Government Executive - Authors - Terry Kivlan

Budget chief catches flak on deficit commission

Terry Kivlan — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag found critics on both sides of the House Ways and Means Committee Wednesday as he attempted to explain President Obama's proposal for a bipartisan commission to recommend ways for reducing the deficit.

The skeptics included House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., who pressed Orszag to explain why a commission should be created to co-opt Congress and its responsibility to put the country's financial house in order. "It doesn't seem like a profile in courage to me," said Rangel.

Orszag said the administration believed that a bipartisan solution was needed to prevent a fiscal train wreck. "The commission is the avenue for doing that," he explained.

The OMB director noted that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., had pledged a prompt Senate vote on the commission plan, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., had promised to follow suit in the House if the Senate cleared the fiscal blueprint.

"We can get a vote but we don't know which way the vote is going to go," retorted Rangel.

House Ways and Means Committee ranking member Dave Camp, R-Mich., also expressed qualms about Obama's deficit-reduction panel, saying he was concerned about its structure and its power to recommend tax increases.

In other testimony, Orszag was forced to defend last year's $787 billion economic stimulus measure against Republican allegations that it had exacerbated the deficit while failing to achieve its goal of keeping the unemployment rate below 8 percent. "I can tell you the folks in my district are very, very reluctant about going forward and spending more money," said Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill.

Orszag argued that the stimulus package saved between 1.5 million and 2 million jobs and slowed the rate of job losses from 700,000 a month at the beginning of 2009 to 100,000 a month now. Without the stimulus, "we would have had a much higher probability of entering a recession," Orszag said.

He also put in a pitch for reviving the stalled healthcare reform legislation, warning that ultimately the deficit could not be tamed without action to bring down runaway health costs. "Unless we address [that] ... there is nothing else that is going to matter," he said.

Rep. Wally Herger, R-Calif., challenged this assertion, noting that an audit of the congressional reform bills done by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services concluded that they would not reduce healthcare spending.

Republicans also complained that the business tax increases called for in the White House's fiscal 2011 budget plan, such as the elimination of the $38 billion-a-year energy production tax credit, would cause additional job hemorrhage.

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Panel presses FAA on pilot fatigue rules

Terry Kivlan — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0500

The Senate Commerce Committee Tuesday stepped up pressure on the Federal Aviation Administration to finish work on the long-awaited modernization of the agency's 40-year-old standards on airline pilot fatigue.

"You know we are just about out of patience here," said Senate Commerce Aviation Operations Subcommittee Chairman Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., after Peggy Gilligan, the FAA associate administrator for aviation safety, confirmed the agency will miss a January deadline for issuing a draft rule.

"This effort is a difficult and complicated effort," she said. "It is taking longer than expected." Gilligan said the FAA intended to complete an analysis for the rule by the end of January and submit it for review up the chain of command at the FAA as well as at the Transportation Department and Office of Management and Budget.

"I know it is complicated but it's not like sending a person to the moon," said Dorgan, noting that two attempts to update the fatigue standards fizzled during the 1990s.

He warned that he intended to continue pressing the FAA for action on the rewrite. "I have not meant to hector you today, but I do intend to do so in the future," Dorgan said. Expressing a similar sense of urgency were Sens. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine. FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt is due to appear before the subcommittee this month.

Dorgan also clashed with Gilligan over her revelation that the new rule would not address the issue of pilots commuting long distances for flight assignments. Although the government could mandate preflight rest periods, "There will always be a responsibility of pilots to manage [them] appropriately," she said.

As an example of the stakes, Dorgan noted that both of the pilots in the cockpit of the Colgan Air plane that crashed with 50 aboard near Buffalo, N.Y., in February had traveled long distances the day before to pick up the flight in Newark, N.J. The pilot was from Tampa, Fla. and the copilot from Seattle, Wash. "It appears that neither of them had a night's sleep," Dorgan said.

Taking Gilligan's side on the matter at the hearing were Air Line Pilots Association President John Prater and Basil Barimo, the vice president for operations and safety of the Air Transport Association. Both insisted that long-distance commuting had become a necessity in the airline industry.

"It's no different than flying from St. Louis to D.C. to start work here," said Prater.

Another witness, Flight Safety Foundation President William Voss, had a different view. "Clearly, commuting sets up a situation where things can go wrong," Voss said. But he added that the problem would be hard to solve in a regulatory framework.

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FEMA is unable to measure funding benefits

Terry Kivlan — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

A top Federal Emergency Management Agency official on Tuesday said he believed that $29 billion in Homeland Security funds spent since 2002 had made the nation better prepared for a terrorist attack, but admitted his agency had no way of definitively assessing the improvement.

Testifying before the House Homeland Security Emergency Communications Subcommittee, FEMA Deputy Administrator Timothy Manning said although his agency had conducted a "look-back" over the last 18 months to determine what had been done with the money, the survey only confirmed that FEMA and other Homeland Security divisions had never asked grant recipients to measure the benefits of the funding.

"Therefore, existing data tells us very little about our return on investment," Manning testified. He said FEMA was collecting detailed information to get a more accurate picture of the nation's readiness. Committee members expressed frustration with FEMA's progress on assessing the effectiveness of Homeland Security spending.

Although Congress mandated the development of a comprehensive system for measuring emergency response programs three years ago, "it still seems to be a work in progress," said Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss.

When Manning estimated the cost of the look-back at $5 million, Homeland Security Emergency Communications, Preparedness and Response Subcommittee Chairman Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, said: "Free advice: For $5 million, I think we can do a little better."

Thompson, Cuellar and other subcommittee members also took Manning to task for a FEMA policy shift last month in which the agency barred the use of new Homeland Security funding to maintain equipment acquired with old grants.

Thompson blamed the change on the "bean counters" at OMB, and said it had left state and local funding applicants in a difficult position.

"If you keep moving the ball, can you imagine what our state and local governments are going through?" he asked.

Thompson and Cuellar warned Manning that the committee was on course to approve legislation sponsored by Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy, D-Ohio, that would reverse the policy shift.

Kathy Crandall, the director of homeland security for Columbus, Ohio, said states and cities across the country had counted on using new grant money to maintain the billions of dollars in homeland security infrastructure that they have been putting in place over the last seven years.

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Experts say policy 'czars' fall within presidential authority

Terry Kivlan — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Constitutional experts mostly defended the legality of President Obama's practice of naming policy "czars" who are not subject to confirmation by the Senate and not readily accountable to congressional oversight committees.

Bradley Patterson, a senior analyst for the Brookings Institution who served on the White House staffs of Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford, said Obama clearly had the power to appoint such top-level aides under the historic prerogative of a president to hire White House personnel without benefit of the Senate's advice and consent.

