A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "To deter illegal entry between the nation's ports of entry, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) developed its Southwest Border Strategy. INS has spent seven years implementing the border strategy, but it may take INS up to a decade longer to fully implement the strategy. This assumes that INS obtains the level of staff, technology, equipment, and fencing it believes it needs to control the Southwest border. Although illegal alien apprehensions have shifted, there is no clear indication that overall illegal entry into the United States along the Southwestern border has declined. INS' current efforts to measure the effectiveness of its border control efforts could be enhanced by analyzing the data in its automated biometric identification system (IDENT). These data offer INS an opportunity to develop additional performance indicators that could be incorporated into its Annual Performance Plan review process and could help INS assess whether its border control efforts are associated with an overall reduction in the flow of illegal aliens across the border. Borderwide analysis of the IDENT data could be used to address several important questions related to illegal entry. The strategy's impact …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Energy (DOE) maintains millions of classified documents containing highly sensitive nuclear weapons design and production information. Allegations that the Peoples Republic of China obtained nuclear warhead designs from an employee of DOE's Los Alamos National Laboratory, as well as the disappearance of two computer hard drives containing highly sensitive weapons information from that same laboratory, have raised concerns about how effectively DOE protects classified information, particularly the most sensitive classified information that is contained in vaults and computer systems. DOE's security program consists of many strategies for protecting and controlling classified information, such as controlling access to classified information through physical and administrative barriers and determining whether a person's work requires a "need to know" the information. DOE has recently increased protection for top-secret documents by revising its Classified Matter Protection and Control Manual, which provides detailed requirements for the protection and control of classified matter. This report reviews the (1) extent to which DOE's Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories have implemented DOE's established access controls and need-to-know requirements for classified vaults and computer systems containing the most sensitive classified information as …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This report reviews the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) expenditures on business systems modernization. IRS obligated and expended available Information Technology Investment Account (ITIA) appropriations in fiscal years 1999 and 2000 to pay for external business systems modernization costs. In fiscal years 1999 and 2000, IRS expended about $12.8 million and $120.2 million, respectively, of ITIA appropriations and, as of September 30, 2000, had an additional $66 million of ITIA appropriations obligated to modernize its external business systems. IRS' use of ITIA appropriations appears to be for no purposes consistent with the fiscal year 1998 and 1999 appropriations acts and within the $249 million approved ITIA expenditure plans. IRS used its information systems (IS) appropriations and other appropriations to fund both internal and external business systems modernization costs. IRS paid its internal business systems modernization costs from its appropriations for IS; Tax Law Enforcement; and Processing, Assistance, and Management. However, the amount of these costs is unknown because IRS did not have a cost accounting system in place to track its internal costs for business systems modernization. IRS initiated actions in fiscal year 2000 to begin tracking …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Social Security Administration (SSA) needs to identify strengths and weaknesses within its agencywide operational and managerial capabilities to enable the delivery of high-quality customer service in the face of increases in both workloads and in the number of retirements from its experienced workforce. Evaluating SSA's management of information technology (IT) is critical to assess whether the agency is adequately addressing these capabilities. This report reviews SSA's IT policies, procedures, and practices in the following five areas: investment management, enterprise architecture, software acquisition and development, information security, and human capital. GAO found that SSA had many important IT management policies and procedures in place in each of these five key areas but did not always implement them consistently. In some areas, SSA had not established key policies, procedures, or practices essential to ensure that its IT was effectively managed. GAO found weaknesses in all of the five key areas of IT management--particularly in investment management and human capital management."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Small Business Reauthorization Act of 1997 directed the President to set a goal of awarding not less than 23 percent of the federal government's prime contracting dollars to small business for each fiscal year. The Small Business Administration (SBA) is charged with working with federal agencies to ensure that agency goals, in the aggregate, meet or exceed the overall goal. To help SBA determine if agency goals are being met, the Federal Procurement Data Center (FPDC)--part of the General Services Administration--collects data on all federal contract actions and calculates the government's annual small business achievements on the basis of procurement information received from the agencies. This report reviews (1) SBA's process for establishing annual small business prime contract goals and the reasons for recent changes to the process; (2) the types of contracts that are excluded when achievements are calculated, as well as SBA's rationale for excluding them; and (3) the dollar value of the excluded contracts. GAO found that in fiscal year 2000, SBA began assigning goals directly to individual agencies because the goals that agencies proposed did not in the aggregate reach the …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Internally displaced persons--those forced to flee their homes because of armed conflict and persecution but who remain within their own country--are among the most at-risk, vulnerable populations in the world. Although some protections have been provided to internally displaced persons, international organizations have been unable to fully meet their needs in most locations, partly because of the danger in operating in conflict zones, the presence of personal security risks to aid workers, and the decline in budgetary resources, but also because international organizations have not taken a proactive approach toward protection. Also, international relief workers have not received training on how to incorporate protection considerations and interventions into their assistance activities. In the three countries GAO visited, international organizations do not coordinate their protection actions within the countries in which they operate. Without such coordination, international organizations are unable to share basic information on the location of their protection officers and effective approaches to protection interventions. The U.N. Security Council is one forum in which these matters can be addressed in the context of underlying political and security factors. The U.S. government has no overall policy …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Rising prices for natural gas, electricity, and other fuels have made it even harder for low-income families to pay their utility bills. By the end of fiscal year 2000, the Office of Community Services had awarded $30 million in Residential Energy Assistance Challenge Option (REACH) program grants to 24 states and 12 tribal organizations to fund 54 separate projects to help meet the home energy (heating and cooling) needs of low-income households. These grants ranged from $50,000 to $1.6 million. Most of the 54 REACH projects have educated low-income clients about home energy efficiency through group workshops or on individual home visits. Many REACH projects have involved energy-related repairs to homes and budget counseling, and three state REACH projects are developing consumer cooperatives to purchase electricity or bulk fuels, such as heating oil. However, some REACH projects have included social services not directly related to meeting home energy needs. The legislation authorizing REACH identifies the following three performance goals for individual REACH projects, (1) reduce the energy costs of participating households, (2) increase the regularity of home energy bill payments, and (3) increase energy suppliers' contributions …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "As used in public health and environmental regulations, risk assessment is the systematic, scientific description of potential harmful effects of exposures to hazardous substances or situations. It is a complex but valuable set of tools for federal regulatory agencies to identify issues of potential concern, select regulatory options, and estimate the range of a forthcoming regulation's benefits. However, given the significant yet controversial nature of risk assessments, it is important that policymakers understand how they are conducted, the extent to which risk estimates produced by different agencies and programs are comparable, and the reasons for differences in agencies' risk assessment approaches and results. GAO studied the human health and safety risk assessment procedures of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Department of Transportation's Research and Special Programs Administration. This report describes (1) the agencies' chemical risk assessment activities, (2) the agencies primary procedures for conducting risk assessments, (3) major assumptions or methodological choices in their risk assessment procedures, and (4) the agencies' procedures or policies for characterizing the results of risk assessments."

