A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General (OIG) has identified significant vulnerabilities in Veterans Affairs' (VA) use of government purchase cards. In its April 26, 2004 report, the OIG reported instances of fraudulent activity totaling $435,900, and numerous improper and questionable uses of the purchase cards totaling $1.1 million. Given that VHA comprised at least 90 percent of VA's dollar and transaction volume for fiscal year 2002, GAO was asked to determine whether existing controls at VHA were designed to provide reasonable assurance that in the future, improper purchases would be prevented or detected in the normal course of business, purchase card and convenience check expenditures were made in compliance with applicable laws and regulations, and purchases were made for a reasonable cost and a valid government need."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This report contains in a single document the budgetary implications of selected program reforms discussed in past GAO work but not yet implemented or enacted. Since 1994, we have prepared annual reports similar to this product, in order to continue to assist congressional committees in identifying approaches to reduce federal spending or increase revenues. This year's report contains over 100 examples of budget options organized by budget function. Where possible, budgetary savings estimates provided by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) or the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) are presented."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In 1906, the Alaska Native Allotment Act authorized the Secretary of the Interior to allot individual Alaska Natives (Native) a homestead of up to 160 acres. The validity of some of Copper Valley Electric Association's (Copper Valley) rights-of-way within Alaska Native allotments is the subject of ongoing dispute; in some cases the allottees assert that Copper Valley's electric lines trespass on their land. The Department of the Interior's (Interior) Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) are responsible for granting rights-of-way and handling disputes between allotees and holders of rights-of-way. GAO determined (1) the number of conflicts between Native allotments and Copper Valley rights-of-way and the factors that contributed to these conflicts, (2) the extent to which existing remedies have been used to resolve these conflicts, and (3) what legislative alternatives, if any, could be considered to resolve these conflicts."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Improving the federal hiring process is critical given the increasing number of new hires expected in the next few years. Congress asked GAO to report on the (1) status of recent efforts to help improve the federal hiring process and (2) extent to which federal agencies are using two new hiring flexibilities--category rating and direct-hire authority. Category rating permits an agency to select any job candidate placed in a best-qualified category. Direct-hire authority allows an agency to appoint individuals to positions without adherence to certain competitive examination requirements when there is a severe shortage of qualified candidates or a critical hiring need."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Congress asked GAO to review operational and programmatic aspects of the Census Bureau's ACS that will affect the reliability of small geographic area data. The ACS will be a mail survey of about 3 million households annually, whose results will be cumulated over 5 years to produce estimates that will replace information previously provided by the Decennial Census long form. In addition, annual data will be published for geographic areas with 65,000+ populations and as 3-year averages for areas with populations of 20,000 to 65,000. Annual data will be published beginning in 2006 with data for 2005. The 5-year averages for 2008-12 will provide data for small geographic areas."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Costs for overseas posts' administrative support services have risen nearly 30 percent since fiscal year 2001, reaching about $1 billion in 2003. These costs are distributed among 50 agencies through the International Cooperative Administrative Support Services (ICASS) system, which was designed to reduce costs and provide quality services in a simple, transparent, and equitable manner. Since ICASS was implemented in 1998, its performance has not been systematically reviewed. GAO was asked to examine (1) whether ICASS has led to efficient delivery of administrative services and (2) whether ICASS is an effective mechanism for providing quality services."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Congress needs the best available data about DOD's resource tradeoffs between the dual priorities of transformation and fighting the global war on terrorism. To help shape its priorities, in 2001 DOD developed a capabilities-based approach focused on how future adversaries might fight, and a risk management framework to ensure that current defense needs are balanced against future requirements. Because the Future Years Defense Program (FYDP) is DOD's centralized report providing DOD and Congress data on current and planned resource allocations, GAO assessed the extent to which the FYDP provides Congress visibility over (1) projected defense spending and (2) implementation of DOD's capabilities-based defense strategy and risk management framework."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "A critical element of the Department of Veterans Affairs' (VA) information technology program is its continuing work with the Department of Defense (DOD) to achieve the ability to exchange patient health care information and create electronic medical records for use by veterans, active-duty military personnel, and their health care providers."

A chapter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Reliable and complete data are needed to assess watersheds--areas that drain into a common body of water--and allocate limited cleanup resources. Historically, water officials have expressed concern about a lack of water data. At the same time, numerous organizations collect a variety of water data. To address a number of issues concerning the water data that various organization collect, the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment, House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, asked GAO to determine (1) the key entities that collect water data, the types of data they collect, how they store the data, and how entities can access the data; and (2) the extent that water quality and water quantity data collection efforts are coordinated."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Two large food recalls completed in 2003 were associated with 8 deaths and nearly 100 serious illnesses in at least 16 states. Manufacturers voluntarily recall potentially unsafe food by notifying their customers to return or destroy it. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), for meat, poultry, and egg products, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), for other food, have programs to monitor voluntary food recalls, verify that companies contact their customers, and maintain recall data. GAO (1) examined the recall programs and procedures USDA and FDA use to protect consumers from unsafe foods and (2) compared their food recall authority with the authority of agencies to recall other consumer products."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 (MMA) requires the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to conduct large-scale competitive bidding for durable medical equipment, supplies, off-the-shelf orthotics, and enteral nutrients and related equipment and supplies provided to beneficiaries. The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 mandated that GAO study an earlier Medicare competitive bidding demonstration. To address this mandate, GAO assessed this past experience in relation to four issues that CMS might consider as it implements large-scale competitive bidding: (1) items for competitive bidding, (2) how to streamline implementation, (3) ways to collect information on specific items provided to beneficiaries, and (4) steps to ensure quality items and services."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The federal government spends more than $230 billion annually for products and services to conduct its operations. Through its purchasing decisions, it has the opportunity to affirm its policies and goals, including those related to purchases of biobased products, as set out in the 2002 farm bill. A biobased product is a commercial or industrial product, other than food or feed that is composed of, in whole or part, biological products, renewable domestic agricultural materials, or forestry materials. GAO examined (1) actions the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and other agencies have taken to carry out farm bill requirements for purchasing biobased products, (2) additional actions that may be needed to implement the requirements, and (3) views of stakeholders on the need for and costs of testing biobased products. GAO interviewed officials from USDA, major procuring agencies, testing entities, interested associations, and 15 manufacturers of biobased products."

