Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Over the past several years, GAO has made a number of recommendations to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)—an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—to increase savings in Medicare fee-for-service and Medicare Advantage (MA), which is a private plan alternative to the traditional Medicare fee-for-service program. Open recommendations that could yield billions of dollars in savings remain in many areas, such as the following:"

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "GAO’s past work has found that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) have faced challenges in developing and meeting program requirements when acquiring screening technologies. GAO’s past work has demonstrated that program performance cannot be accurately assessed without valid baseline requirements established at the program start. In June 2010, GAO reported that more than half of the 15 DHS programs GAO reviewed awarded contracts to initiate acquisition activities without component or department approval of documents essential to planning acquisitions, setting operational requirements, or establishing acquisition program baselines. At the program level, in January 2012, GAO reported that TSA did not fully follow DHS acquisition policies when acquiring advanced imaging technology (AIT)—commonly referred to as a full body scanner that identifies objects or anomalies on the outside of the body—which resulted in DHS approving full AIT deployment without full knowledge of TSA’s revised specifications. In July 2011, GAO reported that in 2010 TSA revised its explosive detection systems (EDS) requirements to better address current threats and planned to implement these requirements in a phased approach; however, GAO reported that some number of the …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Our work on the outcomes of the CBP round 1 rebid found that the number of bidding suppliers and the number of contracts awarded in the CBP round 1 rebid were very similar to the CBP round 1 and about a third of the 1,011 suppliers that bid in the rebid were awarded at least one CBP contract. CMS made improvements to the bidding process for the CBP round 1 rebid—such as providing additional information about disqualification reasons—and significantly fewer bids were disqualified than in round 1. However, many suppliers still had difficulty meeting bid requirements. Of the bids that were disqualified during the initial bid review, 73 percent were disqualified because suppliers failed to provide the required financial documentation or did not meet CMS’s minimum financial standard threshold for suppliers. The number of bids disqualified for missing financial documentation in the CBP round 1 rebid would have been higher if many suppliers had not benefited from a MIPPA provision that required that CMS provide suppliers the opportunity to be notified of and to submit missing required financial documentation—a process not available during CBP round 1. As a …

The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an oral interview with Charles Engh. Engh entered the Navy’s V-1 program before beginning V-12 in July 1943. He graduated from midshipmen’s school in 1945 and was sent to Subic Bay in June on lighterage duty as a yeoman. In July he was sent to Okinawa with a flotilla of LCTs that drifted out of formation each night and would spend the following day reorganizing. He was beached by a typhoon at Okinawa for 10 days until a channel was dredged and a tug and bulldozer helped with maneuvering. In October he was sent to China, where he delivered bombs to the Nationalists. After turning his LCT over to the Chinese, Engh returned home in June 1946.

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Since 2001, SSA has reported spending more than $5 billion on the development, modernization, and enhancement of its IT systems and capabilities. SSA officials identified 120 initiatives undertaken from 2001 to 2011 that the agency considered to be key investments in modernization. These comprise a subset of the hundreds of projects and modernization activities SSA undertakes yearly, which vary greatly in level of effort, scope, and cost. These initiatives affected all of the agency’s main program areas:"