A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Despite efficiency gains from processing more tax returns electronically, adding website services, and shifting resources from enforcement, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was unable to keep up with demand for telephone and correspondence services. Access to IRS's telephone assistors remained at 68 percent from 2012. The percentage of overage paper correspondence (over 45 days old) increased to 47 percent from 40 percent in 2012. In the face of similar trends, last year GAO reported that a dramatic revision in IRS's taxpayer service strategy was needed and recommended IRS take steps to better balance demand for services with available resources. GAO acknowledged this may require IRS to consider difficult tradeoffs, such as limiting some services. In response, IRS has proposed eliminating or reducing some services for 2014 such as answering basic tax law questions only during the filing season. However, IRS officials told GAO the proposed cuts may not be sufficient to stop the deterioration in services. Until IRS develops a strategy, it risks not communicating expectations about the level of services it can provide based on the resources available. IRS could use the strategy to facilitate …

The Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) will use colemanite bearing concrete neutron absorber panels credited with attenuating neutron flux in the criticality design analyses and shielding operators from radiation. The Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) is tasked with measuring the total density, partial hydrogen density, and partial boron density of the colemanite concrete. SRNL received two samples of colemanite concrete for analysis on November 21, 2013. The average total density of each of the samples measured by the ASTM method C 642, the average partial hydrogen density was measured using method ASTM E 1131, and the average partial boron density of each sample was measured according to ASTM C 1301. For all the samples tested, the total density and the boron partial density met or exceeded the specified limit. None of the samples met the lower limit for hydrogen partial density.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Since January 1990, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has leased 107 coal tracts, and associated coal production and revenues have grown. Most lease sales have had a single bidder and were leased the first time offered. The amount of coal produced from federal leases and associated revenues have increased since 1990, although production has leveled off since 2002. Revenues from federal coal leases have generated about $1 billion annually in recent years. Royalties paid when coal is sold and bonus bids paid for the right to mine a federal coal tract account for nearly all of these revenues."

This report provides background and analysis with regard to the FY2014 appropriations process. The first section discusses the status of discretionary budget enforcement for FY2014, including the statutory spending limits and allocations under the congressional budget resolution. The second section provides information on the consideration of regular appropriations measures and an overview of their funding levels.

During a camera inspection of a failed coil in the 6.1D dissolver, an orange discoloration was observed on a portion of the dissolver wall and coils. At the request of H-Canyon Engineering, the inspection video of the dissolver was reviewed by SRNL to assess if the observed condition (a non-uniform, orange-colored substance on internal surfaces) was a result of corrosion. Although the dissolver vessel and coil corrode during dissolution operations, the high acid conditions are not consistent with the formation of ferrous oxides (i.e., orange/rust-colored corrosion products). In a subsequent investigation, SRNL performed dissolution experiments to determine if residues from the nylon bags used for Pu containment could have generated the orange discoloration following dissolution. When small pieces of a nylon bag were placed in boiling 8 M nitric acid solutions containing other components representative of the H-Canyon process, complete dissolution occurred almost immediately. No residues were obtained even when a nylon mass to volume ratio greater than 100 times the 6.1D dissolver value was used. Degradation products from the dissolution of nylon bags are not responsible for the discoloration observed in the dissolver.

None

Three projects were analyzed with the overall aim of developing a computational/analytical model for estimating values of the energy, angular momentum, enstrophy and total variation of fluid height at phase transitions between disordered and self-organized flow states in planetary atmospheres. It is believed that these transitions in equilibrium statistical mechanics models play a role in the construction of large-scale, stable structures including super-rotation in the Venusian atmosphere and the formation of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. Exact solutions of the spherical energy-enstrophy models for rotating planetary atmospheres by Kac's method of steepest descent predicted phase transitions to super-rotating solid-body flows at high energy to enstrophy ratio for all planetary spins and to sub-rotating modes if the planetary spin is large enough. These canonical statistical ensembles are well-defined for the long-range energy interactions that arise from 2D fluid flows on compact oriented manifolds such as the surface of the sphere and torus. This is because in Fourier space available through Hodge theory, the energy terms are exactly diagonalizable and hence has zero range, leading to well-defined heat baths.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Substantial increases occurred over the last decade in the number of civil lawsuits filed in federal district court alleging violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, as amended (FLSA). Federal courts in most states experienced increases in the number of FLSA lawsuits filed and the percentage of total civil lawsuits filed that were FLSA cases, but large increases were concentrated in a few states, including Florida and New York. The number of workers involved in FLSA lawsuits is unknown because the courts do not collect data on the number of workers represented. Many factors may contribute to this general trend; however, the factor cited most often by stakeholders, including attorneys and judges, was attorneys' increased willingness to take on such cases. In fiscal year 2012, an estimated 97 percent of FLSA lawsuits were filed against private sector employers, often from the accommodations and food services industry, and 95 percent of the lawsuits filed included allegations of overtime violations."

