The latest in a NYT series on how well the federal government treats the oil and gas industry shows just how wasteful this nice treatment is.

The article focuses on an Interior Department study that found almost no benefit to giving energy companies a royalty break for drilling on public property. Over 40 years, these breaks will cost around $48 billion- and probably won't produce a drop of oil that wouldn't have otherwise been pumped.

The report estimates that the current incentives would have a tiny impact that is far exceeded by swings in market prices.

The report predicted that the current incentives would lead to the discovery of only 1.1 percent more reserves than if there had been no incentives at all. Total oil production from 2003 to 2042 would be about 300 million barrels more, or less than 1 percent, than it would have been anyway. Natural gas production would be 0.6 percent greater than it would have been otherwise.

But the cost of those royalty incentives would be high: about $48 billion less in royalty payments over the 40-year period. That loss would be offset by a slight increase in the prices that companies pay when bidding for leases in government auctions, but analysts said the net cost would still be above $40 billion.

What a great study. Could the government do one of these studies on every revenue break we give to businesses? That could give the 110th Congress much more "low-hanging fruit" to pay for programs under PAYGO. We might even get a better government out of it, too.

Mother Jones has a good article on the privatization fad that's sweeping the nation. A deal in Indiana to sell a toll road to a private company has started up conversations across the country about privatizing other roads. Which public assets are next? And how far will privatization go?

"the road is one succession of dust, ruts, pits, and holes." So wrote Dwight D. Eisenhower, then a young lieutenant colonel, in November 1919, after heading out on a cross-country trip with a convoy of Army vehicles in order to test the viability of the nation's highways in case of a military emergency. To this description of one major road across the west, Eisenhower added reports of impassable mud, unstable sand, and wooden bridges that cracked beneath the weight of the trucks. In Illinois, the convoy "started on dirt roads, and practically no more pavement was encountered until reaching California."

It took 62 days for the trucks to make the trip from Washington...

GovExec reports today that the Bush administration's push for "E-government" has not yet to show big returns, according a report by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

E-gov is one of the five planks of the President's management agenda. The basic idea is to make government programs and data easier to use by setting up "one-stop shop" websites. A lot of these websites are up and running. Check out Grants.gov for a good example.

Yet, site traffic and usage are low. Nobody really knows about these websites, and the administration hasn't been asking agencies to use them enough. Some site functions still don't work very well, either.

"We're in the second phase [of e-government] and we're trying to drive utilization and usage of these initiatives across the government," [OMB official Andrew] Ciafardini said. "The first phase was getting these programs implemented. It was more proof of concept -- get these things up and running."

In his budget proposal last year, the President claimed that the vast majority of federal agencies had made enough progress on the E-gov initiative. The next budget is coming out in February. How will the President grade agencies on E-gov then?

GovExec reported that new GSA chief Lurita Doan, who's had it out for the GSA's Inspector General office, got two serious letters from Congress last week.

One of the letters, from Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA), James Oberstar, (D-MN), and Eleanor Holmes Norton, (D-DC), questioned Doan's plan to hire contractors to conduct "pre-contract award audits" that the Inspector General's office has been doing for quite some time. The letter says the move raises conflict of interest and privacy concerns. Rightly so.

The other letter, from Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Tom Coburn (R-OK), questioned why Doan deemed it necessary to cut the IG's budget request for 2008, despite mounting concerns of waste, fraud and abuse in federal programs. The effective budget cut was apparently unprecedented, as Inspectors General offices are supposed to maintain a large degree of independence within the agency they've been charged to monitor. Otherwise, there's a clear conflict of interest, once again.

Now, it's too easy just to blame Doan for all this mess (she called the IG a "terrorist" in a memo that was leaked to the Washington Post). After all, Doan is only exploiting loopholes in policy that Congress has failed to close- loopholes which allow for the systemic co-option of IG's offices and the systemic outsourcing of contractor oversight to other contractors.

Congress is doing the right thing by questioning GSA here. And it might have been the only thing they could do, since improvements in procurement oversight policy just weren't an option in the last Congress, of course. But this is ultimately a policy issue, and if the next Congress wants to put a stop to these abuses, letters and hearings and what have you will only be the beginning. Let's hope they do some follow-up in January.

Back in September, you may recall a series of reports based on an internal investigation of the Interior Department that, essentially, showed that gas and oil companies were getting away with skimping on royalty payments. Interior just wasn't auditing these companies enough to compel the royalties they owed for extracting natural resources from public property.

Now, CBS News reports that not only were they not auditing enough, they didn't actually do the auditing they said they did. Interior misrepresented the number of audits they had been doing all along!

If the report's correct, that's pretty bold stuff. It seems almost a certainty that Democrats will hold hearings on this issue in 2007.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) has written up an analysis of the Census Bureau's survey of material hardship from 2003. Among the more startling findings:

* Between one-fourth and one-third of black African American families with children (28 percent) experienced at least one of three hardships — overcrowded housing, hunger or the risk of hunger (termed “food insecurity” by the government), or lack of needed medical care — in the 12 months before the survey was conducted in summer 2003. [2] This was double the comparable rate for non-Latino white families with children (14 percent).

* Nearly one in three families with children headed by a Latino citizen (31 percent) experienced at least one of these three hardships, not significantly different from the rate for black families.

What's more, this might be the last time researchers and advocates are able to gauge the unmet need. The survey used by CBPP (and countless other analysts) - called the Survey of Income and Program Participation - will be terminated unless Congress appropriates more funding for the Census Bureau (we commented on this development back in June). That'd be a shame if Congress didn't restore sufficient funding. How else will we know how effectively federal programs are dealing with material hardship?

The dynamic duo of Ornstein and Mann have an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer today that's worth a read. Their highest-priority reforms to help make Congress functional again:

• New ethics and lobbying rules, including an independent enforcement panel
• 5-day work weeks and a minimum number of weeks in session
• A return of regular order to bill votes, amendments, and debate

These seem like realistic proposals. And the new Congressional leadership seems to be listening. Both Senator Reid and Rep. Pelosi have promised longer weeks, hours, and days, and Reid has scheduled an intense first seven weeks of the session. Pelosi will introduce a rules package that includes ethics reform as the first order of business in the House. And both, to my knowledge, have promised a return to more bipartisan, open legislative procedures.

That's easier said than done, of course. We'll still have to hold them to these promises, and make sure that they go far enough.