Tilting at Windmills.

• Author: PETERS, CHARLES
• Position: Analysis of various social trends and events - Column

Hillary's Pink Blouse * Allan's Threat To Albert * Greed on PBS The Boomer Space Race * Wrong Man in Wrong Place II

HILLARY CLINTON'S "CAMPAIGN wardrobe is getting a little ... repetitive" charged the March 6 issue of Time. It illustrates this grave accusation with pictures taken on seven different occasions, each showing the First Lady wearing a pink blouse and a brown jacket. Why should anyone care? The only people I can think of who would be interested are the same ones who criticized her for changing her hairstyle too often. And for them, one would think her fidelity to pink and brown would be reassuring.

MY WIFE AND I HAVE A SMALL house. We have lived in it for 38 years and have grown too fond of it to leave even if we could afford to. But it is small and by now is crammed to the eaves with books and papers and the assortment of memorabilia and just plain junk that families accumulate over the years. So we understand the need for more space. But baby boomers have taken it to a new dimension. Consider one couple who are friends of ours. When they moved from the small apartment where they lived when we first knew them to a nice house twice the size of ours, we thought they had found a permanent home. But just a few years later, the husband told me they were moving. "Why?" I asked. "You have such a nice place now." His answer: "We need more space." The new house is 2 1/2 times the size of the house that was twice the size of ours.

It turns out that my friends aren't unusual. They're typical. "Like the American waistline, the new American home is getting larger," write The Wall Street Journal's Carlos Tejada and Patrick Barta. "Empty nesters, baby boomers at the tops of their careers and the young and options-rich all are buying homes with more bedrooms, more bathrooms, and more flourishes than ever before. `People want incredible amounts of space,' says Leslie Barry Davidson, a Houston architect. `They come in and say, `I want space for all my stuff, my clothes, my skis.'"

The flourishes usually include spacious, well-appointed kitchens. "Not that anyone cooks," one buyer told the Journal. "But it looks impressive."

"OH MY GOD. MY GOD. I HAVE no idea what you're talking about. I can't believe this." Thus spake Joseph Westphal, an assistant secretary of the Army, after The Washington Post's Michael Grunwald informed him that the Corps of Engineers, which Westphal supposedly oversees, had been waging a behind-the-scenes campaign to increase the Corps' $4 billion civil works budget to $6.2 billion. This illustrates a couple of truths about the culture of bureaucracy that this magazine has long labored to bring to the public's attention. One is that the boss is often the last to know, which is why any boss should take great pains to find out what's going on below. The other is that anyone charged with overseeing a bureaucracy should know that its natural tendency is to increase its budget. A larger budget not only heightens the bureaucrat's sense of importance, it also decreases the likelihood of job loss and increases the possibility of promotion, not to mention more funding for travel, conferences, and other goodies dear to the bureaucratic heart.

When a misguided staff economist suggested that a proposed Corps project really was not needed, his supervisors immediately circulated a memo saying it was time to "get creative" with studies in order to "grow" and "not to take no for an answer."

SO MANY CORPS PROJECTS have done more environmental harm than good and so many have proved to be costly boondoggles that it seems an unlikely candidate for a budget increase. But that does not mean that all agencies have enough funding. Some truly need more. An example is the National Transportation Safety Board, an agency with an impressive record of efficient and courageous fact-finding. A recent Rand study found that the NTSB staff is overworked. Average workload for the staff involved in the TWA 800 and ValuJet investigations was 62 hours a week. And the situation is likely to get worse. The number of transport aircraft is projected to double by 2017.

BY THE WAY, IF YOU'RE IN the market for a new home, large or small, be warned that there's a new racket being practiced by the homebuilders. They will advertise the home as...