Tuesday Morning Federal Newscast – July 12

The National Archive\'s first Wikipedian in Residence, Medicare and Medicaid fraud going undetected and the House lightbulb wars escalate.

The Morning Federal Newscast is a daily compilation of the stories you hear Federal Drive hosts Tom Temin and Amy Morris discuss throughout the show each day. The Newscast is designed to give FederalNewsRadio.com users more information about the stories you hear on the air.

  • Agencies spent less on high risk types of contracts last year. But not much less. The Office of Federal Procurement Policy, in a report to Congress, says the figure was $28 billion in 2010, a billion less then the year before. The Office of Management and Budget has deemed labor-hours and time-plus-materials contracts to be high risk. For two years it has been telling agencies to avoid them in favor of fixed price contracts. While dollars for those types of contract fell, spending on cost-reimbursement contracts is still on the rise. Procurement chief Dan Gordon says, more accurate reporting might be the culprit, not agencies ignoring policy.
  • The Senate Democratic budget proposal, still unreleased, contains nearly $900 billion in cuts to national security over 10 years. The bulk of the reductions would hit the Pentagon. The Hill newspaper reports, the Senate budget version would also reduce domestic program spending by $350 billion in the same period. Budget Committee Chairman Ken Conrad of North Dakota is shepherding the bill through the Senate. While the plan is yet to be publicly announced, the cuts in security spending are significantly deeper than those proposed by House Republicans. Plus, the Senate version includes several tax increases.
  • The Office of Management and Budget is giving independent regulatory agencies three months to issue a streamlining plan. A new Executive Order issued Monday builds on progress from preliminary plans to improve regulation efforts. The language in the order is clearer and more direct than the previous order issued in January, says Cass Sunstein. He’s the administrator at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Sunstein says the so-called “look-back” plan has cut millions of hours of paperwork and slashed more than $1 million in annual regulatory costs.
  • The federal government’s system for detecting Medicare and Medicaid fraud is late, inadequate and underused. Those conclusions from a new Government Accountability Office report. GAO says the systems don’t even include Medicaid data. So far, 639 analysts were supposed to have been trained to use the system, but only 41 have. GAO also says the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services lacks a plan to finish the system. CMS has spend $150 million on the fraud detection system. It went live in 2009, but remains incomplete.
  • The National Archive’s first Wikipedian in Residence is helping to bring old, rare documents out of the backrooms and make them more accessible to the public. One of those documents is the full petition that feminist Susan B. Anthony sent to Congress to remit a fine she received for voting illegally. Before, there was only access to a few scanned pages, now a collaboration with volunteer transcribers on Wikisource has transformed the document into a searchable full web text, NextGov reports. Wikipedian Dominic McDevitt-Parks has sent more than 40 documents to his volunteer team of wiki-transcribers. He has also submitted rare new photos to Wikipedia, hoping to spur interest and new articles written around them.
  • Some House Republicans are launching a new salvo in the light bulb wars. They want to repeal 2007 legislation outlawing standard incandescent light bulbs in favor of compact fluorescents. Because they use less electricity to produce light, the fluorescents are seen by environmentalists as the wave of the future. Texas Representative Joe Barton says Americans should be able to buy any kind of light bulbs they want. He’ll have an uphill legislative battle. Democrats on the Energy and Commerce committee oppose the repeal.

THIS AFTERNOON ON FEDERAL NEWS RADIO

Coming up today on In Depth with Francis Rose:
Federal News Radio’s Jared Serbu steps into the anchor chair while Francis Rose enjoys vacation. On today’s show:

  • With the end of the fiscal year rapidly approaching, one Senator is hoping for a future of balanced budgets. And he’s drafted the legislation to make it happen.
  • When the space shuttle Atlantis glides back to earth, it’ll mark the official end of NASA’s orbiter program. That means a lot of the space agency’s staff will no longer be needed. We’ll hear how they plan to wind down the shuttle program’s workforce.

Join Jared from 3 to 7 p.m. on 1500AM or listen on your computer.

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