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Home :  Federal Budget & Tax : 
Federal Budget & Tax:      News     Blog     Background    



Wednesday, October 31, 2007

TheMiddleClass.Org

The Drum Major Institute has an intriguing new website up- themiddleclass.org- where you can basically track legislation that matters to the "current and aspiring" middle class, and get a reliable perspective on what it's all about.

Its unveiling is a good opportunity to rundown a couple other really useful sites that help everyone -myself included- hold the government accountable.



Posted by Matt Lewis, 01:16:11 PM



Friday, October 26, 2007

Blackwater Shows That The Market Works!

In the Guardian, Greg Anrig has a comprehensive look at rightist ideology and how its been neither efficient nor effective in practice.

In a recent speech, former business consultant and current Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney sang from the conservative movement's hymnal when he intoned: "Compared to free markets and free enterprises, government is slow to act, wasteful, duplicative, bureaucratic, inefficient, ineffective and unresponsive." That same mindset under the Bush administration impelled a massive increase in reliance on private contractors to provide goods and services that previously the government had been more directly responsible for producing and overseeing. The upshot has been far more egregious and pervasive wastefulness of taxpayer dollars than anything documented in the past.

The state department's contracting failures closely resemble those uncovered last month by the government accountability office (GAO) in its investigation of the department of homeland security's (DHS) outsourcing. The GAO, which scrutinized 117 DHS contracts, found that "the level of oversight provided did not always ensure accountability for decisions or the ability to judge whether the contractor was performing as required." Other studies have documented egregious wastefulness connected to post-Katrina government contracts with private providers, as well as the defence department's outsourcing to companies like Bechtel, Fluor, Parsons and the Halliburton subsidiary KBR.

As the problems with contracting get worse, the right's rhetoric on government gets even more supportive of contracting and the market and less supportive of government. The contradicting evidence provided by Blackwater and all the other contracting mishaps that Anrig documents is merely a test of the faithful, a way of sorting out the true believers from the casually observant. And Romney's quote shows that the true believers have increasing control over the Republican Party.



Posted by Matt Lewis, 02:01:19 PM



Thursday, October 25, 2007

Government Is...Good?

A cool new site called governmentisgood.com. Next time that uncle you and everyone else has goes off about "big government," tell him to visit it.



Posted by Matt Lewis, 12:57:58 PM



Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Conflabbin' Gov'mint!

The federal government wastes a tremendous amount of money. I'm talking hundreds of billions of dollars every year.

But no, it's not on mob-infested unions, lazy bureaucrats or degenerate poor people. Most of it is spent on everyday people.

For more, check out this testimony by CBO director Peter Orszag on performance budgeting for Medicare, Medicaid, and tax expenditures- the biggest money wasters of them all.



Posted by Matt Lewis, 05:54:40 PM



Monday, October 22, 2007

Allard PART Amendment Hammered By Senate

The Allard amendment that would automatically cut programs in the Labor-HHS appropriations bill should OMB hand down an "ineffective" PART rating was hammered back by the Senate this evening by a vote of 68-21.

Thanks to everyone who contacted Senators to urge them to vote against this dangerous policy.





Posted by Adam Hughes, 07:08:14 PM



Vote No on Sen. Allard's PART Amendment

The Senate is debating the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill today (and probably tomorrow), and Sen. Wayne Allard has introduced a disturbing amendment that would automatically cut the budget of any program that was given an "ineffective" PART rating by the Office of Management and Budget. Under Allard's amendment, any program that is listed as "ineffective" under the PART would be automatically cut by 10 percent, with the amount cut used to pay down the national debt. To see which programs would be cut, see this list of "ineffective" programs on the ExpectMore.gov website: programs rated ineffective. The list includes Even Start, the Perkins loan program, vocational education grants, Upward Bound, the Workforce Investment Act programs for Migrant and Seasonal Farmworkers and Youth, the Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment Block Grant, and the Healthy Community Access program, among others.

But there is a larger issue at play here than where you come down on these programs or the PART itself (and you should come down against it). Congress is granted the authority to appropriate public funds under the Constitution, not the executive branch. Enacting this amendment would transfer that authority to the executive branch, and more specifically to a number of unelected public employees whose sole job is to carry out the policy preferences of the president. Why would any Senator want to vote to give him or herself less power?

What's more, imagine the degree or manipulation of future PART scores for programs covered under this bill if this administration (or any future one) knew a rating of "ineffective" would bring an automatic 10 percent cut. Something tells me we would start to see a whole lot more "ineffective" ratings for programs in the Departments of Education, Labor, and Health and Human Services.

A vote on the amendment is likely later today or tomorrow morning. Please take 5 minutes to call your Senators offices to tell them to vote no on the Allard amendment to the Labor-HHS-Education bill.





Posted by Adam Hughes, 12:22:32 PM



Friday, October 12, 2007

Privatization: The Other Blackwaters

Be sure to read a great op-ed by our own Matt Lewis in TomPaine.com today on larger lessons to be learned from the privatization of security services in Iraq. Here's the key passage:

Citizens who believe in government as a tool to advance the public interest ought to be concerned about excessive privatization of public services. Contractors like Blackwater USA are alienating would-be friends abroad and the public back home. Instead of rushing to privatize public services at every turn, our government should carefully review the services it currently oursources—keeping in mind the role of government should be to serve the public interest.

TomPaine.com: The Other Blackwaters





Posted by Adam Hughes, 05:05:32 PM



Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Even Bad Contractors Get New Contracts!

U.S. PIRG released a new report today that profiles how contractors who have poor performance or fraudulent practices can still receive new contracts from the federal government. The report profiles companies such as Bank of America, General Electric, Lexis-Nexis, Kellogg, Brown, and Root, and Northrup Grumman, among others. An excerpt from the report's executive summary:

The rapid increase of federally contracted dollars—100 percent since 2000—makes outsourcing the fastest growing component of discretionary spending. The government's preference for using outside contractors to provide goods and services makes careful scrutiny of the process and the decisions more important than in the past. At present, loose rules, lack of competition, and limited accountability permit so-called 'bad actors' to receive contracts that put taxpayers and our money at risk.

It's a very interesting report and I'm sure, as they imply, these examples are just the tip of the iceberg. Also of note, they use FedSpending.org for their contracts data - very cool!

U.S. PIRG: Forgiving Fraud and Failure: Profiles in Federal Contracting





Posted by Adam Hughes, 04:42:20 PM



Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Defense Authorization Would Change Contracting Rules

The Senate overwhelmingly passed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2008 last night. The bill included the Webb/McCaskill wartime contracting commission, and, according to BNA (subscription required), these provisions on military contracting:

Immediately before voting on the measure, the Senate agreed 51-42 to adopt an amendment that would impose new limits on Defense Department implementation of the public-private competition process under Office of Management and Budget Circular A-76, and eliminate OMB competitive sourcing goals.

The amendment, offered by Sens. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), includes provisions that would:

  • exclude health care and retirement costs from the A-76 cost comparison process in DOD public-private competitions;
  • prohibit federal agencies from converting to private-sector performance any function performed by 10 or more in-house employees without implementing a formal cost comparison that includes an in-house most efficient organization (MEO) and results in a determination that contractor performance will result in savings of $10 million or 10 percent of the personnel-related costs of the agency tender;
  • eliminate automatic recompetition of work at the end of the performance period when an A-76 competition is won by federal employees;
  • expand appeal rights for federal employees who have lost A-76 competitions to contractors; and
  • require DOD to issue guidance on allowing federal employees to compete for new work or for certain work currently being performed by contractors.


Posted by Matt Lewis, 10:32:54 AM




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