That’s not quite the point of T. X. Hammes’ article in the current Armed Forces Journal, but it’s pretty close. My familiarity with Power Point has been much more on the academic than DOD side, but my understanding is that academics are nothing when compared to Pentagon planners when it comes to egregious abuse of Power Point. Here’s Hammes:

Before PowerPoint, staffs prepared succinct two- or three-page summaries of key issues. The decision-maker would read a paper, have time to think it over and then convene a meeting with either the full staff or just the experts involved to discuss the key points of the paper. Of course, the staff involved in the discussion would also have read the paper and had time to prepare to discuss the issues. In contrast, today, a decision-maker sits through a 20-minute PowerPoint presentation followed by five minutes of discussion and then is expected to make a decision. Compounding the problem, often his staff will have received only a five-minute briefing from the action officer on the way to the presentation and thus will not be well-prepared to discuss the issues. This entire process clearly has a toxic effect on staff work and decision-making.

The art of slide-ology

Let’s start by examining the impact on staff work. Rather than the intellectually demanding work of condensing a complex issue to two pages of clear text, the staff instead works to create 20 to 60 slides. Time is wasted on deciding which pictures to put on the slides, how to build complex illustrations, and what bullets should be included. I have even heard conversations about what font to use and what colors. Most damaging is the reduction of complex issues to bullet points. Obviously, bullets are not the same as complete sentences, which require developing coherent thoughts. Instead of forcing officers to learn the art of summarizing complex issues into coherent arguments, staff work now places a premium on slide building. Slide-ology has become an art in itself, while thinking is often relegated to producing bullets.

Hammes makes a number of excellent points, including his mention of my pet peeve, the presenter who places full paragraphs on slides (preceded, of course, by a bullet, which makes it more Power Point‑y), and then proceeds to read the paragraphs to his audience and calls this a “briefing.” Of course, humans can read faster than they can speak. One wonders whether there could be any real value in a brief provided by someone who does not understand this. 

Hammes closes by mentioning that one excuse for using Power Point in this way is that

senior leaders don’t have time to be pre-briefed on all the decisions they make. If that is the case, they are involved in too many decisions. When the default position is that you are too busy to prepare properly to make a decision, it means you are making bad decisions.

Sage wisdom. Some of us might argue that there are many indications that folks in the Pentagon are “involved in too many decisions,” but the entropic debasement of thought there, enabled by Power Point, is as good a sign as any.

This won’t make the “Buy the Planes that the Pentagon Doesn’t Want” Caucus happy. (There’s a similar “caucus” in the Senate, too; and 12 governors.)

The Washington Post reports that the F‑22 requires

more than 30 hours of maintenance for every hour in the skies, pushing its hourly cost of flying to more than $44,000, a far higher figure than for the warplane it replaces.

How might this bad news be twisted into a good news story by the F‑22’s advocates in industry and on Capitol Hill? Look for the same line of reasoning that has been used up to this point. If we’re building the F‑22 in order to give jobs to workers who might otherwise have to seek out other opportunities, then maybe the plane’s high operating costs can be justified on the grounds that it employs more maintenance workers?

J.M. Keynes must be smiling down on us.

“[O]nce it is clear that a bill will be coming to the president’s desk, the White House will post the bill online,” White House spokesman Nick Shapiro told New York Times reporter Katherine Seelye for her June 22 story on President Obama’s “Sunlight Before Signing” campaign pledge. “This will give the American people a greater ability to review the bill, often many more than five days before the president signs it into law.”

The story, titled “White House Changes the Terms of a Campaign Pledge About Posting Bills Online,” was about the White House effort to walk back from President Obama’s campaign pledge to post bills he receives for five days before signing them.

When the New York Times published the story, five bills had been presented to the president and were awaiting his signature. Four more were presented to him after the story’s publication. All nine are now law.

And for the life of me, I can’t find where any of them have been posted on White​house​.gov. Surely it was clear to the White House that the five bills it had and the four soon to come would reach the president’s desk.

