ABOUT:
Defense policy analysis, commentary and discussion.Kerry Young covers appropriations for CQ Roll Call. She joined CQ in 2007 as co-editor of Budget Tracker, an electronic newsletter and Web site on the budget and appropriations, keeping track of efforts to reduce waste in government and control deficit spending and the debt. She’s a veteran of Bloomberg News, where from 1995 to 2006 she covered energy and health, including the FDA and Medicare. A graduate of Tulane University, Kerry worked for several small newspapers in New Jersey at the start of her career in the early 1990s.
Republican appropriators in the House are starting to discuss potential terms for a stopgap funding bill to keep the government operating after September, even as both chambers gear up for a flurry of action this week on competing spending measures.
The population of veterans waiting for verdicts on their disability claims, about 816,839 people, is larger than that of four states — Alaska, North Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming — as well as of the District of Columbia.
The late Sen. Daniel K. Inouye, who lost an arm fighting in World War II, once observed that advances in transportation and medicine were allowing soldiers to survive battlefield wounds that would have been a death sentence during his time in combat.
Next week, we’ll be watching to see whether Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell makes a rare appearance in his seat at the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., said the mixture of a trending-purple state and a bloody GOP primary could hinder the party’s ability next year to hold the Georgia Senate seat of his retiring colleague.
Congressional Republicans and Democrats are pushing forward on separate legislative tracks for appropriations measures over coming days that break with current budget law to advance what will amount to little more than negotiating tactics for a larger budget deal.
Tim Huelskamp of Kansas has been one of the most vocal tea-party-backed conservatives in the House, but his calls to shrink the size of government didn’t apply when it came to bringing a new Department of Homeland Security lab to his district.
Dr. Jeffery C. Ward, a cancer specialist, has not yet faced the painful task many of his colleagues have this year: closing the door to patients because of federal budget cuts. But that’s only because Ward already made the hard choice of switching from running a private practice to serving on staff at a large hospital.
Lawmakers and outside coalitions supported by doctors and drug companies face an uphill battle in their bid to reverse sequester cuts that have hit cancer drugs.
This may be small solace to airline passengers waiting out delays at airports in Los Angeles and New York, but the general consensus in Washington is that the real pain from budget cuts under the sequester may not be felt until the end of the summer or even next year. That’s because managers of federal agencies are using whatever flexibility they can, according to officials at agencies and unions representing workers, to cut down on furloughs to minimize disruptions in services.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency that regulates trade in goods based on their projected value, will be able to avoid furloughs during this fiscal year in part because it did a good job of preparing for the future.
Democrats and Republicans will need to bridge a $91 billion gap on budget plans before they can clear any new spending laws. But for now, neither side is suggesting a compromise — even as both contend they want a more orderly appropriations process.
For Cliff Mass, a University of Washington professor and the author of a popular meteorology blog, the title of the 2012 federal report “Weather Service for the Nation: Becoming Second to None” summed up his growing concerns.
Almost a year after Congress learned of a budget scandal at the National Weather Service, lawmakers are still trying to get a realistic estimate of what it costs to run the nation’s first line of defense against the effects of hurricanes, tornadoes and winter storms.
Senate leaders are trying to whittle down a daunting list of more than 90 amendments pending to a fiscal 2013 spending package. They aim to send to the House early next week a measure needed to fund the government through the rest of the fiscal year.
Republicans and Democrats in the House expect to support the Senate’s version of a fiscal 2013 continuing resolution, provided that the spending package doesn’t arrive weighed down with contentious new provisions.
Appropriators in the Senate are trying to stave off attempts from budget hawks and proponents of more special exceptions that threaten to slow down work on the continuing resolution needed to fund the government through the rest of the fiscal year.
The continuing resolution that will come out of the Senate will almost certainly be a larger and more complicated measure than the stopgap funding measure the House coped with this week.
House appropriators are proposing a final fiscal 2013 spending package that would effectively cap federal operating expenses at $982 billion, while giving military and veterans programs new flexibility to cushion the effects of the sequester’s automatic cuts.
President Barack Obama and congressional leaders said Friday that they expect to advance a straightforward continuing resolution that would set federal spending through the rest of the current fiscal year without addressing the automatic cuts under sequester and other potentially contentious questions.
House Republican leaders seem to have averted a potential rift in the conference, garnering wide support for a continuing resolution that Majority Leader Eric Cantor on Thursday said will move next week.
House appropriators may unveil as early as the coming week their proposal for funding the federal government in the second half of fiscal 2013, but there’s no decision yet on whether the Republican leadership may bring the bill to the floor.
As the story goes, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942 asked Sen. Kenneth McKellar, then the ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, to quietly provide $2 billion for a secret weapons lab, the Tennessee Democrat had a brief and quick response.
Senate Appropriations Chairwoman Barbara A. Mikulski faces tough hurdles in her quest to return to “regular order” for handling her committee’s dozen annual spending bills.
A bipartisan Senate duo is again trying to permanently ban earmarks, a practice now out of favor with most members of Congress.
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