OMB Watch has been trying for the past year or so to connect the dots to expose the farce that is the administration's Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART). Here's another great example:

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) was reviewed under the PART survey in 2003 and given the highest rating of "effective." Some excerpts from the PART survey itself:

• [NCES] makes a unique contribution to knowledge about the conditions and outcomes of education in America.
  
  
• Educational administrators, researchers, and policymakers report high levels of customer satisfaction with the comprehensiveness and utility of program publications and services.

Aside from the demonstrated bias against the Department of Education within PART reviews, a partial answer to that question may have come last week from a new study released by none other than the NCES. The study was a comparison of fourth grade student performance in 2003 between students enrolled in charter schools and students enrolled in public schools. In short, the study found that the public schools, on average, were performing better than charter schools.

This report left me wondering not about whether charter schools are a good idea (full disclosure: my wife is a public charter school teacher in Washington, DC), but whether the Bush administration sees the NCES as a threat to one of their highest policy priorities: promoting school choice.

The more we delve into the PART, the more evidence we find that even the Bush administration doesn't believe the PART is an unbiased evaluative tool. It's simply another way for them to advance an agenda - but only when it is convenient. When it isn't convenient, they will just ignore it.

Via Kevin Drum, we may now know why CBO found an unexpected drop in Medicare spending this year. Actual spending hasn't gone down. Rather, the Bush administration is waiting until next fiscal year to pay some of its bills from this year. That way, some of the spending on services performed this year will get counted in the FY07 budget. And when the CBO puts out its FY07 budget projection, there'll be no pesky election to worry about.

Here's an excerpt from a great article on the scheme, from Barron's (sub. req'd).

The bureaucratic brainstorm was straightforward -- simple-minded is, perhaps, a more appropriate description -- don't pay doctors, hospitals and their army of auxiliaries tending to indisposed old folks and the afflicted disabled for their labors in the last nine days of the current fiscal year. Instead, send them a check for what you owe them, sometime after the first of October, the start of the government's fiscal '07. In essence, those doctors, hospitals et al. are making an involuntary loan of nine days' pay without interest.

That way, point out the gleeful budgeteers and Medicare pooh-bahs, all of whom presumably are glowing with health, Uncle Sam's Medicare tab this fading fiscal year will be $5.2 billion less than it otherwise would have been. Or at least would seem to be $5.2 billion less -- in Washington, as we all know, appearance and reality are not invariably the same phenomena.

Of course, this oh-so-clever stratagem would mean that next fiscal year's Medicare bill will be $5.2 billion more than it would have been. But, not to worry, those indefatigable financial watchdogs in the Office of Management and Budget and their henchmen in the uppermost reaches of Medicare are on the case. And we have every confidence that next year they'll make up for any untoward increases in costs by ceasing to send checks to doctors, hospitals et al. in August or even July, if necessary.

Yesterday, the U.S. House Government Reform Committee’s Minority Staff Special Investigation Division released a report on waste, fraud and abuse in procurement spending in response to Hurricane Katrina.

The report, requested by Reps. Henry A. Waxman, Dennis A. Cardoza, David R. Obey, John S. Tanner, Eleanor Holmes Norton, and John F. Tierney, examines 19 Katrina contracts, collectively worth $8.75 billion, with significant overcharges, wasteful spending, or mismanagement.

According to the report, only 30 percent of these contracts were awarded with full and open competition and over 47 percent were awarded on a sole-source basis.

The highlights:

• Full and Open Competition is the Exception, Not the Rule. As of June 30, 2006, over $10.6 billion has been awarded to private contractors for Gulf Coast recovery and reconstruction. Nearly all of this amount ($10.1 billion) was awarded in 1,237 contracts valued at $500,000 or more. Only 30% of these contracts were awarded with full and open competition.
  
• Contract Mismanagement Is Widespread.Hurricane Katrina contracts have been accompanied by pervasive mismanagement. Mistakes were made in virtually every step of the contracting process: from pre-contract planning through contract award and oversight. Compounding this problem, there were not enough trained contract officials to oversee contract spending in the Gulf Coast.
  
• The Costs to the Taxpayer Are Enormous. This report identifies 19 Katrina contracts collectively worth $8.75 billion that have been plagued by waste, fraud, abuse, or mismanagement. In the case of each of these 19 contracts, reports from the Government Accountability Office, Pentagon auditors, agency inspectors general, or other government investigators have linked the contracts to major problems in administration or performance.

What has the Administration learned in the year since Bush praised Brownie? The report provides this clue:

"Earlier this month, the Federal Emergency Management Agency awarded new contracts worth over $1 billion to several of the same companies implicated in the wasteful Hurricane Katrina response."

The 1-year anniversary of the Katrina disaster is coming up, and the New Republic is featuring the plodding recovery effort in its most recent issue. From the editor's take on it (free registration required):

While some money has flowed to the shores of the lower Mississippi, this sense of national purpose has been completely absent. Reconstruction has proceeded aimlessly and without leadership. Mayor Ray Nagin hasn't even issued his grand plan for the city yet. (That is scheduled for the end of this year.) The municipal authorities who could make the city livable are starved for funds. Despite needing $2 billion in repairs following the storm, the city's water and sewage system has received a mere $32 million loan from Washington. Meanwhile, the feds have completely stiffed the city's bankrupt power company--which may pass $700 million in losses and rebuilding costs on to consumers, essentially requiring them to pay $100 more in utility costs each month for the privilege of living in a semi-habitable city.

Sigh.

This as news comes that FEMA housing contracts that were supposed to cost the government $400 million may now total $3.4 billion, for the same work that the contractors originally agreed to do.

So here's something to help defray the federal budget deficit a bit: make people who owe taxes actually pay those taxes. Sen. Carl Levin's (D-MI) staff conducted an investigation into off-shore tax havens. His minority report, which was adopted by the full Senate Permanent Investigations subcommittee, finds that superrich tax cheats are gaming the system to the tune of $70 billion per year.

David Cay Johnston reporting in The New York Times:

The 400-page report recommends eight changes, some of them aimed at going after the law and accounting firms, banks and investment advisers that the report says enable tax schemes that rely on complexity, secrecy and compartmentalizing information so that advisers can claim they had no idea that the overall transaction was a fraud.

"We need to significantly strengthen the aiding and abetting statutes to get at the lawyers and accountants and other advisers who enable this cheating," Senator Levin said, adding that "we need major changes in law to stop the use of tax havens" by tax cheats.

[...]

[Sen. Levin] said that during the investigation he grew angry as he learned how common cheating had become and how existing government rules aided tax cheats. He said that complex schemes were broken into discrete pieces, allowing professional advisers working on each piece to assert that they had no idea that, taken as a whole, a scheme was improper.

The New York Times: Tax Cheats Called Out of Control