Over the last year fiscal hawks have been warning that if we didn’t drastically cut spending and enact major reforms in entitlement programs to reduce the federal budget deficit, the United States would become another Greece. Greece, however, after years of severe fiscal austerity, is now running a budget surplus,

Earlier this month the House passed two appropriations bills, Milcon/VA, and Homeland Security, both of which the president opposes. No appropriations bills have come to the floor in the Senate. As discussed in the newsletter, with a $91 billion gap between the House and Senate discretionary spending levels (302a allocations),

I’ve been closely following the federal budget for more than two decades, and at no point have things been more confusing, not only to observers like myself, but more importantly to federal managers and executives who are trying to plan their department budgets. One of our goals is to try

More good news bad news: Unlike this year, the sequesters scheduled for FY14 to FY21 will not cut spending across the board, but simply impose caps on discretionary spending, which ought to allow agencies to make more rational budget decisions. The bad news is that by making the cuts more

Although the President submitted this year’s budget two months late, it’s clear that the various fiscal cliffs, the on again off again on again sequester and the continuing resolutions have made budget planning a nightmare. In defense, the budget proposes a new round of base closures that would begin in

The sequester was, of course, never supposed to happen. The indiscriminate cuts to spending would be so damaging that surely Congress would take some action to avoid it – except it didn’t. With the exception of certain exempted programs – military salaries, veteran’s programs, Social Security, welfare and food stamps

The continuing resolution (CR) that passed in the House on March 6 was expected to easily pass in the Senate last week (wait a minute; did I just say “easily pass in the Senate”?). Both bills would fund the government at sequester level spending through September 30. The Senate version

Both chambers remain on course to pass a largely uncontroversial extension of the expiring continuing resolution (CR) that will be comprised of an omnibus and probably five out of the 12 individual appropriations bills. It will set FY13 discretionary spending at $984b, equal to the sequester level, but with increased

CR Update: Yesterday the House passed a six-month FY13 continuing resolution (CR) that maintains sequester level spending for the remainder of the fiscal year, but provides appropriations to Defense and Milcon-VA. The measure, HR 933, passed by a vote of 267-151, would extend the federal pay freeze but grants military