Jeremy Scahill, an investigative journalist and contributor to The Nation, blogged this morning about a discovery he made in a recent Department of Defense (DOD) Inspector General's (IG) report. The DOD IG found, in what Scahill mockingly referred to as "a not shocking revelation," that "private contractors working for U.S. Special Forces have been allowed to 'perform inherently governmental functions.'"

In case you hadn't noticed, it's getting late in the year. We're almost to the end of May, and Congress is starting to run out of legislative time. The week-long Memorial Day recess gets rid of next week, July 4th patriotism will consume another week, summer recess erases most of August and half of September, and Congressional leadership is aiming to adjourn in early October. And with Congress' already jammed legislative agenda, when is it going to get around to passing FY 2011's budget resolution? Answer: most likely never.

President Obama has proposed to Congress "a new, expedited tool to reduce unnecessary or wasteful spending," lining up on the side of so-called fiscal conservatives to enhance the Executive's ability to force Congress to vote on measures that cut federal spending.

In his latest Chairman's Corner, Recovery Board Chairman Earl Devaney announced that Recovery.gov is now the first "government-wide" cloud computing system. Sounds impressive, right? Well, sort of. Essentially, this means that Recovery.gov, which used to be housed on servers operated by the Board and used solely for that purpose, is now hosted on "cloud" servers run by Amazon.com.