Category: Federal Budget and Appropriations

On Friday, President Trump endorsed a full-year CR for the FY25 appropriations, which will likely end the appropriations process for this fiscal year. After its failure to enact full year appropriations bills by October 1, Congress has passed a series of continuing resolutions (the first through December 20; a second

Congress has once again missed its annual deadline to fund the federal government for the entire fiscal year. This has become an all-too-familiar dance on Capitol Hill: Congress fails to adopt a budget; the House and Senate draft very different spending bills; nothing happens for a few months; then we

After a chaotic and historically unproductive first session, the 118th Congress appears to be off to a more hopeful start in the new year. Recent news indicating congressional leaders have finally secured an agreement on the top-line numbers for funding the federal government for the remainder of FY24 is certainly

Normally, we remember what we were doing when great triumphs or tragedies take place on the world stage. Fiscal policy is not typically on that list of events. And yet, I remember clearly what I was doing in the lead up to Treasury’s “X date” in 2011. I was in

The partisan and intra-branch posturing on the debt ceiling, on display since January, has finally yielded actual legislative text. Last week Speaker Kevin McCarthy successfully shepherded his conference to pass a debt ceiling bill, accurately characterized as a “bare-minimum victory on a doomed bill.” This description of the House GOP’s

President Biden released the President’s Budget last week and with it, the federal appropriations process has lurched to a start. In the modern era, we have come to expect to see late introduction of the President’s budget, forgoing passing a budget resolution by the budget committees (“deeming” them instead), and

Guest Post by Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Cabana For the national security community, the calendar year has dawned with an $858 billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and an omnibus funding bill passed in late December. But what may have felt like a Christmas miracle to congressional staffers scurrying home belies

Why walk when you can fly? As the 117th Congress pushes into its lame duck session, party leaders consider an ambitious array of bills, and historically, it’s not unusual for such sessions to feature major legislative items. While lame ducks of the past decade or two have typically been marked

Sometime in the last ten years the congressional budget process died. The precise moment is hard to pinpoint because it is not totally – just mostly — dead. But today, only a hollow version of the process still exists. Partisan majorities pass shell budgets to trigger reconciliation in the hopes

Defense officials are already busy making the obligatory annual rounds on Capitol Hill in support of the President’s preferred spending priorities. The current steady pace of congressional hearings might suggest that Congress is methodically working its way towards a timely passage of the defense budget. But this burst of activity