You're Doing a Heckuva Job, Uncle Sam!

After spending billions (if not trillions) of dollars on homeland security gadgets and employees, it seems the federal government still does not have the capacity to merge basic information or even spell correctly. I'm quite sure these new protocols and additional dollars will not fix the problems.

Fixing errors after the Christmas Day near-bombing

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 12, 2010; A15


Philip J. Crowley, assistant secretary of state for public affairs, acknowledged last week at a news conference that State Department officials made two key errors in the initial reporting about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

They misspelled his name -- "a one-letter difference," an intelligence official said -- in filing their first report Nov. 20, the day after Umau Mutallab, a Nigerian banker, described his concerns about his son.

And they didn't officially look for Abdulmutallab in a department database of U.S. visa-holders.

State Department officials wrote a Visa Viper cable Nov. 20 saying that Mutallab thought his son had become attached to "extremists" and might be in Yemen, and that the father wanted help in trying to locate him to reestablish family relations. The Visa Viper terrorist-reporting program calls for each Foreign Affairs post abroad to identify "potential terrorists and to develop information on those individuals," according to the State Department's Foreign Affairs Manual.

But before the Christmas Day bombing attempt aboard a Detroit-bound airliner, developing such information for a Visa Viper report apparently did not involve searching for the name of a "potential terrorist" in the State Department's database of people with visas to enter the United States. It is now.

That was the first reform announced almost immediately by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and later by President Obama.

Back in November, it was a day or two after the initial Visa Viper report was received at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) before analysts there realized the correct spelling of Abdulmutallab's name, based on data from other agencies. With the error corrected, he was listed, along with about 400,000 others, on the Terrorist Identities Datamark Environment (TIDE). That is a list of people, along with relevant information about them, who are suspected of, or known to be associated with, terrorist activities outside the United States.

At that time, NCTC analysts who worked on TIDE entries processed only nominations from the State Department, the CIA and other collection agencies. They checked the TIDE list to see if a name was on it, but they did not search other databases for more information. The NCTC also determined what further action, if any, was necessary, such as moving a person's name to the next level, the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center.

Meanwhile, back at the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, State Department officials -- "out of curiosity" -- did check to see whether Abdulmutallab had a visa for entry into the United States, according to a department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the matter is under investigation. But because the misspelled name was used, the fact that Abdulmutallab had a multi-entrance, two-year tourist visa obtained in June 2008 was not sent to the NCTC or to other intelligence agencies.

As Crowley put it last week, "The initial search to determine if there was a visa did not -- one did not show, expressly because of this misspelling."

"This is a critical lesson learned," Crowley said. "The steps that we've put in the process beginning immediately after December 25 will, in fact, make sure that future reports do have visa information in them, so that this is . . . inserted into the process right from the outset."

Lack of information about Abdulmutallab's open visa affected the NCTC's determination of the threat he presented and thus the list he was put on. Apparently no other agency checked State's database of visa-holders, though they all have access to it. The assumption, one intelligence official said, was that State would have done that.

One of the major findings of the ongoing inquiry into Abdulmutallab's case deals with reviewing the names of those with outstanding visas to enter the United States. The State Department has withdrawn an unknown number of visas since Dec. 25, but Crowley refused to discuss any except Abdulmutallab's.

One of Obama's new directives requires the FBI to "conduct a thorough review of Terrorist Screening Database holdings" -- about 440,000 names -- "and ascertain current visa status of all 'known and suspected terrorists,' beginning with the no fly list" -- 4,000 names. One wonders if such a check has been done before.

And the NCTC, under the president's new directive, has been given responsibility to do more than just bring together data collected by others. It is to "establish a dedicated capability responsible for enhancing record information on possible terrorists" on the TIDE list.

In addition, it is to pursue "thoroughly and exhaustively terrorism threat threads" with a new group so it can pass on information for "followup action by the intelligence, law enforcement, and homeland security communities." For that, according to NCTC officials, they will need more personnel and equipment.

