Appropriations are one part of a complex federal budget process that includes budget resolutions, appropriations (regular, supplemental, and continuing) bills, rescissions, and budget reconciliation bills. This report is a guide to CRS reports that provide analytical perspectives on the 13 annual appropriations bills, and other related appropriation measures. It does not include a detailed explanation or description of the budget or appropriations processes. It is designed to supplement the information provided by the House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittees on Treasury, Postal Service, Executive Office of the President, and General Government.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the impact of operations other than war (OOTW) on the military services, focusing on the: (1) impact of OOTW on the warfighting capability of each of the services, including the time to recover warfighting skills; (2) extent to which reporting systems fully capture the impacts; (3) available information on the effect of OOTW on morale and retention; (4) ability of U.S. forces to respond to a major theater war while engaged in OOTW; (5) Department of Defense (DOD) efforts to alleviate any adverse impacts; and (6) funding provided by Congress for OOTW."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on alleged misconduct by Internal Revenue Service (IRS) employees in their treatment of other IRS employees and taxpayers, focusing on: (1) the specific allegations made at the Senate Committee on Finance hearings; and (2) any underlying systemic or programmatic problems that need to be resolved to protect the rights of taxpayers and IRS employees."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Office of Personnel Management's (OPM) year 2000 business continuity and contingency planning activities, focusing on OPM's efforts to: (1) develop an overall planning strategy for ensuring the continuity of agency operations; (2) assess the risk and impact of system failures on the agency's core business processes; (3) prepare contingency plans that include procedures and timetables for continuing agency operations in the event that critical systems fail; and (4) test the contingency plans to determine their effectiveness."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO responded to congressional concerns regarding the Department of Veterans Affairs' (VA) efforts to address the year 2000 computer problem, focusing on: (1) VA's ability to achieve year 2000 compliance; (2) VA's work to date on the year 2000 challenge; (3) what areas VA should concentrate on over the next six months to ensure that its highest risks areas are addressed prior to January 1, 2000; (4) identifying any areas where VA has misdirected its efforts; and (5) VA's greatest strengths in the effort to surmount the year 2000 challenge."

We present measurements of Z{sup 0} to heavy-quark coupling electroweak parameters, R{sub b}, R{sub c}, and parity-violation parameter A{sub c}, from SLD. The measurements are based on approximately 550k hadronic Z{sup 0} events collected in 1993-98. Obtained preliminary results of R{sub b} and R{sub c} measurements are R{sub b} = 0.2159 {+-} 0.0014 {+-} 0.0014 and R{sub c} = 0.1685 {+-} 0.0047 {+-} 0.0043. In the A{sub c} measurement, we use four methods to determine the initial-quark charge: combined Kaon charge and Vertex charge, lepton, exclusively reconstructed D*, D-mesons, and a new method using inclusive soft-pion from D*. The preliminary results of these four methods were combined to give A{sub c} = 0.634 {+-} 0.027.

The ANL Physics Division traces its roots to nuclear physics research at the University of Chicago around the time of the second world war. Following the move from the University of Chicago out to the present Argonne site and the formation of Argonne National Laboratory: the Physics Division has had a tradition of research into fundamental aspects of nuclear and atomic physics. Initially, the emphasis was on areas such as neutron physics, mass spectrometry, and theoretical studies of the nuclear shell model. Maria Goeppert Maier was an employee in the Physics Division during the time she did her Nobel-Prize-winning work on the nuclear shell model. These interests diversified and at the present time the research addresses a wide range of current problems in nuclear and atomic physics. The major emphasis of the current experimental nuclear physics research is in heavy-ion physics, centered around the ATLAS facility (Argonne Tandem-Linac Accelerator System) with its new injector providing intense, energetic ion beams over the fill mass range up to uranium. ATLAS is a designated National User Facility and is based on superconducting radio-frequency technology developed in the Physics Division. A small program continues in accelerator development. In addition, the Division has a strong …

Inspired by the relation between the hadronic decay of the {tau} lepton and the e{sup +}e{sup {minus}} annihilation into hadrons, we derive new tests of perturbative QCD. We design a set of commensurate scale relations to test the self-consistency of leading-twist QCD predictions for any observable which defines an effective charge. This method provides renormalization scheme and scale invariant probes of QCD which can be applied over wide data ranges.

