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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Recovery Board Releases Rest of Recipient Data

Oct 30, 2009 by Sam Rosen-Amy

Finally, at long last, the Recovery Board has now released the totality of recipient reports to the public through Recovery.gov. Today's release covers grant and loan data, as the Board published the contract data on Oct. 15. This new batch of data, though, is magnitudes larger.

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Congress Passes Second Continuing Resolution

Oct 30, 2009 by Adam Hughes*

I had a feeling when Congress passed a continuing resolution (CR) last month that funded the federal government for only 30 days that they'd be back to pass another one. And so they did.

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Senate Budget Committee Task Force Gets Underway

Oct 29, 2009 by Adam Hughes*

I blogged yesterday about a new task force that was recently created within the Senate Budget Committee that will focus on government performance issues. The task force (SBCTFGP?) got things started this morning with its first hearing, where Jeffrey D. Zients, the Deputy Director for Management and Chief Performance Officer at Office of Management and Budget testified along with Sir Michael Barber from McKinsey & Company and Dr. Paul Posner from George Mason University.

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Recovery Act Job Creation Numbers, cont.

Oct 29, 2009 by Sam Rosen-Amy

As a follow up to Craig's earlier post on the AP article/Recovery Act job numbers, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities just put up a great article on what we will and will not see, data-wise, on Oct. 30, when the rest of the recipient reports are published. The timely report serves as a reminder that the recipient reporting doesn't cover most Recovery Act spending, nor does it reflect many of the jobs "created" by the Act.

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AP's Limited Review of Recovery Act Job Numbers

Oct 29, 2009 by Craig Jennings

Updated.

The Associated Press unleashed something of a firestorm earlier today, when it published an article critiquing the recent Recovery Act jobs data. Performing a "limited review" of "some" of the recipient reports of Recovery Act contracts on Recovery.gov, the Associated Press concluded that the "government has overstated by thousands the number of jobs it has created or saved with federal contracts" under the Recovery Act. A bold claim certainly and one not supported by the facts.

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Credit Rating Agency Regulation Bill Approved by House Panel

Oct 29, 2009 by Craig Jennings

A bill to strengthen regulation of credit rating agencies (HR 3890) took a step toward passage yesterday as the House Financial Services committee voted 49-14 to approve the Accountability and Transparency in Rating Agencies Act.

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Sunlight Labs Unveils Recovery Act Augmented Reality Mashup App

Oct 28, 2009 by Sam Rosen-Amy

Ever since the Recovery Act passed back in February, we've been encouraging the Recovery Board, which operates Recovery.gov, to make its data as open and accessible as possible. The idea is that, the government could set up the greatest recipient reporting system in the world, but if that data is then locked into a proprietary system that is closed to the public, it's really no good. Unfortunately, so far, the Board has not made the recipient data itself readily available, but it has provided a KML file for the data feeding into its mapping applications. This file is a decent start, and the smart folks over at Sunlight Labs have taken advantage of it to create their first Recovery Act-focused application.

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Calls for Stricter Tax Haven Legislation Answered

Oct 28, 2009 by Gary Therkildsen*

Yesterday, the chairmen of the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means committees introduced legislation to crack down on overseas tax havens. Coming on the heels of the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) successful amnesty program that rooted out tax cheats hiding assets overseas, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act would help the government root out more cheaters by providing tools to target foreign banks and other entities that provide hiding places for wealthy Americans' riches.

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Poor Data Quality and Lack of Website Functionality Hobble Recovery Act Recipient Reports

The release of the first round of Recovery Act contracts spending data marks the first time that recipients of federal funding have been required to report to the federal government on their use of the funds in a timely and transparent manner. This represents an important milestone in government transparency and accountability. However, the poor data quality and Recovery.gov's limited functionality hinder the promise of a new era of fiscal transparency – at least for this round of recipient reporting.

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Senate Continues to Struggle with Appropriations

Congress is preparing to pass a second continuing resolution (CR), as the first stopgap appropriations measure is set to expire on Oct. 31 and little progress has been made toward completing the remaining appropriations bills in the Senate. As the window of opportunity to pass all the appropriations bills individually continues to close, even the once-optimistic head of the Senate appropriations process has stated that Congress will likely have to use an omnibus spending bill to finish the work before the end of 2009.

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