The new Capitol Visitor Center opens its doors tomorrow, December 2nd.

You already opened your wallet to help build it. The $621 million final price tag amounts to about $6.30 per U.S. family, or $2 per person. The original cost estimate was $265 million, with a completion date of December 2005.

But it’s going to be a real improvement for visitors to the Capitol, who have been waiting in line and suffering slow entry through cluttered doorways not designed for magnetometers and the security checks we have today.

Between the Capitol, the Library of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the U.S. Botanic Garden, you could spend a full day all within a few square blocks and get some real insights into the workings of the government - and some exotic plants.

The best times of year to visit are spring and early fall. You get about two weeks of nice weather between when it’s too cold and when it’s too hot and humid.

So what are you waiting for? You already paid for it! Come on check out your new Capitol Visitor Center!

The National Institute of Dental & Craniofacial Research is having a meeting on Friday this coming week. But the meeting is closed to the public.

The grant applications and the discussions could disclose confidential trade secrets or commercial property such as patentable material, and personal information concerning individuals associated with the grant applications, the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.

Grant applicants are using government funds to work on advancing their business interests, so we don’t get to know about it? And on top of that, we don’t get to know who they are?

This looks like a bunch of bunk. The meeting notice is even being published less than the 15 days prior to the meeting as required “due to the timing limitations imposed by the review and funding cycle.” Uh-huh.

But nobody pays much attention to the National Institute of Dental & Craniofacial Research, and so they get to do stuff like this. In the dark corners of the government stuff like this goes on all the time. It’s your money. You’re paying for it.

With the drama of the election and the recent huge bailout and spending bills flying through Congress, it’s easy to forget the kajillions of little things the federal government is churning out all the time.

So here’s one that caught my eye - the Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has just announced a meeting “of the General Conference Committee of the National Poultry Improvement Plan.” It’ll be held at the at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta January 28, so book your plane tickets now if you want to go.

The meeting will be open to the public, but I was disappointed to learn that the public is not allowed to participate in the discussions during the meeting. I had thought that I would share my personal poultry improvement plan, which is to cook it in some oil and spices and plop it into folded corn tortillas with a dollop of sour cream.

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This Associated Press article notes what I wrote here yesterday morning about the annual spending process and the October 1 start of the new fiscal year:

If Congress spends $700 billion this week on a financial services bailout, at least we’ll know where that money went. Before the month is out, Congress will spend hundreds of billions more on heaven-knows-what.

The AP says:

The legislation is coming together in a remarkably secretive process in which decisions are concentrated in the hands of just a few lawmakers such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis. The unusual process means thousands of lawmakers’ pet projects of the very sort blasted by GOP presidential nominee John McCain on the campaign trail would escape scrutiny, including up to $5 billion worth of such “earmarks” in the defense budget alone.

Back to me:

The start of the new fiscal year is not a surprise to anyone, but Congress didn’t follow its own budget and spending processes and has created a spending mess to go along with the financial crisis.

Your Congress. Your representatives. Your crisis fatigue. You’re paying for it. Follow the action here.

With less than ten days to go before the beginning of the new fiscal year, Congress hasn’t passed a single annual spending bill. Only last week, the second of twelve bills was introduced in the House. Not passed - introduced. The Senate, at least, has seen nine bills introduced, though it hasn’t passed any.

(Follow the annual budget and spending process here.)

Even before the current crisis, Congress was angling to determine spending levels for the 2009 fiscal year in a careless, ad hoc way.

Many of my friends in the government transparency movement focus on earmark reform, and it does represent the flagrant parochialism at play in politics. But earmarks are a small part of federal budget. The problems with government management are far bigger and far deeper.

If Congress spends $700 billion this week on a financial services bailout, at least we’ll know where that money went. Before the month is out, Congress will spend hundreds of billions more on heaven-knows-what.

The start of the new fiscal year is not a surprise to anyone, but Congress didn’t follow its own budget and spending processes and has created a spending mess to go along with the financial crisis.

Your Congress at work. You’re paying for it.

It’s always interesting to me when I come across government Web sites “for kids,” like:

• this one from the Environmental Protection Agency
• this one from the Department of Agriculture’s Animal Improvement Programs Laboratory
• this one from the Patent and Trademark Office
• this one from the Department of Labor’s Mine Safety and Health Administration
• this one from the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, or
• this one from the FBI.

It’s good to have information available to kids, and I can see a White House for Kids page or a Basic Readings in Democracy (Department of State), but I wonder if a kids’ page at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms is a leisure that the American taxpayer might just as well forgo.

This page from the National Institutes of Health seems designed to turn all kids into worrywarts. It features a cat named “Toxie” that shows you all the dangerous chemicals and substances that can be found in people’s residences. Have a nice day, kids!

So, are “for kids” sites across the government something you think there ought to be? You’re paying for it!

The back story here is an obnoxious email that a PR flack at the Small Business Administration sent me.

