A key vote on the Farm Bill, which includes increases in funding for anti-hunger programs, is set for December 7th (tomorrow). The Food Research and Action Center and the Coalition on Human Needs are asking people to call their Senator in support of the increases. The vote is on whether to filibuster the bill, and it's probably even more important than the vote on whether to actually pass it. We need 60 votes to avoid a filibuster. We need only a majority to pass the bill, and previous votes have shown that there's a clear majority in favor of the bill.

Check it out. Hopefully this means that we can outsource posts on say, Robert Samuelson's disgusting and wrong column on health care policy? The Samuelson column really is awful, and if Orszag lays into it publicly, perhaps Samuelson will lose so much credibility that he'll shut up. If you do read it, remember that the central problem with health care is not overspending, but price, i.e. we're buying stuff that isn't worth the price we're paying.

In the report, CREW details billions of dollars in waste and mismanagement of taxpayer dollars, for example:

• $24 billion has been spent, and at least $178 million wasted, on the failed Coast Guard Deepwater program;
• over $600 million has been allocated for unworkable radiation border scanners;
• $1.3 billion has been lost on the USVISIT program, which was never fully implemented; and
• projected $2 billion loss on the SBInet "virtual fence" border program.

Read the report, Homeland Security for Sale - DHS: Five Years of Mismanagement

If you were slightly sick to your stomach after reading Matt's post yesterday about a drastically under funded Food and Drug Administration and the risks posed to consumer safety, don't think you can get away from that feeling by taking the kids to Disney World this winter for a tropical getaway. The Washington Post published a great investigative report on safety inspections of rides at theme/amusement parks and traveling carnivals. The article uncovered that the Federal oversite agency responsive for inspecting the rides - the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) - is dangerously overworked and under funded compared to its mission and lacks sufficient authority to adequately ensure public safety. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, the federal agency responsible for regulating traveling carnival rides, has not required Wisdom or any other ride manufacturer to make safety improvements in the past eight years. After a meeting last year on the Sizzler's troubled safety record, the agency asked only that ride operators pay "greater attention to safety." The CPSC has no employee whose full-time job is to ensure the safety of such rides. The agency's 90 field investigators -- who oversee 15,000 products, work from their homes and live mostly on the East Coast -- are so overstretched that they frequently arrive at carnival accident scenes after rides have been dismantled. As a result, critics say, supermarket shopping carts feature a more standardized child-restraint system than do amusement rides, which can travel as fast as 100 mph and, according to federal estimates, cause an average of four deaths and thousands of injuries every year. Hmmmm...I feel like I've already seen this movie. What's worse, the article points out, is that the CPSC does not even have the authority to inspect larger, permanent parks - called "fixed-site" amusement parks - like Disney World and Six Flags: State regulators and ride safety advocates say that this record [of lack of inspections and safety problems] is emblematic of wider problems at the CPSC, whose lagging efforts to keep unsafe toys and other children's products from the marketplace have created a public outcry and have brought intense congressional scrutiny. Rulemaking by the agency has decreased during the Bush administration, and its officials say that budget and staffing constraints have made the commission vulnerable to industry pressure to adopt voluntary standards, or, in the case of fixed-site amusement park rides, no federal regulation. Despite Congress holding hearings on the CPSC and its budget and staffing issues, it is unclear if any change will come this year. With the appropriations process just about broken and Congress and the president continuing to argue over minute differences in funding, the CPSC continues to operate with inadequate resources and poor leadership. Enjoy your trip to Orlando.