NPP Executive Director Doug Hall will present at the Participatory Budgeting Conference taking place in San Francisco on September 25-27 on how to influence the federal budget process. In honor of the power of participation, we bring you a guest post from Tarsi Dunlop, of the Roosevelt Institute, on what participatory budgeting is and why cities should adopt it.

While many Americans probably haven’t heard of Title X, it plays an integral role in our public health system, particularly for low-income and uninsured patients.

Social Security is popular because it is a social insurance program that over 58 million Americans depend on to make ends meet.

In 2011, Emily was 20 years old and living in a homeless shelter.

One of the most indefensible components of the federal budget is the continuing expenditure of tens of billions of dollars a year to maintain and upgrade nuclear weapons.

When discussions around federal spending turn to trade-offs and long-term projections, the stakes are highest for the Millennial generation and those who are still in the K-12 education system.

Congress failed to make funding decisions for fiscal 2014 on its regular time-frame, and now the debate on Syria has jumped to the front of the line. That means Congress is going to make some very last-minute decisions about spending in the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1. Even more last-minute than they had already planned.

The sequester not only cut money allocated to federal programs, but also meant reductions for federal spending at the state and local level.

Millennial America – the generation born between 1981 and 2000 – is bigger than the boomers and values innovation, government stewardship and community investment. That means the time is ripe for consumers and environmentalists to push for better clean energy technologies.

Today, the White House is issuing a new Executive Order on Open Data -- one that is significantly different from the open data policies that have come before it -- reflecting Sunlight's persistent call for stronger public listings of agency data, and demonstrating a new path forward for governments committing to open data.