Results are presented for design of a high-power microwave switch for operation at 34.3 GHz, intended for use in an active RF pulse compressor. The active element in the switch is a ring of ferroelectric material, whose dielectric constant can be rapidly changed by application of a high-voltage pulse. As envisioned, two of these switches would be built into a pair of delay lines, as in SLED-II at SLAC, so as to allow 30-MW μs-length Ka-band pulses to be compressed in time by a factor-of-9 and multiplied in amplitude to generate 200 MW peak power pulses. Such high-power pulses could be used for testing and evaluation of high-gradient mm-wave accelerator structures, for example. Evaluation of the switch design was carried out with an X-band (11.43 GHz) prototype, built to incorporate all the features required for the Ka-band version.

A number of major accomplishments resulted from the project. These include: • Data Structures, Algorithms, and Numerical Methods for Reactive Molecular Dynamics. We have developed a range of novel data structures, algorithms, and solvers (amortized ILU, Spike) for use with ReaxFF and charge equilibration. • Parallel Formulations of ReactiveMD (Purdue ReactiveMolecular Dynamics Package, PuReMD, PuReMD-GPU, and PG-PuReMD) for Messaging, GPU, and GPU Cluster Platforms. We have developed efficient serial, parallel (MPI), GPU (Cuda), and GPU Cluster (MPI/Cuda) implementations. Our implementations have been demonstrated to be significantly better than the state of the art, both in terms of performance and scalability. • Comprehensive Validation in the Context of Diverse Applications. We have demonstrated the use of our software in diverse systems, including silica-water, silicon-germanium nanorods, and as part of other projects, extended it to applications ranging from explosives (RDX) to lipid bilayers (biomembranes under oxidative stress). • Open Source Software Packages for Reactive Molecular Dynamics. All versions of our soft- ware have been released over the public domain. There are over 100 major research groups worldwide using our software. • Implementation into the Department of Energy LAMMPS Software Package. We have also integrated our software into the Department of Energy LAMMPS …

This report describes current federal policy with respect to medical child support. It also examines the potential impact of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on the Child Support Enforcement (CSE) program. It provides a legislative history of medical support provisions in the CSE program and state data on the medical support coverage of children in the CSE program.

Efforts are being made to increase the efficiency and decrease the cost of vitrifying radioactive waste stored in tanks at the U.S. Department of Energy Hanford Site. The compositions of acceptable and processable high-level waste (HL W) glasses need to be optimized to minimize the waste-form volume and, hence, to reduce cost. A database of glass properties of waste glass and associated simulated waste glasses was collected and documented in PNNL 18501, Glass Property Data and Models for Estimating High-Level Waste Glass Volume and glass property models were curve-fitted to the glass compositions. A routine was developed that estimates HL W glass volumes using the following glass property models: II Nepheline, II One-Percent Crystal Temperature (T1%), II Viscosity (11) II Product Consistency Tests (PCT) for boron, sodium, and lithium, and II Liquidus Temperature (TL). The routine, commonly called the HL W Glass Shell, is presented in this document. In addition to the use of the glass property models, glass composition constraints and rules, as recommend in PNNL 18501 and in other documents (as referenced in this report) were incorporated. This new version of the HL W Glass Shell should generally estimate higher waste loading in the HL W glass than …

