holdover from the administration of George W. Bush. Rather, it rests on legislation passed under two Democratic administrations"

  • President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that allows religious employers to prefer staff who share their religious conviction and mission.
  • President Bill Clinton, in 1993 signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), based on which, the Justice Department recently concluded faith-based organizations are entitled to continue their religious hiring policy while also receiving federal grants. That legislation 17 years ago was championed by then-Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass), as well as Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and then Representative Charles Schumer (D-NY).

Richard Stearns, the president and CEO of World Vision, U.S., says that "the letter and other efforts are targeting not just pending legislation, but also calls for Congress to ban religious hiring exemptions in an expected continuing budget resolution later this fall".

Rev. Barry W. Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, responded with a press release of their own and stated that “I am appalled that these religious leaders are trying to undermine the civil rights protections that every American counts on. If government pays for a social work position, every qualified applicant should be considered for the job regardless of their views on religion.

“At a time when the economy is hard-hit and a lot of people are out of work, it is disgraceful that some religious leaders want to deny government-funded job opportunities on the basis of religion,” he continued. “Members of Congress must say no to this exercise in discrimination.” 

In February, the Coalition Against Religious Discrimination (CARD) sent a letter to the President urging him to act now to restore the constitutionally-required safeguards and civil rights protections governing partnerships between government and religiously-affiliated institutions – standard operating procedures that had been largely in place for decades prior to the creation of the Faith-Based Initiative. 

The CARD Coalition suggests that “one simple and highly significant step the Administration could take now to show its commitment to our civil rights and religious liberty concerns is to direct the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) to commence review and withdrawal of its June 29, 2007, Memorandum interpreting the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA)”. 

(Lee Mason 08/26/10; 0 comments)