All of Washington, D.C., as well as the rest of the country, has been binging on the third season of the wildly popular Netflix original series “House of Cards,” the sordid tale of Washington politicians who will stop at nothing to bend the power structure to their will in order to gain power, prestige, and money.
The List Nobody Wants to Make: The 2015 GAO High Risk List
Anyone who has spent time on social media in recent years has inevitably noticed the proliferation of lists.
Fiscally Drunk and Disorderly
In spite of the decisive drubbing that President Obama and his party sustained in the mid-term elections, he continues to gallop along on his (gift) horse, proposing all kinds of new government spending programs, as if nothing has changed. His behavior is reminiscent of the over-served guy drowning his sorrows at the local watering hole, running up a big tab on his maxed-out credit card, yelling “another round on me for everybody!”
USPS Labor Woes: A Greek Tragedy
In the myth of Sisyphus, the protagonist angers the gods so much that they condemn him to spend eternity fruitlessly rolling a weighty boulder up a steep hill. This turns out to be an apt description of the fate of labor costs at the fiscally stressed United States Postal Service (USPS).
USPS In-APPtitude on Display
Sometimes, when it comes to grAPPling with the overarching, mind-numbing problem of trillions in government waste across all federal agencies, it’s the little vignettes that really illustrate and crystallize the larger story. And so it goes with the newest mis-hAPP unveiled by the United States Postal Service and reviewed by a reporter for Popular Mechanics: […]
Ding, Ding, Ding – Arlington, Virginia Hops Off the Trolley
Good for Arlington, Virginia for pulling the plug on its wasteful trolley project. May the action of a few sages in Arlington become a beacon of light to other municipalities, which may be experiencing the intense pressure of the “smart growth,” mass transit zealots, but really don’t want to bleed scarce tax dollars on projects […]
Postal Delivery Times for Mail Slip, But Groceries Get Delivered in San Francisco !
Even as the USPS has ramped up a demo project to delivery groceries with Amazon in a few cities and made a deal to deliver some parcels for certain retailers on Sunday, the USPS is scaling back delivery standards for core customers, the folks who pay their bills, first class mail customers. While we support […]
By Your Leave: Federal Employees on Administrative Leave Cost Taxpayers Billions
ICYMI, this American Public Media interview with the Washington Post reporter Lisa Rein is a quick primer on a very big problem. In a nutshell, over a three-year period, 2011 to 2013, more than 57,000 federal employees hung out at home for a month or longer while cases of wrongdoing or malfeasance or whatever were […]
John Locke was Right….
When he said “I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.” Partisan ideology, never-ending campaigning, and empty rhetoric is no substitute for leadership, competence, and good management. The Keystone Cop character of the “we first heard about it when we read about it in the news” Obama administration is […]
USPS Delivers Groceries: Jack of All Trades, Master of None
The United States Postal Service (USPS) seems to be on a frenzied crusade to delve into new areas of business, even as it is posting billions in quarterly losses and mismanaging its core line of business, delivering first-class mail. Its latest entry into a new market, grocery delivery, ignores the fact that the USPS is […]