I disagree with arguments for releasing President Obama from his pledge to sign bills only after he has posted them for a full five days after receiving them. It would have the same effects as the 72-hour hold the Sunlight Foundation is seeking from Congress — also a welcome legislative process reform.

And it’s becoming more clear that the five-day promise could be implemented. At this point, only one of 39 bills that the president has signed has been posted for five days in advance. (The DTV Delay Act was actually not held five days after formal presentment, but the White House posted it after the final version had passed Congress.) Twenty-four other bills have been held at the White House five days or more before the President has signed them. They just haven’t been posted.

To repeat, over 60% of the legislation coming out of Congress waits five days for the president’s signature as a matter of course. The only thing preventing implementation of the president’s promise as to these bills is the White House’s inexplicable reluctance to do what it says it will do.

At this point, it’s worth repeating that I can’t find the bills online at White​house​.gov. I have searched the site high and low, even entering URLs where I would guess they might be. I find it hard to believe that no bills have been posted under even the modified promise given to the Times late last month. I will happily post a correction and apology if there is a corner of White​house​.gov that I failed to explore. (If bills are so deeply hidden, that’s a problem, too, of course.)

I’m fond of joking that the “Sunlight Before Signing” promise is a golden opportunity because I can write 100 blog posts over the next few years without thinking a single original thought. But voters and me are one thing — if the White House is breaking a promise to the New York Times, that could be serious!

For the record, here are the pieces of legislation signed by the president so far:

Nothing has changed in the six short weeks since Sonia Sotomayor was nominated to the Supreme Court: she remains a symbol of the racial politics she embraces. While we celebrate her story and professional achievements, we must realize that she — an average federal judge with a passel of unimpressive decisions — would not even be part of the conversation if she weren’t a Hispanic woman.

As Americans increasingly call for the abolition of affirmative action, Sotomayor supports racial preferences. As poll after poll shows that Americans demand that judges apply the law as written, the “wise Latina” denies that this is ever an objective exercise and urges judges to view cases through ethnic and gender lenses.

At next week’s hearings, Sotomayor will have to answer substantively for these and other controversial views — and for outrageous rulings on employment discrimination, property rights, and the Second Amendment. To earn confirmation, she must satisfy the American people that, despite her speeches and writings, she plans to be a judge, not a post-modern ethnic activist. After all, a jurisprudence of empathy is the antithesis of the rule of law.

A company called Smartronix will get $18,000,000 to redesign Recov​ery​.gov, the federal Web site intended to track where federal Recovery Act spending goes.

The government purchased technology for a similar site (with a somewhat smaller scope), USASpend​ing​.gov, from the non-profit group OMB Watch for only $600,000. A private company already provides information on Recovery Act spending to the public for free.

[Update: A link formerly just above at “for free” has been removed. To learn the unusual circumstances of the removal, check out: Copyright Law’s Abuse.]

I wrote here enthusiastically about the plans of the Sunlight Foundation to go after this contract, saying “[T]he contract award will now be subject to public scrutiny. Value-for-dollar to the taxpayer will be easily discernible, and that will raise the political risks of awarding the contract based on cronyism or go-with-whatchya-knowism. Transparency in all things.”

Sunlight did not ultimately bid. Instead, it took some lessons about the government contracting business. The transparency I wrote about materialized, though, and we can take a lesson, too: The federal government will pay $18,000,000 for one freaking Web site.

Time and again my colleagues and I have warned that the government’s takeover of GM would divorce business decisions from economics and wed them to politics ‘til death do they part. But I won’t gloat. Better to be right and satisfied that government is reasonably restrained than right and house hunting in Galt’s Gulch.

We’ve already seen the president insist on the firing of a CEO, design and negotiate a bankruptcy plan devoid of much economic merit, impose preferences about which models to produce, and assure the diabolical, undeserving management of the UAW that GM won’t import small cars from its foreign plants to make space for its U.S.-produced budget-busting green vessels.

