The Magic of Change, NOAA Style

Hope and change have been disappointing at best. Apparently hope was not a powerful enough tool. Mayhap magic might prevail.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), under the enlightened administration of environmental superstar Dr. Jane Lubchenco, is planning a leadership conference in June. The conference is to be held in a hotel near the NOAA Headquarters in Silver Spring, MD. No excessive travel for these parsimonious protectors of the purse strings. 

A couple of months ago, we were told of some high jinks at the GSA. That's the Government Services Administration (GSA) that is chartered with overseeing the careful spending of our money. They had a big conference with clowns and magic and mystics. Then they had a big scandal.
Maybe NOAA missed the memo.

One of the sessions at the NOAA conference was to have a motivational theme and had the working title of "The Magic of Change." NOAA placed an ad to find a magician and it caught the attention of Senator Scott Brown (R MA) among others. With the GSA conference fresh in the minds of people, the reaction was immediate; ridicule, objections, outrage, you name it. The results were viral with ABC, CNN, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, the Gloucester Times, Politico, Boston.com, and the Belfast (that's right, Ireland) Telegraph and several others picking up the story.

Most of the media outlets that ran the story made the link to the GSA scandal but none made the link to the ongoing and unreported (other than the American Thinker) NOAA scandal.

I only wish that I were a fly on the wall and could have heard what Senator Brown said privately. He released the following official statement:

It's outrageous that NOAA is advertising to hire a magician for an upcoming government conference. This is taxpayer abuse, pure and simple, and I urge Commerce Secretary John Bryson to immediately cancel these frivolous plans. This is a low point even by Washington's standards and an insult to the fishing families that have been harmed by NOAA's over-regulation and attitude of indifference. The best magic that NOAA could perform would be to make this wasteful spending disappear.

NOAA listened (a strange phenomena in itself) to Senator Brown and withdrew the ad. There will be no magic at the upcoming conference.

The clowns will still be there; they are protected by privacy screens erected by their government employee unions. I don't think Dr. Lubchenco belongs to a union, but she's protected by the President.

This post originally appeared in the American Thinker on 5 May 2012.

Where Are the Rolling Heads from NOAA?

Scandals are shaking the Obama administration. Personnel with the highest of security clearances are being intimate, in the most basic definition of the word, with foreign nationals. Pillow talk, anyone? Other high-ranking officials cavort with clowns and psychics, all paid for on the government dime. Hot tub, anyone?

In the meantime, a human tragedy is occurring driven by a much more expensive if equally sordid scandal at NOAA that goes on under the radar of media attention. Steve Urbon of the New Bedford Standard-Times asks, "What about our scandal?"

Back in February 2011, CBS News did an exposé on the NOAA law enforcement scandal. As far as I know, this has been the only national coverage of the outrage other than what's appeared here at American Thinker (AT). AT has been reporting on the NOAA scandal for the past two years. Many of the citations and links in this essay are from AT's coverage. CBS showed a clip of Senator Grassley, who said, "I want to make sure that heads roll ... because in a bureaucracy, if heads don't roll, you don't change behavior."

Last week, a dozen or so Secret Service agents, including a couple of supervisors, did what boys do. Wham, bam, thank you, ma'am! Problem was, they were on duty in a foreign country, protecting the president. Not a good thing.

The first cut made for three heads: one supervisor gone, allowed to retire; another supervisor being discharged, with 30 days to mount a defense; a third non-supervisory person resigned. Three more were announced on 20 April, and there are probably more to come.

Six and counting! Secret Service behavior will be better in the future.

A couple of weeks earlier, we were told of some hijinks at the GSA. That's the GSA that is chartered with overseeing the spending of our money. The following is from the Washington Post on 2 April:

The chief of the General Services Administration resigned, two of her top deputies were fired and four managers were placed on leave Monday amid reports of lavish spending at a conference off the Las Vegas Strip[.]

That's three GSA heads gone and four other heads hovering above the block. A very definite message in the behavioral department.

Two scandals, two forceful responses, and two problems fixed.

And then there is NOAA. NOAA law enforcement was running essentially unsupervised for years, inflicting huge fines on fishermen for small infractions and putting the collected monies in a slush fund used for lavish trips and booze-cruise luxury boats.