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The Government Accountability Office's annual report on costly overlap and duplication identifies 380 actions to make government more efficient. Despite White House efforts to make meaningful progress in this area, it is hamstrung, said GAO Comptroller General Eugene Dodaro.

The General Services Administration owes more than one thousand contractors more than $3 million because the agency failed to reimburse vendors after kicking them out of the schedules program.

The Smithsonian Institution has closed portions of three exhibits for the remainder of the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, due to across the board funding cuts known as sequestration.

A 21 to 25 percent improper payment rate at the Internal Revenue Service's earned income tax credit program puts the agency out of compliance with the Improper Payments Elimination and Recovery Act, which requires agencies report improper payment rates of less than 10 percent.

Agencies will rely on partnerships to support the programs facing the largest cuts. International cooperation around physics, for example, has presented opportunities for saving money, said Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy John Holdren, during an April 17 hearing of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee.

President Obama's fiscal 2014 budget proposal requests $ 12.86 billion for IRS programs, or 5.92 percent more than the agency is currently funded under the current year's continuing resolution, when adjusting for inflation.

Quatitiative and qualitative analysis led researchers to identify the most significant factors that cause erroneous conviction. Report authors claim their model can accurately predict an erroneous conviction versus a near miss nearly 91 percent of the time.

Pinterest is among the three most popular social media tools and the fastest growing. Most importantly for the Navy, Pinterest users are creative, engaged and more than 60 percent are female--helping the service reach a non-traditional audience.

If Congress does not fully-fund NIST, Ross Corotis, a member of NRC's laboratory assessments board, recommends the agency avoid an across-the-board cut to all programs as that approach would impact quality. Rather, NIST should prioritize what areas it wants to focus on. "They should cut out some things rather than trying to continue doing all they're doing," he said.

The Veterans Affairs Department has nearly 900,000 pending disability claims, more than 70 percent of which have been pending for more than 125 days, according March 20 testimony before a House Committee. Still, Allison Hickey, under secretary for benefits at VA, said the Veterans Benefits Administration is actually making progress. "VBA employees are completing more compensation claims than ever before in the history of VA," she said.