Efforts to improve the security of chemical facilities from terrorist attack took a step forward this week as a House subcommittee passed legislation that encourages plants to switch to safer and more secure technologies. The bills – the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Act of 2009 and a related bill that addresses security at drinking water facilities – also require participation by plant workers in assessing vulnerabilities and creating a security plan. With no Republican support, the party-line vote in the Energy and Environment subcommittee sends the bills to the full Energy and Commerce committee for another vote, likely next week. Although the bills still lack crucial accountability measures, they represent a major improvement over the flawed and inadequate temporary security measures now in place.

Grab the kids, stock the bomb shelter with supplies, and say goodbye to friends, because yesterday the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its fiscal year-end Monthly Budget Review, and it's bad.

Two back-to-back announcements by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) this week extend the agency's admirable record on transparency since the beginning of the Obama administration. EPA announced two policy changes that increase the transparency of the agency's pesticides programs: opening up the registration process for pesticides to public scrutiny and moving to require all pesticide ingredients be listed on product labels.

Last week, the Government Accountability Office released its third bimonthly report on the Recovery Act. The report, which examines the Act's implementation across the country, received a fair amount of press. Many of the articles focused on the speed of the Recovery Act spending, as the report noted that the spending is proceeding according to schedule, or how the report examines the effectiveness of the President's summer jobs program. Only a few articles, however, mentioned one of the most important quotes, at least in terms of Recovery Act transparency: "This unprecedented level of detailed information to be reported by a large number of recipients into a new centralized reporting system raises possible risk for the quality and reliability of these data." In other words, the GAO is very concerned about the quality of the October recipient reporting data.