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.

This week we're talking about pie. Federal budget pies, that is. The first pie we're looking at is total federal spending. Join us every day this week for a different slice of pie.

We've updated all of our electric emissions indicators to reflect the latest available published data. In addition, we renamed the datasets from State Emissions to Electric Emissions, a name that better reflects what the numbers stand for--emissions from electric power plants. This update affects the following, which are now current through ...

President Obama released a budget in February, the House passed a very different budget in March, and the Senate has declined to do a budget. The seeds are planted for stalemate this election year. Why can't Congress just pass a budget without all this conflict?

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 ...

Rebecca from Lititz, Pennsylvania, asked: Why are there different versions of the budget, and who decides which one becomes the actual budget for the federal government? It’s a good question. You might have read in the news recently about the House budget introduced by Rep. Paul Ryan. And back in ...

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. ...