are your plans with regard to that, have you talked about it, studied it? tell me, is that something that is gsa-wide, federal government-wide? i'm just wondering. >> i had some of these responsibility overseeing the human capital operations at the treasury department in my role as assistant secretary of management. and i have to say that i -- i have a slight disagreement. i believe that the process actually gives the administrator more authority. and so one of the things we'll need to do is make sure, as we look at how we manage performance, that we should look at the conversations we're having with the ig. and if there are any issues out there. and maybe put these things on hold if there are big questions out there. >> you know, i talk about re-establishing trust, but it seems as if -- you know, when i look at what happened here, it seems as if there may have been rules that were just totally

disregarded. and that concerns me, because -- particularly when you've got rules that are being disregarded and not only being disregarded, but then you have folks making videos about how they're disregarding them, which is incredible to me. >> right. >> and basically saying, the hell with those people who are supposed to be over the oversight. how do you -- i mean, this seems kind of deep. it seems like you've got to dig deep to get into some of this. i don't know if this is just some surface stuff. so i was just trying to figure out, how do you get to that? were you in here for the administrators' testimony? >> yes, i saw the testimony. >> all right. and did you hear my last question, sir, with regard to it seems as if the administrator is here, but then there's all this stuff going on that seems to have a disconnect.

and so tell me -- talk to me. >> what i found in just the short time i've been here, and it's only been about two weeks now, that it seems obvious to me that there is a disconnect between the headquarters and the recentlinal operations. and to some extent, we need to build a stronger connection at a separation of duties level. so the chief financial officer -- i've asked that the chief financial officer of the gsa serve as the chief financial officer straight down into the region. so that we have visibility into the way the regions are designing their budgets. and more importantly, spending their budgets. i think that's one of the things as we conduct a top to bottom review of gsa, we can ask ourselves some questions, why are we structured this way, is this the best way to provide accountability and oversight, and if not, we should change it. >> well, i really wish you well, as you go forward. and i too agree with the chairman that we have seen what

the failure to have somebody in that position permanently can do. and we need to do that. and i'm hoping that the president will nominate you or somebody capable of addressing these issues. and then the senate will move on in confirmation as soon as possible. thank you very much. and if there is anything we can do to be supportive of your efforts, please don't fail to call on us. >> i appreciate that. >> thank you, mr. chairman. >> i thank the gentleman from maryland. the chair will now recognize the gentleman from texas, mr. farrenthal. >> thank you, mr. chairman. we saw earlier in the day the gsa mission statement. are you looking at revising that, or are you -- are you thinking we're already with what it is? >> i think as part of a top to bottom review, we should start with the mission statement and the goals. i haven't been there long enough to say whether this is the exact right one or the exact wrong one. it seems to hit many of the key

points of savings and efficiency, economy. effectiveness. so i want to make sure that even if we were to change it, we wouldn't lose those important parts. >> all right. and it would be your belief that in general,it the gsa's job to get the best deal for the government, and efficiently manage what the government has. >> absolutely. >> broad general terms. and part of that would be taking care of tax dollars is -- as if it they were your own or more so almost as if they were being held in trust. >> absolutely. >> great. now, the purpose -- the title of this hearing was do we have culture problem within the gsa, or within the broader government. and i have to say, i've worked with a lot of great government employees, i've worked with some that aren't so great. do you think this is a cultural problem, or do you think this is more of a cancer? >> well, i think we definitely had a cultural problem in region 9. probably tied to a leadership

problem. but i can't say that i know enough -- enough about gsa to say whether we do or do not have a cultural problem across the organization when it comes to these issues. i will point out, though, i've received dozens and dozens of e-mails from gsa employees who are every bit as outraged, every bit as angry about what took place here. >> well, it's my hope this is a cancer and we're going to be able to excise it from wherever it exists, be it in the gsa or in any other government agency. and i think this committee has already started investigating the spending habits of some government agencies. i did want to touch on one other point. with regard to the acquisition of services. in his report, the ig identified a number of problems. in fact, this isn't the first report by mr. miller that's raised concerns about gsa acquisitions officers disclosing competitor pricing to -- for the

