Last week, the Republican Congress is expected to unveil its fiscal year 2016 budget resolution just as House defense authorizers start marking up their annual bill. What will that mean for the US military? Bottom line, the Pentagon should realistically expectno more than $569 billion from Congress in the final, enacted 2016 budget between base and… Keep reading →
“We’re long past the point of doing more with less,” said the blunt-spoken Under Secretary of the Navy, Robert Work. “We are going to be doing less with less in the future.”
But with a continuing resolution, sequestration in three weeks, and to-be-determined defense cuts a likely part of any “grand bargain” to avert the fiscal cliff, how much less is maddeningly unclear. So it’s impossible to make intelligent plans or choices. Keep reading →
Chicken Little squawked about the sky falling. Pundits warn about the Fiscal Cliff. But federal agencies nearly every year hold up the sky while walking on the edge of a cliff. This is the world of Continuing Resolutions and Government Shutdowns.
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This article originally appeared on the IBM Center for the Business of Government’s blog.
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In the old days, Congress would disagree over the federal budget for a few months before coming together to pass a budget by the start of the new fiscal year on October 1. This changed in the 1990s. The budget has since become a political battleground with Congress rarely passing a budget on time. The current fiscal year is no exception with the Super Committee looking at deficit reductions and elections looming in 2012.
This fiscal year 2012 has started under a Continuing Resolution (CR). CRs are normally a simple pro-rata allocation of the prior fiscal year that funds the government while Congress works toward a solution. For example, the current CR provided 45/365 (Oct. 5 to Nov. 18) of last year’s funding levels, minus 1.5%, to Executive Branch Agencies. Congress passed a “minibus” on Thursday containing three appropriation bills but most of the government is under another CR until December 16. Keep reading →