Now Congress is attempting to legislate its way into the boardroom. Last month, GM/​Obama announced plans to terminate 1,300 dealerships, as part of a larger effort to reduce costs and, ultimately, turn a “profit.” (The term “profit” is, shall we say, imprecise in this case given the amount of production subsidization, fuel taxation, and tax code inducements that will be necessary to sustain GM for the foreseeable future). But many in Congress don’t like the idea. As reported in the Detroit Free Press:

By a unanimous vote, a U.S. House committee has approved a measure that would restore 2,100 dealers either cut or scheduled to be closed by General Motors Corp. and Chrysler Group LLC.

…The bill would turn back the clock to before the companies filed for bankruptcy, restoring the 789 dealers cut by Chrysler and 1,300 dealers GM chose to wind down.

…Executives from GM and Chrysler have both told Congress that cutting dealers was essential to their survival outside of bankruptcy, saving each company billions of dollars a year and strengthen their remaining sales force.

“This legislation, if passed, would put our long-term viability at risk,” said GM spokesman Greg Martin.

I suppose you can’t really blame Congress for trying to impose its wishes on GM. After all, the Constitution is silent on the matter of which branch of government furnishes the CEO of nationalized companies.

But in all seriousness, this legislative effort is an affront to common sense and an insult to our heritage of free enterprise and capitalism. It is stunning enough to watch the slow-motion nationalization of an iconic behemoth like GM, but Congressional meddling at the operational level to stop the company from following through on an obviously wise cost-cutting measures should be a wake up call to all Americans that we are doomed to politically-driven micromanagement of the economy–into the ground no less–unless we register our disgust and dissent now!

What makes these actions evil, and not just stupid, is that Congress really does not care about whether GM is profitable or not. The Henry Waxmans of the Hill only care that GM produces green vehicles, regardless of their exorbitant costs of production and scant consumer demand. And the John Dingells (among whom are included the 200 sponsors of the bill to restore the dealerships) only want GM to provide jobs, regardless of the fact that GM needs to scale back its labor force substantially to even approach the realm of commercial viability. In other words, Congress demands that Americans subsidize GM because GM’s short-term viability is good for their political fortunes.

Enough. Show Congress that you won’t comply and that you won’t be pawns. Boycott GM. Boycott GM until the government relinquishes its grip on the company’s decision making process.

Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona is one of the very few fiscal policy heroes in Congress. Last night, he was doing what he does best — offering amendments to cut funding from a wasteful appropriations bill moving through the House.

Flake tried to strike spending earmarks slipped into the bill by both Republicans and Democrats. Watching the action on C‑SPAN, I was struck by what a bunch of robots the big spenders defending the bill were. They said things like “this project is very important,” “it will help people,” and “it has a rate of return of 30-to‑1 for every tax dollar spent.”

Flake pointed out the simple logical flaws in the spenders’ arguments. If an earmarked project is so important, why doesn’t it get funding through the normal competitive process? If a project has such a high return, wouldn’t private investors swoop in to earn the big profits? The “high return” claim is a commonly used gambit by big-spending politicians. Economist Martin Sullivan calls it the “liberal Laffer curve.”

Anyway, the spending robots listened politely to Flake, then they focused back in on their staff-prepared bullet points and continued with their self-interested drivel about how the nation’s fate rested on federal aid for the Elvis museum back in their hometown, or whatever their particular project was.

Flake presented some interesting statistics on the earmarks in the agriculture appropriations bill being considered last night. As shown in the chart below, two-thirds of the earmarks go to a small, exclusive club within the House of those on the appropriations committee, committee chairs, and party leadership. He characterized the appropriations process as a “spoils system,” which is evocative of government corruption of the past, such as Tammany Hall.

But unlike the original Tammany Hall, today’s spoils system is not party-based. Instead, it’s run by an elite and bipartisan group of spending robots within Congress, who pose as representatives of the people when they travel outside the beltway. As Flake implied, it’s odd that the great majority of members and their constituents, who get the short end of the stick from the spoils system, don’t revolt.