Congress has broad authority to place conditions on the purchases made by the federal government or with federal dollars. One of many conditions that it has placed on direct government purchases is a requirement that they be produced in the United States. The most well-known of these requirements is the Buy American Act, which is the major domestic preference statute governing procurement by the federal government. This report summarizes (1) the Buy American Act, what it does and does not cover; (2) the Little Buy American Acts found in permanent law, emphasizing what they govern, major exceptions and why Congress felt them necessary in light of the requirements of the Buy American Act; and (3) the temporary Little Buy American provision found in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

This report provides an overview of two situations in which agencies are arguing that they do not need to conduct a comprehensive environmental review of hydraulic fracturing under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

Since the mid-1980s, budget experts have debated whether the best method of measuring the subsidy cost of federal credit (direct loans and loan guarantees) is the cost to the government or the fair value cost. This report presents a chronology of this still unresolved debate, which dates from the mid-1980s.

Congress has long been concerned about whether U.S. policy advances the national interest in reducing the role of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and missiles that could deliver them. Recipients of China's technology reportedly include Pakistan and countries said by the State Department to have supported terrorism, such as Iran. This CRS Report, updated as warranted, discusses the security problem of China's role in weapons proliferation and issues related to the U.S. policy response since the mid-1990s.

This report examines current conditions in Honduras as well as issues in U.S-Honduran relations, including human rights, poverty, inequality, international support, democracy, security challenges, and international trade.

Since 1973, 84 Members of Congress-69 Representatives, and 15 Senators-have died in office. When a sitting Member dies, the House and Senate carry out a number of actions based on chamber rules, statutes, and longstanding practices. This report discusses these actions.

Congress has long maintained an interest in how Navy ships are named, and has influenced the naming of certain Navy ships. The Navy suggests that congressional offices wishing to express support for proposals to name a Navy ship for a specific person, place, or thing contact the office of the Secretary of the Navy to make their support known. Congress may also pass legislation relating to ship names. Measures passed by Congress in recent years regarding Navy ship names have all been sense-of-the-Congress provisions.

This report examines 40 major or controversial regulatory actions taken by or under development at EPA since January 2009, providing details on the regulatory action itself, presenting an estimated timeline for completion of the rule and provides the EPA's estimates of costs and benefits where available. It provides background information on recent EPA regulatory activity to help address issues raised by this activity, as well as factors that will affect the timeframe in which these regulations will take place.

This report looks at the history, purpose, and current status of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "To successfully manage AIA implementation, USPTO must consider a number of trade-offs as it sets and uses its over 340 fees, as well as maintain an effective fee review process. USPTO officials have stated that the agency’s limited fee-setting authority prior to the AIA and uncertainty about the extent to which its collections would be available contributed to a number of the agency’s operational challenges, such as the current backlog of over 640,000 patent applications and patent application processing time of over 30 months. They said fees that generated over 80 percent of USPTO’s revenues were set in statute, limiting the agency’s ability to ensure that total collections kept pace with total costs as its workload has grown. USPTO can only use its fee collections to the extent that Congress makes them available. In the past, Congress has in some years made available less than the total amount collected; there has been significant debate about the status and use of these fees collected in excess of amounts appropriated."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Field employees have key roles in the U.S. Postal Service’s (USPS) efforts to reduce costs and generate revenue. For example, these employees evaluate the feasibility of closing or consolidating facilities, such as post offices and mail- processing facilities; carry out the closures and consolidations of these facilities; and evaluate and consolidate delivery routes. These roles support USPS’s plans to save, by 2016, about $9 billion annually by improving its operational efficiency and realigning its retail, mail processing, and delivery networks with declining mail use. These plans include evaluating about half of its approximately 31,000 post offices to identify cost-reduction opportunities, closing or reducing operations at about half of its 461 mail-processing facilities, and consolidating about 20,000 of its 144,000 city delivery routes. Area and district employees also have a significant role in USPS’s efforts to generate additional revenue by (1) promoting the value of mail to businesses, (2) maintaining and increasing its customer base through customer service, and (3) growing the package business."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins ""

