Government Budget

In a sweeping narrative about the people and the politics behind the budget, Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter David Wessel looks at the 2011 fiscal year (which ended September 30) to see where all the money was actually spent, and why the budget process has grown wildly out of control.

We hear it every day: government spending is out of control. Yet, despite all the rhetoric coming out of Washington about the need to cut spending, we continue to go deeper and deeper into debt. If we're serious about restoring America to fiscal health, we must do something about government spending, not just talk about it. So argues U.S. Senator Mike Lee in his new book, The Freedom Agenda.

BASED ON A TRUE STORY: In the late 1940s after the 2nd World War, a classified government program was created in order to explore the military use of psychics to gain an advantage for their soldiers during armed conflict. At a remote laboratory in the mountains, a secret compound comprised of several hundred test subjects were trained to enhance their abilities with the goal of achieving the skills of telepathy and mind control. Assigned to investigate this covert project, Walter Grant found himself entangled in a web of conspiracy and deceit when he discovered that the residents of the ...

With the decline of traditional journalism, there are precious few inquiring eyes watching government and the public service. How can any of us know how our tax dollars are being spent? But there is good news. For at least the past decade, governments at all levels have been busy publishing truckloads of data representing official policies and their outcomes. For the most part, that data is available in the public domain and just sits there, waiting for us to come and get it. This book was written with the hope and expectation that sophisticated data analytics tools can tame those ...