Despite providing the State of the Union address with its only truly funny section, President Bush's Social Security overhaul plan was barely mentioned during the speech. Bush proposed instead the classic "bipartisan commission" to put off real debate and most likely push the problem to someone else beyond his presidency. Yet the much publicized and thoroughly failed policies of Social Security privitization have not disappeared. In fact, they have been included in the FY 2007 budget release.

One of the more high profile budget cuts proposed by President Bush in his 2007 budget so far is a $53.5 million cut to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the largest cut President Bush has ever proposed. Similar cuts have been proposed in year's past, but have not been enacted by Congress because of broad bipartisan support for public broadcasting. With the budget squeeze even tighter this year, it may be increasingly difficult to stave off the cuts. The 2007 proposal would be a 13 percent real cut in the CPB budget. Reuters: Bush Seeks to Slash Public Broadcasting Funds

Our initial analysis of the president's budget release is now available. This is just preliminary and there are many more aspects of the budget to comment on. Check back here often for additional updates and information about what's in the FY 2007 budget proposal.

With the release of the White House's budget submission comes, of course, the latest PART scores. In an effort to be tech-fancy, OMB created a new website, ExpectMore.Gov, to feature PART assessments. Only the homepage was working this morning, and now the pieces that are working are either not completely functional or spotty, taking you sometimes to data and other times to the 404-error page.