Government Agencies

Four government agencies, including Los Angeles County and the Los Angeles Unified School District, have joined in a $600-million complaint against the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power alleging that the public utility deliberately inflated the electric bills of government agencies operating in the city.

SACRAMENTO - Gov. Jerry Brown wants to limit the amount of money government agencies can recoup for battling wildfires and restoring damaged public lands. The proposal would prevent agencies from seeking payouts several times larger than the value of the land - a goal of the powerful timber industry, which has fought the federal government's efforts to recoup hundreds of millions of dollars after destructive wildfires in California. Federal prosecutors in Sacramento are concerned that the proposal, if approved by the Legislature, would hurt their case against Sierra Pacific Industries, the state's largest timber company.

Twenty service agencies that help find employment for disabled residents of the San Fernando, Santa Clarita and San Gabriel valleys recognized 36 companies and government agencies Friday for providing work to those who are mentally and physically handicapped.

For the last four years, Vice President Dick Cheney has made the controversial claim that his office is not fully part of the Bush administration in order to exempt it from a presidential order regulating federal agencies' handling of classified national security information, officials said Thursday.

Over the past half-century, an obscure Pentagon group, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has been behind some of the world's most revolutionary inventions -- the Internet, the global positioning system, stealth technology and the computer mouse, to name a few. It's an impressive record of success offset only by the fact that DARPA has also come up with some of the most boneheaded ideas ever to spring from the government.

The Senate Intelligence Committee is preparing to launch an investigation of the CIA's detention and interrogation programs under President George W. Bush, setting the stage for a sweeping examination of some of most secretive and controversial operations in recent agency history.

To quote Michael Boskin's former boss, "There he goes again." I'm sick of economists like Boskin lambasting the government every chance they get ["U.S. Economy Does Better When Government Butts Out," Times Board of Advisors, Sept. 14]. Of course government agencies are less efficient than their private counterparts. But if Boskin means by his insinuation that "government is best which governs least," he can't get away with that without a challenge. He says that government must be limited to what they need to do and what they can do well.

The amount of uncollected federal taxes soared to $45 billion last year--a 31% increase--and the budget proposed for the Internal Revenue Service offers little hope of correcting the problem, government auditors said. The General Accounting Office cautioned Congress that requiring the IRS to share in mandatory budget cuts with most other government agencies could make matters worse. "IRS stands virtually alone on the 'revenue side' of the government," GAO spokesman Johnny C.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued the FBI and other government agencies Tuesday on behalf of two peace activists who say they were wrongly detained at San Francisco International Airport because their names popped up on a secret no-fly database. The ACLU also said that, during the past two years, the names of 339 travelers at the airport popped up in a database as they were checking in, according to documents the group obtained from the airport via the Freedom of Information Act.