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "As with many other demographic groups, older workers’ unemployment overall and long-term unemployment rates have increased dramatically since the recession began in 2007. In December 2011, the unemployment rate for older workers was 6.0 percent, up from 3.1 at the start of the recession, but down from its peak of 7.6 percent in February 2010. In particular, long-term unemployment rose substantially, and at a greater rate for older than younger workers. By 2011, 55 percent of unemployed older workers had been actively seeking a job for more than half a year (27 weeks or more). Meanwhile, the long-term trend of rising labor force participation rates among older workers has continued, with the recession possibly amplifying this trend."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Oversight of managed care rate-setting has been inconsistent. In August 2010, GAO reported that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) had not ensured that all states were complying with the managed care actuarial soundness requirements that rates be developed in accordance with actuarial principles, appropriate for the population and services, and certified by actuaries. For example, GAO found significant gaps in CMS’s oversight of 2 of the 26 states reviewed—CMS had not reviewed one state’s rates in multiple years and had not completed a full review of another state’s rates since the actuarial soundness requirements became effective. Variation in practices across CMS regional offices contributed to these gaps and other inconsistencies in the agency’s oversight of states’ rate setting. GAO’s previous work also found that CMS’s efforts to ensure the quality of the data used to set rates were generally limited to requiring assurances from states and health plans—efforts that did not provide the agency with enough information to ensure the quality of the data used. With limited information on data quality, CMS cannot ensure that states’ managed care rates are appropriate, which places billions of …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Budget Control Act of 2011, amending the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985, establishes limits on discretionary spending for fiscal years 2012 through 2021. In addition, the Act specifies additional limits on discretionary spending and automatic reductions in direct spending because legislation was not enacted that would reduce projected deficits by at least $1.2 trillion by the end of fiscal year 2021. Among other things, the Budget Control Act requires the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to calculate, and the President to order, a sequestration of discretionary and direct spending on January 2, 2013, to achieve reductions for that fiscal year."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) uses data reactively and proactively to prevent accidents and manage safety risks. For instance, since 1998, FAA has partnered with the airline industry to identify precursors and contributing factors, and ensure that efforts to improve safety focus on the most prevalent categories of accidents and formulate an intervention strategy designed to reduce recurrences. Although FAA plans to continue using data reactively to understand the causes of accidents and incidents, as part of its adoption of Safety Management Systems (SMS), it is shifting to a proactive approach in which it analyzes data to identify and mitigate risks before they result in accidents."

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A class of generalized Kapchinskij-Vladimirskij solutions of the nonlinear Vlasov-Maxwell equations and the associated envelope equations for high-intensity beams in a periodic lattice is derived. It includes the classical Kapchinskij-Vladimirskij solution as a special case. For a given lattice, the distribution functions and the envelope equations are specified by eight free parameters. The class of solutions derived captures a wider range of dynamical envelope behavior for high-intensity beams, and thus provides a new theoretical tool to investigate the dynamics of high-intensity beams.

This is a revision to a previously released report. This revision contains additional analytical results for the sample with HEIS number B2H4X7. Between November 4, 2010 and October 26, 2011 sediment samples were received from 100-HR-3 Operable Unit for geochemical studies. The analyses for this project were performed at the 331 building located in the 300 Area of the Hanford Site. The analyses were performed according to Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) approved procedures and/or nationally recognized test procedures. The data sets include the sample identification numbers, analytical results, estimated quantification limits (EQL), and quality control data. The preparatory and analytical quality control requirements, calibration requirements, acceptance criteria, and failure actions are defined in the on-line QA plan 'Conducting Analytical Work in Support of Regulatory Programs' (CAW). This QA plan implements the Hanford Analytical Services Quality Assurance Requirements Documents (HASQARD) for PNNL. Samples were received with a chain of custody (COC) and were analyzed according to the sample identification numbers supplied by the client. All Samples were refrigerated upon receipt until prepared for analysis. All samples were received with custody seals intact unless noted in the Case Narrative. Holding time is defined as the time from sample preparation to the …