A chapter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Over the past decade, the booming growth in scheduled commercial airline traffic has tended to obscure developments in another part of the aviation industry--general aviation. General aviation covers all civil aircraft not flown by commercial airlines or the military. In 1994, concerned that general aviation was in decline, Congress passed the General Aviation Revitalization Act (GARA), which sought to boost the industry by placing limitations on product liability lawsuits against aircraft manufacturers. Trends show that there was a decline in most general aviation indicators prior to the 1994 enactment of GARA and that this decline reversed in the years after GARA--sharply in manufacturing indicators and to a lesser extent in flying activity indicators. Trends in general aviation since GARA was enacted suggest that the law has reduced manufacturers' liability concerns, leading to a rebound in the manufacturing industry. The amount of federal funding available for capital development at general aviation airports has consistently been below what has been requested by the airport officials to fund their airports' planned projects. In 2000, for example, the amount of federal funding available was almost $900 million short of what …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Millions of people who live and work near eight Army storage facilities containing 30,000 tons of chemical agents are at risk of exposure from a chemical accident. In 1988, the Army established the Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program (CSEPP) to assist 10 states with communities near these eight storage facilities. The Army and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) share the federal government's responsibility for the program's funding and execution. Since its inception, the program has received more than $761 million in funding. One third of this amount has been spent to procure critical items. Because each community has its own site-specific requirements, funding has varied greatly. For example, since the states first received program funding in 1989, Illinois received as little as $6 million, and Alabama received as much as $108 million. GAO found that many of the states have made considerable progress in preparing to respond to chemical emergencies. Three of the 10 states in the CSEPP are fully prepared to respond to an emergency and four others are making progress and are close to being fully prepared. This is a considerable improvement since …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "According to the World Health Organization, infectious diseases account for more than 13 million deaths every year, including nearly two-thirds of all deaths among children under age 5. Infectious diseases present a substantial threat to people in all parts of the world, and this threat has grown in volume and complexity. New diseases have emerged, others once viewed as declining in significance have resurged in importance, and many have developed substantial resistance to known antimicrobial drugs. Infectious disease surveillance provides national and international public health authorities with information that they need to plan and manage efforts to control these diseases. In the mid-1990s, public health experts in the United States and abroad determined that global infectious disease surveillance was inadequate, and both the World Health Assembly and the President of the United States called for the development of an effective global infectious disease surveillance and response system. The strongest influence on the evolution of the current global infectious disease surveillance framework has been the international community's focus on specific diseases or groups of diseases. The international community has created diverse surveillance programs to support global and …

The Remote-Handled Transuranic (RH-TRU) Content Codes (RH-TRUCON) document representsthe development of a uniform content code system for RH-TRU waste to be transported in the 72-Bcask. It will be used to convert existing waste form numbers, content codes, and site-specificidentification codes into a system that is uniform across the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) sites.The existing waste codes at the sites can be grouped under uniform content codes without any lossof waste characterization information. The RH-TRUCON document provides an all-encompassing|description for each content code and compiles this information for all DOE sites. Compliance withwaste generation, processing, and certification procedures at the sites (outlined in this document foreach content code) ensures that prohibited waste forms are not present in the waste. The contentcode gives an overall description of the RH-TRU waste material in terms of processes and|packaging, as well as the generation location. This helps to provide cradle-to-grave traceability ofthe waste material so that the various actions required to assess its qualification as payload for the72-B cask can be performed. The content codes also impose restrictions and requirements on themanner in which a payload can be assembled.The RH-TRU Waste Authorized Methods for Payload Control (RH-TRAMPAC), Appendix 1.3.7of the 72-B Cask Safety Analysis …

