The drama of the financial services bailout, coming right at the end of the congressional session and the beginning of the new fiscal year, was very distracting. So distracting that it was easy to miss the partial/temporary spending bill that Congress hurriedly passed.

The bill (now law) is Public Law 110-329, the Consolidated Security, Disaster Assistance, and Continuing Appropriations Act, 2009. Total cost: $8,000 per U.S. family.

The financial services bailout law cost a little under $3,000 per U.S. family, according to our analysis of a relatively vague government cost estimate. (It will probably really cost more like $6,500 per family.)

But this spending bill - which received almost no comment in the press or consideration in either House of Congress - cost about eight large per family.

Here’s a breakdown of where the money goes in the bill, which is split into five “divisions”:

• Division A is a “continuing resolution, which spends money on domestic, non-defense government programs through March 6, 2009. Cost per U.S. family: about $1,650, or $525 per person.
• Division B is “emergency supplemental” spending for relief and recovery from hurricanes, floods, and other natural disasters. Cost: $230 per family/$75 per person.
• Division C is spending for the full 2009 fiscal year on the operations of the Department of Defense. Cost: $5,000 per family/$1,600 per person.
• Division D is spending on the Department of Homeland Security for the full 2009 fiscal year. Cost: $410 per family/$131 per person.
• Division E is full fiscal year 2009 spending on military construction and veterans affairs. Cost: about $750 per family/a little under $240 per person.

Congress had essentially been planning to abandon the regular schedule for several months before the beginning of the fiscal year October 1st. The investment banking crisis made the problem worse by drawing everyone’s attention from the really big spending moving through Congress at the same time.

Oh well! Better luck next year, right? Or maybe people will start to insist that Congress use a more careful process when deciding how to spend literally thousands of American families’ dollars.

Silly season on Capitol Hill. It’s that special time of year when Congress nears the end of its scheduled session and decides to do all its work at once. Dozens of bills fly across the House floor with little debate.

They’re not all bad bills, but nothing prevented Congress from addressing them at a careful pace all through the winter, spring, and summer.

This year has been particularly silly, as Congress didn’t even try to follow its annual budgeting and spending process. It just passed a temporary measure on the fly, funding the government through the first half of the fiscal year in one big bill.

Then along came the financial services crisis. (Or is it a “crisis”? I’m less and less sure that it’s a crisis for anyone more than the investment bankers who overextended themselves.)

Smack dab at the end of the session, right when members want to go home and campaign, they have to think about a $700 bailout of the financial services industry. (Text of the proposal that failed Monday is here.)

Congress comes back Thursday - maybe to consider another bailout proposal. Don’t lose focus on that issue just yet!

But for the moment, let’s take a look at some of what the Congress did while we focused on everything else that Congress was doing. These are the bills that went to the floor of the House of Representatives on Saturday. The bills that were on the House floor last Thursday and Friday are here and here. Monday’s bills coming soon:
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Big ol’ Hurricane Gustav is a reminder of Katrina, of course, and things have gone quite a bit differently - in part because of good preparation, but mostly because of luck.

When we were unlucky, we were really unlucky. The result was more than $800 per family in government spending. It’s something we featured in a news release here. (This was before the spectacular WashingtonWatch.com blog, you see.)

Here’s a look at the Katrina-related bills we featured shortly in that disaster’s aftermath - passed bills and pending bills. Of the bills pending, H.R. 3863 passed, becoming Public Law 109-86 and spending another $0.38 per family.

As of October 11, 2005:

Bills already passed:

• P.L. 109-61, A bill making emergency supplemental appropriations for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2005, to meet immediate needs arising from the consequences of Hurricane Katrina, and for other purposes. Costs: $120.36
• P.L. 109-62, A bill making further emergency supplemental appropriations to meet immediate needs arising from the consequences of Hurricane Katrina, for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2005, and for other purposes. Costs: $593.78
• P.L. 109-66, The Pell Grant Hurricane and Disaster Relief Act. Costs: $0.02
• P. L. 109-68, The TANF Emergency Response and Recovery Act of 2005. Costs: $68.77
• P. L. 109-73, The Katrina Emergency Tax Relief Act of 2005. Saves: $62.11

Bills still under consideration:

• H.R. 3670, A bill to extend for persons affected by Hurricane Katrina the time for appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims of certain decisions of the Board of Veterans Appeals that are rendered during the period from June 1, 2005, through November 30, 2005. Costs: $0.01
• H.R. 3863, The Natural Disaster Student Aid Fairness Act. Costs: $0.38
• S. 1716, The Emergency Health Care Relief Act of 2005. Costs: $96.46
• S. 1738, The Special Inspector General for Relief and Reconstruction Act of 2005. Costs: $0.85
• S. 1764, An act to provide for the continued education of students affected by Hurricane Katrina. Costs: $2.43
• S. 1766, The Louisiana Katrina Reconstruction Act. Costs: $1,751.79
  

Well, this isn’t hot off the presses, but it’s a fascinating paper that I just had the chance to read.

