President-elect Donald Trump finds “tremendous waste, fraud and abuse” in the federal government, and proclaims, “we’re going to get it.” When it comes to the military, which Trump wants to rebuild, that is going to be a tough task. As Craig Whitlock and Bob Woodward note in the Washington Post, “The Pentagon has buried…
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In 2011, U.S. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner realized the most significant achievement of his entire career in the U.S. Congress when he reached a deal with the White House to restrain the growth of U.S. government spending: the Budget Control Act of 2011. Here, using the leverage of the threat of not…
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The Pentagon deploys the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System (JLENS) to guard the nation from cruise missiles and other low-flying threats. JLENS primary contractor, Raytheon, says the system is proven capable and performing well right now, but as David Willman notes in the Los Angeles Times, taxpayers might have…
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As we noted in 2013, politicians seemed intent on buying 280 more M-1 Abrams tanks the U.S. military didn’t want or need. The M-1 Abrams is a formidable machine but not really suited for counterinsurgency operations, and the tanks run $8 million each. Last year we alerted taxpayers to the new fleet of presidential…
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The Pentagon plans to add the Defense Clandestine Service to the nation’s Intelligence Community (IC). This is being billed as an advance in national security but it shapes up as a costly bureaucratic turf war that could leave the nation less secure. The current IC boasts 17 member agencies: Air Force Intelligence Army Intelligence…
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The New York Times has a useful infographic outlining proposals for how to trim the defense budget. The Pentagon has committed to cutting $450 billion in spending over the next 10 years—only a small slice of the tremendous increase in war and defense spending we have seen in the previous 10 years. The graph…
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The Wall Street Journal reports in “A New Spending Record: Washington had its best year ever in fiscal 2011″ that: Maybe it’s a sign of the tumultuous times, but the federal government recently wrapped up its biggest spending year, and its second biggest annual budget deficit, and almost nobody noticed. Is it rude to…
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The latest effort coming out of Capitol Hill to reduce the debt and avoid default is called the “Gang of Six Plan”, named after its three Democrats and three Republican authors. The plan includes $500 billion in immediate “budget savings”, reductions in marginal income tax rates, and the abolition of the alternative minimum tax….
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Here is a great video presentation on the gigantic growth of Big Government federal spending and debt in the United States and its impact on the average America:
Independent Institute Research Fellow Emily Skarbek is interviewed here by Nick Gillespie of Reason TV regarding the Institute’s very timely and far-reaching Government Cost Calculator. The Calculator enables any American to clearly understand three aspects of federal government spending. First, the Calculator helps you determine how much a person will pay for various federal…
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