In, like, 53-point italics, it said I should “call to interview the award winners and discuss the event.” I didn’t know what the event was - the subject line of the email was: “SBA Press Release:” - and the flack obviously didn’t know that I’m not a reporter.

Mission accomplished . . . sorta.

I read the release, and will now tell you why the budgets of the Small Business Administration and the Department of Commerce should be cut.

National Minority Business Development Enterprise Week was last week. It’s a project of the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Minority Business Development Agency and the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Government Contracting and Business Development. “MED Week” is “an annual celebration in recognition of the contributions made by minority businesses to the Nation’s economy.”

Do minority business contribute to the nation’s economy? They certainly do. Are minority businesspeople worthy of our appreciation and respect? They certainly are. Should they get an annual celebration paid for with Americans’ tax dollars? Absolutely not.

Government programs almost always grow beyond their original purposes. And this is true even of programs with entirely legitimate original purposes. Whatever help is or was appropriate for minority businessespeople, throwing them an annual party is not part of that.

Racial and ethnic issues are sensitive, and it’s easy to be misunderstood, so let’s be clear again: Minority businesspeople are terrific people - just like all businesspeople. Anyone who consciously or unconsciously makes business decisions based on race or ethnicity is wrong to do so - and people who do that deprive themselves of good business relationships.

But I’d rather see businesspeople and consumers of all backgrounds get their tax money back than see their dollars used to support parties and celebrations that reinforce divisions in our society along racial and ethnic lines.

The Department of Commerce and the Small Business Administration are funded annually through the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act. (link to the Senate version - a month before the new fiscal year, the House bill still hasn’t been introduced) Here’s the current vote on the bill. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article about the bill.

I came across an interesting article in my Labor Day weekend reading. (Yes, I do know how to have a good time.)

“What’s the Emergency?” [PDF; scroll down a bit] is the name of an article in the Summer 2008 issue of Regulation magazine, and it illustrates yet another dimension of how the federal spending process is out of control.

In addition to falling well behind in the regular spending process, Congress is increasingly passing emergency supplemental spending bills - even for ordinary spending.

In May 2007, for instance, President Bush signed into law the biggest supplemental bill in history, $120 billion [$1,300 per U.S. family - ed.], to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and pay for hurricane recovery and agriculture disaster relief at home. . . . By contrast, the average annual amount of emergency supplemental spending in the 1990s — a decade that saw interventions in Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo — was just $13.8 billion.

“Emergency” bills are given special exceptions from budgetary rules designed to restrain spending. But Congress never defined the term “emergency” other than to say that these bills must be necessary, sudden, urgent, unforeseen, and temporary. These things are all in the eye of the beholder. As de Rugy points out, “most of the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — approximately $900 billion through the end of 2008 — has been funded through supplemental bills — effectively on top of the
Pentagon’s regular budget. While the costs of the wars may be necessary and not permanent, they are by no means sudden or unforeseen.”

Your Congress at work.

(Disclosures: I know and like de Rugy, and Regulation is a publication of my employer, The Cato Institute.)

Last week, I wrote here about how well federal civilian workers are doing compared to the private sector worker. Well, it might soon get a little better.

H.R. 6339 is called the “Federal Employees Deserve to Volunteer on the Elections Act of 2008.” In addition to giving money to states for recruiting and training election workers, it would give federal employees paid leave for time spent working at polling places.

Certainly, service to your community as an election worker is a good thing. My mom was one for many years - and the woman was a saint! But private sector workers don’t get paid to do it.

Federal workers who volunteer to work in polling places should volunteer for it - meaning they don’t get paid.

H.R. 6339 would cost a little under 75 cents per U.S. family to implement, some of which goes to improving the lot of those federal workers yet more. You’re paying for it.

Here’s the current vote on H.R. 6339, the Federal Employees Deserve to Volunteer on the Elections Act of 2008. Click to vote, comment, learn more, and edit the wiki article on the bill.

Federal civilian workers earned an average wage of $77,143 in 2007, 61 percent higher than the $48,035 average in the U.S. private sector. That 61 percent pay advantage has increased from a 34 percent advantage in 2000.

Total compensation (wages plus benefits) was $116,450 for the average federal worker in 2007, compared to $57,615 in the private sector. The federal compensation advantage increased from 68 percent in 2000 to 102 percent today. You’re paying for it.

All this is according to Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute in a recent Cato@Liberty blog post. (Full disclosure: My day job is at Cato and I think Chris is a nice guy.)

Edwards suggests that this disparity and the federal budget deficit of $500 billion demand a freeze in federal pay and privatization of costly activities like air traffic control.

The list of bills dealing with federal employees is long. One of the most often visited these days is H.R. 5781, the Federal Employees Paid Parental Leave Act of 2008, which would expand federal worker compensation a little more with paid time off, at a cost of a little over $7.00 per U.S. family.

Here’s what people think of H.R. 5781, the Federal Employees Paid Parental Leave Act of 2008. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article about the bill.