The Buzz

Budgets and parity, revised auditing rules, Butt-Head strikes again, David Safavian on the record.

The Budget
Ratings and Reductions

President Bush laid down a marker with his fiscal 2006 budget proposal in February, proposing to slash domestic discretionary spending and to cut or significantly scale back more than 150 federal programs deemed ineffective, obsolete or duplicative.

The proposed reductions would save $20 billion in fiscal 2006 alone, Office of Management and Budget Director Joshua Bolten told reporters. "This budget restrains spending in a responsible way by focusing on priorities, principles and performance," he said.

In preparation for the 2006 budget release, OMB conducted formal evaluations of an additional 20 percent of all major federal programs in preparation, bringing the total number of programs evaluated to 607 programs and the cumulative percentage to 60. Evaluators used a 25-part questionnaire called the Program Assessment Rating Tool.

Of the programs rated this year, 15 percent ranked as "effective," 26 percent earned marks of "moderately effective," 26 percent ranked as "adequate," 4 percent were rated "ineffective" and 29 percent could not demonstrate results. Last year, 38 percent of 407 programs evaluated could not demonstrate results and only 11 percent earned "effective" ratings. Despite the notable progress, President Bush recommended eliminating 48 of the 607 programs evaluated for the fiscal 2006 budget cycle.

Budget Breakdown

Pay Parity Pushback

Once again, President Bush picked a fight with federal employees and members of Congress in his budget, putting forward a 3.1 percent pay raise for military service members and a 2.3 percent average increase for civilian federal employees. For the past several years, the White House has fought the battle for lower civilian pay raises on Capitol Hill-and lost.

"The administration's proposal is closer than we have seen in recent years to pay parity," says David Marin, a spokesman for House Government Reform Committee Chairman Tom Davis, R-Va. "But it still ain't parity."

$1 Million A Minute

The Defense and Homeland Security departments were the big winners in the Bush administration's fiscal 2006 budget. But even before next year's money kicks in, the United States will spend $1 million per minute in fiscal 2005 on efforts to pro-ject power overseas and defend the homeland. The funds break down like this:

• $444.5 billion from past appropriations
• $37 billion in new war funds
• $26 billion from Homeland Security
• $16.9 billion in Energy Department funding on nuclear weapons programs
• $2.6 billion miscellaneous

TOTAL: $527 billion, or more than $1 million for each of the 525,600 minutes in a year.

Sources: Congressional Budget Office, House Budget Committee

Revised Accounting Rules

The Office of Management and Budget has released new auditing rules that require agencies to review their internal controls over financial management, fix potential shortcomings and submit an annual report on their activities.

Ever since the passage of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which calls for publicly held companies to obtain audits of their internal controls, government auditors and financial managers have debated whether they should follow suit. The Government Accountability Office held a meeting late last year in which some auditors expressed concern that tightening federal auditing practices was costly and unnecessary. But senior GAO officials supported strengthening internal control audit requirements.

OMB sided with the faction supporting stricter rules. Linda Springer, who recently resigned as OMB's controller, said that when the rules were released effective internal controls were "the foundation of reliable financial reporting." GAO offers guidelines on auditing standards, while OMB's rules are binding.

OMB stopped short of adopting the full force of Sarbanes-Oxley provisions, which would have included requiring a separate audit opinion on internal controls. The new rules, however, do allow OMB to require agencies to obtain a separate opinion on their internal controls if they fail to fix identified internal control problems.

Beavis and Boredom

Somebody in the Census Bureau has a sense of humor. In January, the Associated Press reported that Bevis Lake, about 25 miles northeast of Seattle, was suddenly appearing in bureau records as "Butthead Lake."

For those of you who weren't watching MTV in the '90s, Beavis and Butt-Head was a wildly popular gross-out cartoon series about two slacker idiots who sat around watching videos all day.

Ken Brown, a land surveyor with Washington's Department of Natural Resources, speculated that some Census Bureau employee had gotten a little bored in the office. "That means someone is playing a joke, I think," Brown told the AP.

ON THE RECORD: David Safavian...

...the new head of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, sat down with Government Executive's Amelia Gruber and Kimberly Palmer in January to discuss his agenda for overseeing the contracting process.

On his priorities: We're looking at how fee-for-service agencies are doing business with other agencies to ensure that the taxpayer at the end of the day is getting the best value. I am not so sure that with all the different fee-for-service agencies competing against one another that the end result is the best deal. Either you're paying fees that are too high, or you're seeing circumstances where the contracting is not done right. So we're delving into that. I told [Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee] Chairman [Susan] Collins [R-Maine] that we would look at suspension and debarment [of contractors]. We are looking at how commercial off-the-shelf products are being treated and whether there are pieces of current legislation that are essentially causing the government to pay higher prices than necessary for the products.

On ethics issues: We need to be looking at whether there are controls in place to make sure that individuals do not amass too much power in acquisition offices. That is different from saying we need to roll back streamlined acquisition processes. I am very concerned that the damage [convicted former Air Force procurement official] Darleen Druyun [did] gives ammunition to people who don't like the streamlined acquisition processes. I'm not sure that the procurement system is in need of a major retooling because of what Darleen Druyun did.

On the acquisition workforce: We have very, very good people in our acquisition workforce. But given all that has been happening in the procurement world, it's clear to me that we need renewed emphasis on recruiting, retention and training. As we all know, there is a retirement wave coming.

We need to begin with a skills assessment: What are the skills needed by 21st century acquisition professionals, and how do we ensure our workforce develops these skills? What are the collective needs of the agencies? It's no secret that I would like to see better alignment between the Defense Acquisition University and the Federal Acquisition Institute. Both organizations bring strengths to the table that can and should be leveraged by the other.