Over at the Mother Jones blog, Kate Sheppard, David Corn and Daniel Schulman compiled a list of "Obama's Five Worst Nominees." Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner doesn't make the cut, which surprised me until I read the short bios of appointees who are likely to put corporate interests ahead of the public interest. In alphabetical order:

William Lynn, for whom the president made an exception to his policy on lobbyists in government. Lynn was the chief lobbyist for defense contractor Raytheon before becoming deputy secretary of defense in the Obama administration.

William Magwood, a "cheerleader for nuclear power" who has "worked for reactor maker Westinghouse and has run two firms that advise companies on nuclear projects." Obama nominated him for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Scott O'Malia, who was apparently suggested by Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. O'Malia "was a lobbyist for Mirant, an Enron-like energy-trading firm" and lobbied for weakening the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, to which Obama appointed him.

Joseph Pizarchik, who helped form policies in Pennsylvania to allow disposal of toxic coal ash in unlined pits. Obama named him director of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement.

Islam Siddiqui, whom Obama appointed to be the chief agricultural negotiator for the U.S. trade representative. Jill Richardson has been on this case at La Vida Locavore; see here and here on why Siddiqui is the wrong person for this job.

I wouldn't suggest that this rogue's gallery is representative of Obama appointees, but it's depressing to see any of them in this administration.

In the good news column, Obama has decided to renominate Dawn Johnsen to head the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, along with five other nominees who didn't receive a confirmation vote in the Senate last year.

Northrop Grumman, the second largest defence contractor in US, fourth largest in the World and a global aerospace company had decided to move its headquarters from Los Angeles to Washington DC metro area.

In a blow to Southern California, Northrop Grumman Corp. said it would relocate its headquarters from Los Angeles -- leaving the region that gave birth to the aerospace industry without a single major military contractor based here.

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Ever notice how Republicans love to complain about "wasteful government spending" but never do anything about it when they're in power?

In contrast, on Wednesday President Barack Obama issued a memo

to the heads of all the executive departments agencies directing them to restrict no-bid contracts; to rein in outsourcing of "inherently governmental activities"; and to, if necessary, cancel wasteful contracts outright. The crucial paragraph, even if it's written in bureaucratese, particularly calls out the Defense Department [...]

Clearly, this has applications far beyond the Pentagon. But the list of big-ticket defense items that have experienced huge cost overruns is a long one. Future Combat Systems in the Army; the Littoral Combat Ship in the Navy; the Joint Strike Fighter in the Air Force -- all of these programs, near and dear to the services, have run massively over budget. If I was a lobbyist for Lockheed or Boeing, I'd be dialing my contacts in the Pentagon and the Hill to figure out what the prospective damage to my company was. And then I'd come up with a strategy to fight this forthcoming Office of Management and Budget review.

Obama went further in remarks at the White House, calling it a "false choice" to say that protecting the country requires acquiescence to Pentagon waste. "In this time of great challenges," he said, "I recognize the real choice between investments that are designed to keep the American people safe and those that are designed to make a defense contractor rich." He also lent support to Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and former presidential rival John McCain's (R-Ariz.) legislation to create new procurement oversight positions at the Pentagon. "The days of giving defense contractors a blank check are over," Obama said.

Music to my ears: no more blank checks for crooked defense contractors.

The White House estimates that changing the way the government does business will save about $40 billion a year.

By way of comparison, the total cost of approximately 11,610 earmarks in fiscal year 2008 was $17.2 billion according to Citizens Against Government Waste. In fiscal year 2007, earmarks cost American taxpayers an estimated $13.2 billion. Republicans howl about earmarks (when they're not busy getting them for their own constituents), but will they get behind Obama's new effort to reduce huge cost overruns and no-bid contracts?

Daily Kos user Pluto gave many examples of the mind-boggling amount of taxpayer money we spend on defense, but neither the problem nor Obama's response is limited to the Pentagon. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has already axed a $500,000 consulting contract:

"The career folks who watched this process unfold in the last waning days of the last administration were very concerned about the process--the connections and relationships between people receiving this half a million dollar contract and what they intended to do with the resource which the career folks felt was unnecessary and inappropriate," Vilsack said during a guest appearance at the daily White House press briefing. "They made a very strong and powerful case to me that the process was not followed as it should have been."

Vilsack did not explain precisely what consulting the contract was to involve, but he said it seemed unnecessary.

"I didn't see any value to USDA from it. I will tell you it was rather startling to see that a substantial amount of money had already been spent on foreign travel under circumstances we did not think was appropriate," the secretary said.

I'd like to see us reduce wasteful spending even more by cutting obsolete Cold War-era weapons systems. I don't expect Obama to take on that battle anytime soon, but I welcome the big step in the right direction he took this week.

UPDATE: Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, under fire for the infamous pig odor study earmark, had this to say yesterday:

What needs more attention, according to Harkin, are no-bid contracts done by federal agencies. “I had a hearing a year ago on the Department of Labor and there were -— I forget the exact figure — but several hundred million dollars that had gone out under Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao on no-bid contracts,” he said. When Harkin directed a federal oversight agency to look into the contracts, it was discovered that the contractors had not done what they were hired to do and, according to Harkin, “didn’t really do anything. … “At least we are transparent,” he said. “You can see where it is going. But on a lot of these non-bid contracts that go through the executive branch, no one knows what they are doing. We have no transparency there.”

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Is the United States of America the world's largest dealer of illegal drugs?  What about the world's largest gun runner?  For years our government has used the CIA, NSA & other super-secret 'intelligence' agencies to cultivate drug harvest and distribution in SE Asia and Afghanistan.  We offer 'aid' and 'trade' to countries in the forms of weapons and ammunition.  The drugs come home to the US to poison and kill our own population.  The weapons we sell are used either against us directly by people to kill others, who then seek to kill Americans.  Did the founding fathers envision a country that would become the world's largest debtor and blood merchant?

(Cross posted at The National Gadfly)

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Martindale, 43, is among a group of procurement officers struggling to keep pace with increasing demands to oversee billions of dollars in spending by the Pentagon and civilian agencies. Although she and her colleagues play pivotal roles in the government's operation, their plight has received little attention even as the government continues to expand its reliance on private companies and embarks on increasingly complicated programs.

The Defense Department's civilian acquisition workforce has shrunk by about 40 percent since the early 1990s and now has about 270,000 employees, according to Pentagon statistics and Government Accountability Office reports. Yet defense spending on service contracts increased 78 percent, to $151 billion, from 1996 to 2006, the reports said.

There are 7.5 million federal contractors, 1.5 million more than in 2002, without a corresponding increase in government officials to oversee them, said Paul C. Light, a public service professor at New York University.

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