It seems that one of the themes running through the recovery effort is the (relatively) blazing speed of the Recovery Act as it passed through Congress versus the considerably slower pace of Recovery Act funds disbursement from Washington. Last week, the New York Times reported that only a "sliver" of the stimulus money has been distributed ($36.8 billion has been disbursed so far, according to the latest data from Recovery.gov), most of which was in the form of one-time Social Security checks, Medicaid supplements, and unemployment benefits. But while the rate and types of spending were prescribed by law -- $115 billion in spending was appropriated through the end of September of this year -- other factors are a slowing the rate of fund disbursal into the economy.

The Washington Post ran an article this morning about Recovery Act funding for environmental clean-up being given to contractors with less than stellar performance records. On the surface, this is yet another example of the desperate need for a fully public contractor misconduct database to help prevent awarding contracts to bad actors. But something else jumped out at me from the article that points to a larger problem that I don't think a misconduct database would solve: contractors and executive branch staff are far too cozy.

I wanted to follow up on Matt's blog post from last week about how regulatory agencies fared in President Obama's FY 2010 budget proposal. As Matt pointed out, the administration is making major investments in some agencies while shortchanging others. One of the agencies Matt didn't cover was the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which is a microcosm of the larger trend Matt was pointing out.

Yesterday, Congress took an imperfect step forward with overhauling the Defense Department's major weapons acquisition process. The House Armed Services Committee moved their reform bill, H.R. 2101, the Weapons Acquisition System Reform Through Enhancing Technical Knowledge and Oversight (WASTE TKO) Act, through mark-up by a 59-0 margin. A similar acquisition reform bill introduced by Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) unanimously passed the full Senate. Before passage of the bill, however, senators agreed to an amendment that, if strengthened in conference, would essentially nullify the purpose of acquisition review.