Dumb and dumber...

Under the heading, “Just When You Thought Things Couldn’t Get Any Dumber” comes this story from the Washington Post -

The freeze on foreclosures is putting federal employees with security clearances in a jam.

The government monitors the finances of employees that it believes could be vulnerable to bribery or blackmail. The foreclosure freeze is preventing these workers from settling their debts, so under government guidelines they could lose their clearances.

There are more than 854,000 employees nationwide potentially affected by this, many of them in the Washington, D.C., area. John P. Mahoney, a lawyer at Tully Rinckey, who specializes in resolving security-clearance problems, says many of the affected workers have had security clearances for years.

"Now they are concerned that their clearance will be pulled, or they will be fired because their real estate investments have gone bad," Mahoney says. "It's a very emotionally charged issue."

Source: The Washington Post, Dina ElBoghdady and Dana Hedgpeth (10/20/2010)

I think it would be an absolute hoot if tomorrow’s headline story was – President Obama has been stranded in California because the pilots for Air Force One and most of his security detail have had their security clearances pulled due to foreclosures on their homes.

Or, maybe we’ll see this story – The FBI today reported that Russians posing as foreclosure rescue specialist have been caught trying to compromise sensitive defense information by promising foreclosure assistance to distressed Federal workers in the Department of Defense in return for state secrets. The Russians all had the coveted CDPE designation and most of them claimed to have a straw buyer already lined up for the properties.

It is more than a little disturbing to see that the number of supposedly irresponsible Federal employees who got themselves in financial difficulty with real estate is 854,000. But I guess that tracks the percentages of the general population. After all how many million workers does the government employ? And of that number, how many need or have security clearances?

In other news from your government at work a new plan has been hatched by the HUD people to help people who can’t find out or figure out who holds their mortgage. Under this new plan, if you can find your mortgage under the right shell you get to refinance or do a short-sale.

So far only three people out of the 142,000 that have played the game have won, but that is ahead of the conversion rate for prior federal programs for homeowners, so it has been declared to be a success.