Why hasnt obama submitted a budget

While mandatory spending — mostly entitlements and mostly on autopilot — remains the largest driver of federal spending and a cause for ongoing fiscal concern , the relative political strength and prominence of mandatory programs made discretionary spending the easier target when it came time to cut.

The Republican takeover of the House was followed first by a round of cuts and then by the Budget Control Act, which locked in sequestration in FY and discretionary spending caps for a decade. While Congress has regularly mitigated these spending caps, it still meant hundreds of billions less in the discretionary budget compared to earlier projections , and therefore significantly less available for science and innovation investments.

In the wake of conflicts over revenues and spending, shutdowns and fiscal cliffs, debt ceilings and deficits, one is left to wonder if there was anything the Administration could have done differently to better protect the discretionary budget while providing leadership on deficit issues.

Early on, the President did state his intention to seek some level of entitlement reform and tackle long-term fiscal sustainability. If the President had continued to emphasize problem-solving on this front, might it have yielded an alternate path forward that was less damaging to the discretionary budget and more amenable to Republicans?

The Democratic coalition that sent Obama to the oval office did so to achieve these things, or at least try, not to dial them back for other lower-priority goals like the discretionary budget, where science happens to live.

The changing composition of the federal budget from discretionary to mandatory outlays bears this out. Observe, for instance, that while discretionary spending was declining from So long as science and technology investments are hitched to a discretionary budget that plays second fiddle, then funding expectations should likely be tempered until a more transformative moment arrives.

Short of that, the best one might expect of an administration and president is to promote, highlight, and prioritize science and technology as best as they can within the box in which those investments must live — just as Obama did. The first appropriations omnibus he signed, for FY , had been punted from the prior year. Search Search. You are here Home News. And I know that sometimes all this squabbling in Washington seems very abstract, and in the abstract, people like the idea, there must be some spending we can cut, there must be some waste out there.

There absolutely is. You are here Home Blog. Twitter Facebook Email. President Obama urges Congress to stop a series of severe and automatic budget cuts set to take effect in just 10 days that will hurt our economic growth, add hundreds of thousands of Americans to the unemployment rolls, and threaten military readiness.

The Final State of the Union. The Supreme Court. Find Your Park. For every net new job created in the last four years, eight people have left the workforce. If we had simply matched the recovery from the last equally-deep recession, 11 million more people would be working. And it never balances — not in a decade, not ever.

In fact, taxes over the next decade would average the largest share of the economy in American history, not a recipe for economic growth. Some have expressed a willingness to pay higher taxes combined with spending cuts to reduce the deficit. Under his plan, 75 cents of every dollar raised in tax increases would go into new federal spending.