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Yesterday we learned that the centerpiece of the president's "No Child Left Behind Law," something called the "Reading First program," has been so badly mismanaged it may have wasted billions of dollars:

A scorching internal review of the Bush administration's billion-dollar-a-year reading program says the Education Department ignored the law and ethical standards to steer money how it wanted.

The government audit is unsparing in its view that the Reading First program has been beset by conflicts of interest and willful mismanagement. It suggests that the department broke the law by trying to dictate which curriculum schools must use. It also says that program review panels were stacked with people who shared the director's views and that only favored publishers of reading curricula could get money.

In one e-mail, director Chris Doherty told a staff member to come down hard on a company he didn't support, according to the report released yesterday by the department's inspector general. "They are trying to crash our party, and we need to beat the [expletive deleted] out of them in front of all the other would-be party crashers who are standing on the front lawn waiting to see how we welcome these dirtbags," Doherty wrote, the report says.

First they underfund it, then they mismanage it. If I didn't know better, I might think these people were trying to discredit the idea of government for a generation.