The American Prospect's Harold Meyerson had an interesting op-ed last week on procurement. Key excerpt:

Part of the problem is that the federal government has no central database to assess the record of prospective contractors. When DHS checks out its contract bidders, Elaine Duke, the department's chief procurement officer, told the committee, there's no file containing reports on contractors from the various departments' inspectors general or Congress's Government Accountability Office. If the companies have been indicted or involved in civil action over their performance, contract officers such as Duke are, like the rest of us, reliant on Google to discover what's out there.

Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney, who represents Manhattan's East Side, has introduced legislation to create a central database that would enable officials at one department to know when a contractor has screwed up at another. Maloney's bill, if enacted, would be only a small step toward bringing accountability to our newly privatized government, but it would at least keep procurement officers from flying blind and might just make our Department of Homeland Security more secure.

Rep. Maloney's bill was covered in this Watcher article. And the Project On Government Oversight has assembled its own database of law-breaking contractors here.

President Bush, as you probably know, says he's gonna veto any SCHIP expansion, the principle rationale being that government doesn't belong in health care.

My hunch is that this won't carry the day. SCHIP's focus on kids is its trump card. But Bush is right that SCHIP is only the beginning of the policy fight over health care, and when the focus isn't on kids or some other sympathetic demographic group, the arguments being made today could win out by tapping into public distrust of government, which the Bush administration has deepened.

The good news is that recent events have demonstrated the superiority of government-sponsored health insurance and government-provided health care, properly administered. Once neglected, hospitals in the care of the Veteran's Administration have been transformed into some of the best examples of how to efficiently deliver health care. Medicare has experimented with privatization in insurance and prescription drugs- both of which have turned out to be more expensive than if government just did it itself.

And the positive conservative agenda -give everyone tax breaks, privatize government and let the market do its thing- really has no prospect of success. More market forces aren't what's needed. Market forces create perverse incentives and do not encourage the information distribution needed for effective market competition and long-term care. The market prices goods arbitrarily. It encourages actors to provide health insurance to the healthy but not the sick. In other words, the market isn't the solution- it's the problem.

I don't expect SCHIP supporters to risk political capital and make this argument just yet, especially with an expansion being so likely. But at some point they'll probably have to show some leadership and challenge the dominant narrative about government and the market if they want to get anything done.

The Taxpayer Advocate's office of the IRS released its mid-year report yesterday -- see: Fiscal Year 2008 Objectives report; IRS press release ($). The report's focus is on improving taxpayer services, ensuring that taxpayer rights are protected in the Internal Revenue Service's private debt collection initiative, and making the offer-in-compromise program accessible for taxpayers.

The IRS also announced yesterday an open conference call of the Taxpayer Assistance Center Committee of the Taxpayer Advocacy Panel, to be held on Tuesday, August 7, 2007 at noon Eastern, to solicit public comments, ideas and suggestions on improving customer service at the IRS. For more information, contact Dave Coffman at 1-888-912-1227, or 206-220-6096.

Bear in mind that the Panel's office is based in Washington State (Pacific Time) and that Mr. Coffman will be out of the office the week of Monday, July 23. He will be back the following week, but anyone in the office can assist you.

The House Ways and Means Committee has approved HR 3056- the legislative package that will end the IRS private debt collection program- by a vote of 23 to 18. Great!

This morning, the Joint Committee on Taxation released its interpretation of a Chairman's amendment to the bill. if passed, it will not affect contracts that have already been issued to private debt collectors. That sounds fair, as the debt collectors who have contracts might take a loss if the program is ended wholesale.

A favorite canard put forward by the defenders of the IRS private tax collection program is that there's no other way to collect these taxes (watch a hearing on the issue here). If Congress gave IRS the resources it needed to pursue these cases, IRS administrators would instead direct the money to functions that would yield a greater return-on-investment.

But IRS has been spending a great deal of money on the IRS program so far. As of a few months ago, the IRS spent $71 million to set up the program. If IRS had spent that money on other things, it could have brought in about $1.4 billion- over 2 years. The private debt collection program is expected to bring in about that much money over 10 years. If the IRS is so concerned with spending money with a high return on investment, why is it even bothering with this program?

