GSA Administrator Lurita Doan got a grilling from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform today. Check out this clip from the hearing where Doan fails to give any explanation for what appears to be the political usage of federal assets- taxpayer money being used to get Republicans elected.

If this is the best she can do, Doan's days as GSA administrator should be numbered.

The Senate today defeated an amendment to the budget resolution that would have made massive cuts in appropriated programs. The amendment, offered by Sen. Wayne Allard (R-CO), went down 64-33.

The Allard amendment would have eliminated funding for programs rated "ineffective" by the dubious Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART). Read more about PART here.

Can you guess which disaster this Washington Post article is about?

In a stinging, wide-ranging assessment of..efforts, .... said that...had no strategy for restoring either government institutions or infrastructure. And in the years since, other agencies joined the effort without an overall plan and without a structure in place to organize and execute a task of such magnitude.

Lines of authority remained unclear in the...effort. With a demand for speed and a shortage of government personnel, much of the oversight was turned over to the contractors doing the work. There was little coordination among the various agencies. The result was a series of missed opportunities to address the unraveling situation....

A. Hurricane Katrina.
B. The Iraq war reconstruction
C. The Afghanistan war
D. It's an article from the future- it's about how they'll handle the next disaster.

Yesterday, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the "Accountability in Contracting Act" by a vote of 347 - 73. The bill (H.R. 1362) would improve oversight of federal contractors by restricting the use of sole-source, or no-bid, contracts and require large contracting agencies to minimize their use of cost-reimbursement contracts. It would also tighten post-employment restrictions on government procurement officials and permanently extend the acquisition workforce training fund.

Despite unsubstantiated objections by the White House, the House moved quickly this week, marking up the contracting bill in both the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the House Armed Services Committee, and passing the bill on the floor in the span of only nine days.

The bill was the fifth passed by the House during Sunshine Week, all of which would expand and strengthen the transparency and accountability of the federal government. The other bills concerned protecting government whistleblowers, expanding the Freedom of Information Act, restoring the automatic release of presidential records, and requiring disclosure of donors to presidential libraries.

TAKE ACTION: Contact your Senators and Representative today to increase contractor responsibility and oversight!

Quick comment on Robert Pear's article yesterday on Medicaid- a must-read, by the way- that demonstrated that falling caseloads may be in part due to new "proof of citizenship" requirements.

Medicaid costs, too, have been going down. Supposing these two trends are related, and it would seem they are, citizenship documentation seems nothing more than a high-handed way to cut budgets and deny people (the vast majority of whom are citizens) health care. Let's remember this if the President ever decides to boast of the cost-containment his policies have achieved.

The supplemental also would ensure that individuals applying for Medicaid have the same "reasonable time period" to show citizenship documents as they would in applying for other programs such as food stamps. It would clarify that children born in U.S. hospitals meet Medicaid's citizenship requirement, regardless of the immigration status of the parent.

The contractor at Walter Reed who's taken much blame for the wretched conditions there is tangled up in IRS privatization, too. Unbossed has the story.

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), chairman of the House committee on government reform and oversight, has introduced a bill that would go a long way toward reforming the contracting process.

The bill would make publicly available more information on contracts, fix parts of the contracting process that have been exploited by wasteful contractors, and move towards closing the revolving door between government employees and contractors.

We look forward to see where Waxman takes this bill. Meanwhile, check out FedSpending.org for the most comprehensive data set out there on government contracting.

As the saga of the General Services Administration (Or GSA, a government agency that handles contracts for other agencies) Adminstrator Lurita Doan unfolds, let's take a look back at everything that got us where we are. There seem to be four things at issue: a contract with Sun Microsystems, a contract with a friend of Doan's, the GSA's inspector general's budget, and talk of GSA employees engaging in electoral campaigning.

So far, it amounts to abuses of power, a war on accountability, and potential violations of federal law.

GovExec has a good story today on how privatization may have made the situation at Walter Reed even worse. A prolonged public-private competition demoralized staff, nearly 100 of whom quit.

On Monday, Weightman said attrition reduced the number of employees affected by the competition from a high of 190 down to about 100 people. He said that despite being given authority to staff up to bridge the gap, he was unable to find more than 10 additional people to take positions not slated to last beyond four months.

If all this is true, last year's Congress had a hand in it. In September, the Senate voted to table, or kill, an amendment to the FY 07 Defense Appropriations bill that would have prevented the Army from privatizing those services. In effect, those voting "yea" were voting for privatization- for making the problem worse for injured veterans.

Take a look at the roll call vote. The vote was very close- 48-50. If one "yea" vote had switched to "nea," the amendment probably would not have been killed.

The House, in fact, approved the same amendment. But because of the Senate vote, it was not included in the enacted appropriations bill.