The appropriate size and role of the government is one of the most fundamental and enduring debates in American politics. What role does the state play in economic activity? How is the economy affected by government intervention? Many of the arguments surrounding the proper size of government are economic in nature, and they will be discussed in this report.

The issue of North Korea's inclusion on the U.S. list of terrorism-supporting countries has been a major issue in U.S.-North Korean diplomacy since 2000, particularly in connection with negotiations over North Korea's nuclear program. North Korea demanded that the Clinton and Bush Administration remove North Korea from the terrorism support list. Secretary of State Clinton said on June 7, 2009, that the Obama Administration would consider reinstating North Korea on the list of state supporters of terrorism. However, she said that there would have to be "recent evidence of their support for international terrorism."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "On May 13, 2005, the Secretary of Defense submitted proposed base realignment and closure (BRAC) actions to an independent commission for its review. The Commission must submit its recommendations to the President by September 8, 2005, for his acceptance or rejection in their entirety. Congress has final action to accept or reject these recommendations in their entirety later this year. The law requires that GAO issue a report on the Department of Defense's (DOD) recommendations and selection process by July 1, 2005. GAO's objectives were to (1) determine the extent to which DOD's proposals achieved its stated BRAC goals, (2) analyze whether the process for developing recommendations was logical and reasoned, and (3) identify issues with the recommendations that may warrant further attention. Time constraints limited GAO's ability to examine implementation details of most of the individual recommended actions."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) has hundreds of millions of dollars of funded work that its working capital fund activities did not complete before the end of the fiscal year. Reducing the amount of workload carryover at fiscal year-end is a key factor in the effective management of Department of Defense (DOD) resources and in minimizing the "banking" of funds for work to be performed in subsequent years. GAO was asked to analyze SPAWAR's carryover balances. GAO assessed the accuracy of the budgeted amounts, the accuracy of the reported actual carryover balance, and the reliability of underlying financial data on which reported actual carryover is based."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO has considered Department of Defense (DOD) inventory management to be a high-risk area since 1990 because inventory management systems and procedures are ineffective. This report evaluates the Air Force's inventory control procedures for material shipped to contractors for repair or for use in repair. The Air Force and contractor personnel have not complied with DOD and Air Force inventory control procedures designed to safeguard material shipped to contractors, placing items worth billions of dollars at risk of fraud, waste, and abuse. The Air Force's three inventory control points have not restricted repair contractors' access to the specific items and quantities of government-furnished material needed to accomplish the contract. Quarterly reports on the status of shipped material have not been sent to property administration officials at the Defense Contract Management Agency. Contractors receiving shipped material have not (1) properly entered the receipt of shipments into their records and into the inventory control points' reporting systems or (2) routinely reported shipment discrepancies. Air Force procedures for following up on shipments that contractors have not confirmed as received are ineffective, leaving the status of the shipments uncertain. The …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Veterans Claims Assistance Act of 2000 was passed in response to concerns expressed by veterans, veterans service organizations, and Congress over a 1999 decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims that held that the VA did not have a duty to assist veterans in developing their claims unless they were "well-grounded." The Veterans' Benefits Administration (VBA) has taken a number of steps, including issuing guidance, revising and supplementing this guidance based on questions raised by regional offices, and reinforcing the guidance based on the results of its accuracy reviews. Despite these efforts, VBA has found problems with consistent regional office compliance with the law. While taking steps to implement the act, VBA is also focusing on significantly increasing production and reducing the claims inventory to manage the slowdown in case processing. In fiscal year 2002, VBA plans to complete 839,000 claims to reduce its inventory to 316,000 claims."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Bayh-Dole Act gives federal contractors, grantees, and cooperative agreement funding recipients the option to retain ownership rights to inventions they create as part of a federally sponsored research project and profit from commercializing them. The act also protects the government's interests, in part by requiring that federal agencies and their authorized funding recipients retain a license to practice the invention for government purposes. GAO examined (1) who is eligible to use and benefit from the government's license to federally funded biomedical inventions, (2) the extent to which the federal government has licenses to those biomedical inventions it procures or uses most commonly, and (3) the extent to which federal agencies and authorized federal funding recipients have actually used or benefited from these licenses. GAO focused its work on the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the Department of Defense (DOD), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). NIH commented that the report implies that the government's right to use its license is more limited than it actually is. GAO recognizes that the right of federal agencies and their funding recipients to use a federally funded invention …

This report discusses the drastic increase in demand for homeowners' insurance in Atlantic and Gulf Coast states following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. This report also discusses various measures and efforts underway to enhance insurer capacity, pursue alternative forms of risk transfer, and create a national catastrophe financing facility, the last of which is an issue under considerable debate.

