Back in September, you may recall a series of reports based on an internal investigation of the Interior Department that, essentially, showed that gas and oil companies were getting away with skimping on royalty payments. Interior just wasn't auditing these companies enough to compel the royalties they owed for extracting natural resources from public property. Now, CBS News reports that not only were they not auditing enough, they didn't actually do the auditing they said they did. Interior misrepresented the number of audits they had been doing all along!

On Sunday, The New York Times kicked off a series exposing the Bush administration's efforts at unabashedly pro-industry and often dangerous deregulation. The first in the series focuses on the trucking industry. The article states, "The federal government's oversight of the trucking industry is a case study of deregulation, as well as the difficulty of determining an exact calculus of its consequences." Despite opposition from public interest groups and even the insurance industry, trucking interests have rewritten rules at the expense of motorists and truck drivers alike.

According to the Federal Times, the Dudley nomination may be indefinitely on hold: The nomination of President Bush’s controversial pick to head the government’s regulatory policy office is dead, according to a leading Republican senator. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who chairs the committee considering the nomination, said she decided not to bring the nomination of Susan Dudley to a vote this month by the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. She said she did this because of the lack of time remaining in this Congress and opposition to Dudley’s nomination from Democrats.

CongressDaily AM($) picked up a meeting of three former CBO directors who aren't very optimistic about the nation's fiscal health. Pessimistic about Congress' willingness to address looming fiscal shortfalls in federal healthcare and Social Security programs, three former CBO directors said Tuesday the outlook is bleak for heading off the problems.