This Thursday, the House is scheduled to take a floor vote on a bill to repeal the IRS private tax collection program.

Today, the Consumer Product Safety Commission announced eight more product recalls of children's products. CPSC cites lead contamination as the reason for all eight. Reg•Watch has been working on some back-of-the-envelope calculations on the number of children's product recalls involving lead contamination. So far this year, CPSC has announced 58 recalls accounting for more than 12 million individual products. (More than 11 million of the products — or about 92 percent — were manufactured in China.) These have all been voluntary recalls which CPSC normally negotiates with retailers.

U.S. PIRG released a new report today that profiles how contractors who have poor performance or fraudulent practices can still receive new contracts from the federal government. The report profiles companies such as Bank of America, General Electric, Lexis-Nexis, Kellogg, Brown, and Root, and Northrup Grumman, among others. An excerpt from the report's executive summary: The rapid increase of federally contracted dollars—100 percent since 2000—makes outsourcing the fastest growing component of discretionary spending. The government's preference for using outside contractors to provide goods and services makes careful scrutiny of the process and the decisions more important than in the past. At present, loose rules, lack of competition, and limited accountability permit so-called 'bad actors' to receive contracts that put taxpayers and our money at risk. It's a very interesting report and I'm sure, as they imply, these examples are just the tip of the iceberg. Also of note, they use FedSpending.org for their contracts data - very cool! U.S. PIRG: Forgiving Fraud and Failure: Profiles in Federal Contracting

The Senate overwhelmingly passed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2008 last night. The bill included the Webb/McCaskill wartime contracting commission, and, according to BNA (subscription required), these provisions on military contracting: Immediately before voting on the measure, the Senate agreed 51-42 to adopt an amendment that would impose new limits on Defense Department implementation of the public-private competition process under Office of Management and Budget Circular A-76, and eliminate OMB competitive sourcing goals.