The project ''Reinforcement of Aluminum Casting with Dissimilar Metal'' was a Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs) between Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Cummins Inc. This project, technologies have been developed to reinforce aluminum castings with steel insert. Defect-free bond between the steel insert and the aluminum casting has been consistently obtained. The push-out experiment indicated that the bond strength is higher than that of the Al-Fin method. Two patents have been granted to the project team that is comprised of Cummins Inc. and ORNL. This report contains four sections: the coating of the steel pins, the cast-in method, microstructure characterization, and the bond strength. The section of the coating of the steel pins contains coating material selection, electro-plating technique for plating Cu and Ni on steel, and diffusion bonding of the coatings to the steel. The section of cast-in method deals with factors that affecting the quality of the metallurgical bond between the coated steel and the aluminum castings. The results of microstructure characteristics of the bonding are presented in the microstructure characterization section. A push-out experiment and the results obtained using this method is described in the section of bond strength/mechanical property.

Depleted uranium hexafluoride (UF{sub 6}) is stored in over 60,000 steel cylinders at the East Tennessee Technology Park (ETTP) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant (PGDP) in Paducah, Kentucky, and at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant (PORTS) in Portsmouth, Ohio. The cylinders range in age from 4 to 53 years. Although when new the cylinders had wall thicknesses specified to within manufacturing tolerances, over the years corrosion has reduced their actual wall thicknesses. The UF{sub 6} Cylinder Project is managed by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) to safely maintain the UF{sub 6} and the cylinders containing it. This report documents activities that address UF{sub 6} Cylinder Project requirements and actions involving forecasting cylinder wall thicknesses. These requirements are delineated in the System Requirements Document (LMES 1997a), and the actions needed to fulfill them are specified in the System Engineering Management Plan (LMES 1997b). The report documents cylinder wall thickness projections based on models fit to ultrasonic thickness (UT) measurement data. UT data is collected at various locations on randomly sampled cylinders. For each cylinder sampled, the minimum UT measurement approximates the actual minimum thickness of the cylinder. Projections of numbers of cylinders expected to …

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The Senate publishes its rules, precedents, and other related information so that Senators and their staff have convenient access to the Senate’s legislative procedures and can gauge how those procedures are likely to apply in various situations. Information about the Senate’s legislative procedures is published in four official documents. This report discusses these documents.

This report includes background, issues, and legislation regarding safe drinking water.

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This report evaluates assertions, and considers other effects China's peg has on the U.S. economy. This report also summarizes the analysis presented in CRS Report RL32165, "China's Exchange Rate Peg: Economic Issues and Options for U.S. Trade Policy".

General frameworks for distributed computing are slowly evolving out of Grid, Peer Architecture, and Web Services. The following results from a summer long survey into distributing computing practices have revealed three things. One, that Legion and Cactus-G have achieved the most in terms of providing an all-purpose application environment. Two, that extending a local programming environment to operate in a highly distributed fashion can be facilitated with toolkits like Globus. Three, that building a new system from the ground up could be realized, in part, by using some of the following components; an Object Oriented Database, Tapestry, JXTA, BOINC, Globus, component architecture technology, XML and related libraries, Condor-G, Proteus, and ParMETIS.

Phase stability and aging mechanisms in a water-quenched (WQ) U-6wt% Nb (U-14at% Nb) alloy artificially aged at 200 C and naturally aged at ambient temperature for 15 years have been investigated and studied using Vickers-hardness measurement, X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis, and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) techniques. Age hardening/softening phenomenon is recorded from the artificially aged samples based upon the microhardness measurement. The age hardening can be readily rationalized by the occurrence of fine-scaled Nb segregation, or spinodal decomposition, within the {alpha}'' domains, which results in the formation of a modulated structure containing nano-scaled Nb-rich and Nb-lean domains. Prolonged aging leads to age softening of the alloy by coarsening of the modulated structure. Chemical ordering, or disorder-order phase transformation, is found within the naturally aged alloy according to TEM observations of antiphase domain boundaries (APBs) and superlattice diffraction patterns. A possible superlattice structure for the ordered {alpha}'' phase observed in the naturally aged sample and underlying low-temperature aging mechanisms are proposed.

This ICN documents the installation of three additional downgradient monitoring wells and one additional upgradient well. It updates the monitoring network and the stratigraphy of the aquifer.

In looking at simulations for the x-ray microscope the question ''Is it necessary to use the multislice method to adequately model the transmission of x-rays through the target?'' has been raised. Another question that has been raised is ''Is it necessary to include diffraction effects in our simulations?'' The purpose of this report is to lay these questions to rest. The short answer to both of these questions is ''No''. The multislice method (also known as the beam propagation method (BPM)) is used to solve the paraxial wave equation. The paraxial wave equation is what the Helmholtz equation reduces to in the limit of small index of refraction deviations and small angular deviations. It lies in the middle ground between full wave simulation and ray tracing (a short wavelength limit). The BPM takes a region and cuts it into strips. The method then propagates a wavefront through the region one strip at a time. For each strip, the method first propagates the wavefront the width of the strip as if through free space (diffraction step), then the method applies a phase correction based on the index of refraction distribution in the strip (refraction step). In this way the method marches …