The Senate is considering another poorly designed disaster aid package. With a price tag of $13.5 billion, the Senate intends to use the bill’s disaster and emergency spending designation as a way to circumvent the spending caps put in place by the Budget Control Act of 2011. The bill will boost funding for programs that […]
Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) presents its 2019 Pork-Barrel Madness bracket in honor of the NCAA tournament. The bracket features 32 of the worst pork-barrel earmarks of all time. Taxpayers will be able to vote on CAGW’s Twitter account @GovWaste. Voting on the first-round matchups begins on March 11 and the torunament will end on April 1.
On January 28, 2019, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its annual Budget and Economic Outlook for 2019 to 2029 and unsurprisingly, the United States’ fiscal outlook remains dreadful. CBO estimates a 2019 deficit of $897 billion, a $118 billion increase from 2018. Trillion-dollar deficits will resume in 2022 and reach all-time highs by the end of […]
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General (OIG) admitted last week that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) hospital payment process is broken. The OIG’s report, “Significant Vulnerabilities Exist in the Hospital Wage Index System for Medicare Payments,” showed that from 2004 to 2017, CMS overpaid nearly […]
Citizens Against Government Waste has previously covered the idea of creating a sixth military branch. The argument in favor of a Space Force is almost entirely without merit. It will increase bureaucracy, add to overhead costs, and complicate existing command structures, all without providing additional capabilities. For these very reasons, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis was […]
Rescission is an abstruse presidential tool passed amid the Nixon administration under the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974. Using rescission, a president can select any appropriated federal program for reduction or elimination by telling Congress what he or she intends to cut. The Congress then has 45 days to accept the decision […]
Taxes, Budget, Appropriations
In 2018, Republicans have done little to separate themselves from Democrats when it comes to spending taxpayer dollars. On February 9, the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 eviscerated the last semblance of fiscal responsibility in Washington, the 2011 Budget Control Act, by allowing spending caps to increase by $300 billion over the next two years. […]
The Earmark Elimination Act—H.R. 5369—would prohibit the House from considering any legislation containing earmarks, and it would strip any earmarks found in a bill being considered by the House before it could proceed.
The concept that federal information technology (IT) procurement should be technology and vendor neutral is among the best practices for federal government agencies. However, when a large federal agency issues an exceptionally large cloud contract to a predetermined vendor for a specific technology solution without competitive bidding, such a contract is neither technology nor vendor […]
