Circuit

The Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum has released more than 120,000 pages of materials from the Nixon presidency, including about 11,000 pages of previously classified material. Included in the documents made public by the National Archives and Records Administration Nov. 28 are pages about covert U.S. actions in Chile, national security documents on the Soviet Union and Saudi Arabia, papers on the Vietnam War, and the president’s daily CIA briefings. The library also released administration files on Mark Felt (Deep Throat), Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), Bob Hope, Elvis Presley, Ronald Reagan, Dick Cheney and Frank Sinatra. The pages of declassified national security materials come from the White House Special Files, Staff Member and Office Files. Some also come from the National Security Council and include documents from Henry Kissinger’s office files. The documents were released under the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act of 1974, which requires NARA to process and make available materials from Nixon’s time in the White House that relate to abuse of governmental or presidential power. The Nixon Library became part of NARA last summer. We have to admit that we haven’t watched all of the presidential debates this year — mostly because it feels like there have been so many of them. We did, however, tune in to last week’s CNN/YouTube Republican debate in which the questions came from YouTube users. Government management issues have not been critical for presidential candidates this season, with a few exceptions. Democratic frontrunner Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) proposed cutting the number of federal contractors. On the other end of the spectrum, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani reiterated during last week’s debate that one of the measures he would use to control government spending is not to fill the jobs of retiring federal workers. A YouTube question was: “If elected, what measures will you take to tackle the national debt and control spending?” Giuliani’s response: “I think you have to [employ] across-the- board spending cuts the way Ronald Reagan did, a 5, 10 percent [cut] per civilian agency should be done right now, actually. We should commit not to rehire half of the civilian employees that will retire in the next 10 years. That is 42 percent of the federal workforce that will retire in the next 10 years. Don’t rehire half of them. Use technology, one person doing the job of two or three. Every business has done it. The government has to do it. And we should look at those programs. There are about 3 percent of programs that OMB finds every year are failing. They should be zeroed out. Twenty-two percent are found to be not able to be evaluated. They should be looked at. We need that kind of approach.” Robert Burton, deputy administrator at the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, was given the Coalition for Government Procurement’s Lifetime Achievement Award earlier this month. Burton was one of a number of people selected for the coalition’s 2007 Excellence in Partnership Awards program. Among the other winners: Because of the Thanksgiving holiday, there were few responses to the FCW.com poll, so we’ll continue it for another week. Let us know your thoughts on the question, “”