Yesterday morning, I attended a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing to listen to Douglas H. Shulman, Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), provide testimony on the funds Congress will supply to his agency this upcoming fiscal year. I had hoped that subcommittee members would question Shulman over the deteriorating quality of the agency's audits over the past few years – especially those performed on corporations and wealthy individuals – and the insufficient level of services provided to those who claim the overly complicated Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). Despite the absence of any of these inquires, there were two interesting exchanges during the hearing.

President Obama released more details of his FY 2010 budget request last week and I've been spending some time flipping through it today. I didn't have to flip far to find some encouraging news about how the new administration will tackle performance assessment over the next four years and what they plan to do with the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART). Front and center on page 9 in the most important volume in the budget release - the Analytical Perspectives - is a section called "Building a High-Performing Government." This gives the first details about administration plans to replace PART with a new performance system the administration refers to as a "performance improvement and analysis framework."

Yesterday, the Obama administration unveiled details of its $3.5 trillion federal budget for FY 2010. The plan includes cutting or scaling back 121 federally funded programs, thereby eliminating $17 billion in government spending. Administration officials recognize that the proposed savings represent less than one half of one percent of all spending, but emphasize that the cuts are an important first step towards President Obama's goal of drastically reducing inefficient budget expenditures.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has released its monthly budget review this morning that estimates a deficit of $953 billion for the first half of FY 2009. This is a whopping $640 billion more than for the same period in FY 2008.