Budget

The Michigan Messenger reports that Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D-Mich.) temporarily laid off state workers at midnight after the state legislature failed to pass a budget for fiscal year 2010. However, two hours later, Granholm signed a resolution passed by the Senate allowing the government to continue operating for 30 days while lawmakers continued to negotiate [...]

The Michigan Messenger reports that Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D-Mich.) has notified state employees that they will be temporarily laid off at the stroke of midnight if the legislature does not pass a budget by the end of the day. Follow events as they develop here.

On a conference call with reporters to release an unclassified version of the new National Intelligence Strategy, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair revealed an intelligence community budget that goes far over recent disclosures of its total. You’re spending $75 billion on intelligence, America.
“We really believe the American people deserve to know about their intelligence [...]

Much as I agree with Andrew Exum that this Washington Post post-mortem tick tock on the killing of the F-22 is worth reading, this paragraph seems a bit, well, incomplete:
[Defense Secretary Robert Gates] bluntly warned Lockheed Martin that he would slice funding for the more modern F-35 jet if the contracting giant lobbied to build [...]

People have been tweeting at me to provide a roll call for yesterday’s OMG-worth vote to kill the F-22, so here’s one. As it appeared yesterday, the vote was relatively nonpartisan: while the 58-40 tally to end funding for the fighter jet was carried by the Democrats, 15 Republicans joined the successful effort. The votes [...]

I’m seeing a bunch of stories about how the spiking worry about the deficit that’s showing up in polls is a political problem for the White House. Inside the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, though, it seems like there’s some breathing room. People simply don’t blame the president yet for the economy or the deficit.
When you [...]

The perils of basing your budget on oil revenue: the Iraqi government is practically hemorrhaging money thanks to falling oil prices, and that’s causing a drastic reduction in defense-related jobs and purchases, according to The Washington Post’s Ernesto Londono. The U.S. general in charge of mentoring Iraqi security forces observes that the shortfall will compel [...]

The Washington Examiner makes a point that I’m seeing on a lot of conservative blogs, alleging “mean-spirited” attacks against Tea Parties due to “the failure of efforts to turn out large crowds in support of the chief executive’s $787 billion economic stimulus package and $3.6 trillion 2010 federal budget.”
The recent “New Way Forward” gathering here [...]

As part of President Obama and Defense Secretary Bob Gates’ pledge for a more responsible Pentagon budget process, the practice of funding the costs of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars — something that obscures the true defense bill — is coming to an end, but not before a final supplemental that covers the rest of [...]

On Monday Defense Secretary Gates took a major step toward rebalancing U.S. military spending.