"The president's staff are personally responsible only to the president, and in the end he is the only 'czar' that is," said Patterson in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Constitution Subcommittee. "And he is accountable to the American people."

The White House, meanwhile, brushed off a request from Judiciary Constitution Subcommittee Chairman Russell Feingold, D-Wis., to send a witness to the hearing.

In a letter to Feingold, White House Counsel Gregory Craig insisted that none of the czar appointments raised valid concerns about accountability and congressional oversight. "Neither the purpose nor the effect of these positions is to supplant existing federal agencies or departments, but rather to help coordinate their efforts," Craig wrote.

Feingold said he considered the White House's refusal to send a witness "unfortunate. It's also a bit ironic, since one of the concerns that's been raised about these officials is that they will somehow thwart congressional oversight of the executive branch."

The expert witnesses at the hearing agreed that the president's use of White House czars did not represent an abuse of power as long as they did not attempt to give orders to agency heads or issue regulations on their own.

University of Virginia law professor John Harrison noted that it was not unprecedented for appointed government officials to wield great influence within an administration while possessing no independent power to implement policy.

"There is nothing legally problematic with that," Harrison said.

Matthew Spalding, director of American Studies at the Heritage Foundation, bemoaned the rise of czars in the Obama administration as continuation of a trend that has seen presidents of both parties try to govern through policy wonks at the expense of the democratic process.

He also suggested that climate czar Carol Browner, officially assistant to the president for energy and climate change, may have encroached on the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency by serving as the administration's point person in developing automobile emissions standards.

Another witness, Villanova University law professor Tuan Samahon, qualified his backing of the president's czar appointments by warning that lawmakers should exercise vigilance to make sure that the "sorcerer's apprentice does not become the sorcerer."

Feingold said he was mainly concerned about the small number of czars operating within the White House itself and vowed to keep pressing the administration for a detailed accounting of their missions.

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Transportation chief defends stimulus spending efforts

Terry Kivlan — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood Thursday denounced criticism that economic stimulus spending on transportation projects has failed to make a dent in unemployment.

Testifying before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, LaHood said the transportation component of the stimulus program provided a huge boost for construction jobs.

"We are driving down (construction) unemployment; a lot of people are working in good-paying jobs," the secretary said under questioning from House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee ranking member John Mica, R-Fla.

Mica challenged the job-creation record of the infrastructure spending, noting that since the stimulus package was signed in February, jobless rates of the 10 highest unemployment states had stayed the same or risen, with the exception of South Carolina, which received the smallest amount of funding for transportation projects.

"The whole purpose of the stimulus program was to get people working." said Mica, suggesting that Transportation Department recalibrate its program to speed up and better target the infrastructure spending. "If you are trying to lay off all the unemployment on us ... for not getting the money out faster, I just don't think that's accurate," LaHood shot back.

He said his department has obligated $29.4 billion of the $48.1 billion in stimulus funding allocated for highway, transit, rail and maritime infrastructure. "We've followed every guideline" in the stimulus legislation, he said. "The money is out the door."

House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman James Oberstar, D-Minn., also defended the effectiveness of the transportation stimulus spending. He said the program had launched 5,279 highway and transit projects and created 122,000 jobs.

LaHood touted as "wildly successful" the recent "Cash for Clunkers" program. He said 694,877 vehicles had been sold in 21,208 dealerships in the program, and the Transportation Department had paid out $2.8 billion in rebates, with an additional 7,098 applications worth a possible $28.8 million in final review. He said the program was a major factor in the increase in overall consumer spending during the third quarter and the 2.7 percent rise in retail sales in August.

LaHood said the administration stood by its call for an 18-month delay in congressional action on a reauthorization of all transportation programs. He said more time was needed to fine-tune and figure out how to pay for the measure. Its cost is expected to exceed $500 billion.

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'Plain English' bill advances in Senate

Terry Kivlan — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0400

A bill intended to banish bureaucratic language from government letters, forms, brochures and other public documents was cleared Wednesday by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

The bill sponsored by Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, would require that government documents be written in plain English, defined by the measure as that which "is clear, concise, well organized, and follows the best practices in language writing."

After passing the House 376-1 last year, a similar bill was on the verge of clearing the Senate in September when Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, placed a hold on the measure. Bennett said he was concerned about its possible effects on the Federal Election Commission.

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Pressure grows on Obama to alter NASA space proposals

Terry Kivlan — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Amid signs it might be receptive to the idea, pressure is growing on the Obama administration to scale back former President George W. Bush's $104 billon Vision for Space exploration plan to replace NASA's Space Shuttle.

"I expect there will be some changes [to the plan] and I think there ought to be some changes," said Louis Friedman, director of the Pasadena, Calif.-based Planetary Society, a pro-space exploration group.

In a "Roadmap to Space" study issued after the November election, the group, which was co-founded by the late Carl Sagan, recommended that any new human landing on the moon be deferred until the interplanetary transportation system envisioned for the mission -- the Orion moon-ship capsule combined with the Ares I rocket launcher -- has been finished and paid for.

"We are space freaks and we want to go to the moon, but we are not living in a perfect world, and there are budget constraints," said Friedman. He added that the Bush administration's "over-focus on the moon" had not "engaged" the public enough to build adequate political support for the massive project.

In their lobbying for retrenchments for the Vision program, a team of experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently released a two-year review of the plan labeling it "over-ambitious," "not carefully thought through," and "unattainable" given NASA's budget limitations. A group of experts at Rice University's Baker Institute recently recommended that the Orion capsule be downsized to carry three instead of six crew members, and that Ares be scrapped in favor of commercial rockets.

The Baker Institute team, which included former Johnson Space Center Director George Abbey, former Clinton White House science adviser Neal Lane, and former NASA flight director John Muratore, added that NASA should put off retiring the Shuttle until 2015 and should focus less on space exploration and more on efforts to develop wind and solar energy and to combat global warming.

The sentiment was echoed by former House Science Chairman Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y.

"I think NASA should return to Planet Earth," Boehlert said in an interview. "It is the most important planet. It's where we live and it's deteriorating before our eyes."

The Obama transition team sent a questionnaire to NASA asking it, among other things, to estimate the savings from scuttling Ares and shrinking Orion.

NASA spokesman Grey Hautaluoma warned against reading too much into the request, noting that the questionnaire included a range of inquiries about programs. Indeed, the transition team also asked NASA for a cost estimate on the acceleration of the first Ares-Orion flight, according to Space News.

During the 2008 campaign, Obama sent mixed signals on the program. At one point, he proposed to delay the program for five years to free up funding for his $18 billion early education plan.

