From Rick Hasen's blog: My own take on what is happening at the FEC: the commissioners are likely looking for a compromise that would garner a majority vote on the Commission and be upheld against an inevitable court challenge no matter what the FEC does. This is a tall task. This is likely to be the most salient action of the FEC since its summer 2004 decision not to regulate 527s as political committees during that election.

We already know that there's a significant mismatch between PART scores, actual program performance, and budget/management policy decisions. We usually hear of a good program that gets a bad PART score, based on criteria that don't really apply to the program, and then is slated for budget cuts. Don't forget, though, that the White House is notorious for claiming that its budget cuts are based on programs' ineffectiveness -- even when most of the programs slated for cuts haven't actually been assessed by even this worthless tool.

There have been scattered reports the last few days of hushed IRS decision to allow tax preparation companies or individual accountants sell part or all of your personal information from your tax returns to third party entities or marketers. (Your Tax Files For Sale? IRS Says Go For It.) The revelation of this decision has sent consumer advocate and public interest groups running - and rightly so. A joint statement filed by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), the Consumer Federation of America (CFA), and the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) to the IRS, they remarked:

After badly fumbling the first of his two major policy goals after being re-elected President last year (Social Security Reform), recently Mr. Bush dropped the ball again on the second of those goals - comprehensive tax reform. Despite an interesting report from his Presidential Tax Reform Commission released November 1 last year, the president seems to have long forgotten this issue was of any importance to him at all.