The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), enacted in 1985, enables producers to bid to retire highly erodible or environmentally sensitive cropland, usually for 10 years. Participants receive annual rental and cost-sharing payments, and technical assistance to install approved plantings. Up to 36.4 million acres have been enrolled; current enrollment is estimated to be 32.9 million acres.

This report reviews some of the concerns surrounding the environment work program and other environmental issues. It briefly describes work underway in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and current thinking underlying development of U.S. positions on trade and the environment in the GATT.

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 Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents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.

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, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether a racetrack admission fee collected by a county to distribute to municipalities pursuant to the Texas Racing Act, see TEX. REV. CIV. STAT. ANN. art. 179e, § 6.17(a) (Vernon Supp. 1999), violates article VIII, section 1(f) of the Texas Constitution (RQ-1016)

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, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Comptroller's adjustment of property tax findings for school district pursuant to section 42.257 of the Education Code (RQ-1194)

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, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Binding effect of government agency rules on other state entities (RQ-1201)

Letter opinion 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, Dan Morales, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether the investigations of the Texas Funeral Service Commission are deemed confidential pursuant to V.T.C.S. article 4582b, section 6D(d).

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed recruiting and attrition in the military services, focusing on: (1) recruiter selection and incentive systems and their effects on recruiter performance; (2) the screening of incoming recruits for criminal history information to ensure that only qualified persons are allowed to enlist; (3) reasons for attrition during the first 6 months of an enlistee's term; and (4) reasons for premature attrition after first-term enlistees have completed 6 months of service."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the counternarcotics efforts of the United States and Mexico, focusing on: (1) Mexico's efforts in addressing the drug threat; and (2) the status of U.S. counternarcotics assistance provided to Mexico."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the year 2000 status of states' automated systems that support federal human services programs, such as Medicaid, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and Food Stamps."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the privacy of medical records used for health research, focusing on: (1) to what extent medical information used for research depends on personally identifiable information; (2) research that is and is not subject to current federal oversight requirements; (3) how the institutional review board (IRB) ensures the confidentiality of health information used in research; and (4) what steps organizations have taken to safeguard information."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the: (1) status of the National Weather Service (NWS) systems modernization; and (2) most cost-effective alternatives for acquiring the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) marine data."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) year 2000 efforts and the remaining challenges IRS faces in making its information systems year 2000 compliant, focusing on: (1) the extent to which IRS monitors the year 2000 status of its mission-critical systems in their entirety; (2) whether IRS met the January 31, 1999, completion goal for the areas that it monitors--application software, systems software, hardware, and telecommunications networks; (3) the status of two remaining, critical year 2000 tasks--conducting year 2000 testing and completing 36 contingency plans; and (4) the fact that other business initiatives are creating competing demands on staff needed for year 2000 efforts."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the readiness of automated systems that support the nation's delivery of health benefits and services to function reliably without interruption throughout the turn of the century, focusing on: (1) Medicare's ability to provide accurate benefits and services to millions of Americans; and (2) the overall readiness of the health care sector."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the readiness of Social Security Administration's (SSA) computer systems that support key benefits programs to function reliably in the next century, focusing on GAO's previous report and recommendations."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the Customs Service's progress in addressing the year 2000 computing problem, focusing on Customs': (1) progress to date; (2) program management; and (3) future challenges."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO examined the significant differences in two Department of Defense training programs, focusing on the: (1) training categories and military services with the most significant funding changes from the 1998 to the 1999 Future Years Defense Program (FYDP); (2) bases for the changes; and (3) potential impact of the changes on the services' future training budgets."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Navy's declining ship maintenance workload, focusing on: (1) the Navy's policies and procedures for allocating ship maintenance work to public and private facilities in the Norfolk area; (2) ship maintenance and modernization funding obligated to the Norfolk Naval Shipyard and private ship repair companies during the fiscal years (FY) 1994 through 1998; and (3) the extent to which the Atlantic Fleet's ship maintenance program has been affected by the movement of funds out of the ship depot maintenance program since FY 1994."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Health Care Financing Administration's (HCFA) ongoing efforts to develop resource-based practice expense relative value units (RVUs), focusing on: (1) whether the new methodology is an acceptable approach for revising Medicare's fee schedule; (2) questions about the data, assumptions, and adjustments underlying the new methodology that need to be addressed during the 3-year phase-in period; and (3) the need for future updates to the practice expense RVUs to reflect changes in health care delivery and for ongoing assessments of the fee schedule's effect on Medicare beneficiaries' access to physicians' care."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the types of health research conducted outside the Common Rule and Federal Drug Administration (FDA) regulations, focusing on: (1) examining how medical information is used for research and the need for personally identifiable information; (2) identifying research that is and is not subject to current federal oversight requirements; (3) examining how institutional review boards (IRB) ensure the confidentiality of health information used in research; and (4) identifying the safeguards health care organizations have put in place to protect the confidentiality of health information used in research."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the auctions federal agencies currently use to award rights or sell assets and the way in which they differ."

We review and extend to the compressible regime an earlier parallelization of an implicit incompressible unstructured Euler code [9], and solve for flow over an M6 wing in subsonic, transonic, and supersonic regimes. While the parallelization philosophy of the compressible case is identical to the incompressible, we focus here on the nonlinear and linear convergence rates, which vary in different physical regimes, and on comparing the performance of currently important computational platforms. Multiple-scale problems should be marched out at desired accuracy limits, and not held hostage to often more stringent explicit stability limits. In the context of inviscid aerodynamics, this means evolving transient computations on the scale of the convective transit time, rather than the acoustic transit time, or solving steady-state problems with local CFL numbers approaching infinity. Whether time-accurate or steady, we employ Newton's method on each (pseudo-) timestep. The coupling of analysis with design in aerodynamic practice is another motivation for implicitness. Design processes that make use of sensitivity derivatives and the Hessian matrix require operations with the Jacobian matrix of the state constraints (i.e., of the governing PDE system); if the Jacobian is available for design, it may be employed with advantage in a nonlinearly implicit analysis, …

A three-dimensional, numerical mode1 for simulating airflow and pollutant dispersion around buildings is described. The model is based on an innovative finite element approach and fully implicit time integration techniques. Linear and nonlinear eddy viscosity/diffusivity submodels are provided for turbulence parameterization. Mode1 predictions for the flow-field and dispersion patterns around a surface-mounted cube are compared with measured data from laboratory experiments.

The Natural Gas Transmission and Distribution Model (NGTDM) is a component of the National Energy Modeling System (NEMS) used to represent the domestic natural gas transmission and distribution system. NEMS is the third in a series of computer-based, midterm energy modeling systems used since 1974 by the Energy Information Administration (EIA) and its predecessor, the Federal Energy Administration, to analyze domestic energy-economy markets and develop projections. This report documents the archived version of NGTDM that was used to produce the natural gas forecasts used in support of the Annual Energy Outlook 1994, DOE/EIA-0383(94). The purpose of this report is to provide a reference document for model analysts, users, and the public that defines the objectives of the model, describes its basic design, provides detail on the methodology employed, and describes the model inputs, outputs, and key assumptions. It is intended to fulfill the legal obligation of the EIA to provide adequate documentation in support of its models (Public Law 94-385, Section 57.b.2). This report represents Volume 1 of a two-volume set. (Volume 2 will report on model performance, detailing convergence criteria and properties, results of sensitivity testing, comparison of model outputs with the literature and/or other model results, and major …