In subsequent statements, he promised to increase NASA's budget by $2 billion and pledged to finish the Ares/Orion development project, but stopped short of committing himself to a manned moon mission. He also expressed a general dissatisfaction with the status quo at NASA.

The agency "has lost its focus and is no longer associated with inspiration," he told the Chicago Tribune. "I don't think our kids are watching space shuttle launches. It used to be a remarkable thing. I don't think it passes for news anymore."

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Lawmaker lays down markers on fiscal 2010 shipbuilding budget

Terry Kivlan — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Weeks before the Obama administration sends a fiscal 2010 budget outline to Capitol Hill, House Armed Services Seapower and Expeditionary Forces Subcommittee Chairman Gene Taylor, D-Miss., is reasserting his belief that the Navy should abandon the DDG-1000 next-generation destroyer.

In a statement Thursday, Taylor dismissed the destroyer as "unaffordable" and warned the administration that expected cost increases on the ship "will require diverting funding from other new construction projects to pay the over-run."

Taylor's statement comes just days after Pentagon acquisition chief John Young penned a memo warning that current plans to limit the DDG-1000 to three ships instead of the seven once planned would force cost increases that would put it in violation of the Nunn-McCurdy law.

In the memo, Young, a Bush administration veteran who is expected to stay onboard until a successor is named, suggests placing the Future Surface Combatant now planned by the Navy within the DDG-1000 program until the Navy decides on a design for the future ship. Doing so would spread out the development costs for the truncated DDG-1000 program across more ships and avoid a breach of law.

Aside from limiting the DDG-1000 to three ships, the Navy has decided to restart production of DDG-51 destroyers in fiscal 2010 and fiscal 2011. And, from fiscal 2012 to fiscal 2015, the service plans to buy guided missile destroyers -- dubbed Future Surface Combatants -- using the same hull as the existing DDG-51 or the DDG-1000.

"In my opinion there is absolutely no value in spending even more precious shipbuilding funds to redesign the DDG-1000 as a ballistic missile-capable platform when the affordable vessel already exists in the DDG-51 destroyer," Taylor said. Both the DDG-51s and the DDG-1000s are built at Northrop Grumman's Ingalls shipyard in Taylor's district and at General Dynamics' Bath Iron Works in Maine.

While his statement did not name Young, a longtime advocate of the DDG-1000, Taylor said in an interview that he wrote it partly in response to Young's memo. "Continuing resistance from outgoing Bush administration officials to the common sense strategy of restarting the DDG-51 destroyer class is not helpful to the Navy and the nation," Taylor said. "The shipbuilding plan needs less meddling, not more."

Taylor also urged the administration to restructure the Littoral Combat Ship, which has suffered from severe cost overruns and now cost $1.4 million each. "In particular, the failure of the LCS program to deliver on the promise of an affordable, capable, and reconfigurable warship only puts the exclamation point on a Bush administration's strategy that was neither well envisioned nor properly executed," Taylor said. He recommended using common combat and propulsion systems for the two variants of LCS, built by teams led by Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics.

Taylor also said he wants to abandon the use of a lead system integrator -- essentially a contractor who manages and supervises major weapons programs -- on the LCS. In recent years, he and other House Armed Services Committee members have been concerned the Pentagon has ceded too much program management to contractors, allowing cost overruns, schedule delays and other problems to go undetected until too late.

"I hope that the new officials within the Obama administration will reach out to the Congress for ideas and suggestions on shipbuilding programs before creating even more imbalance and uncertainty in the shipbuilding master plan," Taylor said.

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Former FBI chief supports AG nominee as 'man of integrity'

Terry Kivlan — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Former FBI Director Louis Freeh Friday said he strongly backed Eric Holder for attorney general even though he believed the nominee allowed himself to be "used and co-opted" in going along with what Freeh called President Bill Clinton's "corrupt" 2001 pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich.

Testifying on the second day of Holder's confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Freeh praised Holder as a "man of integrity and the law" and said he had no doubt that the nominee would be politically independent in the post despite the "terrible mistake" he made as deputy attorney general in facilitating the pardoning of Rich, who fled to Switzerland after being indicted on fraud and weapons trafficking charges.

"I know Eric Holder would be able to say no to the president if that was needed," said Freeh, who described how he traveled to Switzerland as a New York-based assistant federal prosecutor to negotiate for Rich's extradition.

Senate Judiciary ranking member Arlen Specter, R-Penn., Holder's chief critic on the panel, expressed incredulity that Freeh could endorse him after using such strong language to characterize the pardon and Holder's role in it. He tried to draw Freeh into a discussion of long-standing allegations that while he was serving as FBI director in the mid-1990s, top Justice Department and White House officials, possibly including Holder, pressured him to back off the FBI's investigations of Clinton's and Vice President Al Gore's fundraising. But Freeh declined to give credence to the charges.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., has scheduled the panel's vote on Holder for Wednesday.

Freeh reiterated his disagreement with Holder's 1999 decision to release 16 imprisoned members of the Puerto Rican FALN terrorist group, but said it would be unfair to use it as an "index" to judge his integrity without taking into account his 26-year law-enforcement career. Another witness, Joseph Connor, whose father died in the 1975 FALN bombing of Fraunces Tavern in New York, castigated Holder for offering what he called the "unimaginable, immoral and dangerous clemency," and argued that this decision alone should disqualify him to be attorney general

Connor's view was seconded by Richard Hahn, a former FBI agent who told the committee that the now-defunct FALN was "no less terrorist than any of the terrorist organizations recognized today." In other testimony, Holder received another major boost from former Bush White House Homeland Security Adviser Frances Townsend. As evidence of his courage, she noted that as deputy attorney general during the investigation of the 1999 millenium terrorist plot, he made a "difficult and close call" that could have resulted in a criminal indictment under wiretap laws.

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Orszag promises scrutiny of stimulus spending but stalls on tighter rules

Terry Kivlan — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Office of Management and Budget Director-designate Peter Orszag promised tough oversight Wednesday of coming economic stimulus spending, but deflected questions on whether the Obama administration will impose specific new requirements congressional Democrats want on the use of Troubled Asset Relief Program funds.

Testifying at a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee confirmation hearing, Orszag said he planned greater scrutiny of stimulus spending by requiring contracts to be posted promptly on a Web site accessible to the public.

"We would favor creating a special board -- an oversight board composed of the inspectors general of the relevant departments and chaired by the chief performance officer that would review problems," he said, including those that might be identified by users of the Web site themselves.

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., pressed Orszag on the incoming administration's attitude toward new restrictions that many Democrats want to put on the second $350 billion of TARP funds that President Bush has requested, at Obama's behest, be released.