And there's no guarantee that the program will actually yield the expected revenues. Revenues are now being collected at a very slow pace, and according to the IRS National Taxpayer Advocate, many of the cases that have been given to the private collectors may be too complex for the PCAs to effectively prosecute. Plus, the last time the program was tried -in 1996- it actually lost money in net! The same thing has been happening so far- $71 million has been spent, but less than $50 million in new revenue has been brought in.

And it's undisputed that the IRS could do this work more efficiently in-house. Period. Even the IRS has admitted that. Program defenders say they're comparing apples to oranges- IRS employees have more powers than private companies and so are more efficient. But that's like saying you can't say that Muhammad Ali is a better boxer than, oh, President Bush, because Ali has natural gifts, training, and experience. Just because the IRS is better doesn't mean you can't compare them.

There's no business case for this program- and let's no forget that the program puts taxpayer information at risk, and has exposed people to abusive tactics by for-profit companies who are paid on a commission basis. End this program now! Pass HR 3056!

Tomorrow, the House Ways and Means Committee will consider a new "good government" bill to end the IRS private debt collection program. Check out the bill here.

It includes virtually the same language as HR 695- Rep. Steve Rothman (D-NJ) and Rep. Chris Van Hollen's (D-MD) bill to end the program. It also includes six other measures that tweak tax laws.

Previous efforts to end the program have been caught up in procedural issues. At first blush, this new bill seems get around those problems- it has proper jurisdiction and probably wouldn't violate PAYGO.

And the bill shows that Ways and Means Chairman Rep. Charlie Rangel was serious when he said he didn't want any new contracts issued to private debt collectors. Kudos to Chairman Rangel for sticking to his guns!

This may be the beginning of the program's end. Good riddance. It's wasteful and puts taxpayers at risk for no good reason. But in a larger sense, it's the poster child for what's wrong conservative ideology and politics- an overabundance of faith in the market, unwarranted distrust of government, and a penchant for putting corporate interests over the public interest.

The Senate Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee, a part of the Senate Appropriations Committee, passed its version of the FY 2008 Financial Services and General Government appropriations bill (HR 2829) by a party-line vote of 5 to 4.

If you're still with me, this bill would do a couple important things. First, it limits funding for the IRS private debt collection program, but not so much that it would violate congressional procedures. A similar version of this limitation was struck from the House's bill on procedural grounds (See this Watcher article for more) . The Senate would not eliminate the program, presumably, but it could contain it so that it probably won't do much more damage.

Second, it funds IRS operations at $11.1 billion, which is significantly higher level than last year, but lower than the $11.6 billion that the IRS Oversight Board recommended. Full funding of the IRS could reduce the tax gap, which would free up more revenue for program expansions and make the tax code more fair and progressive.

And third, it would defund the part of the Office of the Vice President (OVP) that's in the executive branch. As you may recall, Vice President Cheney has been saying he's not really in the executive branch, and therefore isn't subject to an executive order that establishes some oversight over the OVP when it classifies information. This measure may make the OVP's operations more transparent to the public, and help Congress hold the Vice President accountable if he or anyone else in his office, besides Scooter Libby, has done anything wrong.

Of course, this is only the subcommittee- the bill has a ways to go. But it's off to a pretty good start.

Prof. Martin Carnoy, who does research on school vouchers, on how experience in education policy has not borne out the theoretical superiority of the market:

We need to go back to basics on educational vouchers and see whether what was claimed for them was ever realized in practice. In the 1950s, Milton Friedman introduced the concept, arguing that if private schools could compete with public schools by having access to public funding (vouchers), the cost of education would fall and parents would feel better off because they would be able to choose their child's school. Friedman advocated a voucher plan that included all families, regardless of income. That was precisely the plan he inspired to be implemented in Chile in 1981, and to be placed on the ballot twice in California, in 1993 and in 2001.

EPI's Max Sawicky on why fewer bureaucrats isn't more:

We always celebrate the sacrifices and contributions of our military men and women, and rightly so. But why not the less dangerous but often saintly deeds of the rest of our public servants?

If you favor less government, maybe you enjoy excoriating "government bureaucrats," but are you cutting your nose to spite your face?