On February 16, OMB Watch, along with numerous other groups such as AFL CIO, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,filed a Petition for Rulemaking with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) asking the FEC to exempt legitimate grassroots communications from "electioneering communication" prohibitions. Currently, the electioneering communications provision bars any ad that mentions a federal candidate broadcast within 30 days of a primary election or within 60 days of a general election.

The Senate leadership appointed three conferees for the upcoming tax reconciliation conference. Here is the full list of conferees: In the Senate: Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-IA); Finance Ranking Member Max Baucus (D-MT); Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and In the House: Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas (R-CA); Ways and Means Ranking Member Charles Rangel (D-NY); Representative Jim McCrery (R-LA); Representative Dave Camp (R-MI); Representative Pete Stark (D-CA) The eight conferees will work to reconcile the differences between S. 2020 and H.R. 4297.

A Washington Post article on the problems of grants.gov. From the Post: The new "Grants.gov" system, under development at a cost of tens of billions of dollars, aims to replace paper applications with electronic forms. It is being phased in at the National Institutes of Health, Department of Housing and Urban Development and other federal agencies. All 26 grant-giving agencies are supposed to have their application processes fully online by 2007.

President Bush, in his FY07 budget proposal released on Monday, asked for $7.65 billion over ten years in tax incentives for charitable giving. The incentives include an IRA charitable rollover proposal. The President’s IRA rollover proposal would allow people over the age of 65 to donate money from qualifying individual retirement accounts to charity without penalty. This differs from the IRA rollover provision included in S. 2020 — a person must be age 70 ½ to take advantage of the Senate-passed provision.