Our nation is in crisis. The federal government has shutdown and lawmakers show no sign of moving toward an agreement. But there are 243 million ways to end this shutdown.

We've been talking a lot about how this government shutdown is corrosive for our democracy. But, of course, there's also a cost in dollars.

The government has shut down today because Congress failed to do its job of passing a budget for fiscal year 2014, which begins today.

NPP is working with partner organizations to send a letter to our lawmakers in Washington, D.C. Dear Congress: it's time for Congress to return to the regular appropriations process and ensure that people have a voice in how their tax dollars are spent.

The one-two punch of a looming government shutdown and the reliance on stop-gap spending measures to fund the government is a stark reminder of the rampant dysfunction in the halls of Congress.

There are just a few days left before Oct. 1, the start of the federal government’s new fiscal year and the deadline for Congress to pass some sort of a spending bill in order to avoid a government shutdown.

As Congress tackles the 2014 budget, tax reform is happening in secret.

Last week, I attended the Data Transparency Coalition’s inaugural conference: Data Transparency 2013. Although the usual open government data suspects from nonprofits and the public sector attended, the conference was largely sponsored by and attended by private sector companies hoping to profit from government data. The meat of Data Transparency ...

The tax code is so full of tax breaks that this year will cost the federal government more than $1 trillion – as much as all discretionary spending in the federal budget. Tax breaks are all different kinds of credits, deductions, and exclusions that allow people to reduce the amount they ...

If the U.S. Treasury estimated that something cost the government $1.13 trillion (that's $1,130,000,000,000) in 2013 alone, would you want to know about it?