Soundbytes: Defense official changes, NII good-bye and downsizing government

A weekly roundup of comments from Nextgov.com. All comments are presented in their original, unedited form.

On Effort to craft FCC broadband regulation bill collapses

ore socializing of our daily lives. Give it up! From Cjengle23

On GAO sting shows passport fraud remains a problem

After years of watching our "infrastructure protection" outfit in DHS mindlessly spend all its energy on guards and fences, followed by buying more of the same vacuous thinking in "consulting" by former political appointees, it's refreshing to find technically-competent people helping us recognize the far greater threat posed by cybersecurity attackers. From Dismayedfed

The government is a wide open canvas. The so-called IT people are so out of date that it only a matter of time before other government start asseting control over critical systems. Read more from AZ Fed

On Campbell out as MHS CIO, Gates to close Defense CIO's office

Let's not lose sight of the big picture. All this cost cutting is NOT about a "bloated bureaucracy", it is about meeting a budget problem brought about by the Administration's and Congress realignment of priorities for the nation and the cost of fighting a war. Read more from Hook

Congratulations to Gates and Lynn for making the hard choices in hard times. Hopefully, congress will go along with this and ignore rationalization that some harm will result. Read more from RobertB

On USPS' eIDEAS Gets Poor Score

Finally, someone is looking at this thing. Seems all anyone is interested in is "generating NEW revenue" and not protecting revenue. Read more from Randy F

what's new? I worked for USPS for 20 years and management never gave a damn what anybody who did real work thought. From Sherri

On So Long NII

In a military establishment, with Title 10 overriding Title 40 (CCA), the only way to achieve commonality is to have one defense agency take the lead as has been done in the past. The services have their own CIO who already looks at standards and know when working together serves their interest. Previous efforts by NII to force standardization and force cooperation has never worked. Read more from John Weiler

That office has failed in its mission, so it should be eliminated. Where I sit, there at least two different IT contracts that deal with the IT infrastructure. In one organization, users have access to websites that are banned for security reasons at the other organization. That is a small example. Why should each COCOM (10 separate SOPs) have it's own IT contract and standards that differ from other organizations (I really have no idea how many others there are?) The security threats in Cyperspace are global, not regional. From Mark Akins

On Bill Seeks to Downsize Government

Dumb-da-dumb-dumb-dumb. Apparently the good Senator thinks that any agency that has expanded since 2009 must be doing stuff that doesn't need doing - or else he's prepared to cut people who are doing things that need doing. I'm sure there are places where cuts could be made, but mindless hacks like this proposal are nonsense. Does he really think that if the government has more oil platform inspectors than it did in 2009, the right thing to do is cut them? How about mine safety inspectors? Need fewer of those? Air traffic controllers? Firefighters? Read more from Little Birdie