With Congress returning from its summer break next week, the appropriations process should begin again as well. Since Congress has been gone for the past few weeks since we last updated you, there isn't anything new to report. But! Never fear, we have been using this time to revamp our patented AppropriationsWatch^TM. We moved it over to GoogleDocs, allowing us to add links, which you can click to see the relevant documents for each appropriations bill. And, moving over to GoogleDocs makes it easier for you, the audience, if you want to copy the table and play around with the numbers. Want to see what happens if you cut Department of Defense spending in half? Go right ahead.

Former White House budget director Peter Orszag's debut New York Times column has drawn a lot of attention because of its reference to the acceptability of temporarily extending the upper-income '01-'03 tax cuts.

Peter Orszag's first opinion piece in the New York Times has certainly made a splash, hasn't it? Media outlets are hyping that the former head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has come out in defiance of the White House to argue that Congress should extend all the Bush Tax Cuts. Take a closer look at Orszag's column, though, and one will recognize this meme as a silly controversy distracting from the real issue raised in the piece.

It wasn't three weeks ago that Earl Devaney, head of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency (RAT) Board, told Congress that conducting oversight of Recovery Act funds was unnecessarily burdensome due to the lack of a standardized coding system for government contracts, and now the procurement regulating arm of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has proposed a solution.