National Priorities Project has released a new analysis of the competing budget plans issued by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan and the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

 In

addition to its new analysis, NPP provides a set of tools which

summarize the outcome of the FY2011 federal budget process and offer a

powerful foundation necessary for understanding the current FY2012

budget debate:Our recent analysis of the Fiscal Year 2011 budget agreement;A re-release of NPP's FY2012 budget materials (reflecting the impact of the FY2011 budget agreement);Our updated President's FY2012 Budget Webinar;Educational materials to help teach others ...

Friday, April 8, the House of

Representatives and the Senate worked until almost midnight to draft

and pass legislation to keep the government open. This seventh

Continuing Resolution cuts another $2

billion from the FY2011 budget in the span of a week. During the

week, Congress has pledged to pass an eigth and final Continuing

Resolution that will fund the government through September 30. This

last piece of budget work must be written and passed before midnight

April 15 to avoid a shutdown.

The House Committee on Appropriations

has released a list of proposed cuts for this final funding bill ...

Late Friday night, Democratic and Republican congressional leaders and President Obama reached agreement on a spending bill that will fund the government for the last six months of Fiscal Year 2011, which ends on September 30, 2011. The agreement is actually two bills -- a seven day continuing resolution that will allow time for the last minute work needed to enact the full spending package. That  package reportedly contains roughly $38 billion less for FY2011 than was requested by the Obama Administration back in February 2010. In doing so, Congress and the White House narrowly averted the first government shutdown since ...

It’s Cherry Blossom season in Washington, D.C. Each year at this time hundreds of thousands of people from across the country and around the world flock to our nation’s Capitol to stroll along the banks of the Tidal Basin, “ooo-ing” and “ahhh-ing” at the vibrant pink flowers on hundreds of trees, the air filled with falling petals and the sweet smell of their blooms.But on the eve of a possible shutdown of the federal government, the many tourists visiting Washington smell something rotten. On Saturday morning they may well awake to a city where much of ...

Chairman Ryan’s deep cuts would only achieve modest deficit reductions in 2012The budget proposal released by Rep. Paul Ryan’s this week includes a slew of cuts to “non-security” discretionary programs in 2012.  The deepest cuts are illustrated below.   Rep. Ryan proposes we spend less than half as much as President Obama proposed on both Transportation and International Affairs.   He would spend 46% less than the President on Energy.  (For a full comparison of President Obama’s and Rep. Ryan’s 2012 budget proposals see NPP’s factsheet.)However, these deep cuts would only have modest impacts on the ...

The US House of Representatives has proposed slashing the FY11 budget for open data from $34 million to $2 million, effectively shutting down sites like Data.gov and USASpending.gov.Open government data is crucial to our work at National Priorities Project, and we’re in a position to give these numbers some context.  Although $32 million may sound like a vast sum of money, it is actually .0009% of the proposed Federal FY11 budget.A percentage that small does not represent a true cost-saving initiative—it represents an effort to use the budget and the economic crisis to promote ...