The Obama administration continues to have a hard time finding people pure enough for appointment to federal office.

New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson raised an early warning flag before the new president was even inaugurated, when he asked in early January that his name be withdrawn from consideration as Commerce Secretary—not because he, Richardson, did anything wrong (he said), but because the feds were investigating how one of his political donors got a lucrative state contract. Then came the flap over the relatively small-scale errors in Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s tax returns—soon followed by the uproar over the considerably larger tax errors made by former Senator Tom Daschle, who in early February was forced to withdraw his nomination as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

And so it has gone, leading an embarrassed White House to tighten and re-tighten its nominee vetting procedures to the point of paralysis. (Geithner is still battling a global financial meltdown solo, without any of his presidentially appointed deputies in place at Treasury.)

Now comes the latest embarrassment: on 12 March Vivek Kundra took a leave of absence from the White House staff just a week after being appointed to the newly created post of US Chief Information Officer (Nature 458, 136; 12 March 2009). It seems that at the office of the District of Columbia’s Chief Technology Officer—Kundra’s previous job—the FBI had caught a mid-level manager with his hand in the till. The Washington Post has the story.

There was no suggestion by the FBI or anyone else that Kundra had had anything to do with the pilfering, or that he ever had knowledge of it. But the now gun-shy White House was taking no chances: according to an administration spokesman, Kundra is ‘on leave until further details become known.’

It’s easy to understand why the administration is being ultra-careful: the press, pundits and politicians of Washington love to play ‘gotcha!’ with stuff like this, happily letting ‘unanswered questions’ consume all the the capital’s available attention. The game is much more fun that dealing with actual problems. It remains to be seen whether Kundra, like other talented individuals before him, will be forced to step aside rather than become ‘a distraction’ to the administration. And it likewise remains to be seen whether the US government—a government facing multiple world crises simultaneously—has any room for actual human beings who have lived their lives on the real, messy planet Earth.