Musings on the Power of the Federal Government

Excellent and brief article below from the WaPo. As for Levy's call to action on binding government, I wonder how such binding can be accomplished when the very same institutions that are to be bound are the ones who would decide/enforce those boundaries? Does anyone expect Congress to voluntarily surrender its accumulated powers? That outcome seems about as likely as Congress eliminating influence-peddlers and PAC money from the political process. The only actor that could bind the federal government is the general electorate, which just happens to be hopelessly split into ineffectual factions, endlessly warring with the others primarily over matters which are not the province of government (sexuality, abortion, etc.). Leave your comments below.

Has the Supreme Court eroded freedom?
By: Robert Levy

The power of our highest court occupies center stage in "The Dirty Dozen: How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom" by Robert A. Levy and William Mellor, now out in paperback. Levy, chairman of the Cato Institute, and Mellor, president and general counsel of the Institute for Justice, worry that the Supreme Court has led the country away from a vision of the Constitution established by the Founding Fathers.

How did we get from the Founders' Constitution, which established strictly limited government, to our contemporary Constitution, which has expanded government and curtailed individual rights? Much of the damage can be traced to a handful of post-New Deal Supreme Court cases that changed the course of American history, with adverse effect on many of today's key policy debates.

Here are just a few of the issues:

Mandatory Health Insurance A 1942 case, Wickard v. Filburn, paved the way for the noxious notion that Congress, under the guise of regulating interstate commerce, can punish the failure to purchase a product -- health insurance -- for which there is no legal interstate market. Of course, if Congress can mandate the purchase of health insurance, why not the purchase of exercise equipment or a new fuel-efficient car? The individual mandate would extend the dominion of the federal government to virtually all manner of human conduct -- including non-conduct -- by establishing a police power that is nowhere authorized in the Constitution.

Home Foreclosures
"No State shall ... pass any ... Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts," states the Constitution. Clear enough? Not in Home Building & Loan Association v. Blaisdell (1934). The Supreme Court upheld a Minnesota statute that -- see if this sounds familiar -- postponed mortgage payments for financially troubled homeowners. Never mind the contract. We're now seeing a replay as creditors are forced to waive foreclosure on sub-prime mortgages, even if there was no fraud in the bargaining process.

Bailouts
In a series of cases culminating with Whitman v. American Trucking Associations (2001), the Court ignored the Constitution's very first sentence after the preamble: "All legislative Powers ... shall be vested in a Congress." For decades, Congress has delegated more and more lawmaking power to unelected bureaucrats in 300-plus executive departments and administrative agencies. That is how Treasury Secretaries Henry Paulson and Timothy Geithner were able to bailout banks, automobile companies, and insurance companies -- making up the rules as they went along, without input from Congress or recourse by the voters.

Eminent Domain
The infamous 2005 ruling in Kelo v. City of New London allowed private homes to be condemned by government so the property could be transferred to other private parties for economic development. The justification was not highways or traditional public uses, but rather the illusory promise of a higher tax base and more jobs. Nobody's home is safe from the government bulldozer when local planners can run roughshod over the most isolated and vulnerable members of society.

The list could go on. Whether it's political speech, economic liberties, property rights, or racial preferences, the Supreme Court has behaved in a manner that would have mystified and outraged our Founding Fathers. The federal government is now immersed in matters ranging from public schools, to welfare, retirement, medical care, family planning, and even aid to the arts -- none of which can be found among Congress's enumerated powers. It's time for the Court to bind the legislative and executive branches with the chains of the Constitution.

Important Insight on the Health Care Debate

Below is an article found in the Washington Post regarding one of the hidden costs of employer-provided health care: the fact that individual employees do not have the right to negotiate their own policy and, for that matter, often do not know how much their employers pay for group plans for employees.  Importantly, the author examines the correlation between rising health care costs and declining wages arguing that employers, with only one predetermined basket of money available for both wages and benefits, necessarily shaft employees on wage compensation in a highly inflationary environment for health care costs.  Reader thoughts are welcome in the comments section.   