Results are presented of a fully ab initio calculation of impact ionization rates in GaAs within the density functional theory framework, using a screened-exchange formalism and the highly precise all-electron full-potential linearized augmented plane wave method. The calculated impact ionization rates show a marked orientation dependence in k space, indicating the strong restrictions imposed by the conservation of energy and momentum. This anisotropy diminishes as the impacting electron energy increases. A Keldysh type fit performed on the energy-dependent rate shows a rather soft edge and a threshold energy greater than the direct band gap. The consistency with available Monte Carlo and empirical pseudopotential calculations shows the reliability of our approach and paves the way to ab initio calculations of pair production rates in new and more complex materials.

Report of the Texas State Auditor's Office related to determining if 19 selected agencies fully complied with the revised historically underutilized business (HUB) statutory requirements, or if they reported complete and accurate data to the State General Services Commission (Commission).

Report of the Texas State Auditor's Office related to information on the number of state employees and the number of consultants and contract individuals who perform services for state government.

Report of the Texas State Auditor's Office related to determining whether selected state entities are accurately reporting their key performance measure results to the Automated Budget and Evaluation System of Texas (ABEST) database, and whether selected state entities have adequate control systems in place over the collection and reporting of their performance measures.

Report of the Texas State Auditor's Office related to determining compliance with a rider related to contract workforce requirements set forth in the General Appropriations Act, Article IX, Section 9-11.18 during fiscal year 2000.

This report provides an overview of the immigration legalization and status adjustment legislation.

This report contains the emergency food assistance program and emergency feeding needs.

This report identifies a number of issues likely to receive attention in connection with water infrastructure. It begins with a brief review of federal involvement, describes the current debate about funding needs, and then examines key issues, including what is the nature of the problems to be solved; who will play, and what is the federal role; and questions about mechanisms for delivering federal support, including state-by-state allotment of federal funds.

This document will explain the process to create a web interface for the accounting information generated by the High Performance Storage Systems (HPSS) accounting report feature. The accounting report contains useful data but it is not easily accessed in a meaningful way. The accounting report is the only way to see summarized storage usage information. The first step is to take the accounting data, make it meaningful and store the modified data in persistent databases. The second step is to generate the various user interfaces, HTML pages, that will be used to access the data. The third step is to transfer all required files to the web server. The web pages pass parameters to Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts that generate dynamic web pages and graphs. The end result is a web page with specific information presented in text with or without graphs. The accounting report has a specific format that allows the use of regular expressions to verify if a line is storage data. Each storage data line is stored in a detailed database file with a name that includes the run date. The detailed database is used to create a summarized database file that also uses run date …

Program demonstration and user instructions are presented for FabryVB5. This computer program was created for use in analyzing Fabry-Perot interferometer records that detail the velocity time histories of fast moving surfaces. Graphical curves representing peak fringe positions and fiducial timing dots are extracted from a digitized film record or from a CCD digital image. An analysis is demonstrated on a sample velocimeter record along with some mathematical formula and routine operations. Routines used to analyze calibration records on streak camera distortions are illustrated in an appendix. This is a Microsoft Visual Basic{trademark} version for the PC.

The lower boundary condition of sea surface temperature (SST) and sea-ice concentration (sic) is a critical forcing of the lower frequencies in multi-decadal global atmospheric reanalyses such as ERA-40. Partly in response to the ERA-40 project, new SST/sic data sets have been developed that are considerably improved over those available to the first-generation reanalyses. This paper documents the input SST/sic data sets and the processing that created the daily SST/sic specification for the ERA-40 period 1956-2001. The source data are: (1) the monthly mean HadISST data set from the UKMO Hadley Centre for 1956-1981; and (2) the weekly NCEP 2DVAR data for 1982-present. Both data sets are reanalyses of satellite and conventional SST/sic observations. The principal reason for the higher quality of these source data sets is the use of a common consensus sic and a common sic-SST relationship in the sea ice margins. The use of a common sic resulted in a very smooth transition between HadISST and NCEP 2DVAR, despite differences in data assimilation techniques and monthly versus weekly analyses. No special action was required to insure consistency at the transition unlike as was necessary for the AMIP II experiment (Fiorino, 1997). The only special processing was application …

Medicare, the nationwide health insurance program for the aged and disabled, does not cover most outpatient prescription drugs. On several occasions, the Congress has considered providing coverage for at least a portion of beneficiaries’ drug costs. The issue received renewed attention in the 106th Congress. However, there was no consensus on how the coverage should be structured. This report provides a side-by-side comparison of bills introduced in the 107th Congress that have received the most attention.