C. Chandler of Newcastle, WA, asks, “I keep hearing how bad these automatic spending cuts will be for the Pentagon. Will any other programs get cut?”We get a LOT of questions about the automatic spending cuts – known as sequestration – called for under the Budget Control Act (BCA) of ...

Bob from Vacaville, California, wrote in to ask us for some fact checking. He said he hears all the time that the size of the federal government has ballooned under President Obama, and wondered if that could be true given all of the budget cuts.

The Challenge NPP is participating in the Knight News Challenge, seeking funding for the mobile piece of our new Backyard Budget project. Please help us strengthen our proposal by reading it and telling us what you think; you can do this on the News Challenge website. What is Backyard Budget ...

This week, in honor of high school and college graduations, we’re talking about job creation and employment. There’s much disagreement over the federal government and job creation—that is, if the federal government can, or should, create jobs.

Recently the notion of the "debt ceiling" has been appearing in the news. It's making a comeback after spending months in the spotlight last summer, when the federal government nearly shut down as federal debt reached the legal limit. (Lawmakers ultimately raised the limit in the eleventh hour.) Currently, it is projected that the federal debt will hit the new debt ceiling sometime before the end of 2012. To once again avoid a government shutdown, lawmakers will again have to raise the debt ceiling, which is now set at $16.4 trillion.

It’s late Friday afternoon. A young worker sitting at his desk receives his first paycheck. “Oh. Wow,” he exclaims, “My first paycheck!” His eyes move quickly to his take-home pay. “Man, I hate taxes,” he grumbles. But his feisty paycheck talks back, offering to tell him the story of the ...

This week the U.S. Senate will consider a series of amendments to the budget resolution. A budget resolution sets out spending and revenue guidelines for Congress’s annual appropriations process.Except that the Senate won’t pass a budget resolution this year. To Hill watchers, this isn’t too surprising – the media is ...

This week we announced the release of our new book A People’s Guide to the Federal Budget, and in yesterday’s blog post we admitted to being idealists: A book can change the world, we said. But it’s not just because we’re idealists that we think so. Consider the evidence.

National Priorities Project is thrilled to announce the release of our new book, A People's Guide to the Federal Budget. Call us idealists, but we at NPP believe that a little information goes a long way, and that a book can change history. Washington belongs to the people, and this book is the federal budget for the rest of us.

Today the House of Representatives passed H.R. 5326, the appropriations bill for the Departments of Commerce and Justice, NASA, and other related agencies.H.R. 5326 includes an amendment that would prohibit the Department of Commerce from funding the American Community Survey (ACS), a yearly household survey conducted by the Census Bureau. ...