The political circus pamphlet the POLITICO recently reported that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has halted development of Boeing's disastrous and budget-bloated Southwest border fence project known as SBInet. Napolitano noted in a press release on the matter that the fence project, which uses an intricate system of sensors and cameras, "has been plagued with cost overruns and missed deadlines."

According to the article, Secretary Napolitano is "withholding funding for the program’s first deployment until a review she ordered in January is finished." The secretary has also diverted $50 million in stimulus funds from the project. Homeland Security will put those diverted funds toward "other tested, commercially available security technology along the Southwest border."

Also according to POLITICO, during recent testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Napolitano intimated her desire to move away from the troubled program. She claimed that she was "not satisfied with SBInet," and stated that Homeland Security would need "to reevaluate how those technology dollars are used and whether there are other technologies...that would be more mobile, better, easier to maintain and easier to operate."

OMB Watch has endlessly documented the defense contracting boondoggle that Boeing's SBInet is, and we're glad that the federal government is starting to take notice. We can only hope that this hold is a step toward permanent cancellation of the project.

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Have you recently tried calling the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to ask a question about your taxes? If you have, there's a good chance that the IRS never picked up. If you were lucky enough for your call to go through, you likely spent about 12 minutes on hold before you spoke to an IRS representative. National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson highlighted these and other problems faced by taxpayers when she testified at a hearing this afternoon in front of the Oversight Subcommittee of the House Committee on Ways and Means.

Olson appeared before the subcommittee to discuss her office's 2009 Annual Report. She highlighted several areas where the government needs to improve the tax administration process – including reforming a harmful lien imposing process and improving the service's debt compromise procedures – but the problem Olson made her priority was the inadequacy of the IRS toll-free telephone service.

As Olson pointed out in her testimony, "Each year, tens of millions of taxpayers call the IRS seeking help with a wide variety of issues, including account questions and tax-filing questions." Unfortunately, in 2009 three out of every ten of those taxpayers couldn't ask their question because an IRS representative never picked up the phone. That's actually an improvement over 2008, when almost one out of every two calls did not go through. To be fair, in 2008 the IRS received a deluge of tax questions related to the Economic Stimulus Act passed in February of that year, and the service usually fields about 80 percent of its calls.

Still, the consequences of not answering a taxpayer's phone call are significant. Not only does the missed call feed into the stereotype of an unresponsive, dysfunctional government, but also the taxpayer may simply give up and not file a return. If the taxpayer does file without guidance, they will likely send in a flawed return, requiring further IRS resources down the line to correct the problem. If the taxpayer seeks out a third party for help, they must navigate the vast paid-tax-preparation landscape, which is filled with unscrupulous and untrained tax preparers – at least until next year.

The problem is a simple one of resources: the IRS doesn't have enough money to employ enough people to answer the phones. For her part, Olson recommends that Congress provide the IRS with enough money to raise their call-fielding success rate to 85 percent and lower their average wait time to 5 minutes. Olson doesn't attempt to put a price tag on these improvements, but it seems clear that the current IRS budget is not sufficient. Without these resources, too many taxpayers will continue to be left in the dark when filing their tax returns.

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Ever wonder about the mechanics of how to spend over $800 billion? Well, so did the authors of a new report from the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, the group charged with Recovery Act oversight, a report which looks at staffing levels in federal agencies in the wake of the Act's passage. And the results aren't good. The report warns that "Recovery Act funding has substantially increased the workload of most agencies receiving these funds," and that as a result, many agency programs are reporting drastically inadequate staffing levels for their workloads.

The report, prepared by the Commerce Inspector General, who sits on the Recovery Board, surveyed 29 federal agencies receiving Recovery Act funding, representing hundreds of Recovery Act programs. Surprisingly, the survey found that 41 percent of the programs in large agencies (defined in this report as the Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, and the Interior) reported inadequate staffing levels. On top of that, another 45 percent reported that while they were adequately staffed, doing so required taking staff away from non-Recovery Act duties. The other agencies reported similar numbers, with only 24 percent of programs in these agencies saying they have adequate staffing levels with minimal impact on non-Recovery Act work. And this is despite agencies detailing some 22,000 staffers to work on Recovery Act grants and contracts.

The consequence of this understaffing is fairly predictable. Crucial work will not get done, and overall work quality will suffer. The report says that because of the overload "the awarding of contracts and grants is being delayed-as is other work; employees are working overtime; and the oversight and monitoring of awards-especially non?Recovery Act contracts and grants-are expected to decline, as many agencies attempt to implement Recovery Act requirements while carrying out their ongoing programs and operations." The report also warns that the impact on work quality may be exacerbated by a dearth of qualified contracting personnel in the agencies.

