Earmarks

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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The Bush Budget Legacy: Misleading Claims and Misguided Priorities

On Feb. 4, President Bush laid out, in a rather slender volume, his federal budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2009, which begins on Oct. 1. Unfortunately, Bush has made little progress toward constructing an honest, fiscally responsible budget that meets the needs of America's communities. In fact, criticisms identical to those levied a year ago against his FY 2008 budget are still quite suitable in their application today — Bush's assumptions about war spending and Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) reform are unrealistic if not outright spurious. His attempt to balance the budget by 2012 requires massive cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and other popular domestic investments Congress will certainly not enact. His proposal to terminate or radically cut 151 federal programs is fantastical — wholesale cuts to popular discretionary programs are not only unlikely but are irresponsible in the face of worsening economic conditions.

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Fun(damental) FY09 Budget Facts: the National Debt

Feb 4, 2008 by Dana Chasin

The FY09 budget proposal released this morning by the White House is replete with interesting and important budget facts. First and foremost of these is the big picture -- the status and story of the national debt. The most salient (and shocking) facts are these:

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Tell the Senate Finance Committee Its New Rules Don't Go Far Enough

Jan 28, 2008 by Craig Jennings

The Senate Finance Committee is considering new rules on Wednesday (Jan. 30) to increase transparency of the committee's meetings. While the proposed changes are a welcome step toward openness and transparency, the draft rules contain several serious problems. We need to give the committee quick feedback on these problems and get them fixed before Wednesday's markup. Most notable are the following three problems:

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Contact Us!

Jan 11, 2008 by Craig Jennings

Questions, comments, suggestions, and glad tidings can now be directed to the BudgetBlog inbox at: (In an effort to prevent spam, our contact address appears as an image and without a link to the address.)

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Coconut Road Earmark Defies Laws of Physics

Jan 9, 2008 by Adam Hughes*

There was a great post yesterday on the NY Times editorial blog about the so-called "Coconut Road" scandal from the 2006 transportation reauthorization bill (for details on the scandal, see the Times coverage from June and October.) The long and short of it is that a questionable earmark was removed from the final version of the transportation reauthorization bill by vote and then, magically it seems, appeared in the text of the bill anyway. From the Times yesterday: Congress rejected [the] Coconut Road [earmark] in the final legislation. But then it resurfaced — apparently via some congressional staffer's clerical sleight of hand — in the suspiciously altered final law. The mystery is how the will of Congress came to be so thwarted, and it deserves solving. The appearance of this earmark after it was struck from the final version of the transportation bill is a violation of congressional processes and horrendously unethical to say the least. And as the Times correctly points out, the fact that nobody except Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) really cares about this is probably even worse. Congress needs to do better.

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2007 Budget Endgame: A Re-Capitulation

Dec 21, 2007 by Dana Chasin

The Devils in the Details Now that Congress has completed its work on the budget for 2007, we can take a critical backward glance at the process and where it ended up. Althought there are silver linings, as noted in 2007 Budget Endgame: Recapitulating the "Capitulations", in the main, it's not a pretty picture.

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Requiem for a Budget Resolution

Dec 19, 2007 by Dana Chasin

The high-water mark of the budget-making process in 2007 may have been Congress' adoption of a budget resolution, a worthy accomplishment rarely achieved in recent years, but hardly a substitute for regular order enactment of appropriations bills pursuant to it. Why was Congress unable to build on its budget resolution this year, why was it left to whither on the vine? Stan Collander, in A Review Of 2007 offers a cogent explanation:

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Despite New Majority in Congress, Fiscal Policy Still Mostly Stuck in Neutral

A new congressional majority in 2007 promised a clean break from past practices of a Congress noted for its corruption, dysfunction and profligacy. It moved on a modest agenda and successfully enacted a few important policies, but overall, it failed to chart a new direction in fiscal policy. This failure was due in large part to the majority underestimating the ability and willingness of a coalition of conservative policymakers and the president to fiercely obstruct even the modest reform policies on the new Congress's agenda.

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Omnibuster: Forget about Topline Spending Cap

Dec 18, 2007 by Craig Jennings

Dems Boost Funding Levels, Redirect Money with Impunity Bush appears to have won the Battle of the Topline, with the House approving an omnibus package (summary; text) accepting President Bush's insistence on the $933 billion cap on total discretionary spending in FY 2008 he requested back in February. On top of that, he will get a $70 billion downpayment on his $200 billion "emergency" spending supplemental request.

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USASpending.gov Launched!

Dec 13, 2007 by Adam Hughes*

OMB has launched their website that will comply with the 2006 Coburn-Obama Federal Funding, Accountability, and Transparency Act (Transparency Act) today. You can visit it at www.usaspending.gov. OMB really needs to be commended for this site, for launching it two weeks before required under the legislation, and for their commitment to transparency. For those of you who haven't been to the BudgetBlog before or have, but are still sleepy this morning, you might not notice that the government's website looks an awful lot like FedSpending.org, the site we launched in October, 2006. Well, that's because it basically is FedSpending.org, with a few design changes. As the Washington Post reported this morning, OMB Watch licensed FedSpending.org to OMB for use in compliance with the law (btw, the article is a great insight into the collaboration we've had with OMB over the past year). We will continue to operate FedSpending.org and add more advanced features that make the site easier to use and the data easier to understand. And we hope with a solid foundation, OMB will be able to make timely and eventually more accurate data available to the public through USASpending.gov. Currently, there are difference between the sites. For instance, OMB will have more timely data as they plan to update the site every two weeks with new data (we currently update data twice a year). In addition, the government site does not have features and upgrades added to FedSpending.org in our last version release, including a mapping feature on all searches, creation of a streamlined and powerful SuperSearch for all advanced searching needs, and increased flexibility in getting data more quickly through expandable summary views. I have been continually surprised and proud of the success of our endevor to make Federal spending information more available and understandable to the public through FedSpending.org. For it to now be the model for the government's efforts to do the same is feels even better.

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