Mark Stewart, a civil engineer at the University of Newcastle and John Mueller, a political science professor at Ohio State University, have done an analysis of the dollars spent per life saved by a couple of airline security measures.

The conclusion? Hardening cockpit doors has the highest risk reduction (16.67%) at the lowest cost: $40 million. The Federal Air Marshal Service costs $900 million but reduces risk by only 1.67% - an annual cost of $180 million per statistical life saved.

The government’s target price per life saved is between $1 and $10 million. That means $180 million is a pretty high number. It’s money that could be used on more efficient security alternatives.

In case you’re freaked out about putting a dollar value on human life, don’t be. We weigh the value of our own lives against other things all the time. To articulate this balancing for policymaking purposes, what economists are doing is using a dollar value to measure the relative importance of life versus other things. It doesn’t cheapen your life to think that people are trying to be smart about protecting it.

This study was written up a lot of places: Bruce Schneier’s blog, the Freakonomics blog, and the Wall Street Journal, just to link a few. But you know why it’s special to see it here? Because you can do something about it!

S. 3181, The Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2009 is the bill that spends money to run the Federal Air Marshal Service. If you think this waste is wasteful, this would be something you want to tell your Member of Congress. Mention that this is the bill on which to do something about it.

Here’s the current vote on the overall bill (the Senate version - the House doesn’t have one yet). Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article about the bill.

“TWIC” stands for Transportation Worker Identification Credential. The TWIC card is a federal program that’s been floating around for a few years now.

Post-9/11, someone decided that if we knew who all the transportation workers were, our transportation would be more secure. That’s true in a small way, but it wouldn’t stop terrorists, it treats all transportation workers a little bit like criminals, and it represents huge bureaucratic hassles for small business people in particular.

How does all that come home to roost? Savannah Price tells us in the comments to S. 3377, the Small Marine Business and Fishing Guide Relief Act of 2008:

My Name is Savannnah Price I am 16 years old and i am a deckhand on a small charter boat in Juneau Alaska. My captain says if he must acept the TWIC card he will no longer be in the charter buisness. It would hurt me and a lot of our trust worthy clients if we were no longer in buiness. I know i am only 16 but it should say something when a 16 year belives in something she is very postionate about and someone is going to ruin that with a simple card. I dont see why we have to fix something that is not broken, we are doing fine know we dont NEED the TWIC card. Let us spend our time worrying about other things. Thank you for taking the time to read this i hopr you take my opinion into consideration. It would mean the world to a lot of people.

(It’s times like these when you get a little bit proud for running a Web site like this because you’re doing a little bit to get young people like Savannah participating in our democracy.)

S. 3377 is designed to relieve certain small business merchant mariners from some of the TWIC card obligations. Makes sense in Juneau, Alaska, which is probably not a terrorist target. And it might be that relief like this should be extended more broadly.

Here’s the current vote on S. 3377, the Small Marine Business and Fishing Guide Relief Act of 2008. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article about the bill.

Issuing passports is one of those things that’s pretty close to the core of what we ask our national government to do. Yet the government is not doing all that great a job.

One brewing fiasco is a thing called the “e-passport.” This is a passport with a radio chip in it, used to share information from the passport over the airways.

The original e-passport plan would have let the radio chip report our identity information to anyone with the right kind of chip reader. They redesigned it, so now it must be unlocked with a digital “key.” (This negated any time-savings you might get from transmitting your identity ahead to the Customs and Border Control agent when you cross the border.)

But the problems didn’t end there. Apparently, the e-passport is still insecure.

Adam Laurie and Jeroen van Beek, at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, showed the Business Technology Blog how to capture and change information stored on chips included in new passports from many countries. . . . Laurie showed us his son’s British passport, in which he embedded a chip that displays Osama Bin Laden’s photograph. The passports have a key needed to access the electronic information, but it is taken from information found in the passport like the date of birth. Laurie was able in about four hours to decipher the key and use an RFID scanner to steal the digital information from a passport contained in a sealed envelope.

One is hard-pressed to find what Congress is doing to oversee things. One bill is H.R. 5752, introduced in April, which focuses on the fact some part of the U.S. passport manufacturing process happens in Thailand. The bill may have been introduced because of the security issues, or as a favor to federal government employees’ unions.

The security of passport isn’t the only thing. Recently, the government increased the documentation requirements for Americans returning from nearby countries - a program called the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative. Well, when the time came for the documentation requirement to go into effect, there was a rush on the passport offices, and the State Department fell behind.

