President Donald Trump recently moved to cancel $4.9 billion in spending on foreign aid, the latest skirmish in the battle for control of the federal budget between the White House‘s Office of Management and Budget and Congress’s appropriations committees…. (Read more)
Blog
He’s got mail: Mailman: My Wild Ride Del
March 2020 was a very bad month for Stephen Starring Grant. He was hustling to New York City for a meeting at the swank “boutique marketing consultancy” that employed him as the “head of strategy.” The company was launching a new initiative for a law firm that helped “the ultrarich, and only the ultrarich.” Then […]
Senate appropriators reject House cuts t...
Before leaving Washington for the August recess, the Senate advanced the annual legislative branch spending bill. The measure proposes $4.97 billion in spending on the upper chamber and the various legislative branch agencies, an increase of $257 million, or 5.4%, from this year. The bill amounts to a rebuke of the lower spending proposed by appropriators in the House […]
Congress passes spending cuts — but the
Something remarkable occurred on Capitol Hill this month: Congress and the president partnered to make a law that cut the budgets of a few federal entities. A rescission of funds has not occurred since 1999, when former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, struck a deal with the Republican-held House and Senate. This legislation cuts various international aid programs run by the […]
Congress tries to ban insider trading by...
Media stories erupted recently about Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) financial dealings. “Stock market watchdog claims Nancy Pelosi raked in $4.7M in a single day of trading,” reads one headline about the 38-year House member from San Francisco, who was speaker from 2007 to 2011 and 2019 to 2023…. (Read more)
Trump and Congress clash over who has fi...
Who is in charge of the Library of Congress: Congress or the president? Until recently, the settled answer in Washington was that the world’s largest library was, as its name states, a legislative branch agency…. (Read more)




