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This report discusses congressional interest in the pace of U.S. technological advancement due to its influence on U.S. economic growth, productivity, and international competitiveness. The proper role of the federal government in technology development and the competitiveness of U.S. industry continues to be a topic of congressional debate.

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 one of the 13 regular appropriations bills that Congress considers each year. It is designed to supplement the information provided by the House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittees on Legislative Branch Appropriations.

This report presents basic background information on the collapse of the Enron Corporation, identifying public policy issues in financial market oversight. This report briefly summarizes some federal laws carrying criminal penalties which may be implicated in the events surrounding the collapse of the Enron Corp. This report compares the auditing and accounting reform measures passed by the House (H.R. 3763) and reported by the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. This report compares the major provisions of three auditor and accounting reform proposals: H.R. 3763, S. 2673, and a rule proposed on June 20, 2002, by the SEC that would create a new auditor oversight board by using the SEC’s existing authority to regulate corporate accounting. The report focuses on Section 404(a) of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), the federal statute that regulates employer-sponsored pension plans. Section 404(a) is considered the “touchstone for understanding the scope and object of an ERISA fiduciary’s duties.”

This report is a guide to one of the 13 regular appropriations bills that Congress passes each year. It is designed to supplement the information provided by the House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittees on Energy and Water. It summarizes the current legislative status of the bill, its scope, major issues, funding levels, and related legislative activity. The report lists the key CRS staff relevant to the issues covered and related CRS products.

The Economic Development Administration (EDA), targeted for elimination or major “reinvention” early in the 104th Congress, gained a new lease on life in the waning days of the 105th. Having been kept alive via appropriations bills since its last authorizing legislation expired in 1982, P.L. 105-393 reauthorized the EDA and its programs for 5 years. On October 27, Congress approved a conference agreement recommending $286.7 million for EDAP and $28 million for S&E, for a totalFY2001 appropriation of$411.9 million for EDA. It became part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act (H.R. 4942, P.L. 106-553) signed into law on December 21, 2000.

This report contains information regarding the Current Economic Conditions, Recent Macroeconomic Developments, Posture of Monetary and Fiscal Policy, Summary of Current Developments, Sources of GDP Growth, Economic Forecasts 2001, and Promotion of Economic Growth. The report also presents statistics regarding the Growth Rate of Real GDP v. Final Sales, Civilian Unemployment Rate, Rate of Change in the Consumer Price Index, Rate of Change in the GDP Deflators, Rate of Change in Labor Costs, U.S. Foreign Trade Deficit, Alternative Measures of Fiscal Policy, The Growth Rates of the Monetary Aggregates, etc.

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 one of the 13 regular appropriations bills that Congress considers each year. It is designed to supplement the information provided by the House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittees on Agriculture.

This report describes the principal elements of legislative process used to establish these executive branch entities. Legislative histories of the organic acts of these Cabinet departments are set out in narrative form in the body of the report, and in tabular format in the appendix.

This CRS Report begins by describing the shift from traditional defined benefit pensions to defined contribution plans – like the 401(k) – that has occurred over the last 20 to 25 years. It then summarizes recent research findings on the extent to which employees’ retirement savings are invested in employer stock. The third section of the report outlines the provisions of federal law that define an employer’s duty to manage its retirement plan in the best interest of the plan’s participants. The report concludes with a summary of pension reform legislation passed by the House of Representatives in April 2002 and a description of several pension reform bills that have been introduced in the Senate in 2002.

This issue brief discusses a number of Supreme Court cases that heavily concern church and state from the 2001-2002 Term. It provides detailed summaries on two decided cases, Watchtower Bible & Tract Society of New York, Inc v. Stratton, Ohio and Zelman v. Selmon-Harris.

In response to the foreign challenge in the global marketplace, the United States Congress has explored ways to stimulate technological advancement in the private sector. The government has supported various efforts to promote cooperative research and development activities among industry, universities, and the federal R&D establishment designed to increase the competitiveness of American industry and to encourage the generation of new products, processes, and services. Among the issues before Congress are whether joint ventures contribute to industrial competitiveness and what role, if any, the government has in facilitating such arrangements.

