Last week, OMB Watch submitted comments to the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP), the contracting regulatory authority within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), regarding their proposed policy letter on reforming "inherently governmental" guidelines. Through our petition drive with CREDO Action, we spurred 29,402 people to write to OFPP to tell the agency what they thought about the proposed guidelines as well.

The Federal Times had an interesting piece last week on the contracting industry's reaction to a recent notice in the Federal Register seeking input on "how best to amend the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) to enable public posting of contract actions." Despite the FAR Councils' stated efforts to post contracts "without compromising contractors' proprietary and confidential commercial or financial information," industry executives are beside themselves over such a monumental change. Not surprisingly, their arguments against the idea don't hold much water.

As Congress gears up for its annual budget process, parochial-minded members are drawing their customary battle lines around administration-targeted programs. One of those is the C-17 transport plane, which the Pentagon has been trying to kill for several years because it deems the military to have ample airlift capacity. Last week, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch highlighted a press conference held by four congressional Missourians who, claiming to know better than the Pentagon, declared that they were going to fight the plane's proposed cancellation.

Picking up the thread from yesterday, I want to expand a bit on this term "fiscal responsibility" that is bandied about so often. "Fiscal responsibility" is not simply setting arbitrary limits on federal spending for the sake of reducing the federal budget deficit. Rather, it is an assessment of the current economic and fiscal environments and a determination of an equitable deployment of national resources.