The week of July 16 was a big one in Washington for Pentagon watchers. The House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to approve the fiscal year 2013 Defense Appropriations bill, while the House Armed Services Committee held hearings on the potential impact of upcoming spending cuts on the Pentagon’s budget.The FY2013 defense appropriations legislation includes $519 billion for the Pentagon’s annual “base” budget, plus an additional $88 billion for funding related to military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The House passed the bill by a vote of 326 to 90.

Surprising to many, the House also adopted a ...

With the end of the current fiscal year rapidly approaching, what many Washington watchers have long predicted appears to be true – Congress will not act on next year’s budget by the Oct. 1 deadline.“But wait,” you’re saying, “October is a long way from now. How can you be sure?”The numbers tell the story.If you look at the congressional calendar you can find out when the House or Senate plan to be in session, known as “legislative days.” These are days on which official business happens. Legislative days can be added at any time, but here ...

C. Chandler of Newcastle, WA, asks, “I keep hearing how bad these automatic spending cuts will be for the Pentagon. Will any other programs get cut?”We get a LOT of questions about the automatic spending cuts – known as sequestration – called for under the Budget Control Act (BCA) of 2011. Under current law, the BCA will trigger automatic across-the-board discretionary spending cuts at the end of this year that will result in $1.2 trillion in cuts over the next decade.“Discretionary spending” refers to spending that is newly appropriated each year through Congress's annual appropriations process, and it ...

Last week’s jobs report for May by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that unemployment grew for the first time in three months, albeit very slowly, up one-tenth of a percentage point to 8.2 percent. Good news or bad news? The news coverage has focused on the “bad,” but the truth is, it’s probably a little of both.

There are several ways to look at unemployment data. First is to look at the official monthly unemployment figure, that 8.2 percent. But that’s only part of the picture. It doesn’t include unemployed people who aren ...

Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, National Priorities Project has tracked the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have focused on the tax dollars expended related to the conduct of these wars, and offered comparisons to funding for other government programs to demonstrate the opportunity costs of these expenditures.But wars are not ultimately about dollars, they are about people. As my colleague Mattea Kramer wrote recently, there are good reasons for keeping funding for veterans programs separate from the Pentagon's budget. But it is also true that the support our veterans ...

The last U.S. combat forces were withdrawn from Iraq on Dec. 15, 2011. And this past week at the NATO summit in Chicago, member nations endorsed President Obama’s plan to remove most foreign combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

Yet the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq and the winding down of military operations in Afghanistan does not mean the end of the U.S. presence or war-related funding. U.S. taxpayers will continue to provide funding for Iraq and Afghanistan for years into the future. The Defense Department will continue to provide weapons ...

This week the U.S. Senate will consider a series of amendments to the budget resolution. A budget resolution sets out spending and revenue guidelines for Congress’s annual appropriations process.Except that the Senate won’t pass a budget resolution this year. To Hill watchers, this isn’t too surprising – the media is quick to point out the Senate hasn’t passed a budget resolution in three years. Although they usually just say “a budget,” which is technically wrong. But that’s another story.The House has already passed its own budget resolution introduced by House Budget Committee Chair ...

The House and Senate return this week from their spring recess with the seeds of a summer budget stalemate already planted.As required by law, in February President Obama released the Administration’s budget request for fiscal year 2013 (which begins on Oct. 1). Although just a proposal, the annual request serves as the jumping off point of the annual budget process, and in this, a critical election year, it sets out the president’s vision for the country’s future.In March, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), released “Path to Prosperity,” a Republican alternative to the President ...

When I pitched the idea for this blog to my co-workers, my research colleague Mattea quipped, “surrrrre, because when I think about the IRS, I think of fun.”That’s pretty much the sentiment of most Americans when it comes to paying taxes, which is a subject of a lot of jokes. One that I came across while researching this piece was “people who complain about paying taxes fall into two categories – men and women.”Anyhow, here are the Top Five things you need to know about the IRS:

Number 5: The origins of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) date ...

As the Pentagon scrambles to find ways to save money, the Defense Department has included in its fiscal year 2013 budget request a bombshell – increasing beneficiary contributions to its health care programs.The Defense Department’s health care network – known as TRICARE – provides a range of benefit plans to active duty military personnel, their dependents and survivors and military retirees. And like private health insurance programs, the costs of these benefits have skyrocketed in recent years, creating a significant financial burden for the military.

According to former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, "health care costs are eating the Defense Department alive ...