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Podcast: How the budget mess in Congress hurts all of us

Podcast: How the budget mess in Congress hurts all of us

This year the federal government is expected to collect more than $3.5 trillion in taxes— a vast amount of money by any measure. One of the key functions of Congress is to pass a budget. But often that seems close to impossible.


Lack of agreement over federal spending regularly threatens to bring about government shutdowns that have a negative impact on millions of Americans. Yet few of us can even begin to understand the byzantine budget process.
Both of our guests in this episode have worked with other policy experts to make the budget process function better, with greater efficiency and transparency.



Alison Acosta Winters is a fiscal conservative and was most recently a senior policy fellow at Americans for Prosperity. Emily Holubowich is vice president for federal advocacy at the American Heart Association, and often supports more government spending.


Brought together by Convergence Center for Policy Resolution, Alison, Emily and other stakeholders from diverse backgrounds spent months working together to come up with several major proposals for overhauling the budget process.

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The Trump Administration’s Plan for Protecting Consumers? Politely Ask Companies to Behave.

Russell Vought, the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, testified before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs in July.

Samuel Corum/Sipa USA via AP Images

The Trump Administration’s Plan for Protecting Consumers? Politely Ask Companies to Behave.

In mid-July testimony before Congress, Russell Vought boasted that, as the acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he’d refashioned the agency’s approach to pursuing banks and other financial companies accused of exploiting Americans — the role Congress had created for the agency after the 2008 economic crash.

Vought had spent the first 18 months of the new Trump administration trying to dismantle the bureau, much as he and other appointees had done with the U.S. Agency for International Development. At CFPB, he’d ordered mass layoffs, tried to choke off the bureau’s funding and ended the lease on its headquarters, attempting to make good on his vow to put civil servants “in trauma.” But federal courts blocked Vought’s efforts to close the CFPB, with a judge at one point saying the administration had acted with “complete disregard” for Congress.

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man walks near the Punta Cardon refinery, on Jan. 23, 2026. Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world with an estimated 303 billion barrels.

(Jesus Vargas/dpa via ZUMA Press/TNS)

Americans should be concerned about the fine print on Trump’s new oil deal

So, it was a war for oil after all.

On social media Friday, President Trump announced that the United States and Venezuela have struck an agreement for “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY.”

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Teal shoes are displayed outside Naval Medical Center Portsmouth in April 2018 as part of Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month.

Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Kris R. Lindstrom/U.S. Navy

Military Sexual Trauma Survivors Can’t Sue the Government. A New Bill Could Change That.

When Mayra Diaz opened the door of her Army barracks room in 2022, she didn’t realize it was the beginning of the end of her military career.

She had never met the soldier standing in front of her, Sgt. Greville Clarke. She didn’t know he had sexually assaulted three other women on base over the past 15 months, including one he threatened at knifepoint.

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Horizontal photo of a DEMOCRATIC PARTY FLAG with a stylized DONKEY with 3 white stars on blue top of donkey and two red feet. Flag is laying on top of a red, white, and blue American Flag.

Getty Images

How to Define the Democratic Party - Left or Centrist?

Labels can be misleading and misused. The label "Centrist" is empowering because it signifies you are mainstream, not extreme, a place where all people can come together. To be labeled "Left" is to place you outside the mainstream, extreme; left connotes a kind of kookiness as well as—horror of horrors—Socialism.

But are the labels accurate? For most of the 20th century, the Democratic Party was, without question, the party that championed the working man, the average person—the people. But they were nevertheless firm capitalists—they were not Socialists.

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