The Inspector General at NASA, Robert Cobb, should be considered for removal given his performance over the past few years according to a government board.   Cobb seemingly worked to undermine the investigate process he was supposed to oversee:

NASA's top watchdog routinely tipped off department officials to internal investigations and quashed a report related to the Columbia shuttle explosion to avoid embarrassing the agency, investigators say.

A report by the Integrity Committee, a government board that investigates inspectors general, found that Robert Cobb "created an appearance of a lack of independence," and it questioned whether NASA would do enough to reprimand him.

NASA administrator Michael Griffin has proposed sending Cobb to leadership training and requiring that he meet regularly with department officials on how to improve, but that is not enough, said Integrity Committee Chairman James Burrus.

"All members of the committee believe that disciplinary action, up to and including removal, could be appropriate," he said in a previously unreleased report that also accused Cobb of abusing authority to create an "abusive work environment."

Washington Post media analyst Howie Kurtz noted a striking pattern among key figures in the Bush administration:

Does everyone in the Bush administration have amnesia?

Alberto Gonzales kept saying he wasn't involved in any discussions about the firing of U.S. attorneys, but according to his former chief of staff yesterday, he was -- several times over.

Gonzales couldn't even recall a conversation with the president involving GOP complaints about some U.S. attorneys, although Bush remembered it.

In his Senate appearance yesterday, Kyle Sampson flatly contradicted his ex-boss's denials. As for himself, Sampson said that, whaddya know, he had forgotten some of the e-mails he sent and received when briefing the deputy attorney general about his appearance before Congress. At one point, Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) said: "We're trying to find out what in heaven's name he does remember."

GSA chief Lurita Doan, who testified Wednesday about a January videoconference in which a White House official briefed the agency about targeting congressional Democrats, said: "I'm a little bit embarrassed to admit this, but I can say that I honestly don't have recollection of the presentation at all."

She kept repeating the "do not recollect" defense until a Democratic congressman likened her to Sergeant Shultz, the see-nothing dufus Nazi guard on "Hogan's Heroes."

Scooter Libby is facing the prospect of jail because he told a grand jury he couldn't remember leaking Valerie Plame's identity to some reporters.

Is it something in the water over there?

CREW wants to know why the Bush administration cut funds to earth sciences programs at NASA and NOAA. Those programs provide critical data for hurricane prediction and climate change observation. Our interest was generated by a disturbing report from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The FOIA requests and the NAS Report's Executive Summary can be found on our main website.

The NAS report, commissioned by NASA, NOAA and the U.S. Geological Survey to provide an assessment of current earth-observation capabilities as well as a 10-year projection of those capabilities, reiterates alarms that were raised in an interim report published in April 2005: due to funding cuts, U.S. satellite and other earth-observation programs will be unable to provide crucial weather and climate data to scientists for some amount of time in the coming decade, an amount that will increase if current funding trends continue. Among the concerns that the report specifically raises is that the government's ability to forecast hurricanes and El Nino patterns will be compromised. Unless funding for one particular program is restored, the report notes, NOAA will be unable to fulfill its obligations under the Clean Air Act. The authors also note that the outlook may be even worse than projected, since the cuts were still being finalized as the report went to print.

Given the seriousness of the concerns raised by the NAS report, we want to know how and why those funding decisions were made.