From this morning's San Francisco Chronicle:

Livermore lab plan: $1 billion misprint / Bush budget would take the money, but leave the staff

In an arrangement that still has top officials at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scratching their heads, President Bush plans to send 80 percent of the lab's budget to his new Department of Homeland Security and as few as 4 percent of its employees.

... neither Ridge nor other White House aides could explain why the plan's fine print calls for the new department to employ just a fraction of the lab's workers while consuming $1.2 billion of its $1.5 billion budget. "I cannot give you the kind of explanation you need to deal with that imbalance," Ridge said Monday in response to The Chronicle's queries...

Somebody in the U.S. government typed that $1.2 billion number. Can't Ridge find out who he or she is, and why that number is $1.2 billion?

The overall impression left, with me at least, is that Ridge and company think of this reorganization plan as a show put on with sock puppets, rather than as an attempt to change how the government works to make it a more effective fighter against terrorism.