H.R. 2745 is called the “Passport and Travel Cost Reimbursement Act of 2007.” It proposes to reimburse the passport processing fees and international travel costs of people who didn’t get their passports processed and so weren’t able to travel.

On the page for that bill, commenter Patty Meeks says, “Not only did my daughter and I experience financial loss, but my daughter’s senior trip was ruined. She will remember that for the rest of her life.” She notes that the bill hasn’t even moved out of subcommittee. Maybe the bill was just for show and not a real effort to make things right.

H.R. 4186 would repeal the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative. Maybe it’s a waste of everyone’s time to demand proof of citizenship from American high school seniors returning from Canada, Mexico, or the Carribean.

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The mighty power of the WashingtonWatch.com blog demonstrates itself again! I posted here at 5:37 p.m. on August 5th about searching laptops at the borders and the bill to require reasonable suspicion for doing so.

Undoubtedly in direct response to my raising the issue, the Department of Homeland Security’s Deputy Commissioner for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Jayson Ahern, rushed out an explanation for the Department’s policies. At 5:40 - just 3 minutes later! - he wrote:

In the 21st century, terrorists and criminals increasingly use laptops and other electronic media to transport illicit materials that were traditionally concealed in bags, containers, notebooks and paper documents. Making full use of our search authorities with respect to items like notebooks and backpacks, while failing to do so with respect to laptops and other devices, would ensure that terrorists and criminals receive less scrutiny at our borders just as their use of technology is becoming more sophisticated.

Alas, Ayhern’s argument doesn’t hold any water. Data is entirely different from physical items. It can be shipped across the border on the Internet. Searching digital devices for noxious ideas or whatever will only turn up the wrongdoing of nincompoops so dumb as to present no danger to the country.

The comments on his post make this point a dozen ways. Restricting the DHS to inspecting data devices when it has reasonable suspicion is, well, reasonable.

Thanks for responding, Jayson, but you should have thought about it a little more than three minutes.

Though I don’t know yet where visitors are coming from, a lot of traffic has come today to a new bill that would lay down rules for searches of laptops and electronic devices at the U.S. borders. And judging by the current vote, a lot of them like it. Here’s some background (with attitude) on the issue.

H.R. 6702 is a bill to “impose requirements with regard to border searches of digital electronic devices and digital storage media.” The bill intends to require border authorities to have reasonable suspicion about people whose laptops they search or whose data they copy.

The Department of Homeland Security would like Customs and Border Patrol Officers to be able to search and seize for any reason or no reason, and you can understand the desire for lattitude, but it’s a somewhat careless policy that would be an invitation for abuse. Why search a laptop when you have no good reason to do so?

People do have lower expectations of privacy at borders under current Supreme Court law because of the strong government interest in controlling the borders.

Let’s hear what you think, either in the comments below or on the page for H.R. 6702. Click below to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article about the bill.

I had to do a double-take when I first saw this bill.

H.R. 6615 would “provide for the transport of the enemy combatants detained in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to Washington, D.C., where the United States Supreme Court will be able to more effectively micromanage the detainees by holding them on the Supreme Court grounds . . . .”

OK, I get it.

Some member of Congress doesn’t like the Supreme Court’s rulings on treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay and decided to introduce a bill to makes a symbolic point: “Well if the dang Supreme Court wants these guys treated well, they should have to serve ‘em sandwiches and sweet tea right there in their own offices!”

I like sarcasm and irony and all, but on balance I think this annoys me. For a symbolic gesture, this guy put his staff to work, he put the House parliamentarian to work, he put the Government Printing Office to work, and the committees of jurisdiction too (Armed Services and Judiciary).

This is taking the legislative process very unseriously. It wastes a lot of people’s time and money.

So, Louie Gohmert, leave it out next time. There are people who differ with the Supreme Court’s rulings, and they offer serious legislation and serious arguments. They’re doing they’re jobs as they see them, not monkeying around with taxpayers’ money on stunts that they think will make cheap political points.

Reserving my right to applaud abuses of the legislative process that are actually clever, here’s the current vote on the bill. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article on the bill.

The Congressional Budget Office came out with a cost estimate today for S. 3297, the Advancing America’s Priorities Act, which has also been called the “Coburn Omnibus.” It combines 36 pieces of federal legislation into one.

Yesterday, adding up all the pieces of the Coburn Omnibus, we came up with about $65 per U.S. family. When we crunch the CBO estimate into its per-family cost, we get just over $70.00.

If you’re curious, more on our methodology is here.

What do people think of all this? Here’s the current vote on S. 3297. As always, you can click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article about the bill.