Federal Budget and Appropriations
The Annual Appropriations Dance
Josh Huder | October 3, 2024
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 watch as Congress fumbles around
Second Verse, Same as the First: 2024 Appropriations Watch
Katina Slavkova | January 10, 2024
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
Debt Limit Déjà Vu? What Can We Learn from the Close Calls of 2011 and 2023?
Laura Blessing | June 7, 2023
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 grad school, and I had
The Debt Ceiling and the Appropriations Process
Katina Slavkova | May 3, 2023
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 initial bargaining offer perfectly
Back to the Future for Appropriations Procedures in the 118th Congress?
Matt Glassman | March 17, 2023
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 the failure to pass individual
Continuing Resolutions: Continuing to Damage Defense
GAI | January 9, 2023
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 a larger problem. The fiscal
A Very Busy Lame Duck?
Katina Slavkova | December 1, 2022
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 by
Rest In Peace Congressional Budget Process
Josh Huder | June 6, 2022
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
The Defense Budget: Current Status and Core Issues
Katina Slavkova | May 3, 2022
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 on the
Appropriations Update and Continuing Resolutions
Matt Glassman | March 2, 2022
Where are we with government funding? It’s déjà vu all over again, as Congress passes another Continuing Resolution (CR). The FY2022 congressional appropriations process—which will provide funding for the federal government from October 1, 2021 until September 30, 2022—is once again delaying final action. After its failure to enact full year appropriations bills by October