Domestic Content Legislation: The Buy American Act and Complementary Little Buy American Provisions

[Excerpt] Congress has broad authority to place conditions on the purchases made by the federal government or with federal dollars. One of many conditions that it has placed on direct government purchases is a requirement that they be produced in the United States. The most familiar of these requirements is known as the Buy American Act, which is the major domestic preference statute governing procurement by the federal government. The Buy American Act applies to direct purchases by the federal government of more than $3,000, providing the purchase is consistent with the public interest, the items or services are reasonable in cost, and they are for use in the United States. The act requires that “substantially all” of the acquisition be attributable to American-made components. Regulations have interpreted this requirement to mean that at least 50% of the cost must be attributable to American content. While the act has only been substantively amended four times since its enactment in 1933, every Congress in the intervening years has seen fit to enact some form of additional domestic preference legislation. This legislation has been generally directed at purchases that for some reason were not governed by the Buy American Act and often took the form of temporary law that was enacted Congress after Congress, often as an appropriations rider to deny the use of funds to purchase goods that were not of domestic origin. While this approach has not been abandoned, the current trend appears to be to codify these “Little Buy American Acts” as permanent law. This report summarizes (1) the Buy American Act, what it does and does not cover; (2) the Little Buy American Acts found in permanent law, emphasizing what they govern, major exceptions, and why Congress felt them necessary in light of the requirements of the Buy American Act; and (3) the temporary Little Buy American provision found in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

Prevailing Wage Requirements and the Emergency Suspension of the Davis-Bacon Act

President Bush has, by proclamation, suspended the application of the Davis-Bacon Act to all contracts to be performed in the jurisdictions in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi included in the Hurricane Katrina disaster area. This has the effect of permitting the payment of less than the locally prevailing wage on contracts entered into after September 8, 2005, for the construction or repair of public buildings and public works in the affected area. H.R. 3684 would make this type of suspension automatic for one year when a disaster is declared under the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act

Location-Based Preferences in Federal and Federally Funded Contracting: An Overview of the Law

[Excerpt] The recession that began in December 2007 has prompted increased interest among some Members of Congress and their constituents in legal authorities that could require or allow federal agencies to prefer contractors in one state or locality over those in other states or localities. Federal spending on procurement contracts has remained high, reaching $523.9 billion in FY2009, at a time when many other businesses have scaled back their purchases of goods and services. However, this spending has historically been localized in three to five states, which receive nearly half of all federal procurement dollars, prompting concerns about whether other states receive their “fair share.” Such concerns may be overstated, given that many contracts must be performed in or near Washington, DC, and shifting the place of performance of existing contracts from one state to another would generally not decrease overall unemployment. Nonetheless, geographic distribution of federal spending and federal funding is often a concern during economic downturns. This report discusses constitutional and other legal issues related to the creation and implementation of location-based preferences in federal contracting, as well as summarizes key authorities requiring or allowing federal agencies to “favor” contractors located in specific places. The report does not address federal preferences for domestic products or provisions of federal law that could, depending upon their implementation, effectively prefer local contractors, such as project labor agreements

An evaluation of nutritional markers, volume 2

Use of nutritional markers for studies of food intake, passage, and absorption in gastrointestinal track of humans and animal

Performance studies of scintillating ceramic samples exposed to ionizing radiation

Scintillating ceramics are a promising, new development for various applications in science and industry. Their application in calorimetry for particle physics experiments is expected to involve an exposure to high levels of ionizing radiation. In this paper, changes in performance have been measured for scintillating ceramic samples of different composition after exposure to penetrating ionizing radiation up to a dose of 38 kGy.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures, to be published in the 2012 IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium Conference Recor

A visualization of the damage in Lead Tungstate calorimeter crystals after exposure to high-energy hadrons

The anticipated performance of calorimeter crystals in the environment expected after the planned High-Luminosity upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) at CERN has to be well understood, before informed decisions can be made on the need for detector upgrades. Throughout the years of running at the HL-LHC, the detectors will be exposed to considerable fluences of fast hadrons, that have been shown to cause cumulative transparency losses in Lead Tungstate scintillating crystals. In this study, we present direct evidence of the main underlying damage mechanism. Results are shown from a test that yields a direct insight into the nature of the hadron-specific damage in Lead Tungstate calorimeter crystals exposed to 24 GeV/c protons.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure

Stagnation region gas film cooling: Spanwise angled injection from multiple rows of holes

The stagnation region of a cylinder in a cross flow was used in experiments conducted with both a single row and multiple rows of spanwise angled (25 deg) coolant holes for a range of the coolant blowing ratio with a freestream to wall temperature ratio approximately equal to 1.7 and R(eD) = 90,000. Data from local heat flux measurements are presented for injection from a single row located at 5 deg, 22.9 deg, 40.8 deg, 58.7 deg from stagnation using a hole spacing ratio of S/d(o) = 5 and 10. Three multiple row configurations were also investigated. Data are presented for a uniform blowing distribution and for a nonuniform blowing distribution simulating a plenum supply. The data for local Stanton Number reduction demonstrated a lack of lateral spreading by the coolant jets. Heat flux levels larger than those without film cooling were observed directly behind the coolant holes as the blowing ratio exceeded a particular value. The data were spanwise averaged to illustrate the influence of injection location, blowing ratio and hole spacing. The large values of blowing ratio for the blowing distribution simulating a plenum supply resulted in heat flux levels behind the holes in excess of the values without film cooling. An increase in freestream turbulence intensity from 4.4 to 9.5 percent had a negligible effect on the film cooling performance

Proof-of-principle of a new geometry for sampling calorimetry using inorganic scintillator plates

A novel geometry for a sampling calorimeter employing inorganic scintillators as an active medium is presented. To overcome the mechanical challenges of construction, an innovative light collection geometry has been pioneered, that minimises the complexity of construction. First test results are presented, demonstrating a successful signal extraction. The geometry consists of a sampling calorimeter with passive absorber layers interleaved with layers of an active medium made of inorganic scintillating crystals. Wavelength-shifting (WLS) fibres run along the four long, chamfered edges of the stack, transporting the light to photodetectors at the rear. To maximise the amount of scintillation light reaching the WLS fibres, the scintillator chamfers are depolished. It is shown herein that this concept is working for cerium fluoride (CeF$_3$) as a scintillator. Coupled to it, several different types of materials have been tested as WLS medium. In particular, materials that might be sufficiently resistant to the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider radiation environment, such as cerium-doped Lutetium-Yttrium Orthosilicate (LYSO) and cerium-doped quartz, are compared to conventional plastic WLS fibres. Finally, an outlook is presented on the possible optimisation of the different components, and the construction and commissioning of a full calorimeter cell prototype is presented.Comment: Submitted to Proceedings CALOR 2014, the 16th International Conference on Calorimetry in High-Energy Physics, Giessen (Germany) 6 - 11 April 2014. To be published in Journal of Physics: Conference Series (10 pages, 15 figures

The Buy American Act: Requiring Government Procurements to Come from Domestic Sources

The Buy American Act is the major domestic preference statute governing procurement by the federal government. Essentially it attempts to protect domestic labor by providing a preference for American goods in government purchases. In the 110th Congress a new reporting requirement was added to the Buy American Act. The Buy American Improvement Act of 2007 would make statutory the definition of "American made," increase the domestic content requirement from 50% to 75%, and place limits upon the "inconsistent with the public interest" and "use outside of the United States" exceptions to the act