They include requiring recipients to track and report on the expenditures, and compelling banks that get the aid to use it to make loans and mitigate home foreclosures.

Levin said the refusal of the Bush administration to adopt these guidelines had hurt the credibility of TARP. He added that he intends to press for their adoption in the new administration and that he had sent a letter to Lawrence Summers, the new head of the White House's National Economic Council, on the issue.

Orszag said the request for the new requirements was "not unreasonable," but that it was a matter within the purview of the Treasury Department, not OMB.

On other issues, Orszag outlined his plans to promote efficiency and cut waste by, among other things, cracking down on federal procurement programs. He noted that while procurement spending has doubled in recent years to more than $400 billion, the number of government contracting officers has remained steady at 28,000.

Federal real estate holdings were another target, he said, noting that 10 percent of the estimated 1.2 billion structures owned by government agencies -- valued at $1.5 trillion -- were either underused or empty. "That is unacceptable," he said.

Orszag said he also intends to rein in government's use of outside contractors because this "depleted the capability'" of the federal work force.

He said he was anxious to help carry out Obama's campaign pledge to "make government cool again," especially in view of the fact that about 60 percent of the government's 1.6 million white-collar employees will be eligible to retire over the coming decade and will need to be replaced.

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Senator promises TVA crackdown after coal ash spill

Terry Kivlan — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., Thursday vowed an oversight crackdown on the Tennessee Valley Authority in the wake of last month's massive coal spill at one of its power plants and accused TVA President Tom Kilgore of negligence in the disaster.

"You have got big problems ...You have got to clean up your act, literally," Boxer told Kilgore at a hearing on the Dec. 22 incident.

The spill occurred after the earthen dike of a coal ash retention pool at the Kingston Fossil Plant near Harrison, Tenn., collapsed, flooding nearly 300 acres of the surrounding rural landscape with sludgy, black gunk.

Some of the mud also sluiced into the Emory and Clinch rivers. Boxer charged that Kilgore ignored evidence of weakness in the dike, which had sprung leaks on two earlier occasions, once in 2003 and then again in 2006.

"You were told you had problems [at the dike] and you chose the cheapest fix" rather than a comprehensive repair job, Boxer said. Kilgore, who became head of TVA in October 2006, said he was aware of the earlier leaks and had "obviously" been concerned by them. But he said he would not discuss the possible causes of the December mud slide until the Tennessee investigators completed their probe of the incident. At the same time, he sought to assure the committee that the TVA "will do a first rate job of correcting the spill" and helping affected area residents -- including those of the three houses destroyed in the flood -- recover.

In testimony, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy charged that TVA opted to install a $480,000 dredge cell in the dike as a response to the earlier seepages instead of spending $5 million on a liner designed to seal off the retention pool. The group said TVA also rejected the $25 million option of switching to dry ash collection at the site.

Boxer also pledged to establish federal standards for the handling of coal ash, which the EPA has said does not have high enough levels of heavy metals and other toxic substances to be regulated as hazardous waste.

Noting that fly ash contains arsenic and a range of heavy metal substances, Boxer said EPA "inaction had allowed this enormous volume of toxic material to go largely unregulated."

In written testimony, EPA said its testing in the Emory and Clinch rivers since Dec. 22 had detected heavy metals from the coal ash but showed that they did not exceed federal safety standards.

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HUD warns losses endanger mortgage program

Terry Kivlan — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500

A HUD auditor Friday warned that the Federal Housing Administration's mortgage program is facing mounting losses from defaults and that the agency lacks the staff and quality-control procedures to stem the hemorrhaging.

In testimony before the House Financial Services Committee, Assistant HUD Inspector General James Heist said the "once fairly robust" program's reserves for covering losses has dropped 40 percent to $12.9 billion -- or 3 percent of total FHA-backed mortgages -- in the last year as the agency has recouped market share with the bursting of the subprime mortgage bubble.

"If more pessimistic assumptions are factored in, the ratio could dip to below 2 percent in succeeding years, requiring an increase in premiums or congressional appropriations intervention to make up the shortfall," Heist told the committee.

Heist said part of the problem was that the agency lacked the staff, the computer muscle and risk-assessment procedures to eliminate the fraud perpetrators from the thousands of lenders who have been flocking into the program since the subprime collapse. He noted that in 2008 the agency approved the application of an Arizona company operated by the previous owners of a firm that had its license suspended by state banking investigators for violations and subsequently went bankrupt several years ago. In other testimony, Phillip Murray, assistant FHA secretary for single-family housing, strongly denied that his agency had been lax in its screening of lender applications but admitted that it needed more authority, staff and computer capacity to bolster its "aggressive oversight" of the program. "The sky is not falling but ... we must have more tools," Murray said. He said that in the case of the Arizona company he lacked the legal discretion to deny its owners access to the program on the basis of "guilt by association with the now-defunct company.

But some of the committee members vented their frustration with what they believed was the failure of FHA enforcement. "Based on what we see, the bad actors are moving over the FHA because the subprime money has dried up," said Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif. She expressed incredulity that FHA could not know the difference between legitimate lenders and the hustlers. Murray conveyed to the committee his agency's continued opposition to the Democratic-sponsored proposal to allow bankruptcy judges to "cram down" the mortgage terms for troubled borrowers to allow them to keep their homes. He said letting judges modify mortgages "will add uncertainty for investors and mortgage markets, which will lead to higher interest rates for borrowers.

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Justice IG calls attorney firings 'fundamentally flawed'

Terry Kivlan — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

House Judiciary Committee Democrats renewed their calls for sworn testimony from Karl Rove and other former top White House officials on the 2006 firings of nine U.S. attorneys as Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine presented his report concluding the removals were "fundamentally flawed" and recommending a criminal investigation.

"A president can fire a U.S. attorney for any reason or no reason ... but not for an illegal reason," Fine said in response to committee Republicans who charged that his report failed to recognize that federal prosecutors serve as political appointees. Democrats said the report vindicated the committee's investigation of the firings.

"There can no longer be any dispute that the firings were improper (and) that false statements were made to Congress," said House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich. House Judiciary Commercial and Administrative Law Subcommittee Chairwoman Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., said the report should prompt the White House to stop backing the refusals of Rove and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers to testify before the committee on their role in the removals.

Unless the White House cooperates with the congressional probe, "the Justice Department will not be able to remove the dark clouds of scandal that have devastated this once venerable institution," Sanchez said. Fine said he failed to uncover evidence of criminal wrongdoing in the firings but suggested that the possibility of illegal activity could not be dismissed because of gaps left in his office's investigation by the lack of cooperation from Rove, Miers and other Bush administration officials.