maximum price. gsa officials have failed to abide by small bissett-asides, failed to properly publish offerings and omitted important federal acquisition regulations clauses which protect the government. do you think this is intentional misconduct, or do you think this is just ignorance or poor training? >> i'm not sure what it was in this case. but i can tell you that i think it's unacceptable. and i can tell you that i think the gsa should be held to a higher standard. we should hold ourselves to a higher standard. and one of the actions i've taken most recently is to centralize in our senior procurement official, our senior procurement executive, the ability to grant or withdraw warrants, warrants, the ability to actually make procurement actions. so i think we have to take a good, strong look at how we do things, how we set ourselves up you, what our standards are, what our performance is, how do we create a structures of accountability. and hopefully we can make the improvements to make sure

nothing like this can happen again. >> members of congress have district offices where they hear complaints and problems from constituents. and i -- just in the past few months have been an alarming number of folks who have complained about the government contracting process. not just with the gsa, but other agencies. and you ought to be able to walk away feeling like you were treated fairly by the government. as a former small business owner, i know it takes a lot of time, and in many cases, thousands of dollars to prepare a proposal, especially for a government agency. and to have your bid disclosed to a competitor, or to have your bid when it was the lowest passed over, is very frustrating to people. and ends up -- especially in the case of smaller businesses, you just throw up your hands, you don't have the money to go hire government contracting attorney, you just walk away and say i'm done with the government. and you end up with good people

who could offer products and services at a better cost, just refusing to go through the red tape. so i look forward to the gsa making that a priority to educate not just their own contracting officers, but the other government agencies that the gsa trains through the federal acquisition institute. and i would appreciate your commitment to make that part of your agenda. >> i appreciate that. and i think you're right. the government contracting isn't always easy, but it should be fair. >> thank you very much. i yield back. >> the chair thanks the gentleman from texas and now recognizes the gentle lady from the district of columbia, ms. holmes-norton. >> thank you, mr. chairman. mr. tangherlini, i must say that i welcome the president's decision to bring you to the gsa, because i'm very familiar with your own record. as -- if you will forgive me, somewhat of a turn-around agent in government, because of the tough post you have had.

first the president simply takes out the top of the agency, including the administrator who may not have been conversant, about what was happening below, but he did that. that's the way things are done in parliamentary democracies, in britain and in asia. but in our country, somehow we go beneath the top, and go after someone who had hands-on, as if the top has nothing to do with how the agency is run. i think that your experience running with the operational head with the district of columbia, running the operations of a big city and for that matter, of the metropolitan transit authority more than equips you to take on what needs to be done here. and you heard perhaps the administrator speak about how she felt the agency was in need of reforming. now, i can't imagine that you don't think so, as well. and maybe that you can continue

what she began and it may be that you have a different vision. but let me give you a specific example. because really involves a chain of command. there was a question asked by one of our colleagues on the other side that i thought was very good, which is how did mr. neely get ahold of this pot of money in the first place. and it looked like he regarded it as his own. and actually, it wasn't -- it wasn't ever answered, at least to my satisfaction. it looks like mr. neely was in charge of mr. neely. let me ask you about howdy centralized this agency is, and whether it is decentralized to a fault. there is one theory of management, which is i think a very efficacious one that goes that if you delegate to managers, hands-on responsibility, you can hold them accountable, and they become more creative. and when you get a situation

like this, one has to ask about whether or not the agency has any chain of command. whether -- if, for important issues like spending, the administrator at the top and the chief of staff can sit here and say, well, i don't know anything about it. one wonders whether this agency is simply run at the regional level with washington having no responsibility for holding the regions accountable. so i would like you to discuss what you think of the chain of command now, if you think it is too decentralized. if you think its operations and its budget and i think you said something about the cfo. but whether in general this agency has simply allowed itself

to be run as if there were, what is it, 11 regions running one agency. >> i think autonomy is incredibly important if you're going to allow managers to innovate. but autonomy without accountability can lead to the kind of situations we find here. and what we're interested -- >> for example, did mr. neely report to anyone on spending, or was he the final -- the check on spending, including his own spending? >> i don't exactly understand the nature of the reporting structure that mr. neely was operating under at the time. i can tell you my concern is that the financial management office of the public building service was autonomous from the chief financial officer. that each of the different authorities -- each of the different regions had authority over their own budget within the region. and so they had autonomy over the administration of those budgets. we even found in trying to get

