This report looks at the background and current Congressional status of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act of 2002.

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "While the previous two-contract structure of the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program met Department of Defense (DOD) needs for unprecedented mission success and an at-the-ready launch capability, the scope of its capability contract limited DOD’s ability to identify the cost of an individual launch, as direct launch costs were not separated from other costs. Minimal insight into contractor cost or pricing data meant DOD may have lacked sufficient knowledge to negotiate fair and reasonable launch prices."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Of the 29 federal programs GAO reviewed (which accounted for about 86 percent of federal program spending for states or their residents in fiscal year 2010), statehood would likely affect 11 programs. For 3 other programs, while the programs themselves would likely not change under statehood, eligibility determinations for these programs could be affected indirectly by changes that could occur to benefits in other programs. Statehood would not likely affect the 15 remaining programs. See figure below."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 (MMA) reformed the way the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency that administers Medicare, contracts with claims administration contractors. From its inception, the process for selecting Medicare fee-for-service (FFS) claims administration contractors was stipulated by Congress and differed from most other federal contracts in that, among other things, the Medicare contracts were not awarded through a competitive process. The MMA repealed limitations on the types of contractors CMS could use and required that CMS use competitive procedures to select new contracting entities to process medical claims and provide incentives for contractors to provide quality services. CMS has implemented the MMA contracting reform requirements by shifting and consolidating all claims administration tasks to new entities called Medicare Administrative Contractors. CMS is currently in the process of further consolidating these contracts. The agency also uses other contractors to review claims to ensure payments are proper and investigate potential fraud."

This report provides information on the origins, content, and submission dates of the President's budget.

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Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: When district courts should begin collecting the new fees for electronic filing under House Bill 2302 and Senate Bill390 (RQ-1151-GA).

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This report consists of the bureau of prisons in operations and budget.

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The emergence of new classes of HPC systems where performance improvement is enabled by Moore’s Law for technology is manifest through multi-core-based architectures including specialized GPU structures. Operating systems were originally designed for control of uniprocessor systems. By the 1980s multiprogramming, virtual memory, and network interconnection were integral services incorporated as part of most modern computers. HPC operating systems were primarily derivatives of the Unix model with Linux dominating the Top-500 list. The use of Linux for commodity clusters was first pioneered by the NASA Beowulf Project. However, the rapid increase in number of cores to achieve performance gain through technology advances has exposed the limitations of POSIX general-purpose operating systems in scaling and efficiency. This project was undertaken through the leadership of Sandia National Laboratories and in partnership of the University of New Mexico to investigate the alternative of composable lightweight kernels on scalable HPC architectures to achieve superior performance for a wide range of applications. The use of composable operating systems is intended to provide a minimalist set of services specifically required by a given application to preclude overheads and operational uncertainties (“OS noise”) that have been demonstrated to degrade efficiency and operational consistency. This project was undertaken …

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Report on House Committee Procedures for the regular session of the 84th legislature.