Appropriations

Feb 8, 2016

Top 400 Taxpayers See Tax Rates Rise, But There’s More to the Story

As Americans were gathering party supplies to greet the New Year, the Internal Revenue Service released their annual report of cumulative tax data reported on the 400 tax r...

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Feb 4, 2016

Chlorine Bleach Plants Needlessly Endanger 63 Million Americans

Chlorine bleach plants across the U.S. put millions of Americans in danger of a chlorine gas release, a substance so toxic it has been used as a chemical weapon. Greenpeace’s new repo...

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Jan 25, 2016

U.S. Industrial Facilities Reported Fewer Toxic Releases in 2014

The Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) data for 2014 is now available. The good news: total toxic releases by reporting facilities decreased by nearly six percent from 2013 levels. Howe...

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Jan 22, 2016

Methane Causes Climate Change. Here's How the President Plans to Cut Emissions by 40-45 Percent.

UPDATE (Jan. 22, 2016): Today, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) released its proposed rule to reduce methane emissions...

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more news

Who is the Bush Administration Kidding on PART?

Jun 5, 2007 by Adam Hughes*

Abstinence education is back in the news as a recent study from Mathematica Policy Research continues to cast significant doubts on the effectiveness of abstinence-only sex education in preventing teen pregnancy, early sexual activity, and sexually transmitted infections. The report, which was commissioned by Congress in 1997, followed 2,057 U.S. teenagers in late elementary and middle school who participated in four abstinence programs, as well as students in the same grades who did not participate in such programs. While this is a topic that is a bit outside the scope of things we comment on here at the Budget Brigade at OMB Watch, I raise it to compare congressionally mandated studies to evaluate programs and the efforts undertaken by the Bush administration with the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART). Congress commissioned this study to compare the impact of abstinence-only programs with a control group of students who did not participate - a helpful comparison in determining if it is the abstinence-only programs that are actually making a difference (and the result has repeatedly been that they do not make a difference). Let's compare that to the PART's performance measurement evaluations. According to the PART review from 2006 of the "Abstinence Education" program, the way program performance will be measured is through tracking teen pregnancy rates, percentage of teens who report never having had sex and who continue to abstain after participation in a program, percentage of teens who have had sex and then report abstaining following participation in a program, and decreases in percentage of 9-12 grade students who report having had sex. These are all fine indicators of the level of, well, teen pregnancy and sexual attitudes and actions of teens in the country. Unfortunately, they will not show whether it was the abstinence-only education programs that caused the improvements or goals unless there is a comparison to difference programs or a control group that does not participate in any program. What's even more appalling than faulty methodology within the PART is the outright fabrications that the administration actually uses PART survey findings to inform its funding priorities. The PART review for the abstinence program references a "forthcoming" Mathematica study (question 4.5) and say it "uses a rigorous experimental design with random assignment of control and experimental group." But when the results of that "rigorous" study were released this past April, Harry Wilson, a top official in the Department of Health and Human Services, told the Washington Post that the study "isn't rigorous enough to show whether or not [abstinence-only] education works." Incredibly enough, Wilson added that the administration has no intention of changing funding priorities in light of the results. Do I really need to say more about what a sham the PART is?

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Pre-emptive Nutrition-Assistance Would Save Money

Jun 5, 2007 by Adam Hughes*

A new report commissioned by the Sedexho Foundation estimates the annual costs associated with hunger in America is $90 billion. This estimate excludes government programs for nutrion-assistance - which amount to approximately $53 billion in FY 2006. The report finds that increasing anti-hunger investments by an additional $10 billion to $12 billion a year is cost-effective and could even almost wipe out hunger in America. The lead author of the report, J. Larry Brown from the Center on Hunger and Poverty at Brandeis University, believes the United States is wasting money by not tackling the issue of hunger head-on: We ought to debate this, because if we're right, we're spending far more by letting hunger exist than it would cost to end it." Washington Times: Cost of hunger calculated at $90 billion