Using infrared, H evolution and x-ray diffraction (XRD), the structure of high H dilution, glow discharge deposited a-Si:H films ''on the edge of crystallinity'' is examined. From the Si-H wag mode peak frequency and the XRD results, we postulate the existence of very small Si crystallites contained within the amorphous matrix, with the vast majority of the bonded H located on these crystalline surfaces. Upon annealing at ramp rates of 8-15(degree)C/min, a H evolution both of which are far below those observed for a Si:H films grown without H dilution using similar ramp rates. While the crystallite volume fraction is too small to be detected by XRD in the as-grown films, these crystallites catalyze the crystallization of the remainder of the amorphous matrix upon moderate annealing, thus explaining the existence of the low temperature H evolution peak.

The Central Solenoid (CS) designed for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is a 13 T, 42 kA coil with a winding pack mass of 863 t, cooled by supercritical helium. To demonstrate the feasibility of the design and performance of the CS a CS Model Coil project was carried out during the ITER Engineering Design Activity in 1994- 1999. This paper describes the R&D and fabrication effort during this project with a focus on the construction of the Inner Module of the CS Model Coil by the US Home Team.

The Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) is supporting the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the development of advanced air traffic management (ATM) systems as part of the Advanced Air Transportation Technologies program. As part of this program INEEL conducted a survey of human-system safety methods that have been applied to complex technical systems, to identify lessons learned from these applications and provide recommendations for the development of advanced ATM systems. The domains that were surveyed included offshore oil and gas, commercial nuclear power, commercial aviation, and military. The survey showed that widely different approaches are used in these industries, and that the methods used range from very high-level, qualitative approaches to very detailed quantitative methods such as human reliability analysis (HRA) and probabilistic safety assessment (PSA). In addition, the industries varied widely in how effectively they incorporate human-system safety assessment in the design, development, and testing of complex technical systems. In spite of the lack of uniformity in the approaches and methods used, it was found that methods are available that can be combined and adapted to support the development of advanced air traffic management systems.

Final microstructures can often be the end result of a complex sequence of phase transformations. Fundamental analyses may be used to model various stages of the overall behavior but they are often impractical or cumbersome when considering multicomponent systems covering a wide range of compositions. Neural network analysis may be a useful alternative method of identifying and describing phase transformation beavior. A neural network model for ferrite prediction in stainless steel welds is described. It is shown that the neural network analysis provides valuable information that accounts for alloying element interactions. It is suggested that neural network analysis may be extremely useful for analysis when more fundamental approaches are unavailable or overly burdensome.

This thesis describes an experiment in which a neutral atom laser trap loaded with radioactive {sup 21}Na was improved and then used for measurements. The sodium isotope (half-life=22 sec) is produced on line at the 88in cyclotron at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The author developed an effective magnesium oxide target system which is crucial to deliver a substantive beam of {sup 21}Na to the experiment. Efficient manipulation of the {sup 21}Na beam with lasers allowed 30,000 atoms to be contained in a magneto-optical trap. Using the cold trapped atoms, the author measured to high precision the hyperfine splitting of the atomic ground state of {sup 21}Na. She measured the 3S{sub 1/2}(F=1,m=0)-3S{sub 1/2}(F=2,m=0) atomic level splitting of {sup 21}Na to be 1,906,471,870{+-}200 Hz. Additionally, she achieved initial detection of beta decay from the trap and evaluated the prospects of precision beta decay correlation studies with trapped atoms.

We present here recent searches at the Tevatron for new phenomena. The superlight gravitino, scalar top and scalar bottom quarks searches are described in the framework of the supersymmetric models. We also discuss the new Tevatron limits on the second and third generations leptoquark masses.

