Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) spent about $23 billion to provide health care to over 4 million veterans in fiscal year 2002. To provide this care, VA relied primarily on its own employees, totaling about 190,000. VA also used contract employees, sometimes referred to as contract labor, to provide these services. In response to the requirements of the Federal Activities Inventory Reform Act of 1998 (the FAIR Act), VA compiled an inventory of more than 180,000 full-time equivalent (FTE) positions that it determined to be "health care commercial" in nature. This means that the work carried out in these positions is also done in the private sector and could potentially be done by contract labor. As part of its management initiatives, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has emphasized that competition should be used to determine the most effective and efficient way to provide commercial services. The process used to make this determination--referred to as competitive sourcing--is established in OMB Circular A-76. This process generally provides for competition between the government and the private sector on the basis of costs or costs and other factors. OMB …

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "To reduce the estimated multibillion-dollar costs to the federal government of renewing rental subsidy contracts while helping preserve available and affordable low-income rental housing, Congress passed the Multifamily Assisted Housing Reform and Affordability Act of 1997 (Act), which established the "mark-to market" program to restructure the contracts. The Act also created the Office of Multifamily Housing Assistance Restructuring (OMHAR) as a temporary organization within the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to administer the contract-restructuring program. With OMHAR scheduled to "sunset" (cease operations) on September 30, 2001, the Subcommittee on Housing and Transportation, Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, held a hearing in June 2001 to determine whether it would be more advantageous to the federal government to extend rather than end the program. Subsequently, Congress extended the sunset date to September 30, 2004, with restructuring work at HUD continuing until 2006. To ensure that OMHAR could attract and retain staff with requisite expertise in multifamily housing finance issues, the Act provided the Director of OMHAR authority to pay salaries comparable with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. As a result, OMHAR salaries are generally higher than …

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; Whether chapter 108 of the Health and Safety Code authorizes or requires the Texas Health Code Information Council to provide the Department of Health with individually identifiable health care information (RQ-0010-GA)

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; City of Skellytown's authority to enter certain agreements with the Skellytown Area Volunteer Firefighters-EMS Association (RQ-0014-GA)

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; Whether the Upton County Commissioners Court may maintain or work on private non-road property or sell county-owned dirt to private individuals for a reasonable fee (RQ-0015-GA)

This document describes two tasks that support CH2M Hill Hanford Group's (CHG) Mission Acceleration Initiative (MAI) testing and demonstration/deployment of supplemental technologies, but the tasks are not to be part of the vendor's scope. The vendor's will be provided samples of radioactive waste for their testing. This document describes the preparation of the radioactive waste samples. CHG is responsible to retrieve the saltcake waste from the single-shell tanks and expects to dissolve the waste using water dissolution. When water dissolves the waste the more soluble components of the waste (including cesium) will dissolve first, leaving the lesser soluble components of the waste in the tank. This phenomenon, termed selective dissolution, is expected to provide a partial separation of cesium from the waste. This document also describes a program involving tank dissolution demonstrations, modeling, and laboratory testing to more completely understand how the composition of the retrieved salt cake waste will change during the course of retrieval.