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Obey Sets FY08 Approps Spending Caps

Jun 4, 2007 by Dana Chasin

8 of 12 of Them Defy Bush's Veto Threats Tomorrow, the House Appropriations Committee is expected to approve the twelve subcommittee spending allocation caps for FY 08 set out today by Committee chair Rep. David Obey (D-WI). Eight of these twelve exceed the amounts requested by the president last February. Although Bush has threatened to veto any bill that exceeds his request, the House Appropriations Committee allocation indicates that Democrats are prepared to challenge him on several spending bills, some of which fund highly popular programs and might be politically perilous to veto.

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Honey, Did You Pack the Veto Pen?

Jun 1, 2007 by Adam Hughes*

President Bush will not want to leave for weekends in Crawford this summer without his veto pen. Yesterday, his OMB Director Rob Portman renewed his threats to veto any appropriations bill that exceeds the budget request the president submitted to Congress in February. On May 11, Portman had warned only that the president would veto any spending bill not on a "sustainable path" to complying with the president's $933 billion total discretionary spending limit.

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Administration Drops Opposition to Data Collection Program

Jun 1, 2007 by Craig Jennings

About a year ago, we reported on the administration's opposition to continued funding of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, or "SIPP." SIPP, you may recall is an ongoing program that ""collect[s] source and amount of income, labor force information, program participation and eligibility data, and general demographic characteristics to measure the effectiveness of existing federal, state, and local programs." It is an indi

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More on the Inherent Superiority of Government

May 31, 2007 by Matt Lewis

A follow-up post to the one on Bryan Caplan's assault on government: I think I may have confused what normal people mean by efficiency with what economists mean by efficiency- that is, an efficient decision is one whose benefits exceed both the opportunity and out-of-pocket costs. Caplan, I presume, means that government services let people consume irrationally. People don't have to pay for the service, so they consume more than they would otherwise. This is irrational, I guess.

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Would Soldiers Really Have Run Out of Funding?

May 30, 2007 by Matt Lewis

From the Hill: "No American troop will go without … just so the most liberal activists in the country can be quieted," said a senior House Democratic aide. "If it means Democrats in Congress get tea bags and hate mail, so be it — we will not be irresponsible with the lives of our troops." I have to call a spade a spade here- that reasoning is a total cop-out and disingenous. This CRS report- distributed to every single congressional office, and presumably read by the ever-so-responsible aide who's quoted here, shows that further delays would not have put soldiers in danger. CRS found that the Army had many options to stretch their funding well into the summer, including invoking the Feed and Forage act, which has been used in the past to finance operations while Congress worked on supplemental appropriations bills. I've pasted below the fold the section of the report that's most important, and added some bolding.

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Congress Passes Supplemental; Cease-Fire in the Capital

The struggle between Congress and the White House over the $120 billion supplemental war funding bill ended last week when, on May 24, Congress sent President Bush a version of the bill that he signed into law. The final bill (H.R. 2206) — the largest supplemental spending bill in the history of the United States — also raises the minimum wage for the first time in over ten years, a fact that seems to have been lost in national news coverage.

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Congress Approves Budget Resolution

On May 17, Congress achieved a basic benchmark of responsible fiscal governance — passing a final budget resolution. While this accomplishment has become somewhat of a rare event in Washington (spending in three of the past five fiscal years has not been guided by a budget resolution), and the votes were close (Senate 52-40, House 214-209), Democrats were able to reach final compromises on a few contentious issues.

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This Too Shall Pass

May 24, 2007 by Dana Chasin

House Approves Minimum Wage Increase Largely overlooked in the month-long test of wills between the White House and Congress over the war supplemental is the fact that, at long last (about a decade), an increase in the federal minimum wage will almost certainly be signed into law in the next 24 hours. It was included as part of the $22.2 billion supplemental package of domestic and security-related items not requested by President Bush. It passed the House moments ago, 348-73

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