"We believe that the evidence collected in this investigation is not complete and that serious allegations have not been fully investigated or resolved," he said.

Committee Republicans assailed Fine's recommendation for a criminal probe. House Judiciary Commercial and Administrative Law Subcommittee ranking member Chris Cannon, R-Utah, said the report failed to expose "any grand conspiracy" on the part of the White House to break the law, and added that he was sorry that "so much time and effort" was put into investigating people "who committed no crime."

He said the report was part of a recent trend toward the "criminalization of politics" and argued that Fine was creating "new standard" by insisting that an administration could not remove political employees without a formal review of their performance. Sanchez also faulted U.S. Attorney General Mukasey's decision this week to have the criminal investigation done by an in-house special prosecutor, Acting Connecticut U.S. Attorney Nora Dannehy. Sanchez said Dannehy's probe was likely to remain hidden because of criminal grand jury secrecy requirements.

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Senate panel approves policies for release of sensitive documents

Juliana Gruenwald and Terry Kivlan — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Tuesday approved legislation that would establish polices and procedures for the designation and release of sensitive but unclassified government information.

The draft bill, offered by Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., cleared on a voice vote in a committee meeting off the Senate floor.

It would establish a Controlled Unclassified Information Office within the National Archives and Records Administration. The office would be responsible for developing and issuing polices and procedures "governing the designation, safeguarding and dissemination of controlled unclassified information" from federal agencies whether in print or electronic form.

The bill calls for the policies to be developed with the help of a new Controlled Unclassified Information Council, which would be chaired by the director of the new office and made up of officials from federal agencies.

The draft measure also would require federal departments and agencies that use sensitive but unclassified information to implement the policies developed by the new Archives' office, designate a senior officer to sit on the Controlled Unclassified Information Council and establish a process for noncompliance or misuse of sensitive unclassified data. The bill would authorize $14.5 million over five years to fund the bill's requirements.

The committee started work on the bill last week but could not take a final vote due to a lack of a quorum.

On a voice vote at the initial markup meeting, the panel adopted a substitute amendment making technical changes to the draft bill and adding language to the section dealing with the responsibilities of the new Controlled Unclassified Information Office.

The language would require that all relevant documents related to the controlled unclassified information framework called for under the bill are "made available on the Web site of the National Archives and Records Administration in a timely manner." In addition, under the provision dealing with agency requirements, the substitute added language that would require agencies to establish a process that allows agency officials or employees to challenge the use of controlled unclassified information markings.

In a May 2007 letter to several administration officials, Lieberman and ranking member Susan Collins, R-Maine, voiced concern over the lack of government-wide procedures for handling sensitive but unclassified government information, which they said may hamper information sharing particularly among agencies involved in deterring future terrorist attacks.

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Grant program approved to preserve presidential documents

Juliana Gruenwald and Terry Kivlan — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Tuesday approved legislation that would establish a competitive grant program to help in the preservation of historical documents from past presidents.

The bill, which was sponsored by Sen. John Warner, R-Va., and cleared on a voice vote in a committee meeting off the Senate floor, would establish a competitive grant program for organizations to help promote historical preservation and access to historical records and documents from past presidents who do not have a library that is maintained by the federal government.

The committee started work on the bill during a markup meeting last week but could not complete deliberations due to a lack of a quorum.

During the initial markup meeting, Warner said there were no federally supported libraries for presidents prior to Herbert Hoover. "The documents and records of these presidents are scattered throughout America," Warner said. "In our view, the federal government should be taking an active role in encouraging the preservation of these documents."

Before the committee adjourned, it approved a substitute amendment to the bill that would allow the National Archives to publish the founding fathers' documents and other important historical documents online in an effort to provide those who do not live near major libraries access to such documents.

In addition, the substitute, which was offered by Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., and Warner, would require the Archives to develop a plan that prioritizes capital improvements at federally maintained libraries, which would provide Congress with information on which libraries are most in need of repairs.

The amendment also calls on the agency to develop a plan for future presidential libraries that will reduce the costs to the federal government, improve public access and provide better access to historical documents.

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Utah senator stalls 'plain language' bill

Terry Kivlan — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

A bill mandating the use of "plain language" on government forms, benefit applications, reports and other documents may languish this year amid a crowded Senate schedule and an unanticipated hold by Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah.

The bill would not apply to regulations. It defines "plain language" as language that "is clear, concise, well organized, and follows the best practices of language writing."

It would direct the Office of Management and Budget to issue guidelines for implementing the program within six months and then monitor compliance among agencies.

In April, the measure cleared the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on voice vote, while a similar measure passed the House 376-1.

It was expected to breeze through the Senate just before lawmakers left town for their summer recess when Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, placed a hold on behalf of Bennett.

According to Bennett aides, he was concerned about its impact on the Federal Election Commission and the Election Assistance Commission -- both of which fall under the oversight jurisdiction of the Senate Rules Committee, where he serves as ranking member.

"The FEC in particular is required to interpret campaign finance law and issue regulations that are often full of legal terms," spokeswoman Tara Hendershott said in an e-mail. "These precise terms may become lost in translation if [the FEC is] required to use whatever OMB determines is 'plain English.'" Hendershott added that while Bennett understands the need for clear communication, "he is concerned about the unintended consequences of this bill."

Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, sponsor of the legislation, expressed disappointment in Bennett's move. The Hawaii senator said in a statement that his measure "is a good bipartisan bill that would improve Americans' access to their government," and "deserves an up or down vote on the floor." Aides to Akaka and Bennett said last week that they were discussing compromise language for the legislation but had not reached an agreement.

Senate Majority Harry Reid, D-Nev., is not planning to try to bring up the bill if Bennett will force him to file cloture, according to a spokesman. But Bennett has come under pressure from outside Congress. The National Small Business Association sent him a letter last week asking him release his hold, arguing that the bill would "not be a mandate" as such, and that it represented a "common sense approach to saving small business -- and the federal government -- time, effort and money."

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GAO unsure about TSA's ability to meet security deadlines

Terry Kivlan — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The Government Accountability Office Thursday raised fresh doubts about the Transportation Security Administration's ability to meet the congressionally imposed August 2010 deadline for screening 100 percent of air cargo.

In testimony before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Aviation Subcommittee, GAO Homeland Security Director Cathleen Berrick said TSA had made significant progress toward meeting the goal but had yet to complete basic assessments of the technology and the additional screening personnel needed for it, and could "face challenges" in acquiring these resources.

"We think more can be done on the positive side," she told the subcommittee.

Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Kip Hawley testified that TSA will meet the interim February 2009 deadline for screening 50 percent of air cargo, but stopped short of guaranteeing 100 percent coverage by 2010.

