On Thursday, May 1, the the President officially requested that Congress appropriate $70 billion in supplemental funding to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Combined with the $108 billion in supplemental funding that Congress is currently mulling to fulfill the remainder of Bush's FY 2008 request, contemplated combined spending package would total $178 billion -- by far the world's biggest supplemental spending bill. (This number omits some $20 billion in domestic spending that Congress has, of late, been considering attaching to the supplemental.) Consider:

When we last left Reading First -- the Bush Administration's "education program," in which the Education Department "inappropriately influence[d] the use of certain programs and assessments" and "created an environment that allowed real and perceived conflicts of interest" -- the president was decrying the slashing of its FY 2008 bud

Economy -- Jobless Rate Drops from 5.1 to 5.0 Percent: The economy lost only 20,000 jobs, far fewer than in recent months, and the unemployment rate fell from 5.1 to 5.0 percent in April. Roughly 250,000 jobs were lost in the first quarter of the year. Construction companies slashed 61,000 positions in April. Manufacturers cut 46,000 and retailers got rid of 27,000. Those losses were eclipsed by job gains in education and health care, professional and business services, the government and elsewhere. Bloomberg.

WaPo published an op-ed Monday in which former senior Department of Defense officials Dov S. Zakheim and Lt. Gen. Ronald T. Kadish (Ret.) note a recent GAO report that finds massive cost and schedule overruns in weapons acquisitions by the Pentagon. The report implicates a degradation of competition between contracting firms resulting in, according to Zajheim and Kadish (ZK, hereafter), "a kind of 'design bureau' competition, similar to what the Soviet Union used." After complaining about an Air Force tanker project won by EADS, a European defense contractor, ZK conclude that what's really needed to curtail waste, fraud, and abuse in military contracting is increased competition in the defense market spurred by an increase in domestic defense firms. Without really explaining why, they also claim that "[m]ore regulations and bureaucratic restrictions on contractors are not the answer." Although the consolidations helped contractors survive the spending cuts, they now threaten to undermine the industry. That's because many in Congress and at the Pentagon want to impose stricter oversight and controls on weapons manufacturing and development while simultaneously demanding more competition -- driving the system to an immature and evolving "globalized" marketplace. Here's the thing though: Better oversight and better procurement practices may not "fix the problem," but because of the nature of the defense "market," it may be the government's only tool to increase acquisition value.