#Discretionary Spending

Although Congress has plenty of serious budget work to do, lawmakers in both parties can’t seem to resist frittering away time and confusing the public with various proposals that serve no useful purpose. Last week offered a couple good examples.…

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has issued its third annual report detailing how Washington could save tens of billions of dollars a year by reducing fragmentation, overlap and duplication in the federal government. The report also suggests improvements to enhance…

Congress received some solid advice from widely respected budget experts at a recent Joint Economic Committee hearing on solving the federal debt crisis. Alice Rivlin, a senior fellow at Brookings and a member of the Campaign to Fix the Debt…

In his semiannual report to Congress on monetary policy last week, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke threw in some solid advice on fiscal policy as well. Let’s hope lawmakers were listening.While some progress has been made toward reducing federal deficits…

Unless Congress and President Obama reach agreement before Friday, about $85 billion in poorly designed spending cuts for Fiscal Year 2013 will begin hitting a broad cross-section of programs across the federal government. The Concord Coalition supports replacing these automatic…

Although recent projections from the Congressional Budget Office offer some encouraging news in some areas, they also show why comprehensive fiscal reforms are badly needed.On the positive side, the CBO expects the annual deficit to drop below $1 trillion for…

With a 241-180 vote, the House last week approved legislation to provide $50.5 billion in appropriations to aid recovery from damage by Hurricane Sandy and to help prevent damage from future disasters. Including $9.7 billion that the House passed in…

As policymakers look towards the upcoming budget debates over the debt ceiling and “automatic” spending cuts (the sequester), those concerned with fiscal responsibility should be more focused on policy reforms than achievement of a specific deficit-reduction target.The idea that we…