FederalDaily - November 1, 2005
ICE Targets Aliens Working for DoD
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced that ICE agents have teamed
up with Department of Defense (DoD) authorities to intercept dozens of illegal
aliens in the past 10 days who were performing contract work at the U.S. Naval
Air Station Joint Reserve Base-New Orleans in Belle Chasse, Louisiana; the
White Sands Missile Range in Las Cruces, New Mexico; the U.S. Army’s
Fort Irwin Training Center in San Bernardino, California; and the U.S. Marine
Corps Logistics Base in Barstow, California. “Unauthorized workers who
gain access to sensitive U.S. military installations through fraudulent documents
or other methods pose serious homeland security threats,” said ICE Acting
Assistant Secretary John P. Clark. For more details on the ICE actions, go
to www.ice.gov/graphics/news/newsreleases/articles/051028washington_2.htm.
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Impact of Evaluating Federal Programs
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) designed the Program Assessment
Rating Tool (PART) to examine the performance of federal programs and recommend
improvements. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently studied the
usefulness of PART. After GAO examined progress on recommendations from PART
reviews at four federal agencies (the Departments of Energy, Health and Human
Services and Labor, and the Small Business Administration), GAO concluded that:
- The PART review process stimulated agencies to increase their
evaluation capacity and available information on program results.
- Agencies are likely to design evaluations to meet their own
needs. If OMB wants evaluations with a broader scope, such
as information that helps determine a program’s relevance
or value, it will need to take new steps.
- Evaluation resources tend to be limited, so they should be
strategically focused. Requiring all federal programs to conduct
frequent evaluation studies is likely to result in superficial
reviews.
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DoD Business Systems Still “High Risk”
The Department of Defense’s (DoD) difficulty in implementing business
systems that are efficient and effective continues, despite the billions of
dollars that it invests each year, according to a new Government Accountability
Office (GAO) report. For a decade—since 1995—GAO has designated
DoD’s business systems modernization as “high-risk.” GAO
recently addressed the planning and costs of the Navy’s four Enterprise
Resource Planning (ERP) pilot projects, and the decision to merge them into
one program. The Navy invested approximately $1 billion in four ERP pilots
without marked improvement in its day-to-day operations, GAO said. The four
pilots were limited in scope and they were not interoperable, even though they
performed many of the same business functions. In short, the efforts were failures
and $1 billion was largely wasted. Because the pilots would not meet its overall
requirements, the Navy decided to start over and develop a new ERP system.
GAO said while the Navy ERP has the potential to address some of the Navy’s
financial management weaknesses, as currently planned, it will not provide
an all-inclusive end-to-end corporate solution for the Navy.
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Senate Passes Labor, HHS, Education Appropriations
The Senate passed the fiscal year 2006 Labor, Health and Human Service, and
Education Appropriations bill, with a bipartisan vote of 94-3. This bill will
provide $604.44 billion in funding for more than 300 programs, spanning three
federal departments. “From Head Start to the National Institute of Health,
this bill reaches out to a large portion of the federal government,” said
Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn. The bill authorizes:
- $29.41 billion for the National Institutes of Health;
- $7.97 billion in emergency funding to combat the avian flu;
- $2.18 billion for the Low Income Heating Assistance Program;
and
- $14.53 billion for Education for the Disadvantaged Account.
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