the records that it's very hard to get the records from the regions of the actual spending. and so early on, we think the quickest thing we can do to make sure we have a stronger sense of accountability to avoid this kind of problem from happening again in the near-term, and going forward, is to centralize the authority over the financial management of the agency within the agency chief financial officer and make each one of those service and regional financial managers report up to that chief financial officer, who are now going to have to build the appropriate data systems, the data collection systems, we're going to have to build the appropriate budget oversight. but that appeared to be missing. >> could i ask you a question about the -- hats-off. tsa procures for federal agencies, doesn't it? if you want to order something, you order knew the gsa. can it be this program where they awarded electronic cameras

and ipods and the like, got out of hand because gsa ran this -- the procurement of these electronic devices and with little oversight from the top, simply regarded these stores as something that grew on its own as something that they could use to award to their own employees. how does -- in other words, i'm looking for the link between their own procurement authority and using that authority within the agency for its own employees in a way that i have never seen done in federal agencies elsewhere. >> so from what i understand, and this is from the ig report, mr. miller's report on the hats-off program, that that was focused with the electronic equipment, the gpses was focused around region 9 and just region 9. >> yeah, i'm talking about

region 9. >> the program operated throughout the agency. from what i also understand, what was going on in region 9, they were violating simply the -- if not the procurement rules, they were violating the personnel rules and the limit you could give for any one special act type award in that regard. so i think that the rules actually are in place. what we had was a case of people simply ignoring them. >> i just wonder -- if you're going to give out valuable, much-wanted things like ipods and other electronic equipment, it seems to me there ought to be somebody -- somebody ought to have done something pretty wonderful in the agency. thank you very much, mr. chairman. >> thank the gentle lady from the district of columbia. the chairman would recognize himself for questioning. mr. tangherlini, you have a herculean task in front of you, which is to restore trust. not just in gsa.

most folks don't come partalize government that way. they don't have any confidence in any of the institutions in government, including any of us sitting on this deis. so it's a big challenge, but it's a fundamental challenge. you have to do it. and far be it for me to tell you how to do your job. i've never ran anything the size of gsa, but i can tell you this, in a little d.a.'s office in spartanburg county, when we had budget cuts, we suspended all travel. and i would encourage you to do something not just at the margins, but something to send a message that if it can be done via telephone, it must be done via telephone. if it can be done by videoconferencing, i understand, i guess, at some level team building. i'm not saying i've never been part of a team-building exercise. i feel sure i have. i don't remember enjoying it, but i remember -- been to different conferences where they

did it. but these are really austere times. and for folks watching who really are struggling, it's hard for them to understand what they've heard today or what they've read about this -- this conference. so -- and let me ask you this, starting off. if one of the folks we work for, one of our fellow citizens or government employee is aware of waste, fraud, abuse, personal gain, is there a repository -- i mean, they don't have access to the inspector general. how would -- just an ordinary citizen or an order another government employee that sees waste, fraud and abuse and wants to correct it, to whom would they report it? >> well, i know this committee has a website in which they can report these things. but actually, private citizen can report waste, fraud and abuse that they think is related to gsa to the gsa ig by going to

www.gsaid.gov and we also have fraud net, an e-mail crass. and the gsaig has a phone number, 800-424-5210. and we encourage anyone who sees anything they think is untoward about gsa activity to reach out to the ig. >> well, thank you for that. and, you know, mr. cummings raised a pretty provocative point, i thought, which is -- and so did mr. farnthat will. where is the line between nuances that need new training and just a character deficiency? because honestly, some of what happened in this conference -- there's no training in the world that's going to fix that. it's just a character flaw. so from the hiring standpoint or a retention standpoint, if you're having to train someone that they can't go to a hotel

employee and ask for a discount on a personal purse or pocketbook, it just strikes me that there is no training in the world that's going to fix that. so there has to be a moral component to it. how do you -- how do you address that, from your position? >> well, i think it starts at -- it's a leadership requirement. and it means that you have to have strong messages coming from the top, and that's why in the first week meeting with the inspector general, we agreed to send a joint letter to all gsa staff and tell everyone that we have an expectation that they will raise alarm or concern if they see something they think is untoward. gsa employees are the most skilled employees for understanding the travel rules, the procurement rules, the acquisition rules. so they should be the ones who are the -- you know, the easiest ones to recognize when something is wrong. and so i think we have to start with strong leadership. and then we have to make sure

our leaders are actually sending the leaders in the regions, the leaders throughout the organization are also sending a similar message. but we also have to encourage employees to come forward. and message. and tell employees it's okay to come forward if you see things that are wrong. this is the way we catch these things before they spin out of control and happen the way this one did. >> mest folks watching this and seeing it on the news are struggling whether or not they're going to be able to go on vacation this summer. the thought of going on a scouting trip to figure out whether or not they like the condo or the beach house or the amusement park never entered their mind. was this a question of people exceeding their jurisdiction or was it a use of discretion?

