Most of the proposed closures are still concentrated in a few states. Florida has the most, with 40; mail volume has fallen faster than the national average in Florida, largely due to the collapse in the housing sector. California and Ohio both have 26 possible closures; Georgia has 17; and Tennessee has 16.

The list still isn’t final. Postmaster General John Potter said last month that he doesn’t expect the closures to begin until at least January; postal officials estimate they will save between $20 million and $100 million per year.

I’m sympathetic to Issa’s central complaint; I’ve spent a fair amount of time browsing the stimulus data in recent weeks, and it’s clearly full of errors. There are multi-million dollar projects that have allegedly created zero jobs, and there are individual employers who report more than half their workforce was “saved” by stimulus spending. Both claims are hard to believe.

Devaney sent a response to Issa today, and his letter has attracted a bit of media attention. Reporters are focusing on the idea that Devaney is backing away from the quality of the Recovery.gov data. But he never made any promises about the quality of that data; in fact, as he told me when I interviewed him earlier this year, it isn’t his job to certify the data. Recovery.gov is a repository for data from other entities. The data in question — the jobs data — comes from the recipients of stimulus cash: State and local governments, private companies, individuals. If there are problems with the data, therefore, the problems are with the recipients, not with the board.

In other words: This is a non-story. There are problems with the stimulus data, and that is a story, but the locus of those problems isn’t the RAT board. It’s the people reporting the data.

I know President Barack Obama still has hundreds of positions to fill. But the top job at the Office of Special Counsel would seem to be an important one. The agency hasn’t had political leadership since October 2008, when the Bush administration forced Bloch to resign.

OSC employees I’ve talked to generally say the agency needs some reorganization, but William Reukauf, the acting special counsel, told me last year that he planned to act as a caretaker. Reorganization, in other words, would have to wait for political leadership. He told Government Executive in May that the agency is “looking forward anxiously” for a new political leader.

Bottom line: it seems that technology will increasingly take the place of postal service in the years to come. This time around, Saturday service may be eliminated. But give it a few more years, and we might see Monday-Wednesday-Friday service. One day, USPS may be eliminated entirely.

Indiviglio casts that as a positive — the Postal Service responding to the changing way Americans use mail (and, increasingly, don’t use mail).

Interestingly, though, I often hear the same argument presented by union leaders and many postal employees as a criticism of 5-day. They view the end of Saturday delivery as a stalking horse for 4-day, 3-day, etc.  And they see it as a negative, both because of its impact on postal workers and because they see it as selling off the agency’s competitive advantage. If the Postal Service doesn’t deliver on Saturdays, they argue, how does it differentiate itself from UPS or FedEx? (The mailbox monopoly, for one…)

This might seem surprising, if you’ve been following our postal coverage; the agency has been on pace to post at least a $6 billion loss for much of the year. But a law passed by Congress in September allowed the agency to defer $4 billion in payments into its retiree health benefits trust fund.

That knocked the deficit down to $3.8 billion, and allowed the Postal Service to pay all of its bills. (The agency would have run out of cash without the legislative relief.)

I’m talking in a few minutes with Joe Corbett, the Postal Service’s chief financial officer, so I’ll have more details about the financial report — and the plan for FY2010 — later this afternoon.

The memo, from OPM director John Berry, requires all agencies to get OPM’s permission before moving political appointees into career positions (at all levels). OPM previously required permission for such moves only during election years. The policy, which takes effect in 2010, applies to anyone who has held a politically-appointed job in the previous five years.

OPM’s reviews will be conducted by career employees.

“Burrowing in” attracted a lot of attention late last year, as it does every election year: Roughly 20 political appointees switched to career jobs during the waning months of the Bush administration.

But that’s not the only important decision on which Obama has delayed. There’s also the question of appointing a “cyber czar,” a White House official to coordinate cybersecurity policy. Obama announced the new position in May, during a White House speech on cybersecurity, but the position has remained vacant for more than five months.

The delay is starting to attract criticism. Rep. Jim Langevin, D-R.I., said last week that he was frustrated with the delay. TechAmerica, an IT industry group, put out a press release this afternoon calling on Obama to appoint a czar “at the earliest possible opportunity.”

Why is the decision taking so long? I’ve posed this question to a few people in recent weeks.

The consensus seems to be that, at first, nobody wanted the job. Several cybersecurity officials have resigned in frustration this year: Mischel Kwon, formerly in charge of US-CERT, stepped down in August; and Rod Beckstrom, the former director of the National Cybersecurity Center, resigned in March.

There’s a general sense that cybersecurity officials don’t have the authority and resources they need to do their jobs — and that scared off a number of would-be applicants for the cyber czar job.

But it seems the White House is finally close to a decision. Several sources told me it could come by the end of the month — perhaps timed around Thanksgiving, when Congress is out of town. (The announcement will surely prompt cries of “what took you so long,” and the administration wants to minimize those.)

That figure includes only the non-military intelligence budget. Blair said in a conference call earlier this year that the entire intelligence community budget is $75 billion — suggesting that the military intelligence budget, still technically classified, is about $25.2 billion.

I’m working on a story about the buyouts, and I’d love to include your stories. Glad to keep you anonymous, of course.

That $533,000 figure comes from dividing the total amount of money spent so far on contracts, $16 billion, by the number of jobs they created, 30,000. $533,000 is more than 10 times the median national income — so if it takes that much money to create a job, the stimulus bill must be wildly inefficient, right?

Wrong. The $533,000-per-job figure is wildly misleading, for two reasons.

The Recovery.gov data is full of errors. This is another problem, of course; the stimulus bill’s vaunted transparency isn’t very useful if the government is releasing bad data.

But this was the first batch of recipient reporting data, and everyone — including the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, which oversees the stimulus — expected problems.

I’m looking around the DC area, for example, and I see dozens of contracts (some for $1 million or more) that don’t include any job creation numbers. It’s not that they say “zero jobs created” — which some contracts do. The contractors evidently didn’t provide any figures at all.

As data quality improves, which the RAT board promises it will, I suspect you’ll see the jobs numbers increase markedly.

Direct vs. indirect jobs. The data also only captures direct job creation; recipients don’t report indirect effects.

What’s the difference? If HUD gives you a million-dollar contract and you hire 20 construction workers, you’ve directly created 20 jobs. Those 20 contractors then turn around and spend some of their salary, stimulating the economy. Maybe they take their kids out to dinner; maybe they buy a new car. In any event, their spending creates indirect jobs.

The Recovery.gov data doesn’t capture those indirect jobs. The Obama administration’s economic team estimates, though, that each direct job creates one indirect job — and even if they’re overstating the case, the stimulus bill will create far more jobs than reported on Recovery.gov.