President Donald Trump’s first year of his second, nonconsecutive term brought all sorts of changes. His administration shuttered the United States Agency for International Development, had the government acquire stakes in Nvidia and several other corporations, and dispatched the National Guard to patrol Washington, D.C., and other major cities, to cite only a few examples. One big thing that has […]
Legislative Tool to Circumvent House Lea...
Congress returned to work in Washington, and one of the first issues lawmakers addressed was government health insurance subsidies. These temporary, emergency subsidies were first enacted during the coronavirus pandemic and expired at the end of last year. On Jan. 8, 213 Democrats and 17 Republicans voted to extend the Obamacare subsidies for three years….(Read more)
House Republicans Want to Show Voters Th...
The House has spent much of the last two months of this year trying to catch up on its work. It passed 22 bills in one recent day and held 13 committee meetings and hearings the day after. All told, the House has passed 41 bills since the end of the government shutdown on Nov. […]
After decades of red ink, a fresh push f...
The U.S government’s debt hit $37.6 trillion on Sept. 30, the end of the most recent fiscal year. To put that number in perspective, a stack of $1 bills in that amount would be 2.5 million miles tall. One day after the nation reached this ignominious fiscal mark, the federal government shut down due to a lack of funding. Legislators are […]
Trump attempts pocket rescission to cut ...
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)
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 […]