A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The colocation of the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) units provides the best opportunity for the agencies to jointly serve the public, effect operational efficiencies, and improve land management. The Service First Initiative is designed to improve the operations of these two agencies by combining resources and providing "one-stop shopping" services for the public. Since the initiative has been in operation, the number of shared projects between BLM and the Forest Service has increased from 15 in fiscal year 1996 to 272 in mid-fiscal year 2000. Many of the projects involve shared personnel, shared equipment, and joint training projects. Although there have been some successes in achieving efficient government operations, there are many legal and regulatory barriers that prevent the full integration of the agencies' resources. The full integration of the agencies' operations depends on resolution of these barriers."

During the WBS4 review almost a year ago in January, and in more recent discussions of needed capsule characterization, I was struck by three pieces of information related to machined Be capsules: (1) that the speed of sound (and perhaps other properties) in Be grains is markedly different in orthogonal directions, (2) that the grain size in the best refined bulk Be samples is 10 to 15 {micro}m, and that these grains in the best case are randomly oriented, and (3) that we are concerned about capsule homogeneity on the level of 1 part in 10{sup 4}, presumably over angular length scales corresponding to the maximum in the growth curve. It seems to me that the first two points might be inconsistent with the third, and this led me to attempt to model the effect of randomly oriented Be grains on the radially dependent properties of a capsule.

The passage of the Department of Defense authorization and appropriations bills through Congress often does not follow the course laid out in textbooks on legislative procedure. This report is a research aid, which lists the DOD authorization bills ad appropriation bills. This includes all the pertinent information on the passage of these bills through the legislative process: bill numbers, report numbers, dates reported and passed, recorded vote numbers and vote tallies, dates of the passage of the conference reports with their numbers and votes, vetos, substitutions, dates of final passage, and public law numbers.

In order to view exo-solar planets and to improve our knowledge of the early universe, it is important to field very large, 100-meter-class, space telescopes. To be able to practically and affordably field such instruments, it is essential to develop membrane optics that are both lighter and more compactly packagable than present space optics. The authors demonstrate a significant breakthrough in membrane optics utilizing thin diffractive lenses instead of reflective films. The uniqueness of this approach is that diffractive lenses utilize globally-flat, easily supported, membranes, and are many orders-of-magnitude less sensitive to out-of-plane surface errors than are reflective optics. Their flight-validation experiment will launch, deploy, and optically test a lightweight diffractive lens. This lens will be built from multiple thin glass sheets, each optically patterned as a diffractive lens panel and then joined together to form a multi-segment foldable lens. the folded-up lens is tightly packaged to survive launch loads and supported after deployment by an outer rim. Its optical PSF performance is then measured by using a three-component system consisting of the diffractive lens, linked by tethers to an optical-beacon on one side, and a sensor-pod on the other.

The entry into force, on January 1, 1994, of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has eliminated the advantage that the beneficiaries of the Caribbean Basin Economic Recovery Act (CBERA) and related provisions of the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) had enjoyed in trade with the United States relative to Mexico, and gave Mexico an increasingly significant competitive edge over the CBERA countries. The scheduled further implementation of the NAFTA would have resulted in a substantial advantage to Mexico over the CBERA countries and vitiate in part the purpose of the CBERA.

None

None

CH2M Hill Hanford Group, Inc. (CHG) had an outstanding year. The most significant accomplishments that occurred throughout fiscal year (FY) 2000 include the following: On April 24,2000, DOE ORP received BNFL Inc. B-1 deliverables and CHG completed Phase 1 Part B-2 Readiness-to-Proceed (RTP), to demonstrate the ability to provide waste feed to be treated/stored in a long-term disposal facility. The RTP consisted of key enabling assumptions, critical risks, waste handling actions, financial and schedule risk analysis, staffing plans, a project execution plan, and a resource loaded schedule. The Department determined that the BNFL Inc. proposal was unacceptable in many areas and essentially shifted the financial risk from BNFL Inc. back to the Federal government; thus a key benefit of privatization was lost. On May 8,2000, the Secretary announced that the privatization contract be terminated. In the interim, the Department directed the onsite Tank Farm Contractor, CHG, to continue the design work scope for the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant until a new waste treatment contract is awarded. DOE ORP released its request for proposals (RFP) for a new Waste Treatment and Immobilization contractor on August 31,2000 and is on schedule to meet award of the contract by January 15,2000. CHG …

The Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA) has been one of the most controversial of all environmental laws. Undoubtedly, the controversy stems from the strict substantive provisions of this law compared to many other environmental laws which tend to be more procedurally oriented or to permit greater administrative discretion. As a result of the ESA’s standards, the Act often plays a role in disputes in which all sides agree that a given species is not the center of the debate.