On January 4, 2011, the GPRA Modernization Act of 2010 (GPRAMA) became law. The acronym "GPRA" in the act's short title refers to the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 (GPRA 1993), a law that GPRAMA substantially modified. Some of GPRAMA's provisions require agencies to produce plans and reports for a variety of audiences that focus on goal-setting and performance measurement. Other provisions, by contrast, establish an annual process to reexamine the usefulness of certain reporting requirements. The report concludes by looking potential issues for Congress in two categories.

Issues concerning and which can be influenced by Congress regarding unemployment rates.

This report provides an overview of the MDBs and highlights major issues for Congress. The first section discusses how the MDBs operate, including the history of the MDBs, their operations and organizational structure, and the effectiveness of MDB financial assistance. The second section discusses the role of Congress in the MDBs, including congressional legislation authorizing and appropriating U.S. contributions to the MDBs; congressional oversight; and U.S. commercial interests in the MDBs.

A report looking at incidences of violence against women of American Indian ethnicity in relation to legal jurisdiction. American Indians experience violent crimes at a rate much higher than the general population. This trend carries over to domestic violence: American Indian women experience domestic and dating violence at more than twice the rate of non-Indian women. Most of this violence involves an offender of a different race. This fact creates a jurisdictional problem because tribal courts do not have criminal jurisdiction over crimes committed within the tribe's jurisdiction by non-Indians.

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "GAO’s recent work highlights the types of challenges facing the Department of Defense (DOD) as it strives to attain audit readiness and reengineer its business processes and systems. The urgency in addressing these challenges has been increased by the goals of an auditable DOD Statement of Budgetary Resources (SBR) by the end of fiscal year 2014 and a complete set of auditable financial statements by the end of fiscal year 2017. For example, GAO’s 2011 reporting highlights difficulties the DOD components experienced in attempting to achieve an auditable SBR. These include:"

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Employee Performance Standards for the Timely Review of Medical Product Applications:"

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Large federal excise tax disparities among tobacco products, which resulted from the Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act (CHIPRA) of 2009, created opportunities for tax avoidance and led to significant market shifts by manufacturers and price sensitive consumers toward the lower-taxed products. Monthly sales of pipe tobacco increased from approximately 240,000 pounds in January 2009 to over 3 million pounds in September 2011, while roll-your-own tobacco dropped from about 2 million pounds to 315,000 pounds. For the same months, large cigar sales increased from 411 million to over 1 billion cigars, while small cigars dropped from about 430 million to 60 million cigars. According to government, industry, and nongovernmental organization representatives, many roll-your-own tobacco and small cigar manufacturers shifted to the lower-taxed products after CHIPRA to avoid paying higher taxes."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Older electricity generating units—those that began operating in or before 1978—provided 45 percent of electricity from fossil fuel units in 2010 but produced a disproportionate share of emissions, both in aggregate and per unit of electricity generated. Overall, in 2010 older units contributed 75 percent of sulfur dioxide emissions, 64 percent of nitrogen oxides emissions, and 54 percent of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel units. For each unit of electricity generated, older units collectively emitted about 3.6 times as much sulfur dioxide, 2.1 times as much nitrogen oxides, and 1.3 times as much carbon dioxide as newer units. The difference in emissions between older units and their newer counterparts may be attributed to a number of factors. First, 93 percent of the electricity produced by older fossil fuel units in 2010 was generated by coal-fired units. Compared with natural gas units, coal-fired units produced over 90 times as much sulfur dioxide, twice as much carbon dioxide and over five times as much nitrogen oxides per unit of electricity, largely because coal contains more sulfur and carbon than natural gas. Second, fewer older units have installed emissions controls, …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Recent GAO work found that funding increases have expanded or created Department of Energy (DOE) programs with varying results. For example:"

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This is the standard operating procedure used by the Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometry Group of the Chemical Sciences Division at LLNL for the preparation of a sample of uranium oxide or uranium metal for {sup 230}Th-{sup 234}U age-dating. The method described here includes the dissolution of a sample of uranium oxide or uranium metal, preparation of a secondary dilution, spiking of separate aliquots for uranium and thorium isotope dilution measurements, and purification of uranium and thorium aliquots for mass spectrometry. This SOP may be applied to uranium samples of unknown purity as in a nuclear forensic investigation, and also to well-characterized samples such as, for example, U{sub 3}O{sub 8} and U-metal certified reference materials. The sample of uranium is transferred to a quartz or PFA vial, concentrated nitric acid is added and the sample is heated on a hotplate at approximately 100 C for several hours until it dissolves. The sample solution is diluted with water to make the solution approximately 4 M HNO{sub 3} and hydrofluoric acid is added to make it 0.05 M HF. A secondary dilution of the primary uranium solution is prepared. Separate aliquots for uranium and thorium isotope dilution measurements are taken and spiked with …

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Nuclear fusion has the potential to satisfy the prodigious power that the world will demand in the future, but it has yet to be harnessed as a practical energy source. The entry of fusion as a viable, competitive source of power has been stymied by the challenge of finding an economical way to provide for the confinement and heating of the plasma fuel. It is the contention here that a simpler path to fusion can be achieved by creating fusion conditions in a different regime at small scale (~ a few cm). One such program now under study, referred to as Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF), is directed at obtaining fusion in this high energy density regime by rapidly compressing a compact toroidal plasmoid commonly referred to as a Field Reversed Configuration (FRC). To make fusion practical at this smaller scale, an efficient method for compressing the FRC to fusion gain conditions is required. In one variant of MTF a conducting metal shell is imploded electrically. This radially compresses and heats the FRC plasmoid to fusion conditions. The closed magnetic field in the target plasmoid suppresses the thermal transport to the confining shell, thus lowering the imploding power needed to compress …

Conversion of biomass to sugars plays a central in reducing our dependence on petroleum, as it allows production of a wide range of biobased fuels and chemicals, through fermentation of those sugars. The DECREASE project delivers an effective enzyme cocktail for this conversion, enabling reduced costs for producing advanced biofuels such as cellulosic ethanol. Benefits to the public contributed by growth of the advanced biofuels industry include job creation, economic growth, and energy security. The DECREASE primary project objective was to develop a two-fold improved enzyme cocktail, relative to an advanced cocktail (CZP00005) that had been developed previously (from 2000- 2007). While the final milestone was delivery of all enzyme components as an experimental mixture, a secondary objective was to deploy an improved cocktail within 3 years following the close of the project. In February 2012, Novozymes launched Cellic CTec3, a multi-enzyme cocktail derived in part from components developed under DECREASE. The externally validated performance of CTec3 and an additional component under project benchmarking conditions indicated a 1.8-fold dose reduction in enzyme dose required for 90% conversion (based on all available glucose and xylose sources) of NREL dilute acid pretreated PCS, relative to the starting advanced enzyme cocktail. While the …

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