At the request of Jerry Sweeney, the LLNL Containment Program performed a review of nuclear test-related data for the Salut underground nuclear test in U20ak to assist in evaluating this legacy site as a test bed for application technologies for use in On-Site Inspections (OSI) under the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Review of the Salut site is complicated because the test experienced a subsurface, rather than surface, collapse. Of particular interest is the stability of the ground surface above the Salut detonation point. Proposed methods for on-site verification include radiological signatures, artifacts from nuclear testing activities, and imaging to identify alteration to the subsurface hydrogeologogy due to the nuclear detonation. Sweeney's proposal requires physical access at or near the ground surface of specific underground nuclear test locations at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site (NNSS, formerly the Nevada Test Site), and focuses on possible activities such as visual observation, multispectral measurements, and shallow, and deep geophysical surveys.

This paper explores a range of high-performance equilibrium scenarios available in the NSTX-Upgrade device [J.E. Menard, submitted for publication to Nuclear Fusion]. NSTX-Upgrade is a substantial upgrade to the existing NSTX device [M. Ono, et al., Nuclear Fusion 40, 557 (2000)], with significantly higher toroidal field and solenoid capabilities, and three additional neutral beam sources with significantly larger current drive efficiency. Equilibria are computed with freeboundary TRANSP, allowing a self consistent calculation of the non-inductive current drive sources, the plasma equilibrium, and poloidal field coil current, using the realistic device geometry. The thermal profiles are taken from a variety of existing NSTX discharges, and different assumptions for the thermal confinement scalings are utilized. The no-wall and idealwall n=1 stability limits are computed with the DCON code. The central and minimum safety factors are quite sensitive to many parameters: they generally increases with large outer plasmawall gaps and higher density, but can have either trend with the confinement enhancement factor. In scenarios with strong central beam current drive, the inclusion of non-classical fast ion diffusion raises qmin, decreases the pressure peaking, and generally improves the global stability, at the expense of a reduction in the non-inductive current drive fraction; cases with …

The Used Fuel Disposition (UFD) Campaign within the Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy (DOE-NE) Fuel Cycle Technology (FCT) program has been tasked with investigating the disposal of the nation's spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and high-level nuclear waste (HLW) for a range of potential waste forms and geologic environments. The planning, construction, and operation of a nuclear disposal facility is a long-term process that involves engineered barriers that are tailored to both the geologic environment and the waste forms being emplaced. The UFD Campaign is considering a range of fuel cycles that in turn produce a range of waste forms. The UFD Campaign is also considering a range of geologic media. These ranges could be thought of as adding uncertainty to what the disposal facility design will ultimately be; however, it may be preferable to thinking about the ranges as adding flexibility to design of a disposal facility. For example, as the overall DOE-NE program and industrial actions result in the fuel cycles that will produce waste to be disposed, and the characteristics of those wastes become clear, the disposal program retains flexibility in both the choice of geologic environment and the specific repository design. Of course, other factors …

This paper describes the general characteristics of disruptions halo currents in the National Spherical Torus Experiment [M. Ono, et al. Nuclear Fusion 40, 557 (2000)]. The commonly observed types of vertical motion and resulting halo current patterns are described, and it is shown that plasma discharges developing between components can facilitate halo current flow. The halo current fractions and toroidal peaking factors at various locations in the device are presented. The maximum product of these two metrics for localized halo current measurements is always significantly less than the worst-case expectations from conventional aspect ratio tokamaks (which are typically written in terms of the total halo current). The halo current fraction and impulse is often largest in cases with the fastest plasma current quenches and highest quench rates. The effective duration of the halo current pulse is comparable to or shorter than the plasma current quench time. The largest halo currents have tended to occur in lower β and lower elongation plasmas. The sign of the poloidal halo current is reversed when the toroidal field direction is reversed.

Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU), via the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education contract, evaluated the Enercon Services, Inc. report on site soils derived concentration guideline levels (DCGLs). The RESRAD code Version 6.5 was used in deterministic mode to consider a range of radionuclides and potential future receptors. A standard sensitivity analysis was also included, along with a probabilistic analysis to select conservative input values for the most sensitive physical parameters.