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Here's a development you shouldn't find surprising from the Bush Administration:

The Internal Revenue Service is asking tax lawyers and accountants who create tax shelters and exploit loopholes to take the lead in writing some of its new tax rules.

The pilot project represents a further expansion of the increasingly common federal government practice of asking outsiders to do more of its work, prompting academics and other critics to complain that the government is going too far.

Hmmm...isn't that interesting? The IRS wants those who benefit most from re-writing the tax code to, uhm, write the tax code?

John D. Graham, the official appointed by President Bush to streamline the federal rule-making process and give private interests a greater voice, said even he was surprised by the I.R.S. plan.

"Whoever's pen the first draft comes out of has a big advantage," said Dr. Graham, who ran the Office of Regulatory and Information Affairs for the White House before becoming dean last week of the graduate school at RAND, the nonprofit research organization.

The I.R.S. staff has been cut by a fifth in the last decade, even as Congress has made the tax code vastly more complex. The agency, in a formal notice, said it lacked the resources to issue as much guidance as taxpayers are seeking.

So there you have it. Spend $500 Billion + on the Iraq war so that you can then claim that there aren't enough resources to run the government at home properly, thereby triggering the need to privatize government. Or as Gary D. Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization that tracks the Office of Management and Budget, asks:

"Why don't we just privatize Congress and outsource the development of our laws? People would chuckle at letting the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or OMB Watch write the laws, but that is what is being done by this administration, which keeps outsourcing more and more regulation work."

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