NPR News

Joran van der Sloot, the 24-year-old Dutchman who remains the prime suspect in the still-unsolved 2005 disappearance of Alabama teen Natalee Holloway in Aruba, was just sentenced to 28 years in prison for the 2010 murder of a woman in Peru.

Transcript

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

NPR's business news starts with efforts to streamline the federal government.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GREENE: President Obama is asking Congress, today, to give him the power to consolidate certain U.S. agencies. Doing that, he says, will reduce the number of federal jobs and make government more efficient.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The government we have is not the government that we need. We live in a 21st Century economy, but we've still got a government organized for the 20th Century.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

It's not every day that you hear about teenagers getting terribly ill from the deer they killed and cooked for a high school class. But that's what happened to 29 teenagers in Minnesota, who got sick after they helped hunt, process and cook seven white-tailed deer for an outdoor recreation and environmental science class.

Maybe even if it weren't a general-election year, President Obama would still be proposing that Congress give him the power to merge federal agencies to make the government smaller and more efficient.

But the fact is it is the year in which the president is seeking re-election, a year in which both the eventual Republican presidential nominee and Obama's GOP opponents in Congress will assert hundreds of times before it's over that he is a big-government Democrat.

Good morning.

Our early headlines:

-- Marines Worried About Desecration Video's Impact On Afghan Operations.

-- Reports: Obama To Seek Power To Merge Agencies, Streamline Government.

Comedian Stephen Colbert's "big announcement" last night (which we previewed yesterday)?

(A new lede was put on this post at 11:30 a.m. ET.)

Saying "the government we have is not the government we need" and that it's still organized for the 20th Century, President Obama is asking Congress to give him the power to do some streamlining and merging of agencies that overlap.

"I'm calling on Congress to reinstate the authority that past presidents have had" to reorganize the government, the president just said at the White House. He pledged to only use the authority to make the government more efficient and leaner.