Federal budget stories on how spending gets decided and checked, from the line-item veto fight and the 2008 bailout bill to the power of appropriators. It also covers Alan Mollohan’s earmark probe and Jeff Miron’s checklist for cutting spending, plus three steps to better money handling.
The 2008 bailout law created the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Treasury ended up spending about $443.5 billion of that, and the program’s lifetime net cost came to roughly $31 billion, according to the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Budget Office. Congress banned earmarks from 2011. They came back in 2021 as…
Duncan Hunter’s campaign for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination ended on January 19, 2008, after he won about 2 percent in the Nevada caucuses. He left the House in January 2009, and his son, Duncan D. Hunter, took the San Diego-area seat. Congress banned earmarks, the main target of the PorkBusters campaign, from 2011. They…
In November 2006, the incoming chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee made headlines for a military draft proposal and for a tax plan in the same weekend. This page covers what Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) said about taxes and earmarks at the time, how one conservative blogger reacted, and what became of each…
About six weeks after this commentary ran in 2006, Democrats won the House 233-202 and the Senate 51-49, counting two independents who sided with them. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resigned the day after the vote. Congress banned earmarks, the spending items the piece blamed for part of the debt, from 2011. They came back in…
In 2006, John Aloysius Farrell wrote a column for The Denver Post about a new book from the Cato Institute’s budget director. The book argued that Republican control of Washington had produced faster spending growth than the party’s critics expected. PorkBusters ran an excerpt of the column during its campaign against congressional earmarks. What follows…
The three habits in this older post still work in November 2026: keep a written budget, build an emergency fund, and set money aside each month for bills that come quarterly or once a year. Rising prices make them more useful, not less. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that consumer prices rose 3.7% in…
President George W. Bush’s 2006 line-item veto plan passed the House as H.R. 4890 on June 22, 2006, by a vote of 247 to 172. The Senate never voted on it, so it died when the 109th Congress ended. That November, Democrats won both chambers. Their leaders, including Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), chose not to pursue…
None of the five cuts in Jeff Miron’s 2006 checklist became law. Social Security and Medicare still pay benefits without a means test, farm payments have grown, and the federal deficit reached about $2.0 trillion in fiscal year 2026, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Earmarks were banned in Congress from 2011. They came back…
The 2006 standoff described below ended in May 2006. The House adopted its fiscal 2007 budget resolution, H.Con.Res. 376, by 218 to 210, and the $4.3 billion “rainy day” reserve for nondefense emergencies stayed in it, though with a softer trigger. Earmarks, the spending items at the center of the fight over emergency bills, were…
Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-W.Va.) was never charged. The Justice Department closed its investigation in January 2010, almost four years after it opened, and he lost the Democratic primary for his seat to state Sen. Mike Oliverio that May. In 2011, partly because of cases like his, Congress stopped approving earmarks. They came back in 2021…
