Overspending at the Smithsonian Institution has become something of an institution.  The latest news, from James Grimaldi of the Washington Post, is of a $48,500 portrait of W. Richard West, Jr., the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.  West commissioned the painting after seeing a portrait of former Smithsonian secretary Robert McCormick Adams by the same artist.  The Adams likeness was half the size of the West portrait and cost half as much.  Wonder how big the portrait was of Lawrence Small, the former secretary who also misspent public funds?  Read James Grimaldi here.

One way to avoid big government is to stop hiring people, a strategy which the Bush Administration and Congress seem to have settled on.  As Madonna Lebling writes in the Washington Post, "Congress and the president [are] locked in a standoff over nominations" that has left TWELVE important federal regulatory bodies (including a few you may have heard of — like the Federal Reserve Board, OSHA, and the Council of Economic Advisers) lacking members and in many cases lacking even a quorum needed to make decisions.  Read Madonna Lebling here.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission ignored warnings from nuclear power plant guards that members of the plant security detail (from private security firm Wackenhut) were sleeping on the job, Steven Mufson writes in the Washington Post.  So the employee videotaped his sleeping colleagues. After CBS News picked it up, the NRC finally had to react, though the reaction to date has been tepid:  the agency is "considering doing a feasibility study of federalizing the security detail" at certain federal installations.  Read Steven Mufson here and view Sharyl Attkisson’s story here.