This morning, the New York Times published a fantastic article by Scott Shane and Ron Nixon about how contractors are taking over huge parts of the federal government. The article, "In Washington, Contractors Take On Biggest Role Ever," is the first in a series of articles by the Times that will investigate government contracting. And rightly so.

Outsourcing of government jobs, services, and product development has more than doubled in the last 6 years - a staggering growth rate. The article in today's paper shows, contrary to popular belief, that contractors often end up costing the government more money than it would otherwise spend, with inflated hourly wages ($104 per hour in one example from the article), poor performance and management, and little oversight or accountability from government employees.

Scott and Nixon profile problems at the General Services Administration and the Department of Homeland Security, among other agencies, as case examples of following poor contracting practices and making wasteful decisions that have squandered billions of taxpayer dollars while enriching private companies. In fact, one study cited in the article concluded the explosion of contracting "poses a threat to the government's long-term ability to perform its mission" and could "undermine the integrity of the government's decision making."

The entire article is worth reading and does a great job summarizing some major concerns about the current contracting environment. I'm looking forward to the rest of the articles in the series and my only hope at this point is that every member of Congress will read the articles as well.

Since the president's FY 2009 budget request was mostly a rehash of old policies and proposals we've already spent time debunking in previous years, we've been looking for some new angles with which to view the president's budget. As I was sitting at my desk looking at the budget books in my office, the actual length of the main budget volume released this year jumped out at me. Or I should say, it didn't jump out at me.

Turns out the main budget book for the FY 2009 budget is the shortest one ever released by the president. At 170 pages, it is more than 45 percent shorter than the average length of the budget book released each year by President Bush (which came in at 311 pages.

Not sure what one can make of this change, particularly since the FY 2008 budget is also much shorter than the Bush average. This particular part of the president's budget proposal has evolved during the Bush administration to be a fancy, glossy, picture-filed advertisement for the administration's achievements and priorities, with little hard budgetary information. It is developed, I suppose, to help the administration put the best spin on their budget proposal and successes.

I wonder if the Bush administration is tired of actively selling their misguided priorities, particularly in this final year and that is the reason for the shorter volume? Or perhaps they have realized they really don't have many budget achievements that they should be bragging about?

As we've started digging through the president's FY 2009 federal budget request today, we haven't come across many surprises yet. As we have come to expect from Mr. Bush, his budget consists of harsh cuts to discretionary programs outside of defense and homeland security, unrealistic assumptions about both current and future economic conditions and policy options related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Alternative Minimum Tax.

Despite this, I was surprised this morning when I saw the administration had included their list of 151 programs the presdient proposed to eliminate or drastically cut in his State of the Union speech last week (see Table S-5). The administration claims these programs are selected using their misleading and biased Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART), but we've never been able to see any evidence that PART ratings are a factor in the president's proposals (see here, here, here, and here). If all of the president's recommendations were accepted by Congress, the cuts would save just over $18 billion.

While the substance of the list is little changed over the last several years - many of the same programs are on the list again this year and previous trends are holding true, such as the Department of Education getting hit the hardest by program eliminations (47) - I am puzzled that the administration has released the list upfront with the budget. And it isn't just the inclusion of the list, but how it is presented. For the last three years, the list was included in a seperate document entitled "Major Savings and Reforms in the President's FY 20XX Budget" (see the docs for 2006, 2007, and 2008). This year, the list is burried on page 143 (out of 170 total pages) in Table S-5 of the glossy main book of the president's budget proposal.

In the last two years, the president has failed to release this list when the budget was published despite calling attention to these programs in his State of the Union in both 2006 and 2007. In both those years, the list was quietly released on Friday night the week the budget was released (see our coverage of the sneaky 2006 and 2007 releases).

So I guess we have to commend the president for publishing the information in a timely, transparent manner (?), but it still feels a little strange. They've gone from three years of releasing a well-presented, thought-out document late one night during the week the budget was released, to a chart in the back of the budget proposal released on the same day as the rest of the budget. It's almost as if they president is trying to hide the list in plain sight.

Maybe they just don't care anymore?

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) released a report entitled "Evaluating Research Efficiency in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency" yesterday that reviewed the way PART evaluates federal research and development programs. This review was requested by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2006 in order to assist the agency in "developing better assessment tools to comply with PART, with emphasis on efficiency," according to the preface to the report. I don't know, but I suspect, EPA requested this study because they are frustrated with the poor ratings and inflexibility of the PART for EPA research and development programs and tired of feeling like the ugly duckling of the federal government, at least in OMB's eyes.

Turns out, the NAS study draws many of the same conclusions we have promoted about the PART, particularly its inability to correctly evaluate and capture the work of R&D programs. For instance, NAS finds that measuring research programs based on outcomes (i.e. does research on health policy make people healthier) is neither achievable nor valid. It further finds that efficiency in research should only be one part of evaluating the quality, relevance, and effectiveness of research programs.

These conclusions lead NAS to make three excellent recommendations for how the federal government should evaluate research.