OMB Watch's Drs. Gary Bass and Rick Melberth have an op-ed posted on CommonDreams.org. The piece derides President Bush's recent changes to E.O. 12866: His actions ... set in motion changes that could further delay or hinder public health, safety, environmental, and civil rights protections. Read the whole thing here

Linda Beale, law professor at Wayne State University Law School, provides a much more detailed rejoinder to the Wall Street Journal piece, Bill Clinton's AMT Bomb," than we could in our blog yesterday. Her main points are as follows:

• The 2001-2006 tax cuts passed by the Republican-dominated Congress and the Bush Administration were packaged with no plan to repeal the AMT, since AMT revenues were needed to pretend that the tax cut package was considerably cheaper than it was known to be

Amid high profile food safety crises such as the spinach contamination of 2006 and recent salmonella tainted peanut butter, the FDA has been reducing its commitment to food safety, according to an Associated Press article.

• There are 12 percent fewer FDA employees in field offices who concentrate on food issues.
• Safety tests for U.S.-produced food have dropped nearly 75 percent, from 9,748 in 2003 to 2,455 last year, according to the agency's own statistics.

The article also reminds us food safety is a legitimate homeland security concern: After the Sept. 11 attacks, the FDA, at the urging of Congress, increased the number of food inspectors and inspections amid fears that the nation's food system was vulnerable to terrorists. Inspectors and inspections spiked in 2003, but now both have fallen enough to erase the gains. One wonders if the pullout of FDA employees has emboldened the enemy.

This week, the House and Senate authorizing committees start drafting their "Views and Estimates" letters, conveying their positions on the President's FY 2008 budget provisions for the programs that fall under their jurisdiction. The committees must submit their letters to their respective budget committees no later than six weeks after the president's budget release, this year, March 19. The budget committees may, however, request a given authorizing committee to submit its letter by an earlier date.