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A weekly publication, the Texas Register serves as the journal of state agency rulemaking for Texas. Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents such as requests for proposals. After adoption, these rulemaking actions are codified into the Texas Administrative Code.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "States provide health care coverage to about 40 million uninsured, low-income adults and children under two federal-state programs--Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). To receive federal funding, states must meet statutory requirements, including providing certain levels of benefits to specified populations. Under section 1115 of the Social Security Act, the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) can waive many of the statutory requirements in the case of experimental, pilot, or demonstration projects likely to promote program objectives. Since August 2001, HHS has approved four of 13 waiver proposals from states to either expand health insurance to uninsured populations or extend pharmacy coverage to low-income seniors, consistent with the new goals. Of the nine proposals still under review, five seek to expand coverage to uninsured populations, while four would provide pharmacy benefits for low-income seniors. GAO has both legal and policy concerns about the extent to which the approved waivers are consistent with the goals and fiscal integrity of Medicaid and SCHIP. The legal concern is that HHS has allowed Arizona to use unspent SCHIP funding to cover adults without children, despite SCHIP's …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) established critical job responsibilities for group managers and frontline employees that align with each of the agency's three strategic goals. In the group managers' performance management system, all of the supporting behaviors clearly align with the critical job responsibilities. However, for frontline employees, the supporting behaviors do not always align with IRS's description of the critical job responsibilities. Misalignments occur when (1) supporting behaviors reflect concerns not expressed in the description, (2) supporting behaviors that relate to a responsibility are located under other responsibilities, or (3) no supporting behavior exists to support the description. Raters provided feedback on the three critical job responsibilities related to IRS's organizational goals in 90 percent or more of evaluations and provided feedback on leadership and equal employment opportunity in 70 percent of the evaluations. IRS senior executives have no firm plans to monitor how well the group managers' and frontline employees' systems are being implemented or to assess whether changes need to be made, even though IRS's management processes call for obtaining data on how well programs are achieving their goals."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) searches state criminal history records to prevent gun sales to ineligible persons. GAO found that state firearm laws and procedures may affect how these records are used by NICS. Each of the six states GAO surveyed had some mechanism by which persons with criminal convictions could have their rights to own a firearm restored. The six states typically require a waiting period before someone can apply for relief, and some criminal convictions make a person ineligible for restoration. In 26 states, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has determined that a concealed carry permit may exempt permit holders from an NICS background check when they are buying a firearm. This situation underscores the need to carefully screen applications and monitor permit holders to ensure their eligibility to own firearms. The six states used various approaches to make it easier to identify individuals convicted of domestic violence. Despite these efforts, NICS failed to detect more than 2,800 persons convicted of domestic violence who bought firearms during the first three years the system was in operation."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Air Force launched an acquisition program to develop and produce a revolutionary laser weapon system, known as the Airborne Laser, in 1996. Being developed for installation in a modified Boeing 747 aircraft, it is intended to destroy enemy ballistic missiles almost immediately after their launch. The Air Force originally estimated development costs at $2.5 billion and projected fielding of the system in 2006. However, by August 2001, the Air Force determined that the development cost estimate rose 50 percent to $3.7 billion, and the fielding date slipped to 2010. The Department of Defense transferred responsibility for the Airborne Laser in October 2001 to the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. Subsequently, the Defense Secretary designated the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization as the Missile Defense Agency and granted the agency expanded responsibility and authority. The Air Force was unable to meet the Airborne Laser's original cost and schedule goals because it did not fully understand the level of effort that would be required to develop the critical system technology needed to meet the user's requirements. The Missile Defense Agency's new strategy for developing the Airborne Laser incorporates some …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Every year investors lose money to individuals and corporations that violate federal securities laws. One mission of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is to deter such violations and return lost funds to investors. SEC's primary tool is the disgorgement order, which requires violators to give up money obtained through securities law violations. In order for disgorgement to succeed, SEC must have an effective disgorgement collection program. Although the courts have ordered billions of dollars in disgorgement in the last decade, concerns exist about SEC's success in collecting these funds. For several reasons, SEC's disgorgement collection rate is not an adequate measure of the effectiveness of SEC's disgorgement program. First, while SEC data showed a collection rate of 14 percent for the $3.1 billion in disgorgement ordered in 1995-2001--compared with the 50 percent collection rate GAO reported in its 1994 report--GAO found that the rate varied widely from year to year and was influenced by large individual disgorgement orders. Second, the data used to calculate the collection rate was not reliable because of weaknesses in entering and updating information in SEC's disgorgement tracking database. Third, factors …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Army's approach to assessing wartime spare parts industrial base capability does not use current data from industry. Instead, the Army uses historical parts procurement data because its prior efforts to collect current data from industry were not successful due to poor response rates. GAO identified a program in the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) that has several attributes reflecting sound management practices for reliable industrial base capability assessments. Although DLA's program is in its early stages of implementation, DLA has been able to successfully collect current data directly from private industry on thousands of parts. Further, DLA is analyzing that data to identify actual or potential parts availability problems."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Unemployment Insurance (UI) program is a federal-state partnership to help replace the lost earnings of unemployed persons and to stabilize the economy during a recession. The Department of Labor estimates that $2.4 billion in overpayments were made in 2001, including $577 million attributed to fraud or abuse. Overpayments in the UI program result from management and operational practices at the state and federal level. At the state level, many states do not sufficiently balance the need to quickly process and pay UI claims with the need to control program payments. Moreover, states rely heavily on self-reported information from claimants for other important data, such as a claimant's receipt of other federal or state program benefits and whether they are citizens of the United States. At the federal level, policies and directives from the Department of Labor affect states' priorities and procedures in a manner that makes overpayments more likely."

The National Compact Stellarator Experiment (NCSX) is a stellarator-tokamak hybrid seeking to combine the good confinement, high beta and moderate aspect ratio of the tokamak with the quasi-steady-state operation and good stability properties of the stellarator. A preliminary list of measurement requirements, intended to satisfy the needs of the phased research plan, provides the basis for a full complement of plasma diagnostics. It is important to consider this full set, even at this early stage, to assess the adequacy of the stellarator design for diagnostic port access. The 3-D nature of the plasma is a measurement challenge, as is the necessity for high spatial resolution to assess the quality of magnetic surfaces. Other diagnostic requirements include the need for re-entrant views that penetrate the cryostat, for a convenient e-beam probe for field line mapping, and for a diagnostic neutral beam for active spectroscopy.

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High performance operating regimes have been achieved on NSTX (National Spherical Torus Experiment) through impurity control and wall-conditioning techniques. These techniques include HeGDC-aided boronization using deuterated trimethylboron, inter-discharge HeGDC, 350 C PFC bake-out followed by D2 and HeGDC, and experiments to test fueling discharges with either a He-trimethylboron mixture or pure trimethylboron. The impact of this impurity and density control program on recent advances in NSTX plasma performance is discussed.