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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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U.S. Capitol.
Ken Burns’ The American Revolution highlights why America’s founders built checks and balances—an urgent reminder as Congress, the courts, and citizens confront growing threats to democratic governance.
Photo by Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash

Partial Shutdown; Congress Asserts Itself a Little

DHS Shutdown

As expected, the parties in the Senate could not come to an agreement on DHS funding and now the agency will be shut down. Sort of.

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(Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

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Donald Trump ran on a simple promise: focus immigration enforcement on criminals and make the country safer. The policy now being implemented tells a different story. With tens of billions of dollars directed toward arrests, detention, and removals, the enforcement system has been structured to maximize volume rather than reduce risk. That design choice matters because it shapes who is targeted, how force is used, and whether public safety is actually improved.

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Getty Images

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On Wednesday, February 11, the National Redistricting Foundation (NRF) asked a federal court to join a newly filed lawsuit to protect Utah’s new, fair congressional map and defend our system of checks and balances.

The NRF is a non‑profit foundation whose mission is to dismantle unfair electoral maps and create a redistricting system grounded in democratic values. By helping to create more just and representative electoral districts across the country, the organization aims to restore the public’s faith in a true representative democracy.

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A Constitutional Provision We Ignored for 150 Years

Voter registration in Wisconsin

Michael Newman

A Constitutional Provision We Ignored for 150 Years

Imagine there was a way to discourage states from passing photo voter ID laws, restricting early voting, purging voter registration rolls, or otherwise suppressing voter turnout. What if any state that did so risked losing seats in the House of Representatives?

Surprisingly, this is not merely an idle fantasy of voting rights activists, but an actual plan envisioned in Section 2 of the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868 – but never enforced.

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