Federal Budget & Tax

Federal Budget & Tax: News Blog Background

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has updated its database of government contracting (you can also check out fedspending.org to search through contracting data). The House's website has interesting profiles of cases where contracting went wrong, and there's a very comprehensive report on contracting.

What it doesn't have is a good narrative to explain why all this stuff matters.

As far as I can tell, the dominant narrative goes something like this: corrupt politicians gave away contracts to companies that lined their pockets. That's why so much money is being wasted and contracting is growing.

But isn't that an anti-government message? Then it's the politicians and the agencies fault for all the waste in contracting. There's some truth to that, but is it the whole truth? And is it the message we want to be sending? All it implies, in terms of solutions, is that the corrupt politicians need to be kicked out, and government needs to be scaled down.

How about this for an alternative: most of the time, private companies aren't set up to do government work right. We asked them to do things they couldn't, so they wasted a lot of money. The solution is to make government do a better job of what it does best: government services.

Posted by Matt Lewis, 01:53:32 PM

Monday, June 25, 2007

The Privatizers Strike Back

Congress may make a move to strip language that would keep states from privatizing the provision of food stamps. The anti-privatization language, which would go in the Farm Bill, could be struck down despite the massive failure of a scheme to privatize the food stamp system in Texas.

Don't the privatizers get it? Government just does things like this better.

Posted by Matt Lewis, 06:01:27 PM

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

What is the President Smoking? Part II

Following up on my post yesterday about the president's weekly radio address and his pharmaceutical preferences, I came across this article today in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel detailing the struggles of Florida's HIV treatment programs:

Every week, Oakland Park HIV patient Peter Giraldo goes for acupuncture and therapeutic massage to lessen severe nerve pain in his extremities caused by his medications and diabetes.

But the therapies will vanish next month, and other services used by thousands of South Florida HIV/AIDS patients will shrink dramatically as a result of federal budget cuts now coming to a head, county health officials said. Substance abuse treatment, nutritional counseling and other programs stand to be cut.

For a second straight year, local HIV budget planners said they are struggling to stretch declining grants from the federal Ryan White Program.

I wonder if Peter Giraldo thinks the president is being disingenuous when he says during his radio address that he is meeting the urgent needs of the country?

Posted by Adam Hughes, 04:09:14 PM

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

What is the President Smoking?

I stumbled across a copy of the president's weekly radio address this morning and, for the life of me, can't figure out what Mr. Bush is smoking. The address summarized Bush's record on fiscal policy, stating outrageous claims like the president's tax cuts were a success, that Bush has enacted fiscal discipline in Washington, and that government spending imperils economic growth. These statements are all pretty much wrong, but the worst part of the speech was this:

Over the past three years, we have met the urgent needs of our Nation while holding the growth of annual domestic spending close to one percent - well below the rate of inflation...By keeping taxes low and restraining Federal spending, we can meet my plan to have a balanced budget by 2012.

Let's take a look at how well the president has met the urgent needs of our nation. Just recently, we've come across the following reports:

New Hampshire may have to cut food and other assistance for the elderly;
Hunger in America could be significantly curtailed if we'd only invest a little more;
Backdoor cuts to Medicaid have drawn the ire of state Medicaid directors. Michigan is one state that has cut its Medicaid program;
Delays and insufficient funding in the FY 06 spending bills threatened cuts to veterans health care, the Social Security Administration, the Food Safety and Inspection Service, the Small Business Administration, the FBI and DEA, Amtrak, and low-income housing programs - all of which have been operating on shoestring budgets over the past several years;
The Walter Reed scandals appear to be a budget issue at its core with privatization of government services pursued to save money over delivering quality services;
A growing number of sinkholes are increasingly becoming a problem around the country - mostly due to underfunded or neglected federal wastewater management programs;
The Food and Drug Administration has largely blamed budget cuts and a lack of resources for their poor responses to recent food safety problems;
The Center for Disease Control stated last week they lacked funding to put a plan in place to respond to a large tuberculosis outbreak;
The president's own Millennium Challenge program, which provides funding to foster the development of poor countries, was running $400 million to $1 billion behind in January, 2007;
Even funding for Iraq reconstruction has been insufficient and mismanaged;

Unfortunately, this is just the tip of the iceberg of unmet needs around the country the president doesn't even seem to be aware of. What's more, the president has presided over the largest increase in the national debt in history, as it has increased from $5.95 trillion to close to $9 trillion during his presidency. At this point, it's a little late for him to be shooting for a balanced budget in 2012 - 3 years after he leaves the White House. I'm afraid the damage has already been done.

Posted by Adam Hughes, 02:07:57 PM

Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Who is the Bush Administration Kidding on PART?

Abstinence education is back in the news as a recent study from Mathematica Policy Research continues to cast significant doubts on the effectiveness of abstinence-only sex education in preventing teen pregnancy, early sexual activity, and sexually transmitted infections. The report, which was commissioned by Congress in 1997, followed 2,057 U.S. teenagers in late elementary and middle school who participated in four abstinence programs, as well as students in the same grades who did not participate in such programs.

While this is a topic that is a bit outside the scope of things we comment on here at the Budget Brigade at OMB Watch, I raise it to compare congressionally mandated studies to evaluate programs and the efforts undertaken by the Bush administration with the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART). Congress commissioned this study to compare the impact of abstinence-only programs with a control group of students who did not participate - a helpful comparison in determining if it is the abstinence-only programs that are actually making a difference (and the result has repeatedly been that they do not make a difference).

Let's compare that to the PART's performance measurement evaluations. According to the PART review from 2006 of the "Abstinence Education" program, the way program performance will be measured is through tracking teen pregnancy rates, percentage of teens who report never having had sex and who continue to abstain after participation in a program, percentage of teens who have had sex and then report abstaining following participation in a program, and decreases in percentage of 9-12 grade students who report having had sex.

These are all fine indicators of the level of, well, teen pregnancy and sexual attitudes and actions of teens in the country. Unfortunately, they will not show whether it was the abstinence-only education programs that caused the improvements or goals unless there is a comparison to difference programs or a control group that does not participate in any program.

What's even more appalling than faulty methodology within the PART is the outright fabrications that the administration actually uses PART survey findings to inform its funding priorities. The PART review for the abstinence program references a "forthcoming" Mathematica study (question 4.5) and say it "uses a rigorous experimental design with random assignment of control and experimental group." But when the results of that "rigorous" study were released this past April, Harry Wilson, a top official in the Department of Health and Human Services, told the Washington Post that the study "isn't rigorous enough to show whether or not [abstinence-only] education works." Incredibly enough, Wilson added that the administration has no intention of changing funding priorities in light of the results.

Do I really need to say more about what a sham the PART is?

Posted by Adam Hughes, 11:37:52 AM

Pre-emptive Nutrition-Assistance Would Save Money

A new report commissioned by the Sedexho Foundation estimates the annual costs associated with hunger in America is $90 billion. This estimate excludes government programs for nutrion-assistance - which amount to approximately $53 billion in FY 2006. The report finds that increasing anti-hunger investments by an additional $10 billion to $12 billion a year is cost-effective and could even almost wipe out hunger in America.

The lead author of the report, J. Larry Brown from the Center on Hunger and Poverty at Brandeis University, believes the United States is wasting money by not tackling the issue of hunger head-on: