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President Obama may not realize that the people who work for him are required to ignore hundreds (thousands?) of Congressional earmarks.  The President has the ability to stop them from doing so.  I hope that he will not. Thanks go to former OMB General Counsel Jeff Rosen for pointing this out. An Executive Order is [...]

Each year Congress enacts 12 annual appropriations (spending) bills.  Those bills are the subject of vigorous and legitimate fights about spending priorities. Included in these annual appropriations bills are spending for defense, veterans, military construction, highways, housing, education (except student loans), foreign aid and the foreign service, the FBI, CIA, and Department of Justice, most [...]

I watched the President’s Tuesday evening press conference twice, and have been studying the transcript as well.  I believe the best way to understand a policymaker is simple:  read, watch, or listen to the words that he or she says.  Getting a policymaker’s views through a news filter distorts and loses content.  In this blog, [...]

In May of 2007, I wrote “Why are gas prices high, and what can we do about it?”  At the time, the national average price for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline was $3.22. The national average price is now 59¢ higher, at $3.81 per gallon.  That’s down 30¢ from a high of $4.11 in [...]

Each year Congress considers the “defense authorization bill”.  This bill gives the U.S. military its legal authorities. The House passed this bill last Thursday.  One provision in the bill would attempt to limit the President’s ability to ignore certain earmarks in the report language that accompanied the bill.  This is an important moment in the [...]

Here’s what the President said last night in the State of the Union about earmarks: The people’s trust in their government is undermined by congressional earmarks — special interest projects that are often snuck in at the last minute, without discussion or debate. Last year, I asked you to voluntarily cut the number and cost [...]

The President delivers his State of the Union address this evening, beginning just after 9 PM.  We typically release “fact sheets” along with the address. Since the big document is 36 pages long, we also have versions of the different component fact sheets on whitehouse.gov.  Here are the economic ones: Economy Budget Free trade Energy [...]