is there really the power to say i need to go four or five time to scout a series. we were surprised to learn that you would have the authority to abuse, to have multiple scouting trips when everything is available virtually online tours, word of mouth. so which is it? is it a discretion issue or a power issue? >> i may not be the best person to answer that question. i can tell you what we've done. what we've done is centralized our travel and conference approval process in our chief administrative officer's office. we don't think we're going to get in the way of anyone doing important and valuable travel and training by simply asking that they come to the front office, they come to the gsa headquarters and make a case for

what it is exactly they're doing. and then hopefully if this kind of thing begins to happen, we can see a pattern and we can stop it before it goes any further. frankly, i think that people know when they're being watched and that they have to make a case and they have to document it, that that will in part stop this behavior. >> well, my time is up. on behalf of all of us, thank you for your testimony today. we earnestly wish you well. not -- i don't know you, not because i want you personally to do well, but for us to make it as a republic, you have to do well. we have to do well. we can't survive with people not having confidence in the institutions of government. we just won't make it. so on behalf of all of us, thank you. and good luck. >> thank you. >> with that -- the hearing is adjourned.

frankly, we owe them to give --

and that's exactly what this legislation does. so congress created first and put it under ntia and then indicated that $7 billion of auction revenue is made available to go ahead and design this network. >> tonight, national telecommunications and information administration head on telecommunications issues at 8:00 eastern on the communicators on c-span#. >> it's been nearly ten years since the release of robert caro's vom of "the years of lyndon johnson" and in just a few weeks, the fourth volume will be published. it follows 198 #'s "the path to power," means of asent in 1990" and 2003's "master the senate. here he is on q&a in 2008 with an update on how volume four is taking shape. >> this is really a book, not just about lyndon johnson but

about jack kennedy and their personalities, particularly robert. and it's a very complicated story. i don't they people know of two very complicated people and robert kennedy and lyndon johnson. i had to really go into that and try to explain it. i suppose chronologically at the moment johnson is passing the 1965 voting rights act and that sort of in one way where i'm up to now. watch the rest of this interview online at the c-span video liar braer and watch for our upcoming q&a interview with robert caro on sunday, may 6th. the president and ceo of boeg

defense space and security spoke to aviation experts and leaders on the future of the industry. he discussed next ngen and about protectsing the industry's intellectual property against cyber attacks. his remarks from the summit hosted by the national chamber of commerce are 30 minutes. >> good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. we have the pleasure of introducing our keynote speaker dennis mullenberg, president and ceo of boeing defense space and security. he continues to provide security to boeing and they include

programs as tie verse as all the engines for the 737 through our joint venture with our partner ge. those engines powered the kc 135 fleet as well as the new p-8 for the united states navy and our new leap engines will continue that on into the future. our company is producing wiring panels and harnesses for, again, a wide diversity of platforms that include the 737s, 777 dz and 787s as well as the v-22s and chinook ch-47s. we continue that long tradition of providing support and key technologies to boeing products. dennis' long and distinguished career with boeing includes many of the programs that this

industry thrives upon. they include air traffic managementment systems and strike fighter. dennis' career spanned everything from basic engineering to program management and leadership and now in his senior executive position as well as the board membership. it's with distinct pleasure and honor that i introduce to you dennis mullenberg.

and russ, i'd like to acknowledge your well deserved recognition today as well. i didn't realize until the introductions that we're fellow iowans. it's good to meet a fellow iowaiowan as well. we had a pleasure of working together for boeing. very good to see all you and lots of other friends and familiar faces here in the audience. well, you may be wondering why the leader of boeing's defense business is here today. given that this is often a commercially focused summit. and don't worry, i'm not here to necessarily ask for your help on the defense budget which has its own challenges these days. although, if you'd like, i'd be happy to take any questions on that a little later. but i'm really here today to talk about where we see some very key and important inte