There are 645 informal (Congressional) Member organizations listed in the Congressional Yellow Book or registered with the Committee on House Administration. Of these 645 informal organizations, 256 are registered with the Committee on House Administration as a congressional Member organization (CMO). This report examines the purpose and activities of CMOs and the reasons Members form them. It also identifies and describes seven CMO types, and it provides an overview of the historical development of informal Member organizations since the first Congress. It concludes with a step-by-step guide for House Members and staff who might be interested in forming a CMO.

The United Nations Security Council unanimously passed Res. 1874 on June 12, 2009, in response to North Korea's second nuclear test. The resolution puts in place a series of sanctions on North Korea's arms sales, luxury goods, and financial transactions related to its weapons programs, and calls upon states to inspect North Korean vessels suspected of carrying such shipments. This report summarizes and analyzes Res. 1874.

After several decades of widespread stagnation, nuclear power is attracting renewed interest. Expanding global access to nuclear power has the potential to lead to the spread of nuclear technology that could be used for nuclear weapons. This report discusses the issue of nuclear power with regard to nuclear weapons nonproliferation policies, the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) begun under the Bush Administration, the future of the GNEP under the Obama Administration, and four areas of oversight in which Congress will have a considerable role.

This report summarizes what is known from open sources about the North Korean nuclear weapons program - including weapons-usable fissile material and warhead estimates - and assesses current developments in achieving denuclearization.

In February 2009, Kyrgyzstan announced that it was terminating an agreement permitting U.S. forces to upgrade and use portions of the Manas international airport near the capital of Bishkek to support coalition military operations in Afghanistan. U.S. forces faced leaving the airbase by late August 2009. Major U.S. concerns included working out alternative logistics routes and support functions for a surge in U.S. and NATO operations in Afghanistan and possibly cooler security ties with Kyrgyzstan that could set back U.S. counter-terrorism efforts and other U.S. interests in Central Asia. After reportedly intense negotiations, the United States and Kyrgyzstan reached agreement in June 2009 on modalities for maintaining U.S. and NATO transit operations at Manas.

The distinguishing feature of our collaborative program of study is the focus it brings to emergent phenomena originating from the unique structural/electronic environments found in nanoscale materials. We exploit and develop frontier methods of atomic-scale materials characterization based on electron microscopy (Yang) and synchrotron X-ray absorption spectroscopy (Frenkel) that are in turn coupled innately with advanced first principles theory and methods of computational modeling (Johnson). In the past year we have made significant experimental advances that have led to important new understandings of the structural dynamics of what are unquestionably the most important classes of heterogeneous catalysts—the materials used to both produce and mitigate the consequences of the use of liquid hydrocarbon fuels.

EMSL, located in Richland, Washington, is a national scientific user facility operated for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The vision that directed the development of EMSL as a problem-solving environment for environmental molecular science has led to significant scientific progress in many areas ranging from subsurface science to atmospheric sciences, and from biochemistry to catalysis. Our scientific staff and users are recognized nationally and internationally for their significant contributions to solving challenging scientific problems. We have explored new scientific frontiers and organized a vibrant and diverse user community in support of our mission as a national scientific user facility that provides integrated experimental and computational resources in the environmental molecular sciences. Users from around the world - from academia to industry and national laboratories to international research organizations - use the resources of EMSL because of the quality of science that we enable.