The authors report the first quantitative phase-sensitive measurement of ultrafast ionization rates in gases using Multi-phase Interferometric Frequency-Resolved Optical Gating. Ultrafast probe depletion via frequency mixing in the ionization front is observed.

The Ion Beam Surface Treatment (lBESTrM) process utilizes high energy pulsed ion beams to deposit energy onto the surface of a material allowing near instantaneous melting of the surface layer. The melted layer typically re-solidifies at a very rapid rate which forms a homogeneous, fine- grained structure on the surface of the material resulting in significantly improved surface characteristics. In order to commercialize the IBESTTM process, a reliable and easy-to-operate modulator system has been developed. The QM-I modulator is a thyratron-switched five-stage magnetic pulse compression network which drives a two-stage linear induction adder. The adder provides 400 kV, 150 ns FWHM pulses at a maximum repetition rate of 10 pps for the acceleration of the ion beam. Special emphasis has been placed upon developing the modulator system to be consistent with long-life commercial service.

Magnetic semiconductors offer a unique possibility for strongly tuning the intrinsic alloy disorder potential with applied magnetic field. We report the direct observation of a series of step-like reductions in the magnetic alloy disorder potential in single ZnSe/Zn(Cd,Mn)Se quantum wells between O and 60 Tesla. This disorder, measured through the linewidth of low temperature photoluminescence spectra drops abruptly at -19, 36, and 53 Tesla, in concert with observed magnetization steps. Conventional models of alloy disorder (developed for nonmagnetic semiconductors) reproduce the general shape of the data, but markedly underestimate the size of the linewidth reduction.

Effect of aluminum on the decomposition of 5 ferrite to austenite was investigated in a low-alloy steel weld. In addition, the effect of inclusion composition on the transition from bainite to acicular ferrite during austenite decomposition was analyzed. Stress relaxation during decomposition of austenite to allotriomorphic and acicular ferrite was also characterized. Results from the above experiments illustrate the importance of thermomechanical effects on weld microstructure evolution.

A Discontinuous Galerkin method is applied to hyperbolic systems that contain stiff relaxation terms. We demonstrate that when the relaxation time is unresolved, the method is accurate in the sense that it accurately represents the system's Chapman-Enskog approximation. Results are presented for the hyperbolic heat equation and coupled radiation-hydrodynamics.

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This document provides a plan for replacement of existing Continuous Air Monitors (CAM) in the tank annuli and K1 and K2 exhausters for selected Tank Farm facilities. Requirements are included.

This document presents the results of a task to evaluate Tank Waste Remediation System (TWRS) sampling equipment drawings and identifies drawings category as either essential, support, or general drawings. This report completes the drawing evaluation task as outlined in Engineering Task Plan For Truck 3 and 4 Drawing Compliance and Evaluation (Wilson, 1997). The scope of this report is limited to an evaluation and identification of drawing category for drawings of certain tank waste sampling equipment for which the TRWS Characterization Project has been assigned custody, including: vapor sampling, grab sampling, auger sampling, and all core sampling equipment (see LMHC Task Order 304). This report does not address drawings for other waste tank deployed equipment systems having similar assigned custody, such as, Light Duty Utility Arm (LDUA), Cone Penetrometer system, or Long Length Contaminated Equipment (LLCE). The LDUA drawings are addressed in the Characterization Equipment Essential Drawings (HNF 1998). The Cone Penetrometer system drawings which are vendor drawings (not H- series) is not currently turned over to operations for deployment. The LLCE equipment was just recently assigned to Characterization Project and were not included in the original scope for this evaluation and will be addressed in the evaluation update scheduled …

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This training plan describes general requirements, worker categories, and provides course descriptions for operation of the Plutonium Finish Plant (PFP) waste generation facilities, permitted treatment, storage and disposal (TSD) units, and the 90-Day Accumulation Areas.