Despite a worsening housing crisis across the country, Congress continues to move slowly to enact legislation intended to ease the burden for homeowners. On May 8, the House adopted comprehensive legislation (H.R. 3221) that would seek to reduce foreclosures in the face of an administration veto threat issued just days before. But Senate negotiations between the chair and ranking member of the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee have gone on for weeks, with no deal in sight. Most members' eagerness to pass a bill to address the crisis before Memorial Day has thus far been thwarted by key GOP leaders in Congress and some in the Bush administration.

Congress continues to wrestle with a number of high-profile budget and financial bills that will have broad impact on citizens throughout the United States and around the world, including legislation on war funding, economic stimulus, housing, and the last budget of the Bush presidency. Despite significant congressional rhetoric and media coverage of these efforts, Congress has made little real progress on reaching compromise or instituting policies.

By fits and starts, Congress is moving toward a legislative response to the housing sector crisis — the biggest sectoral crisis to afflict the U.S. economy since the technology stock bubble burst earlier this decade. In what might turn out to be a case of the tortoise and the hare, the Senate has jumped out front with a housing bill that enjoys little if any support in the House or the Bush administration, while the House has embarked on a schedule of hearings and mark-ups of a much-praised bill of a wholly different nature. There is a widely shared consensus that, with elections approaching, Congress must and will act to address the crisis, but thus far, the two houses are proceeding along on separate, if not perpendicular, tracks.

On March 13, the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Oversight heard testimony concerning the 2008 tax return filing season, Internal Revenue Service (IRS) operations, the Fiscal Year 2009 budget proposals, and the National Taxpayer Advocate's Annual Report to Congress. Then-Acting Commissioner of the IRS Linda Stiff testified, and Nina Olson, the National Taxpayer Advocate, pressed for reforms that would both protect taxpayer rights and improve tax enforcement.