This report examines these proposals as well as the “Medicare Rx Drug Benefit and Discount Act of 2003,” which was introduced by Representative Charles Rangel, the ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee. Specifically, this report provides background on how the cost-sharing and premium provisions under each bill would affect the amount that a beneficiary pays annually for prescription drugs.

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This issue brief views reorganization and management as involving the alteration of the program administrative structure and operations of the executive branch for reasons of efficiency, economy, and direction. The underlying issue is who reorganizes or sets management policy—Congress or the President— and by what authority and, also, for what purpose?

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Under provisions of the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (EGTRRA, P.L. 107-16, enacted June 7, 2001), the estate tax is scheduled to be repealed in 2010 but reinstated in 2011. All tax cut provisions of EGTRRA are scheduled to sunset on December 31, 2010. This report tracks actions in the 108th Congress to permanently repeal the estate tax or to retain but alter the tax.

This report provides an overview of efforts to reform and improve financial management in the federal government in the last 25 years. The Federal Managers Financial Integrity Act of 1982, generally regarded as the first of these efforts, was intended to strengthen internal controls and accounting systems. The Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 followed and created a new leadership structure for financial management, including two new positions in the Office of Management and Budget and 24 chief financial officer (CFO) and deputy CFO positions in the major executive departments and agencies. Other provisions in the CFO Act as originally enacted addressed the improvement of financial management systems, requirements for audited financial statements and management reporting, and changes in audits and reporting requirements for government corporations.

Bill introduced by the Texas Senate relating to the regulation and prompt payment of health care providers; providing penalties.

Funeral program for Mr. Paul Virgil Dymond, born November 1, 1917. The funeral was held June 17, 2003 at St. Philip's Episcopal Church. The funeral arrangements were made through Sutton and Sutton Mortuary.

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In 2001, an estimated 2 million elderly households with very low incomes (50 percent or less of area median income) did not receive housing assistance. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) considered most of these households to be "rent burdened" because they spent more than 30 percent of their incomes on rent. The Section 202 Supportive Housing for the Elderly Program provides capital advances (grants) to nonprofit organizations to develop affordable rental housing exclusively for these households. Based on a report issued in May 2003, this testimony discusses the role of the Section 202 program in addressing the need for affordable elderly housing and factors affecting the timeliness of approving and constructing new projects."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Invasive species--nonnative plants and animals--have caused billions of dollars in damage to natural areas, businesses, and consumers. In 2001, the federal government issued a National Management Plan to coordinate a national control effort involving the 20 or so federal agencies that are responsible for managing invasive species. In October 2002, GAO reported on the implementation of the management plan and efforts to manage ballast water, among other things. This testimony discusses some of GAO's findings and recommendations in that report. It also presents the results of a subsequent GAO survey of state officials responsible for managing terrestrial and aquatic invasive species. This survey sought state perspectives on (1) the perceived gaps in existing legislation and barriers to addressing terrestrial and aquatic invasive species and (2) the federal leadership structure for addressing invasive species, as well as the integration of federal legislation on terrestrial invasive species with legislation on aquatic invasives."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Defense (DOD) and its military services are responsible for complying with a broad range of environmental laws and other requirements that apply to the lands they manage, including more than 425 major military installations covering about 25 million acres across the United States. Through its environmental quality program, DOD spends about $2 billion per year to comply with these requirements. Although the services have made significant improvements in environmental management in recent years, DOD has not reached full environmental compliance. In response to the Senate Armed Services Committee's report on the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2002, we assessed how DOD and the services identify, prioritize, and fund their environmental quality activities to determine whether the most important and appropriate activities are funded."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Energy (DOE) oversees one of the largest cleanup programs in history--the treatment and disposal of 94 million gallons of highly radioactive nuclear waste from the nation's nuclear weapons program. This waste is currently at DOE sites in Washington, Idaho, and South Carolina. In 2002, DOE began an initiative to reduce the estimated $105-billion cost and 70-year time frame of this cleanup. GAO was asked to determine the status of this initiative, the legal and technical challenges DOE faces in implementing it, and any further opportunities to reduce costs or improve program management."