To be clear, the understaffing problem is not due to the reporting requirements of the Recovery Act which we here at OMB Watch are so fond of. The agencies are under enormous political pressure to spend the $275 billion of Recovery Act discretionary funds as fast as possible, thanks to the Obama Administration's dedication to funding "shovel-ready" projects. But spending money quickly without creating absurd amounts of waste, fraud, and abuse requires large staffs. And thanks to the all the attention that these programs are getting, both from Congress and from the public, agency heads are far more likely to pour resources into Recovery Act projects than other programs, regardless of whether such allocations make sense policy-wise. As the report notes, "to ensure timely completion of Recovery Act work, agencies are prioritizing their Recovery Act workload, hiring additional personnel, and shifting and/or reassigning staff."

That said, I'm sure the transparency requirements of the Act are at least contributing to the strain on the agencies. For instance, agencies are tasked with helping their grant, loan, and contract recipients understand how to report back on the use of their funds, a somewhat confusing process for those who have never reported before. Responsibilities such as these, while they are incredibly important from a transparency perspective, do take up staff time, since they involve communicating with thousands of recipients scattered across all fifty states. I'm disappointed the Recovery Board's report does not specifically address this issue.

Unfortunately, at the end of an otherwise great report, the Board whiffs on providing solid recommendations for how to fix the staffing problem. The report simply finishes by saying "we recommend that agencies continue to closely monitor their staffing of both Recovery Act and non?[Recovery Act] work, and make adjustments as necessary to ensure that all contracts and grants are properly awarded and monitored." Well, if they won't say it, I will: the agencies need to begin channeling more resources to hire and train contract officers, and Congress needs to increase agency funding by the requisite amount so that the program funding levels are not adversely affected. End of story. You cannot simply dump billions of dollars on already-stretched agencies and expect them to deal with the new funding quickly and easily.

It's reports like this that make discretionary caps such as the ones proposed in President Obama's budget patently absurd, since they severely limit the government's ability to react to new situations.

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In a report released yesterday, Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) critically examined the tax policies proposed recently in Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-WI) budget alternative, titled conventionally, "A Roadmap for America's Future." Claims of the proposal "balancing the budget" and "reforming entitlements" have already been thoroughly debunked, but CTJ has contributed a valuable analysis of the young Republican's tax policies, which will actually cost the government "$2 trillion over a decade even while requiring 90 percent of taxpayers to pay more" than they already do in taxes.

How does Ryan, the ranking member on the House Budget Committee, accomplish this stunning feat? Steve Wamhoff, the report's author, argues that Ryan's proposal reduces federal receipts and outlays to recklessly low levels, while pumping money into the pockets' of the nation's wealthiest citizens. Ryan, according to Wamhoff, structures this disaster of a budget proposal around four main tax policies: extension of all Bush Tax Cuts; introduction of a "simplified" tax as an alternative to the personal income tax; elimination of the estate tax; and replacement of the corporate tax with a value-added tax (VAT).

I know we're just beginning to see signs of an economic recovery, but that doesn't mean that it's time to start providing tax relief to those making over $250,000 a year. Extension of the Bush Tax Cuts for the wealthiest Americans makes little sense when you examine the cost to government in the form of lost revenue and the unsustainability of claims that rich people use most of their money to create jobs. In light of Ryan's other regressive tax policies in the proposal, though, I suppose we should be grateful that he just didn't reverse President Obama's plan and only extend the Bush Tax Cuts for those making over $250,000.

The effects of Ryan's "simplified" income tax competing with the traditional income tax make the proposal, according to Wamhoff, anything but simple. The plan reduces taxes for all but the poorest Americans and takes more money from you the wealthier you are, but the benefits of the system are extremely regressive compared to the current income tax structure. Moreover, the competition of the "simplified" tax would actually complicate matters as people tried to shift from one system to the other depending on which one required the least amount of tax liability.

I have exhaustively chronicled how elimination of the estate tax would benefit only the wealthiest of Americans and drastically hurt the government's bottom line, all while discarding one of the only checks on the accumulation of wealth – and, therefore, power – in this country. Replacement of the corporate tax with a consumption or VAT for business would create a regressive tax that would overwhelmingly hurt the poor and middle class, as businesses would be able to shift what was once a tax on them onto consumers.

Critics have been beating up on Rep. Ryan's budget proposal since he released it back in February, but, as Matt Yglesias noted earlier today, it's important to consider that in the not-too-distant future, Ryan could be writing budgets for a GOP majority, "presumably animated by the same moral principles that led him to this idea." That is a scary thing.

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