Government Performance

Feb 8, 2016

Top 400 Taxpayers See Tax Rates Rise, But There’s More to the Story

As Americans were gathering party supplies to greet the New Year, the Internal Revenue Service released their annual report of cumulative tax data reported on the 400 tax r...

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Feb 4, 2016

Chlorine Bleach Plants Needlessly Endanger 63 Million Americans

Chlorine bleach plants across the U.S. put millions of Americans in danger of a chlorine gas release, a substance so toxic it has been used as a chemical weapon. Greenpeace’s new repo...

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Jan 25, 2016

U.S. Industrial Facilities Reported Fewer Toxic Releases in 2014

The Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) data for 2014 is now available. The good news: total toxic releases by reporting facilities decreased by nearly six percent from 2013 levels. Howe...

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Jan 22, 2016

Methane Causes Climate Change. Here's How the President Plans to Cut Emissions by 40-45 Percent.

UPDATE (Jan. 22, 2016): Today, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) released its proposed rule to reduce methane emissions...

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more news

Congress Demands Answers to USDA Security Breach

On April 13, a user of FedSpending.org, an online database on government spending run by OMB Watch, discovered that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) was publishing personally identifiable information about a loan she received from the agency.

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An Attack on Government, A Response

May 29, 2007 by Matt Lewis

Chris Hayes has an interesting article out that got me thinking about the problems with free-market primacy. Hayes reviews a provacative book by economist Bryan Caplan that proposes that voters are irrational, and hence choose irrational economic policy that generate inefficient market outcomes. Here's the summary of the argument:

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More Bad News for Head of GSA

May 23, 2007 by Craig Jennings

This has not been a good week so far for the leader of the General Services Administration. Additional information on problems at GSA have catapulted Administrator Lurita Doan back into the headlines - and the news isn't good.

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Statement, Hearing on IRS Privatization

May 23, 2007 by Adam Hughes*

OMB Watch contributed this statement to a hearing on the IRS private debt collection program. At the hearing, which was held by the full House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Charlie Rangel asked acting commissioner of the IRS Kevin Brown to not issue any more contracts to private debt collectors. Commissioner Brown did give a clear response, but Rep. Rangel seemed intent on reaching a compromise with IRS that contained the size of the program, making it unnecessary to immediately pass legislation that would end it.

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New Report: War Funding and the Feed and Forage Act

May 22, 2007 by Matt Lewis

OMB Watch has just put out a report on a little-known law -the Feed and Forage Act- that seems to give the President broad powers to fund war efforts- even without an enacted appropriations bill. So even if the negotiations over the war funding supplemental drag on, the President could meet the needs of the soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Read the whole thing if you have the chance.

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House Reform Members Might Get Slammed by "Revolving Door"

May 21, 2007 by Dana Chasin

Late last week, the House leadership agreed to remove the "revolving door" provision from the lobbying and ethics bill. The bill is scheduled to reach the House floor for a vote this Thursday, right before Congress leaves for Memorial Day. The revolving door provision in the Senate version of the bill calls for a two-year "cooling off period" after members retire from Congress before they are allowed to lobby their former colleagues.

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You Might Have Thought I Was Done Talking About Contracting, But You'd Be Wrong

May 18, 2007 by Matt Lewis

One thing lacking from the last couple of posts on privatization was good old-fashioned data. Well, here's one place to start- a thoughtful analysis of a couple of cases studies where local and state services were privatized. Apparently, privatizing certain services turned out to be much more expensive than when government did the work. How come? First, contracted services can be complex (emph. mine).

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More Deep Thoughts on Contracting

May 17, 2007 by Matt Lewis

I wanted to revisit a post I did on contracting earlier this week. The point I was trying to make is that it's often assumed that everything government can do, the market can do better. So if it's feasible to outsource something, you should do it, because you'll save the taxpayer money. So why exactly is the market superior? Well, I went digging through one of my favorite books from college- Charles Lindblom's The Market System. Here's what he says:

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Comment on the CAP Contracting Report

May 15, 2007 by Matt Lewis

A quick comment on the CAP report- it focuses on the surge in non-competitive contracts. But non-competitive bids are just the most obvious example of how market forces are not being applied in government contracting. The most damning observation that the CAP report makes is that even if these bids were competitive, the work wouldn't be done efficiently. Agencies need resources to hold contractors accountable, but they often don't have them.

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DHS Doesn't Share Well with Others

The Homeland Security Act of 2002 granted the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) statutory authority to coordinate information-sharing networks with state and local governments. As the five-year anniversary of the creation of the Department approaches, along with the six-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has found that DHS is falling short of its responsibility to effectively share information within the federal government, or with state, local and tribal governments and the private sector.

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