Reports
Sequestering Meals on Wheels Could Cost the Nation $489 Million per Year
Apr 30, 2013
Sequestering Meals on Wheels funds could cost taxpayers far more than it saves. While across-the-board spending cuts that began March 1, called sequestration, are expected to reduce spending on Meals on Wheels programs this year by an estimated $10 million, these savings will dwarfed by at least $489 million per year in increased spending on Medicaid, both this year and in each subsequent year that sequestration remains in place.
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Charitable Deduction Should Be Preserved
Apr 24, 2013
Congress is currently considering tax changes that could substantially reduce charitable giving in the United States. One threat is a proposal from President Obama to cap the deductibility of itemized deductions by high-income taxpayers at 28 percent. A second threat is less understood – tax reform that lowers tax rates. Tax rate changes like those in the tax reform plan proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) would reduce the tax benefit of charitable giving even more than the proposed Obama limit on itemized giving. This report reviews the impact on charitable giving of both the Obama proposal and tax reform more generally. It concludes that both would substantially reduce charitable giving and that the impact on the nonprofit sector could be comparable to sequestration.
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Americans' Views on Spending Versus Federal Budget Plans
Apr 2, 2013
President Barack Obama’s Fiscal Year 2014 budget request is at odds with the majority of Americans’ views on Social Security, according to recent Pew Research Center polling of some 1,500 Americans. Obama has proposed to modify how regular Social Security benefit increases are calculated by switching to a "chained" Consumer Price Index (CPI) to determine the annual cost-of-living adjustment (COLA), which would lead to benefit cuts for Social Security recipients over time. Social Security is extremely popular with 87 percent of Americans who support maintaining or increasing spending in this area.
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Freedom of Information Act Performance, 2012: Agencies Are Processing More Requests but Redacting More Often
Mar 13, 2013
A building block of American democracy is the idea that citizens have a right to information about how their government works and what it does in their name. However, citizen access to public information was only established by law in 1966 with the passage of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The law has since been strengthened and improved over the years, and FOIA currently requires federal agencies to formally respond to requests for information within 20 working days or potentially face a lawsuit. While there are exemptions that agencies can use to avoid the disclosure of sensitive information or information that violates privacy rights, agencies processed over half a million FOIA requests in 2012. In about 41 percent of these cases, the information requested was released “in full” with no parts “redacted” – i.e., clean, complete documents with no blacked-out parts were provided to the person who requested the information.
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Delivering on Open Government: The Obama Administration's Unfinished Legacy
Mar 10, 2013
This report examines progress made during President Obama’s first term toward open government goals outlined in a comprehensive set of recommendations that the open government community issued in November 2008, titled Moving Toward a 21st Century Right-to-Know Agenda. We examine activity in the three main areas of the 2008 report: creating an environment within government that is supportive of transparency, improving public use of government information, and reducing the secrecy related to national security issues.
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Small Businesses, Public Health, and Scientific Integrity
Jan 29, 2013
This report examines the activities of an independent office within the Small Business Administration: the Office of Advocacy. The Office of Advocacy has responsibility for ensuring that federal agencies evaluate the small business impacts of the rules they adopt. Scientific assessments are not “rules” and do not regulate small business, yet the Office of Advocacy decided to comment on technical, scientific assessments of the cancer risks of formaldehyde, styrene, and chromium. By its own admission, Advocacy lacks the scientific expertise to evaluate the merits of such assessments.
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Extending Current Estate Tax Rates May Force Spending Cuts in Education and Health in 2013
Nov 2, 2012
With wealth disparities between the wealthy and middle class continuing to grow under current law, now is not the time to reduce or continue already low rates of taxation on wealth inherited from the top one percent of estates.
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Mitigating the Impact of a Temporary Sequester
Oct 1, 2012
On Jan. 2, 2013, if Congress and the president have not enacted legislation delaying or canceling a process known as "sequestration," $109 billion in automatic, across-the-board spending cuts will be applied to defense and non-defense programs in 2013. If these cuts were to occur, however, the White House would have substantial authority to mitigate and postpone the impact on those programs that are not exempt for several weeks. Moreover, large portions of the federal budget would be exempt from the cuts.
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The Regulatory Tsunami That Wasn’t
Sep 27, 2012
This report shows that there is little difference between the Obama administration and past administrations in their overall level of regulatory activity. There has been an increase in the number of significant rules during the Obama administration, but that has been driven by the statutory and judicial deadlines the Obama administration faced and by regulatory actions left uncompleted by prior administrations. The number of pending regulations leading into this election year is remarkably similar to comparable time periods under past administrations and does not provide any evidence of plans for an avalanche of regulations to come.
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The Right to Know, the Responsibility to Protect: State Actions Are Inadequate to Ensure Effective Disclosure of the Chemicals Used in Natural Gas Fracking
Jul 9, 2012
The Right to Know, the Responsibility to Protect examines the actions being taken or considered by state governments to ensure that the public can track the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing (also known as natural gas fracking). By examining current state disclosure laws, identifying the gap between effective disclosure policy and existing practice, and reviewing the most recent evidence on the health risks of exposure to the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing, we hope this report will encourage state and local authorities to improve their chemical disclosure standards.
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