"We will meet the February 2009 deadline and progress toward August 2010," he told the subcommittee. He said that two-thirds of the cargo passed through 18 airports.

Hawley also acknowledged that TSA will not meet the Aug. 3 deadline for issuing strengthened security standards for foreign repair shops used by U.S. airlines.

But he insisted that a rulemaking delay had not deterred efforts to increase security. Hawley said TSA had adopted a policy of "rolling out" new security measures at the shops while waiting for the rulemaking process to "catch up."

He said TSA will publish the notice of proposed rulemaking next month and have the final standards ready by early next year. But in a letter to the committee, the Aeronautical Repair Association said the delay could hurt the competitiveness of U.S. repair companies by preventing the timely certification of the shops.

In other testimony, Hawley touted TSA's recent efforts to improve airline security by, among other things, deploying new passenger imaging machines capable of seeing through clothes.

He downplayed privacy concerns about the body scanners, explaining that the machines blur out the faces of the subjects and are read by screeners located where they cannot see the passengers. "There is a wall (of privacy) between the individuals and the images of the individuals," Hawley said. In another security enhancement, Hawley said TSA had launched a comprehensive retraining program for airport screeners.

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IRS head says agency to focus efforts on enforcement

Terry Kivlan — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400

IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman Friday warned that his agency will continue to ratchet up enforcement efforts now that it has cleaned up its customer services programs under the landmark 1998 law requiring the restructuring of IRS operations.

Shulman, who started his five-year term in March, said he believed it was incumbent on the IRS to "refocus" on enforcement actions and work to maintain the traditional balance between them and its service operations.

"We cannot afford to let our enforcement program diminish," he said at a Capitol Hill forum on the legacy of the 1998 legislation.

Shulman, the former staff director of the bipartisan commission whose recommendations formed the substance of the bill, said it was the IRS' job was to "bring in $2.7 trillion a year to fund the government" and that "whole system is based on your neighbor paying their fair share."

He noted that "there are some taxpayers who don't want to meet their obligations to their fellow citizens."

Shulman's assessment of IRS priorities was backed up by former Rep. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, who co-chaired the IRS structuring commission. Portman, who served as OMB director and U.S. Trade Representative after leaving Congress in 2005, said he and other observers were "concerned" when IRS enforcement lagged earlier in the current decade as agency transferred resources away from audits and collection efforts and into service improvement initiatives. He said the IRS seemed to have begun a "rebalancing" over the last several years, but added, "I think the right balance is in the eye of the beholder."

Shulman said the IRS has largely met the goals of the 1998 measure, which required the agency to shed its geographic-based structure to adopt one consisting of operations serving four groups -- individuals, small businesses, larger businesses, and tax-exempt entities.

As a result of the reorganization, the IRS has become the international "gold standard" for tax administration, Schulman said. "I think we can all agree that the IRS is a very competent agency," he declared. Shulman cited figures indicating that the agency now responds quickly to taxpayer inquiries with an information accuracy rate of over 90 percent. He said its Web site received 215 million hits last year and was among the world's busiest. Shulman said one of his ambitions as commissioner was to establish "seamless" coordination among the agency units. He said he would also work to improve the agency's employee retention and recruitment efforts. "There are a lot of people [at the IRS] who can walk out today and double and triple their salaries," he explained.

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Shoddy standards blamed for electrocutions in Iraq

Terry Kivlan — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The mothers of two soldiers electrocuted in Iraq due to faulty electrical wiring in military facilities urged a Senate Democratic panel to hold the Pentagon and its contractors accountable for the deaths of their sons and 11 other American personnel who have suffered the same fate.

"Anger has taken over my grief," said Larraine McGee of Texas, in testimony before the Senate Democratic Policy Committee.

Her son, Texas Army National Guard Staff Sgt. Christopher Everett, 23, was electrocuted while power-washing a Humvee in Iraq almost three years ago.

"My son was my hero," said Cheryl Harris of Pennsylvania.

Harris' son, decorated Green Beret Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth, 24, was killed six months ago while taking a shower at a Baghdad military facility.

His "burnt and smoldering" body was discovered lying in electrified water on the shower stall floor by a soldier who kicked down the door to get in, Harris testified.

She said that although an improperly grounded pump was blamed for the death, the Army initially told her that he may have triggered the shock by carrying an electrical appliance into the shower.

Members of the committee, which has held 17 hearings in the past two years on waste, fraud and abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan, accused the Pentagon of stonewalling congressional inquiries about its ongoing investigations of possible negligence on the part of the its main construction contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan -- Kellogg, Brown and Root.

"It is about time we got some answers ... at long last," said Sen. Robert Casey Jr., D-Pa. He released a letter to Gen. David Petraeus asking why his command had only recently ordered "theaterwide" technical inspections of military facilities despite being alerted to widespread wiring problems in Iraq installations more than three and a half years ago in a report filed by a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers safety specialist.

The Pentagon has acknowledged that 11 soldiers and two civilian contractor employees have died in Iraq as a result of faulty wiring systems.

In other testimony, two former KBR electricians accused the company of shoddy and negligent management practices in its war-theater operations. Debbie Crawford of Oregon, who worked for KBR in Baghdad, said the company failed to provide its electricians with the most basic tools and equipment, and routinely farmed out jobs to local and "third-country" subcontractors who knew nothing about U.S. standards and often had no electrical experience at all.

"Time and time again we heard, 'This is not the United States, [U.S. health and safety standards don't] apply here.' " she said.

Jeffery Bliss of Ohio, who worked for KBR in Afghanistan, charged that the company was dominated by a "good-old-boy network" in which "communication was poor and professionalism nonexistent." He said he spent two and a half months at one base doing nothing until finally being assigned "the task of building a dog house."

Another witness, Rachel McNeill of Wisconsin, who served as an Army Reserves heavy construction equipment operator in Iraq, said soldiers in her unit often received shocks in shower facilities but that "it made no sense" to report the situation to KBR because the firm "had a reputation for taking a long time to address repairs."

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Subcommittee backs $27.9 billion Interior spending bill

Terry Kivlan — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The fiscal 2009 appropriations bill for environmental, park service and wildlife preservation programs became a gas price battleground Wednesday as Democrats on the House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee beat back a Republican effort to end a 27-year-old ban on oil and gas exploration in the outer continental shelf.

Along party lines, the panel voted 9-6 to defeat an amendment proposed by Rep. John Peterson, R-Pa., that called for modifying the ban to permit exploration between 50 and 200 miles in offshore areas along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and the eastern Gulf Coast.

