A major decision point facing the 114th Congress will be how to deal with federal spending beyond the end of the current fiscal year. The December 2013 Ryan-Murray agreement raised baseline discretionary spending by about $9 billion per year for FY14 and 15, but expires at the end of the

Although the current continuing resolution (CR) expires in just six weeks, and Congress isn’t scheduled to return for another two weeks, no one is mentioning the “S word” (shutdown) this year. Instead, the question seems to be whether Congress will be able to pass an FY15 omnibus bill, or whether

Yesterday the Congressional Budget Office issued its preliminary deficit projection for FY 2014, estimating a deficit of under a half trillion dollars. The FY14 deficit of $486 billion would be $195 billion under last year’s deficit, and the fifth consecutive year that the deficit has fallen as a percentage of

It’s September in Washington (yes, I know it’s September elsewhere as well). We’ve just returned to work from the long Labor Day weekend, school buses are again making our nightmarish traffic even worse, and the Washington Nationals are in first place in the National League East. Congress has returned from

Prior to the start of this year’s World Cup, the United States had reached the semifinals only once, in 1930, at the first World Cup. The US team advanced beyond the round of 16 only one other time, when they beat Mexico in 2002, and reached the quarter finals. At

It’s been thirty-six years since Affirmed won the Triple Crown, horse racing’s greatest challenge. With California Chrome’s defeat on Saturday, twelve horses have won the first two legs of the Triple Crown since 1978, only to fail in the 1½-mile Belmont Stakes, the longest and most demanding of the three

When asked what they remember as the most significant event of 1994, people tend to be divided between the massive 6.7 magnitude Northridge earthquake that devastated Los Angeles and the arrest of O.J. Simpson on murder charges following the infamous slow motion car chase in the white Bronco. Some of

On Tuesday the FY15 congressional budget process officially began with President Obama submitting his FY15 budget request to Congress. The discretionary portion of the president’s $3.9 trillion request stays within the caps agreed to in last year’s omnibus appropriations bill, but also contains a $56 billion supplemental “wish list” of

With the January 15 deadline to pass the FY14 appropriations bills fast approaching, on Friday House Appropriations Chair Harold Rogers (R-KY) filed a “clean” three-day extension of the current continuing resolution, which is expected to pass both chambers by Wednesday. Both sides continue to report good progress on the $1.012