Blogs

There is ample opportunity to make federal spending on highways more productive, according to a new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report. Funding formulas that the federal government uses to apportion spending to each state do not correspond well to how…

The administration is seeking roughly $1 billion in additional IRS funding that the agency says could improve customer service and step up enforcement work, resulting in billions of dollars in additional federal revenue. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen faced Republican skepticism,…

House Speaker Paul Ryan is urging Republican lawmakers to respect the 2017 spending levels set in last fall’s budget deal, but continuing opposition from some conservatives has raised the possibility that Congress might not pass a budget resolution this year.…

The federal debt has reached $19 trillion, an omen of increasingly severe financial difficulties for the United States unless Washington approves sweeping budget reforms. Well over $13.6 trillion of that total is known as “debt owed to the public,” meaning…

The administration unveiled a proposed budget Tuesday that would lower projected deficits and keep the debt stable as a share of the economy over the next 10 years. But the plan has no chance of winning approval from a Republican…

In its spending bill for Fiscal 2016, Congress seemed to acknowledge that medical research had been cut too deeply for over a decade. The legislation will boost that funding in the coming months. “But without reforms to address the basic…

A new report, released shortly before Monday’s Iowa caucuses, says that while all of the 2016 presidential candidates in both parties acknowledge that the rapidly growing national debt is a problem, most of their proposals to deal with it fall…

On the campaign trail, voters are hearing promises of big tax cuts from the Republican presidential candidates and of big spending increases from the Democrats. Meanwhile, back in Washington last week, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a new…