On a voice vote, the subcommittee cleared the overall bill that would provide $27.9 billion for Interior Department and EPA programs. The total represented a $1.9 billion -- or 4.9 percent -- increase over this year's spending levels.

The funding included $175 million to revitalize the National Mall, whose plan has not been updated since 1902. Interior Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Norman Dicks, D-Wash., said the Mall "has deteriorated due to lack of investment in necessary maintenance and critical upgrades."

Peterson said scuttling the outer continental shelf exploration ban, which has been renewed by Congress every year since 1981, would give the nation access to an estimated 86 billion barrels of oil and help apply the brakes to escalating crude oil prices. They have doubled to over $130 a barrel in the last year, pushing up the average cost of gas to over $4 a gallon.

"There is no valid reason to keep Americans from the energy resources they own," Peterson said.

Democrats said attempting to increase oil supplies would have little or no effect on the market because it was being driven by the weakness of the dollar, the fear of instability in foreign oil producing nations, and massive speculation on the part of hedge funds and other large investment entities.

"Crude oil prices are not connected to supply," said Dicks, adding that the speculation reminded him of the Enron scandal in 2001.

Democrats also contended that the outer continental shelf areas that contain the bulk of proven oil reserves -- those in the Western Gulf -- are open to drilling.

Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y, charged that oil companies had been intentionally delaying production in the open areas in anticipation that oil prices will continue to soar.

Peterson was expected to continue pressing his amendment in the markup of the underlying bill in the full Appropriations Committee and on the House floor.

The measure would not affect a separate presidential ban on drilling in the protected parts of the outer continental shelf that does not lapse until 2012. President Bush has said he has no intention of eliminating the drilling ban.

Peterson, who has announced his intent to retire at the end of his current term, has crusaded for lifting the moratorium throughout his six-term career. He succeeded in attaching a rider to end the ban in the committee version of the fiscal 2006 Interior spending bill only to see the full House vote to restore it amid heavy lobbying by environmental groups and officials from coastal states.

The White House had sought a cut of over $1 billion for Interior and EPA programs, leaving them $1.6 billion short of what would be needed to maintain current operations, Dicks said.

A $350 million increase would go for programs serving Native Americans. The increase includes $181 million for health initiatives and $118 million for law enforcement on reservations.

The National Park Service would get $2.64 billion, including an increase of $158 million for the operations expenses of the 391 park units. The bill would continue funding for the effort to upgrade parks in time for the Service's 1916 centennial celebration.

The allocation for the National Wildlife Refuge program would be $469 million, $35 million more than this year.

The Forest Service would get an increase of $475 million over the White House's request for a total of $2.61 billion. The bill would also provide $2.9 billion for the wildland fire fighting accounts of the Interior Department and the Forest Service, $217 million more than this year and $141 million above the amount sought by the White House.

EPA would get $7.8 billion, an increase of $689 million from the White House request and $371 million more than fiscal 2008. The funding includes $850 million for the Clean Water State Revolving Fund program to pay for sewage treatment projects around the country. The Bush administration had sought $555 million for the fund.

The bill would provide $160 million each to the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, an increase of $15 million over fiscal 2008 levels in both cases.

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Witnesses cite prostitution, other contracting abuses in Iraq

Terry Kivlan — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Testifying before the Democratic Policy Committee, Barry Halley said the site manager of one of the defense contractors he worked for in Iraq used armored cars to shuttle prostitutes from Kuwait to Baghdad hotels run by the company.

When top company officials found out about the arrangement, they merely transferred the ringleader to another project in Haiti instead of firing him, Halley said.

In the meantime, another company employee was shot and killed in an unsecured car while on a high-risk mission. "I believe my co-worker would have survived if he had been riding in an armored car," Halley said.

He was one of three witnesses appearing at the 13th hearing the committee has held on private contractor fraud and abuse in Iraq in the past three years. Aides said the panel gave the allegations made by the witnesses an initial vetting and then passed them along to the Department of Justice for further investigation.

Halley told the Democratic panel of billing and contract fraud, including the award of contracts to an environmental cleanup firm, CAPE Environmental Management - another company he worked for in Iraq - for the construction of bridges that were never completed.

In retaliation for reporting these and other "discrepancies" to company officials, he was locked in a room at gunpoint, beaten by security guards, fired and left stranded in Iraq, Halley testified.

Another witness, Frank Cassaday, an ice plant manager for the contractor KBR, Inc., said he saw large amounts of construction wood and military equipment, such as flak jackets, combat boots, tires and ammunition crates, thrown into "burn pits" and destroyed. He also charged that plant foremen and other company supervisors shortchanged troops of ice bags to trade them for DVDs, food and other items in Iraqi shops, and stole military refrigerators and ordnance, including artillery rounds and rocket launchers.

After he reported the thefts and the Marines "descended on our camp and found everything I had seen," he was placed in a company jail tent and told by a KBR site manager that as far as he was concerned "Frank Cassaday doesn't exist anymore," Cassaday told the committee.

In other testimony, Linda Warren a KBR laundry foreman in Baghdad, said company employees assigned to do construction work inside Iraqi palaces and municipal buildings looted them of art works, rugs, crystal and gold, and set up a system for transporting the goods out of the country to sell on the Internet.

After she called the KBR ethics hotline to report the pilfering, company security officials showed up at her quarters at night, and "gave me a satellite radio and asked if I felt my life was in danger," Warren testified. "I told them 'yes.' "

She said the company subsequently evacuated her from Baghdad but did no follow-up investigation of any possible threats leveled against her. "Based on my experience, if appeared as though the only way you could be disciplined at KBR would be if you reported illegal actions by other KBR employees," she told the committee.

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Senate committee passes 'plain English' bill

Terry Kivlan — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Thursday passed legislation that would require federal agencies to purge their rules, forms, letters and other documents of confusing bureaucratic language and replace it with simple English.

The bill, which cleared on a voice vote without discussion, would require federal agencies to launch programs within six months for translating their documents into "plain language," and to file periodic reports to Congress on the progress of the efforts.

Some agencies already have programs to improve the quality of their documents. For example, the Securities and Exchange Commission published an instruction guide, entitled "Plain English Handbook," for its regulations and document writers. And a private group, Plain Language Action, has put out a similar guide book, "The Federal Plain Language Guidelines."

The project to straighten out the convoluted sentences and paragraphs of government prose is expected to take many years because it involves tens of thousands of documents. Moreover, the government's culture of obfuscation will not be easy to reform, supporters of the plain language bill acknowledge.

A version of the bill cleared the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee earlier this year and is awaiting approval by the full chamber. Its sponsor, Rep. Bruce Braley, D-Iowa, introduced the measure after coming to the conclusion that the incomprehensibility of many government benefit forms was frustrating their purpose.