The global market for wireless sensor networks in 2010 will be valued close to $10 B, or 200 M units. TPL, Inc. is a small Albuquerque based business that has positioned itself to be a leader in providing uninterruptible power supplies in this growing market with projected revenues expected to exceed $26 M in 5 years. This project focused on improving TPL, Inc.'s patent-pending EnerPak{trademark} device which converts small amounts of energy from the environment (e.g., vibrations, light or temperature differences) into electrical energy that can be used to charge small energy storage devices. A critical component of the EnerPak{trademark} is the supercapacitor that handles high power delivery for wireless communications; however, optimization and miniaturization of this critical component is required. This proposal aimed to produce prototype microsupercapacitors through the integration of novel materials and fabrication processes developed at New Mexico Technology Research Collaborative (NMTRC) member institutions. In particular, we focused on developing novel ruthenium oxide nanomaterials and placed them into carbon supports to significantly increase the energy density of the supercapacitor. These improvements were expected to reduce maintenance costs and expand the utility of the TPL, Inc.'s device, enabling New Mexico to become the leader in the growing global …

This case study describes how the J.R. Simplot company's Don Plant in Pocatello, Idaho, achieved annual savings of $335,000 and 75,000 MMBtu, with a simple payback of 6.5 months, after receiving a DOE Save Energy Now energy assessment.

This report presents the framework that was developed to analyze energy efficiency and renewable energy policies on the state level based on how well they meet the stakeholder drivers.

This report summarizes the experimental results done with the fundamental damper for the 56 MHz prototype Cu cavity. Various measurements were done on the cavity including determination of the position of the fundamental damper and measurement of the frequency and Q factor changes while the damper is withdrawn. Prediction on the dissipated power while the damper is withdrawn was made by experiments.

Clean Cities Now is the official newsletter of DOE's Clean Cities program. It includes articles on coalition activities, fleet and stakeholder success stories, and helpful resources.

This document defines a test plan for a long-term (2500 Hour) test of a ten-cell high-temperature electrolysis stack to be performed at INL during FY09 under the Nuclear Hydrogen Initiative. This test was originally planned for FY08, but was removed from our work scope as a result of the severe budget cuts in the FY08 NHI Program. The purpose of this test is to evaluate stack performance degradation over a relatively long time period and to attempt to identify some of the degradation mechanisms via post-test examination. This test will be performed using a planar ten-cell Ceramatec stack, with each cell having dimensions of 10 cm × 10 cm. The specific makeup of the stack will be based on the results of a series of shorter duration ten-cell stack tests being performed during FY08, funded by NGNP. This series of tests was aimed at evaluating stack performance with different interconnect materials and coatings and with or without brazed edge rails. The best performing stack from the FY08 series, in which five different interconnect/coating/edge rail combinations were tested, will be selected for the FY09 long-term test described herein.

This Test Definition for the Evaluation of Digitizing Waveform Recorders (DWR) defines the process that can be performed as part of the evaluation and testing of geophysical sensors, digitizers, sensor subsystems and geophysical station/array systems. The objectives are to (1) evaluate the overall technical performance of the DWR, measure the distortions introduced by the high resolution digitizers and provide a performance check of the internal calibrator if provided and (2) evaluate the technical performance of the DWR for a specific sensor application. The results of these evaluations can be compared to the manufacturer's specifications and any relevant application requirements or specifications.

The polarization of the proton beams [1, 2] at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)[3] RHIC ring. The H-Jet polarimeter is located at the collision point allowing measurements of absolute normalization is provided by the hydrogen polarimeter, which measures over 1 {approx} 2 another measurement rather than measuring the absolute polarization. both beams. Two identical pC-polarimeters are equipped in the yellow and blue rings, where carbon ribbon target, providing fast feedback to beam operations and experiments. The days to obtain {approx} 5% statistical uncertainty (in Run05). Thus, the operation of the carbon is measured using both an atomic beam source hydrogen gas jet (H-Jet)[4, 5] and proton-carbon polarimeters was focused on better control of relative stability between one measurement to statistical accuracy within 20 to 30 seconds using an ultra-thin (typically 6 {approx} 8 {micro}g/cm{sup 2}) the rings are separated. The pC-polarimeter measures relative polarization to a few percent.

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