Tuesday, September 10th, 2024 - TrickJarrett.com: Be excellent to each other.

Pizza in North Korea

9/10/2024 10:34 am

An interesting look at pizza's introduction to North Korea, courtesy of Kim Jong Il in the 90s.

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| Tags: pizza, north korea

Partnership for Public Service

9/10/2024 10:48 am | : 6 mins.

Brought to my attention via this opinion article on the Washington Post which highlights the effort this organization is putting into bringing recognition to individuals who excel as public servants.

The organization, called the Partnership for Public Service, created the awards, called the Sammies, in 2002 to call out extraordinary deeds inside the federal government. Founded the year before by an entrepreneur named Samuel Heyman, it set out to attract talented and unusual people to the federal workforce. One big reason talented and unusual people did not gravitate to the government was that the government was often a miserable place for talented and unusual people to work. Civil servants who screwed up were dragged before Congress and into the news. Civil servants who did something great, no one said a word about. There was thus little incentive to do something great, and a lot of incentive to hide. The awards were meant to correct that problem. "There's no culture of recognition in government," said Max Stier, whom Heyman hired to run the Partnership. "We wanted to create a culture of recognition."

A third was given to a man inside the Energy Department who had been sent to a massive nuclear waste dump outside Denver, containing enough radioactive gunk to fill 90 miles of railroad cars, and told to clean it up. He finished the project $30 billion under budget and 60 years ahead of schedule — and turned the dump into a park.

That man was Frazer Lockhart in 2007. From the linked page about his award:

The federal government created the Superfund program in 1980 to clean up the country's most dangerous abandoned toxic waste sites. Out of the hundreds of environmental hazards on the Superfund list, the Rocky Flats plant outside of Denver, Colorado was among the worst of the worst. Rocky Flats was a nuclear weapons production facility that manufactured plutonium triggers for nuclear warheads for nearly 40 years. In 1989, it was shut down after a raid by the FBI and EPA discovered multiple pollution violations. Some people suggested that Rocky Flats should be a "sacrifice site," meaning cleanup was impossible and should not even be attempted. As recently as 1995, a cleanup effort was estimated to cost $37 billion and take 70 years to complete. Frazer Lockhart and his team at the Department of Energy managed to prove the skeptics wrong. Working with contractors, local officials and his federal colleagues, Lockhart led the effort to successfully remediate Rocky Flats in just 10 years, at a cost of $7 billion.

If the fact that the project was completed decades ahead of schedule and billions of dollars under budget were not astounding enough, consider the following. According to the Department of Energy, the cleanup team removed more than 21 tons of weapons-usable nuclear materials; decontaminated and demolished 800 structures, comprising more than 3 million square feet; drained 30,000 liters of plutonium solution; stabilized and packaged 100 tons of high-content plutonium residue; performed environmental cleanup actions at 130 sites; dispositioned millions of classified items and excess property; and safely shipped more than 600,000 cubic meters of radioactive waste to a safe disposal site — enough to fill a string of railcars 90 miles long.

The project was the largest and most successful cleanup ever conducted by the Department of Energy, and Lockhart recently received EPA approval for over 95% of the formerly restricted land to be officially removed from the Superfund list. The majority of the 6,200-acre site is scheduled to be transferred to the Department of the Interior and will become a national wildlife refuge.

I'm excited to learn about the Partnership for Public Service and follow as more people get recognized and help shine a light on the good work being done in the government.

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| Tags: science, civil servants, public service, recognition