The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, popularly known as BuRec, is not much heard of east of the Hundredth Meridian, but in the 16 mainland states to the west it plays a central role in managing water…
Category: Spotlight
Agency Profile: The US Army Futures Command
If knowledge is power, as the English scientist and politician Sir Francis Bacon is credited with saying, then knowing how and when to use force can be thought of as a kind of superpower. It requires…
Spotlight: USAID
Since its heyday in the Kennedy Administration more than half a century ago, nonmilitary foreign aid has had detractors and defenders in roughly equal measure. On the con side, critics urge that money spent building power…
Spotlight: CFTC
Founded in 1974, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is an independent agency charged with regulating the futures and options markets. As these markets have grown with the “financialization” of the economy, the scope and…
Spotlight: Farm Service Agency
If the Farm Service Agency (FSA) sounds as if it might be some forgotten holdover of the alphabet-soup New Deal of nine decades ago, there is good reason. Although it was formally instituted only in 1996,…
Spotlight: Secret Service
How much office and other space does the US Secret Service occupy? That turns out to be a difficult question with a simple answer: It’s secret. Its Washington headquarters, a building on H Street, looks nondescript,…
Spotlight: SBA
“The chief business of the American people is business,” said President Calvin Coolidge, speaking before a convention of newspaper editors 90 years ago. (His bon mot is often shortened to “the business of America is business.”)…
Spotlight: CIA
Thanks to extensive media coverage, both positive and negative, and to countless spy novels and movies, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is the best-known intelligence unit within the U.S. government, virtually synonymous with intelligence generally. In…
Spotlight: Smithsonian Institution
Where would you go to see The Spirit of St. Louis, the monoplane that, in 1927, bore Charles Lindbergh on the first nonstop flight from New York to Paris? How about Tony Hawk’s skateboard, which carried…
Spotlight: TSA
Traveling as much as we do to represent national owners of government-leased properties, it’s inevitable that one of the federal agencies we encounter most is the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). The agency’s current procurement for a long term lease…