Could Secrecy Caps Reduce Over-Classification?

Government officials from both parties have decried the excessive secrecy rampant in the executive branch for decades. For instance, in 2005 then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal where he stated “I have long believed that too much material is classified across the federal government as a general rule.”

read in full

Can the House GOP Live Within Its Own Budget?

Yesterday, the House of Representatives pulled the annual spending bill that funds the Transportation Department and Department of Housing and Urban Development (THUD Bill) from its calendar because the chance it would be passed by the Republican-controlled House was low.

 “The prospects for passing this bill in September are bleak at best, given the vote count on passage that was apparent this afternoon,” House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers (R-KY) said in a statement.

read in full

Tax Reform Should Not Happen Behind Closed Doors

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) and Ranking Member Orrin Hatch (R-UT) pledged to their colleagues in the Senate earlier this month that their tax reform proposals—namely on tax breaks and loopholes, both of great concern to corporate interests—would be kept secret for 50 years. In contrast, presidential records become accessible to the public after 12 years with certain exceptions.

read in full

White House Veto Threat: House Defense Bill Would Hurt Americans

The White House issued a veto threat on Monday evening, threatening to torpedo the House’s version of the annual Department of Defense (DoD) appropriations bill (H.R. 2397). House Republicans are proposing defense spending levels that are higher than this years and that break through spending caps established by the Budget Control Act of 2011.

read in full

Congress Says Special-Ops Budget Too Secret

While details on spending on specific national-security programs are sometimes kept from the public, such secrecy is not supposed to extend to Congress. Lawmakers are supposed to have detailed information on executive branch activities so they can knowledgeably exercise their constitutional power of the purse.

read in full

Senate Bill Lowers Contractor Compensation Cap Nearly $300K

A Senate bill would reset the maximum amount taxpayers pay government contractors for their employees’ compensation back to its original level, adjusted for inflation, and would change the formula for determining future increases in this level. This is commonly referred within government and contracting circles as the contractor compensation cap.

read in full

GAO: Lower Contractor Compensation Caps Would Save Hundreds of Millions

Hundreds of millions of dollars per year could be saved if Congress lowers the maximum amount the government reimburses contractors for their employees’ compensation, according to a new report released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congress’ investigative arm.

read in full

The Impact on Public Investment from Drops in Non-Defense Discretionary Spending

While the damaging impacts of austerity have received increased attention in recent weeks, a new report from the Economic Policy Institute shows that most of the major budget plans being considered in Washington would make things worse.

read in full

White House At Odds With House on Weapons Cancellations

It's an old battle: executive branch expertise on how it thinks taxpayer dollars should be spent versus the congressional power of the purse. This story plays out often in the yearly authorization and appropriations bills for the Department of Defense (DOD). This year is not any different as a White House statement from yesterday makes clear.

read in full

The House Armed Services Committee Proposes Weakening Contractor Compensation Cap

The House committee in charge of overseeing the Department of Defense and drafting the National Defense Authorization Act has answered the White House’s call to address the ever-increasing contractor compensation cap. But the House Armed Services Committee is serving up something far weaker than what the White House wants and a substantial reversal from the status quo. Namely it would exempt a large universe of contractors that are subject to the cap currently.

read in full

Pages

Subscribe to The Fine Print: blog posts from Center for Effective Government