Did you know that the federal government expects to spend $450 billion on fighting wars over the next decade? This, despite the removal of all troops fron Iraq, and the transition of combat missions over to the Afghans by 2014, if not a year earlier? That’s what we can take from the numbers in the [...]

President Obama has asked Congress to provide him with the authority to consolidate multiple federal agencies, the next step on a plan announced earlier in the year to reconstitute the Commerce Department and several other agencies as a trade and economic competitiveness department. In a letter to John Boehner, Jeffrey Zients, the acting director of [...]

The White House formally threatened a veto of the House version of a surface transportation bill, opening the question of whether any long-term bill will get signed before March when current funding on roads and bridges expires. There are currently different versions of the surface transportation bill moving through each chamber of Congress. The House [...]

A Gallup poll out today shows virtually no ill effects to President Obama’s poll numbers among Catholics after a week of controversy about birth control access rules opposed by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. The poll shows that support for Obama has hovered between 45% and 51% over the past couple months, and after [...]

Blowing right past the Republican concession on the payroll tax cut, the President demanded passage of all three expiring measures without delay in remarks at the White House today. He only referred to the new GOP concession in passing: Now, the good news is over the last couple of days, we’ve seen some hopeful signs [...]

We know that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has rejected the new compromise policy on birth control access, and that the Republican leadership agrees with them. But does that mean they have a chance to shift policy legislatively? The chances of that took a severe blow today, when Maine Republican Senators Olympia Snowe and [...]

I’m loath to dive into the numbers of the Administration’s FY 2013 budget, because it won’t be used as anyone’s baseline, and to the extent that it will, that was baked into the cake by the debt limit deal. If you want the hard numbers, the surprisingly best source I’ve found comes from the Guardian. [...]

The FY 2013 budget that the Administration will release today is, in the long run, a meaningless document in substantive terms, so I don’t want to spend that much time on it. But I was a little surprised with the pushback I received about my assessment that it reflects a shift in tone rather than [...]

Noam Scheiber has an excerpt of his new book on Obama’s economic policy in The New Republic. It focuses on 2011 and the series of bruising negotiations with Republicans over the deficit. And it includes the now-familiar internal White House struggles between deficit reduction and economic stimulus, with deficit reduction winning out through 2010 and [...]

Catholic bishops had a mixed reaction to President Obama’s new plan for birth control access, which preserves universal cost-free access and uses a Hawaii-type compromise to leave the religiously affiliated institutions out of the exchange of services between an insurance company and the employee. Catholic officials say President Obama called New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, [...]

Senior Administration officials outlined the imminent compromise to be announced by President Obama, which follows the “Hawaii compromise” by mandating that insurance companies reach out directly to employees at religiously affiliated institutions and offer them contraceptive care. The officials described a process that “accommodates religious liberty while protecting the health of women.” Under the new [...]