An expanding ring was developed that provided remote repair of the pour spout for a radioactive waste vitrification melter. This passive device used gas pressure to expand a metal ring against the irregularly shaped pour spout wall. Laboratory modeling and testing were performed for proof of concept and optimization before final design and field deployment. The ring expanded radially more than 4.8 mm and successfully repaired the melter pour spout allowing continued glass pouring operation.

The breakup of injected fuel into spray is of key interest to the design of a fuel efficient, nonpolluting diesel engine. We report preliminary progress on the numerical simulation of diesel fuel injection spray with the front tracking code FronTier. Our simulation design is set to match experiments at ANL, and our present agreement is semi-quantitative. Future efforts will include mesh refinement studies, which will better model the turbulent flow.

The Savannah River Technology Center (SRTC) - Immobilization Technology Section (ITS) was requested to perform simulant bench-scale flowsheet studies to qualify Sludge Batch 3 (SB3), the next sludge batch to be processed at the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF). Simulant flowsheet runs have been performed for every sludge batch that has been qualified for DWPF processing to date. SB3 will consist primarily of Tank 7 sludge, but will also contain transfers from other tanks and processes at the SRS and other materials not considered typical for DWPF processing. Projections also indicate that SB3 may contain higher than previously observed levels of noble metals. Over the last year, SRTC has focused significant effort on studies to understand the behavior of SB3 and to evaluate any necessary process changes.

The performance of Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator, currently in its Run II stage, is degraded by beam loss and emittance dilution during ramping from injection to collision energy. This could be related in part to insufficient compensation of dynamic effects such as the decay of the magnetic field in the dipoles during the dwell at injection and the following so-called snapback during the first few seconds of the energy ramp. The two effects are closely related and depend on the powering history of the magnets. Dynamic effects, which were originally discovered at the Tevatron, were investigated on Tevatron magnets in various past measurement campaigns in the 1980s and later in 1996. This paper reports on the most recent measurements performed on an additional set of Tevatron magnets.

This document describes some of the exciting possibilities for the next steps in the field of long baseline neutrino oscillation measurements. Because the primary goals of these new experiments are so different from those of the current generation, one cannot simply increase the running time or detector mass of the current programs. There are several new strategies which have been discussed for taking the next steps: sometimes the detectors, sometimes the beamlines, and sometimes both are radically different from what is now in place.

A new scheme to accurately retain kinetic electron effects in particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations for the case of electrostatic drift waves is presented. The splitting scheme, which is based on exact separation between adiabatic and on adiabatic electron responses, is shown to yield more accurate linear growth rates than the standard df scheme. The linear and nonlinear elliptic problems that arise in the splitting scheme are solved using a multi-grid solver. The multi-grid particle-in-cell approach offers an attractive path, both from the physics and numerical points of view, to simulate kinetic electron dynamics in global toroidal plasmas.

The baseline flowsheet for low activity waste in the Hanford River Protection Project Waste Treatment Plant includes pretreatment of supernatant by removing technetium using ion exchange. The primary purpose of this work is validation of the predictions of the Tc eluate computer model.

The baseline flowsheet for low activity waste (LAW) in the Hanford River Protection Project (RPP) Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) includes pretreatment of supernatant by removing cesium using ion exchange. When the ion exchange column is loaded, the cesium will be eluted with a 0.5M nitric acid (HNO3) solution to allow the column to be conditioned for re-use. The cesium eluate solution will then be concentrated in a vacuum evaporator to minimize storage volume and to recycle HNO3.

Every five years since the mid-1970s DOE has requested an update on the meteorological conditions at SRS in order to provide dose calculations for accident or routine release scenarios for onsite and offsite populations. The meteorological database includes wind speed, wind direction, temperature, dew point, and horizontal and vertical turbulence intensities. The two most recent databases prior to the current one were completed in 1998 for the time period 1992-96 (Weber, 1998) and one for 1987-91 (Parker, et. al., 1992). The current database covers the period 1997-2001. The advantage of updating the database every five years is that meteorological observations are steadily growing more complete and less subject to errors with the implementation of better electronic data archiving software and hardware, and improved data quality assurance procedures. Also, changes in the region's climate may be manifest.