What Has Bush Done to the Government?

"Are presidential loyalists being placed in jobs with direct influence over grants, contracts, the granting of licenses, etc? If so, was there a centrally directed effort to use these powers for the benefit of Bush's reelection or the Republican Party?"

Lewis also asks: "[I]s there a competence gap developing? Have this administration's actions to politicize the bureaucracy in order to get control of the bureaucracy and satisfy patronage demands done serious damage to government competence? My research shows that politicization hurts performance. Apart from the competence gap between new hires and those departing, politicization of the bureaucracy creates systematic management problems that hurt the agencies more generally. It makes it difficult for agencies to recruit and retain high-quality civil servants; it reduces incentives for careerists to develop expertise; and it leads to increased management turnover -- three factors that can hurt performance even under the best of conditions."

I intend to keep an eye on this issue, both here and at Nieman Watchdog, with the hope that we'll see more coverage in the future. As you run across stories about federal government competence -- or if you feel like sharing your own observations -- e-mail me at froomkin@washingtonpost.com. And keep an eye on my new "Federal Government Competence Watch" feature as well.

Federal Government Competence Watch

For my inaugural entry, Ellen Nakashima and Brian Krebs write in The Washington Post: "The FBI is investigating a major information technology firm with a $1.7 billion Department of Homeland Security contract after it allegedly failed to detect cyber break-ins traced to a Chinese-language Web site and then tried to cover up its deficiencies, according to congressional investigators."

Who was supposed to be minding that particular store?

Iran Watch

Dan Ephron and Mark Hosenball write in Newsweek that "though the United States is now emphasizing sanctions and diplomacy as the means of compelling Tehran to stop enriching uranium, an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities could end up dragging Washington into a war."

I wrote about the ambiguous White House role in Israel's recent bombing raid on suspected nuclear facilities in Syria in Friday's column.

Ephron and Hosenball write: "While the Bush administration appears to have given tacit support to the Syria raid, Israel and the United States are not in lockstep on Iran. For Israel, the next three months may be decisive: either Tehran succumbs to sanctions and stops enriching uranium or it must be dealt with militarily. . . .

"In Washington, on the other hand, the consensus against a strike is firmer than most people realize. The Pentagon worries that another war will break America's already overstretched military, while the intelligence community believes Iran is not yet on the verge of a nuclear breakthrough."

That said, as Ephron and Hosenball note: "There are still voices pushing for firmer action against Tehran, most notably within Vice President Dick Cheney's office. But the steady departure of administration neocons over the past two years has also helped tilt the balance away from war. One official who pushed a particularly hawkish line on Iran was David Wurmser, who had served since 2003 as Cheney's Middle East adviser. A spokeswoman at Cheney's office confirmed to Newsweek that Wurmser left his position last month to 'spend more time with his family.' A few months before he quit, according to two knowledgeable sources, Wurmser told a small group of people that Cheney had been mulling the idea of pushing for limited Israeli missile strikes against the Iranian nuclear site at Natanz--and perhaps other sites--in order to provoke Tehran into lashing out. The Iranian reaction would then give Washington a pretext to launch strikes against military and nuclear targets in Iran."

That's a shocking and important story and it's getting quite a bit of media pickup today. But it's also old news.

Newsweek gives credit for the original reporting about Wurmser to Washington foreign-policy blogger Steven Clemons-- but suggests that Clemons first wrote about it only last week.