The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

GSA: A checkered past

A vari­ant of a Shake­spear­ian quote shows up on the base of a statue out­side the National Archives, once within the domain of the Gen­eral Ser­vices Admin­is­tra­tion: “What is past is prologue.”

Why have so many scan­dals bro­ken out at the government’s busi­ness agency over the years? And will we see more of them in the future? Jonathan Stone, the reporter In The Solomon Scan­dals, recalls “GSA’s quo­tid­ian mis­sion as the government’s house­keeper, and its rep­u­ta­tion as a haven for polit­i­cal hacks will­ing to bend over for their masters—the low­est form of bureau­cratic life despite many stel­lar civil ser­vants like Margo.”

In fair­ness to GSA, the agency has engaged in some laud­able ini­tia­tives since its found­ing in 1949, such as the encour­age­ment of telecom­mut­ing and his­tor­i­cal preser­va­tion. The agency has indeed had its share of pos­i­tives. Per­haps through the wise use of infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy, more­over, the incom­ing Obama admin­is­tra­tion will improve the fair­ness and open­ness of con­tract awards—a point I’ve made else­where on this site. The sav­ings could amount to many bil­lions, con­sid­er­ing that GSA’s 12,000 employ­ees work with a yearly bud­get of $16 bil­lion but over­see the spend­ing of $66 bil­lion.

But for now, GSA has its share of neg­a­tives to over­come. Most recently the agency drew the ire of safety experts with a state­ment against fire code reg­u­la­tions designed to reduce 9/11-type deaths dur­ing the evac­u­a­tion of tall high-rises. Just who are GSA’s ulti­mate con­stituents? The tax­pay­ers or gov­ern­ment contractors? Check out Wikipedia for some of the more recent scan­dals at GSA, such as the Bush White House’s attempts to make GSA even more polit­i­cal than it has been. In April 2008, Admin­is­tra­tor Lurita Doan resigned amid charges she had engaged in “the most per­ni­cious of polit­i­cal activity.”

The good news is Pres­i­dent Obama’s appoint­ment of Martha John­son as GSA admin­is­tra­tor. Among other things she is an expert in orga­ni­za­tional cul­ture and per­haps can make some pos­i­tive changes in GSA’s; fur­ther­more, in at least one case, she has stood up to polit­i­cal pres­sure involv­ing the GSA leas­ing pro­gram.

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• Martha N. Johnson: GSA’s new leader vs. dirty politics—the ‘Solomon Scandals’ angle
• ‘The Solomon Scandals’ vs. Dan Brown’s latest, ‘The Lost Symbol’: Same city, different books
• Two Chicagoans: President Bullard vis-a-vis Obama
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