House of Eratosthenes

The Secret Service has screwed up, just the latest out of many times recently, and its director has resigned. James Taranto, writing in WSJ Best of the Web, notices:

From some media quarters one hears the usual bureaucratic excuses. Politico’s Marc Ambinder argued last week that “there’s also a direct link between Friday’s security breach and Washington’s budgetary and political dysfunction…Years of leaner budgets and inconsistent direction from Congress and the executive branch have left the Secret Service–especially its Uniformed Division, which guards the White House–understrength for years.”

That Times editorial echoes the point: “The budget and size of the Secret Service . . . has fallen in the last few years. In 2011, the agency had about 6,900 staff positions; it now has about 6,600. Its budget fell from $1.9 billion in 2012 to $1.8 billion in 2013, in part because of automatic cuts demanded by Congress, and it has gone up only slightly since then.” But as The Wall Street Journal notes in an editorial today, “the truth is that the Secret Service budget of $1.7 billion for 2014 has doubled in real terms since 1998.”

Anyway, how many millions of dollars does it take to lock a door?

It all reminds us of an observation Peggy Noonan made in May, in a column pegged to the Veterans Administration scandal:

Barack Obama is killing the reputation of government. He is killing the thing he loves through insufficient oversight. He doesn’t do the plodding, unshowy, unromantic work of making government work. In the old political formulation, he’s a show horse, not a workhorse.

The president’s inattention to management — his laxity, his failure to understand that government isn’t magic, that it must be forced into working, clubbed each day into achieving adequacy, and watched like a hawk — is undercutting what he stands for, the progressive project that says the federal government is the primary answer to the nation’s ills.

He is allowing the federal government to become what any large institution will become unless you stop it: a slobocracy.

As John Podhoretz observes in the New York Post: “This seems to crystallize a more general feeling that stretches from Washington to the far reaches of the globe–the feeling that things are spinning wildly out of control and there’s no one even minimally competent enough at the highest reaches of American power to calm the gathering storm.”

The knee-jerk wagon circling about budget cuts sickens me, since I’m an Earth person with red blood who doesn’t live inside the beltway. Out here, you don’t get to demand more money after a glaring defeat, reasoning that little should have been expected of you since your budget was increased by only $1 billion instead of 2. Out here, regardless of what last year’s budget was, if you screw up too much that’s when the budget-cutting really begins.

It’s a different planet in there. Not even in the same galaxy.

Well, they found their scapegoat. Maybe her sacking is deserved. I’m not in a position to definitively say, although the above article about recent Secret Service screw-ups does paint a picture of an agency out of control. Maybe she knows a lot more about running the Secret Service than I do.

Maybe she does. But, her Wikipedia entry doesn’t demonstrate such a thing, too much…

Julia Ann Pierson is a former American law enforcement official. She served as the 23rd Director of the United States Secret Service. Pierson was appointed by President Barack Obama on March 27, 2013, and became the first woman to head the agency. Amidst a series of security lapses involving the agency, Pierson resigned on October 1, 2014.

Early life and education

Pierson is a native of Orlando, Florida. While she attended high school, she worked at Walt Disney World as a parking lot attendant, watercraft attendant, and in costume in Disney parades.

She was an Explorer in the Learning for Life program of the Boy Scouts of America in a post specializing in law enforcement chartered to the Orlando Police Department. She was the 1978 National Law Enforcement Exploring Youth Representative, leading the Law Enforcement Exploring division, and was selected as the National Law Enforcement Exploring chair.

She attended the University of Central Florida, graduating in 1981 with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice.

Career

Following graduation, Pierson served three years in the Orlando Police Department (OPD), patrolling the northeastern section of Orlando. She was one of the first female OPD officers assigned to a beat. She joined the United States Secret Service in 1984 as a special agent. She served in the Miami Field Office from 1984 to 1985, and the Orlando Field Office from 1985 to 1988. From 1989 to 2000, she served on the presidential protective details (PPDs) of Presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. Between 2000 and 2001, Pierson held the position of special agent in charge of the Office of Protective Operations, and then as deputy assistant director of the Office of Administration from 2001 to 2005. From 2005 to 2006 she served as deputy assistant director of the Office of Protective Operations. From 2008 to her appointment as director, Pierson served as the chief of staff to the director, and as the assistant director of the Office of Human Resources and Training for the Secret Service.

Pierson was already the agency’s highest-ranking woman before being promoted to director. She was tasked with improving the image of the Secret Service, following the Summit of the Americas prostitution scandal. On September 30, 2014, while testifying at a United States House of Representatives hearing, Pierson faced Congressional criticism over the White House security breach of September 19, 2014. On October 1, 2014, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson accepted her resignation as director.

I don’t think her sacking is going to fix things. There is a lot of opportunity for improvement, here, but there is also a problem that is much bigger than Julia Pierson.

What’s remarkable about her? First paragraph: “…and became the first woman to head the agency.” Career: “She was one of the first female OPD officers assigned to a beat.” Next paragraph: “…was already the agency’s highest-ranking woman before being promoted to director.”

Reminds me of an office discussion of the up-and-coming Barack Obama, back in 2007: What has He accomplished? “Got elected to the Senate.”

I’m sure it will look, to some, like my concern is that we’re not promoting enough white guys. Nothing will ever change their minds. But my concern is actually that we’re losing the ability to recognize true excellence. We wouldn’t recognize a public servant possessing extraordinary and distinguishing ability, if he ran up and kicked us square in the balls.

Which he’d be sorely tempted to do, if ever he could find them. We seem to have lost them, lost our ability to recognize genuine achievement. It’s all “first black guy this” and “first woman that.”

If we meet a black guy who really does have these distinguishing abilities, or a woman who has them; if we as a society have any sort of unified response, let us say that that response is not one of recognition.

We’re living in a rather odd time right now. It’s always fun and rewarding to put an argument together, however ramshackle and slipshod it is, that some office demands a suite of abilities far more imposing than whatever its current occupant possesses. And that some sort of ejection is due, or overdue. Getting people sacked is fun! Criticism is fun!

But — we deserve people who have ability, if & when we recognize ability, when we take steps to reward it. Lately, we don’t, because we don’t and we don’t. This is the paradox of our time: We demand unique abilities, but we do not seek them out. If we happen to blunder into them it seems our first impulse is to punish, rather than reward.

Then we find our highest offices are saturated with the mediocre, and we get outraged about it. Huh. Well, okay.

[…] Pad Journalism” “Slobocracy” The Omelette Thing The Moral Failings of Eric Holder The Pros and Cons of Dating a Programmer […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 10/02/2014 @ 06:04
You know, it just may be that the Secret Service, seeing Barry and the wife up close and personal day after day, just doesn’t really give a flying fuque about taking a bullet for either or them.
- vanderleun | 10/02/2014 @ 12:36

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“Slobocracy”Thursday, October 2nd, 2014

“Slobocracy”
Thursday, October 2nd, 2014