Boeing's C-17 Globemaster

Via ProPublica, Ben Elgin and Keith Epstein have a really terrific piece in Business Week about the struggle to rid the defense spending bill of expensive, largely unnecessary Cold War-weapons projects. A few things caught my eye here, first a breakdown of how spending on weapons changed from the last Geroge W. Bush administration Pentagon bill to the first Barack Obama administration miltary budget (which the president signed Wednesday) (more…)

Breathtaking Joliet Prison in Joliet, Illinois

Here is one partial solution to states with no money  — release prisoners early.  The Chicago Tribune’s Megan Twohey reports that Illinois will save $1 billion by releasing 1,000 inmates who were imprisoned for non-violent crimes. The prisoners will then be electronically monitored by state parole agents.

One problem with this strategy is what exactly the prisoners will do when paroled — it is hard to find a job in Illinois, which has a double-digit unemployment rate. Also, prisoners might not get the attention they need to successfully re-integrate into society — Twohey reports that they are already waiting lists at cash-strapped substance abuse and mental health counseling centers. The problem of prisoners re-joining society is not unique to the recession — already, half of the inmates who leave Illinois prison return in three years. But cuts in the state’s Dept. of Health budget could eventually lead to another increase in Dept. of Corrections spending.

The Wall Street Journal’s John Hechinger reports out a Dept. of Education study that shows wild disparity in the level of difficulty between states when it comes to there 4th and 8th grade math and reading standardized tests. Hechinger focuses on states that made these tests even easier between 2005 (the last time DOE had such a study) and 2007.

However, the big-picture story is this: some states assign relatively hard reading and math tests and some states give pretty easy ones. A 4th grader that scored a 200 out of 500 on a Massachusetts math test actually displayed more math skills than an 8th grader in Tennessee who scored 250 out of 500.

And yet, the No Child Left Behind law — which says all 4th and 8th graders must be “proficient” in math and reading by 2014 — lets states write their own standardized tests and determine their own level of proficiency. So on the one hand NCLB emphasizes standardizes tests. And on the other, NCLB has no mechanism whatever for actually standardizing these tests between states.

Education Sec. Arne Duncan hopes to make state governors agree upon common standards.  For an administration so focused on quantifying progress in education, stopping the lack of standards in high-stakes standardized math and reading tests (the tests that determine if a school is “failing”) should be a more urgent priority.

Walter Pincus of the Washington Post knows how to find the nitty gritty that uncovers the big picture.  Here he picks up on a new report by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction that uncovers (drum roll, please) . . . the $20 washer!   Aecom Inc. of Los Angeles charged the Pentagon $196.50 for a set of 10 washers that should have been priced at $1.22.  It’s not as great an image as theoverpriced toilet seat, but what a great markup for Aecom!  That’s a margin of at least $19.40 per washer!  And according to an inspector general spokesman, contrary to what Aecom claims, “they’ve never reimbursed the government for the washers.”

Interesting story from the Washington Post’s Carrie Johnson:

Heightened efforts by the Drug Enforcement Administration to crack down on narcotics abuse are producing a troubling side effect by denying some hospice and elderly patients needed pain medication, according to two Senate Democrats and a coalition of pharmacists and geriatric experts.

Tougher enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act, which tightly restricts the distribution of pain medicines such as morphine and Percocet, is causing pharmacies to balk and is leading to delays in pain relief for those patients and seniors in long-term-care facilities, wrote  Sens. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.).

You’d think from coverage of the Justice Dept. not cracking down on medical marijuana in states where its legal that the federal government no longer has an impractically “tough” drug enforcement policy. However, DEA is evidently still prioritizing zealous enforcement over the patient’s drug treatment.

The Wall Street Journal’s Miriam Jordan identifies a really interesting economic/immigration indicator — the federal H-1B program, which provides 65,000 Visas a year to match highly-skilled immigration labor with U.S. companies, has only received 46,700 applications since they were first accepted in April. It took exactly a day for 65,000 applications to be accepted when the program was rolled out it in 2008. In fact, technology companies often refer H-1B as the “visa roulette” — a virtual lottery system where these companies would collectively like to offer hundreds of thousands positions to talented foreign labor, but can only offer 65,000.

Why are companies and foreign workers not signing up? (more…)

Barack Obama signed a $680 billion Pentagon spending bill yesterday — and the New York Times’ Christopher Drew reports that the administration did a bang up job cutting costs! The $680 billion is more than the last Bush administration Pentagon budget, which was $654 billion (that figure includes the Pentagon bill, plus the spending on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which the Bush White House budgeted separately) . But the focus of this bill has been on what isn’t included — extravagant programs like Army modernization and missile defense have been pared down and the bill apparently better reflects current military priorities. Hopefully the first cut will not (ahem) be the deepest: the re-ordering of priorities in this budget will only be significant if Obama can leverage further, more substantial cuts in the next three Pentagon budgets.

Education Sec. Arne Duncan has $3 billion in the Education Dept. budget to close “failing” schools across the country — something Duncan did when he headed the Chicago school system. But the New York Times’ Sam Dillon relays a report from the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research that closing schools doesn’t help students. In fact, it causes unnecessary disruption.

In Chicago, school shutdowns have already been replaced by the, in theory, less disruptive “turnaround” approach — students stay at a failing school, but the school district recruits a new staff. Oddly, Duncan is still pushing for these dramatic closings of schools nationally, even though such a plan has already been discredited in Chicago.

By Mitchell Polman

America’s pop culture exports are the boon and bane of the country’s reputation abroad. But there is one cost-effective way to change people’s perceptions of American society. It is to show people abroad an aspect of American life and culture that is very different from what they are exposed to when they turn on their television sets. Through its public diplomacy programs, the Department of State works to educate foreign publics about aspects of American culture that they otherwise may never see or hear. For example, few people overseas are aware of the fact that the U.S. is considered an innovator in the field of contemporary dance. A new State Department-sponsored initiative that is set to begin early next year will work to change that. (more…)