National Priorities Project is thrilled to announce the release of our new book, A People's Guide to the Federal Budget. Call us idealists, but we at NPP believe that a little information goes a long way, and that a book can change history. Washington belongs to the people, and this book is the federal budget for the rest of us.

Today the House of Representatives passed H.R. 5326, the appropriations bill for the Departments of Commerce and Justice, NASA, and other related agencies.H.R. 5326 includes an amendment that would prohibit the Department of Commerce from funding the American Community Survey (ACS), a yearly household survey conducted by the Census Bureau. ...

Having access to a single, comprehensive source for U.S. federal spending data isn't a partisan matter. We support the DATA Act because accurate spending information is critical to an informed budget conversation.

State Children's Health Insurance Program enrollments are now current through fiscal year 2010.

Tracking federal spending is tricky, but it's critical to having an informed discussion about the budget. Because "federal spending" can mean different things and involves multiple sources of data, we often don't know exactly how much is spent on a particular program. The DATA Act wants to fix that.

The White House used to put out a Citizen's Guide to the Federal Budget every year, but it was discontinued during the George W. Bush presidency. President Obama has not resurrected the practice. Meanwhile, valuable information about how the federal government spends our tax dollars is going extinct

During Pie Week, we’ve explored three types of federal spending pies: total, mandatory, and discretionary. Judging from your comments on our Facebook page, you have strong opinions about the numbers on these charts. To wrap up the week, we think it’s important to see the spending charts next to one ...

Our final pie of Pie Week! We showed you total federal spending, mandatory spending, and discretionary spending. Today's flavor of pie? Where the money comes from to fund the federal budget.

Pie Week continues today with the part of the federal budget that often receives the most scrutiny: discretionary spending.

For the second day of Pie Week, we present the mandatory spending pie. Mandatory spending is part of total federal spending, which we explored in yesterday's total federal spending pie.