Revenue & Spending

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

Board Releases New Features for Recovery.gov

Feb 2, 2010 by Sam Rosen-Amy

While the entire rest of the fiscal policy world is obsessing about the budget, I thought I'd take a minute to talk about the other major event of the week, the release of the second round of Recovery Act recipient reporting. We're still working on sifting through the reports themselves, but the website, Recovery.gov, also received an overhaul this weekend. While many of the site's new features still have a long way to go, it's encouraging to see the Recovery Board, which is responsible for the site, actively working to improve the website, despite the fact that public attention has largely moved on.

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President's Budget Far from Change

Feb 2, 2010 by Craig Jennings

OMB Watch has released its statement on President Obama's FY 2011 budget request.

Read the whole statement here.

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An OMB Watch Statement on President Obama's Fiscal Year 2011 Budget Request

WASHINGTON, Feb. 2, 2010—President Obama has sent his budget request for fiscal year 2011 to Congress. Far from bringing change, it at best tinkers with federal priorities while perpetuating the wrong budget agenda.

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Senate Clears $1.9 Trillion Debt Ceiling Increase

Feb 1, 2010 by Gary Therkildsen*

Last Thursday, the Senate voted, 60-39, along partisan lines to pass legislation raising the nation's borrowing capacity to $14.3 trillion. During debate of the bill, senators rejected an amendment to establish a commission to make recommendations to reduce the deficit, but agreed to an amendment reinstituting statutory pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) rules with some exemptions.

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Second Round of Recovery Act Recipient Reports Released Saturday

Jan 29, 2010 by Sam Rosen-Amy

As a reminder, tomorrow the Recovery Board will release the next batch of recipient reports on Recovery.gov. The new reports will be released along with a limited overhaul of the site, which will feature a new search option, a "diversity map," and a job search function. We'll be reviewing these new features, and the new reports, on Monday.

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CBO Recovery Act Cost Estimate Rises to $862 Billion

Jan 29, 2010 by Sam Rosen-Amy

I'm sure you all already read all of the Congressional Budget Office's 2010 Budget Outlook since I blogged about it the other day, but in case you missed it, the outlook also included a special section on the Recovery Act. The main take away from this section is that the CBO predicts that the overall cost of the Act will be higher than initially estimated, thanks to a couple of factors.

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Iraq and Afghanistan Get an Extra Dose of Oversight

Jan 29, 2010 by Gary Therkildsen*

The folks over at Government Executive.com have the scoop on the Commission on Wartime Contracting's (CWC) recent move to open two field offices in Southwest Asia. The Iraq office, which is currently staffed by one expert and awaiting a second, is located in central Baghdad. Two experts staff the Afghanistan office, located at Bagram Air Field, which is roughly 25 miles outside the capital of Kabul.

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Of Campaign Promises and No-Bid Contracts

Jan 28, 2010 by Gary Therkildsen*

With the recent passage of President Obama's first anniversary in office, journalists, bloggers, and commentators have been sizing up the administration's accomplishments and failures thus far. In that spirit, Fox News, in an article examining a contract recently awarded under the Obama administration, concluded that the president has failed to keep his campaign promise of ending no-bid "sweetheart deals" in government contracting. To say that this verdict – which manipulated OMB Watch data – is misleading and a bit premature is an understatement.

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CBO: 2010 Deficit to Fall to $1.35 Trillion

Jan 27, 2010 by Sam Rosen-Amy

In case you missed it, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just released its 2010 Budget Outlook, its yearly look at the health of the federal budget. CBO's director, Doug Elmendorf, provides the basics of the report:

CBO projects, that if current laws and policies remained unchanged, the federal budget would show a deficit of $1.35 trillion for fiscal year 2010. At 9.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), that deficit would be slightly smaller than the shortfall of 9.9 percent of GDP ($1.4 trillion) posted in 2009.

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The End of TARP to Be Met with Controversy

The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) began with a single, basic idea: prevent imminent economic collapse. With that premise, then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson convinced Congress and President Bush to authorize $700 billion of emergency spending to undertake actions to avert such disaster. Now, with economic catastrophe averted but with the nation's economy still struggling, a new report turns policymakers' focus to the end of TARP.

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