The State Department is moving ahead with new recordkeeping requirements for foreign-aid recipients that it estimates will take 600,000 hours to meet, while acknowledging that its earlier notice "generated confusion" and rejecting a call to withdraw it, according to a Federal Register notice reviewed by The Digital Free Press.

Chemonics International, long the largest for-profit contractor of the now-closed U.S. Agency for International Development, hired a new Washington lobbying firm this summer and paid it $60,000 in the third quarter to lobby the State Department and the White House budget office on "Foreign Assistance and International Development," according to federal filings reviewed by The Digital Free Press.