The medical bill you need to see
By Ezra Klein
www.washingtonpost.com , Tuesday, December 8, 2009 


We've had a pretty good discussion this year on the public option and on "death panels." But for all the hype over health-care reform, we have not done a very good job of talking about the health-care system itself -- in particular, why our system is so expensive. As a result, we're not doing a very good job of fixing it. There's still time to change that, but not much.

The doomsaying is by now familiar: Left unchecked, health-care reform will bankrupt our nation. It will grow to consume every dollar of gross domestic product. And Congress isn't contemplating anything nearly radical enough to avert the emergency.

The reason is not that people haven't heard grim warnings about the future. It's because they don't understand what's going on in the present. In 2009, the average employer-sponsored health-care plan cost a bit less than $13,500. But virtually no one cut a check for $13,500. Employers generally pay more than 70 percent of their employees' health-care costs. To employees, that seems like a good deal, particularly given how fast costs are growing. A "benefit," as it's called.

But health-care coverage is not a benefit. It's a wage deduction. When premium costs go up, wages go down. When premium costs go down, wages go up. Yet workers don't know that. In fact, the information is hidden from them. That means that cost control seems like all pain and no gain, which makes it virtually impossible for Congress to pass. It's like asking someone to diet when they don't realize it will help them lose weight.

Cost control is not, in fact, all pain and no gain. It's some pain in return for a fat raise. A 2006 study, for instance, by Harvard's Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra used malpractice payments to estimate the effect of premium increases on wages. They found that a 10 percent increase in health-care premiums "results in an offsetting decrease in wages of 2.3 percent" and an increase in unemployment of 1.2 percentage points. Compensation is basically a set sum for employers, and they don't seem to care much whether it goes into wages or into health-care costs.

Workers saw this in the 1990s. This was the era of the managed-care revolution, which most remember as a horrifying failure. Famously, audiences applauded when Helen Hunt broke out into a profanity-laden rant against HMOs in the movie "As Good as It Gets." The popular backlash was so intense that by the turn of the century the managed-care experiment was virtually over. The problem with this historic failure? The data showed the experiment to be a tremendous success.

From 1989 to 1995, median wages actually fell a bit. Then, managed care kicked in. Annual growth in health-care costs fell from more than 10 percent in the early 1990s to less than 5 percent in the late '90s. Meanwhile, wages shot through the roof, rising more than 11 percent from 1995 to 2000. Then we ended the managed-care experiment, and health-care costs resumed their normal speed of growth. Predictably, wages slumped back down from 2000 to 2006. "By every observable indicator," says Harvard's David Cutler, "managed care was a huge success. It cut spending, cut the growth of spending and didn't seem to kill anyone. And yet everyone hated it."

Of course they hated it. They didn't see its benefits, only its costs. They knew they were suddenly trapped in networks and being hassled by their insurers. As for their raises, those were nice, but why are you changing the subject?

When Americans rejected managed care, in other words, they didn't know they were ending wage increases, too. But since 1990, wages have tracked changes in premiums more closely than they've tracked the growth of GDP. Maybe if more workers knew that, they would be more interested in efforts to control health-care costs.

One of the best reforms that could be made this year would be to give workers that information. So far, however, efforts have been unsuccessful. During the Senate Finance Committee's negotiations, Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) offered to give employees the option to reject their employer's offerings in return for a voucher that would help them choose their own insurance on exchanges, which meant they would save money if they chose cheaper plans. Much more modestly, Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) floated an idea to simply require employers to report their health-care spending on workers' W-2 forms. Both were stymied by an odd-bedfellows alliance of employers and unions.

It's not too late, though. Perhaps the easiest way to dramatize the issue for workers would be to attach health-care costs to each paycheck. If employers listed the cost of health care alongside the bite taken by payroll taxes, it would be much clearer to workers that health-care coverage was coming out of their wages, not out of their employer's largess. That, at least, could help them see the costs of the system more clearly, which is, unfortunately, something that all the congressional debate isn't helping anyone do.