The Senate version of the bill was introduced by Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, who was present at the markup but did not speak on the measure.

In recent statements, Akaka has said his bill would "save the American people a great deal of time, energy and money spent wading through overly complicated" forms for federal taxes, veterans benefits, Medicare and Social Security, and other programs.

Akaka said the switch to plain language would make the government more efficient and transparent, and easier to hold accountable.

In one difference with the Senate bill, the House bill contains an added provision requiring federal agencies to use English in their documents "to the maximum extent possible." In the Oversight and Government Reform Committee markup of the legislation, Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., argued that the provision would not "unduly" prohibit the use of other languages.

Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., agreed to accept Foxx's provision but warned that the issue would be revisited if it holds up full House passage of the overall bill.

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Senate panel moves whistleblower measure

Terry Kivlan — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved a modified version of legislation intended to shore up the ability of government whistleblowers to collect claims under a landmark 1986 law.

The bill, which was sponsored by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and cleared on a voice vote with no discussion, is intended to counter a series of recent court decisions that critics say weakened the law -- the False Claims Act -- by imposing major limitations on the latitude of whistleblowers to take action under the 22-year-old statute. It authorized individuals file "qui tam" claims against federal contractors for defrauding the government, and share a portion of the recovered claims with the government regardless of whether it opted to join the suits.

Effectively reversing a 2004 appeals court decision, the Grassley bill would eliminate a requirement that false claims have to be presented directly to a government employee before liability attaches. In the case, the court ruled that the government could not collect on a false claim because the defendant submitted it to employees of Amtrak, a government grantee.

The legislation also scuttles a U.S. Supreme Court stipulation that only claimants who originate fraud charges can recover money, and clarifies that government employees may act as whistleblowers once they have reported fraud up the chain of command only to see no effective recovery action for 18 months.

To fend off opposition from the Bush administration to the bill, Grassley agreed to a series of changes, including a provisions prohibiting "parasitic" claims based on public information and government probes, and explicitly requiring government employee whistleblowers to report fraud first to supervisors for investigation and redress.

In addition, the new version of the bill would exempt Social Security and other government assistance payments from liability, and bar government auditors, attorneys and other government investigative employees from filing false claim actions.

Aides to Grassley, author of the original False Claims Act, said he agreed to the modifications at the suggestion of the Justice Department but did not believe they amounted to a watering-down of his legislation to bolster the law. From 1987 to 2005, recoveries under the Act totaled $15.6 billion, from which whistleblowers got settlements of $1.6 billion.

The Grassley bill has pitted federal contracting trade groups, which regard the measure as an expansion of the law, against trial attorneys, who have one of the strongest lobbies on Capitol Hill.

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DHS says responders resistant to communications sharing

Terry Kivlan — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

A top Homeland Security Department official told a House panel that the agency has made significant progress toward providing first responders with interoperable radio technology but said "culture" was part of the problem.

Testifying before the House Homeland Security Emergency Preparedness Subcommittee, Jay Cohen, the department's undersecretary for science and technology, said first responders were not always enthusiastic about sharing communications.

"We have some communities where the police chief only wants the police to talk to him ...," Cohen said. To a large extent, "technology is not the problem with interoperability ... it's the culture," he said. Cohen said that although the department was preparing to test a "phone-home" interoperable system for first responders, the jury was out on whether it would be widely accepted.

The undersecretary said later that the department had signed a contract with Thales Communications, Inc., to test an interoperable radio system developed by the company. "It's designed for first responders; it's agile," Cohen said.

He said the Thales radios were similar to ones used by the military. "They cost $10,000 each," he said. "We are hoping to get that down to maybe $1,000."

Cohen said the reluctance of police personnel to let other first responders listen in on their communications was understandable in view of the "arrest-and-convict" nature of law enforcement operations. "There are police who do not want to share real-time criminal intelligence with ambulance crews," he said.

The need for promoting interoperable communications systems for first responders was dramatically demonstrated on Sept. 11, 2001, when many of the firefighters in New York's World Trade Center's North Tower failed to receive an emergency evacuation order broadcast over police radio shortly before the building collapsed. An estimated 120 firefighters died in the collapse of the tower.

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House, Senate budget panels clear $3 trillion spending plans

Andy Leonatti and Terry Kivlan — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Defeating Republican efforts to preserve President Bush's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts and impose a moratorium on earmarks, Democrats pushed a $3 trillion fiscal 2009 spending plan through the House Budget Committee shortly after midnight. On a straight party-line 22-16 vote, Democrats adopted the budget after defeating numerous Republican amendments aimed at stopping what they thought were inevitable tax increases as Bush's tax cuts expire in 2010.

Meanwhile, the Senate Budget Committee Thursday afternoon approved its budget resolution on 12-10 party-line vote, after adopting amendments dealing with transparent budgeting, reserve funds for pediatric dental care and health information technology, and caps on farm commodity payments.

The House budget resolution also contains reconciliation protection for a one-year fix of the alternative minimum tax to prevent it from affecting an increasing number of middle-class households. Republicans unsuccessfully offered amendments to set aside $330 billion to accommodate the proposed healthcare plan of presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y. Republicans joined Democrats in voting against it. Rep. Rodney Alexander, R-La., then offered an amendment allotting $195 billion for the proposed healthcare plan of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., which also was defeated.

The House bill would boost domestic spending while rejecting President Bush's fiscal 2009 budget proposals to slash spending for Medicare and Medicaid by more than $150 billion and make deep cuts in an array of other programs, including education, alternative energy, the environment, economic development and infrastructure improvement and low-income heating assistance. The biggest spending increase would be a $50 billion expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program. The measure would also boost spending on veterans' health care by $3.6 billion and education by $3.8 billion. The bill authorizes the $573 billion in fiscal 2009 defense funds sought by the president but would not earmark money for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. House Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt, D-S.C., noted that Bush had not requested specific allocations for the conflicts next year.

Reprising their stance in last year's budget debate, Republicans argued that the Democratic measure would trigger "the largest tax increase in American history" by failing to provide for the extension of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts when they lapse next year. Rep. Dan Lungren, R-Calif., charged that the increased domestic spending in the bill would be financed with $683 billion a year in savings "assumed" from the expiration of the tax cuts. The committee defeated Republican attempts to target specific taxes that they argued would return to pre-2001 levels if allowed to expire. Democrats also voted down an amendment from Rep. Pat Tiberi, R-Ohio, that would have preserved the elimination of the "marriage tax," an amendment by Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Texas, that would have set aside $180.5 billion for estate tax relief and an effort by Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., to prevent the child tax credit from being reduced from $1,000 to $500.

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