During the first year of the SciDAC gyrokinetic particle simulation (GPS) project, the GPS team (Zhihong Lin, Liu Chen, Yasutaro Nishimura, and Igor Holod) at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) studied the tokamak electron transport driven by electron temperature gradient (ETG) turbulence, and by trapped electron mode (TEM) turbulence and ion temperature gradient (ITG) turbulence with kinetic electron effects, extended our studies of ITG turbulence spreading to core-edge coupling. We have developed and optimized an elliptic solver using finite element method (FEM), which enables the implementation of advanced kinetic electron models (split-weight scheme and hybrid model) in the SciDAC GPS production code GTC. The GTC code has been ported and optimized on both scalar and vector parallel computer architectures, and is being transformed into objected-oriented style to facilitate collaborative code development. During this period, the UCI team members presented 11 invited talks at major national and international conferences, published 22 papers in peer-reviewed journals and 10 papers in conference proceedings. The UCI hosted the annual SciDAC Workshop on Plasma Turbulence sponsored by the GPS Center, 2005-2007. The workshop was attended by about fifties US and foreign researchers and financially sponsored several gradual students from MIT, Princeton University, Germany, Switzerland, …

The state of the art for signal processor hardware has far out-paced the development tools for placing applications on that hardware. In addition, signal processors are available in a variety of architectures, each uniquely capable of handling specific types of signal processing efficiently. With these processors becoming smaller and demanding less power, it has become possible to group multiple processors, a heterogeneous set of processors, into single systems. Different portions of the desired problem set can be assigned to different processor types as appropriate. As software development tools do not keep pace with these processors, especially when multiple processors of different types are used, a method is needed to enable software code portability among multiple processors and multiple types of processors along with their respective software environments. Sundance DSP, Inc. has developed a software toolkit called “PARS”, whose objective is to provide a framework that uses suites of tools provided by different vendors, along with modeling tools and a real time operating system, to build an application that spans different processor types. The software language used to express the behavior of the system is a very high level modeling language, “Simulink”, a MathWorks product. ORNL has used this toolkit to …

None

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "As of June 30, 2013, State Small Business Credit Initiative (SSBCI) participants--states, territories, and municipalities--had used $549 million of the $1.5 billion the Department of the Treasury (Treasury) allocated to them, nearly four times the amount used as of June 30, 2012. However, the rates at which participants have used funds continue to vary, as shown below. While initial challenges generally have been addressed, others remain. Participants' challenges with using funds at the start of the program resulted from some program policies not being finalized and low demand for some program types, among other things. Treasury and participants have since addressed many of these issues, but according to agency officials and others, participants will likely continue to face some challenges in using SSBCI funds. For example, some large lenders have been reluctant to partner with SSBCI participants because the variation in participants' programs makes it difficult for lenders to implement the program on a national basis, which has limited the program's reach into the small business lending market."

None

This report discusses Short-Term Energy and Winter Fuels Outlook (STEWFO) is to provide estimates of expected average annual heating fuel expenditures in comparison to previous years.

The focus of this report is Algeria, a country in North Africa that is increasingly important for U.S. efforts to counter international terrorism as a key partner in the fight against Al Qaeda linked groups. As an energy producer, it also is a significant source of natural gas for the United States and not a major recipient of U.S. aid. This report discusses Algeria's current political conditions and Algeria-related U.S. policy.

The Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) began processing Sludge Batch 7b (SB7b), also referred to as Macrobatch 9 (MB9), in January 2012. SB7b is a blend of the heel of Tank 40 from Sludge Batch 7a (SB7a) and the SB7b material that was transferred to Tank 40 from Tank 51. SB7b was processed using Frit 418. During processing of each sludge batch, the DWPF is required to take at least one glass sample to meet the objectives of the Glass Product Control Program (GPCP), which is governed by the DWPF Waste Form Compliance Plan, and to complete the necessary Production Records so that the final glass product may be disposed of at a Federal Repository. Two pour stream glass samples were collected while processing SB7b. The samples were transferred to the Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) where one was analyzed and the other was archived. The following conclusions were drawn from the analytical results provided in this report: The sum of oxides for the official SB7b pour stream glass is within the Product Composition Control System (PCCS) limits (95-105 wt%); The average calculated Waste Dilution Factor (WDF) for SB7b is 2.3. In general, the measured radionuclide content of the official …

This report examines the historical issue of child labor in America and summarizes legislation that has been introduced from the 108th Congress to the 113th Congress.

This report summarizes the structure of Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC08) benefits currently available through December 28, 2013 (December 29, 2013, for New York). It also provides the legislative history of the EUC08 program.

The report discusses the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)-Related Congressional Actions in the 112th Congress.

The report discusses the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)-Related Congressional Actions in the 112th Congress.