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2016 United States Federal Budget
The United States Federal Budget for Fiscal Year 2016 began as a budget proposed by President Barack Obama to fund government operations for October 1, 2015 – September 30, 2016. The requested budget was submitted to the 114th Congress on February 2, 2015. The government was initially funded through a series of three temporary continuing resolutions. The final funding package was passed as an omnibus spending bill, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2016, enacted on December 18, 2015. Background The Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA) had established spending caps on defense and non-defense spending. These were first applied in FY2013; they resulted in across-the-board sequestration cuts because that budget was funded through a full-year continuing resolution that exceeded the budget caps. The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013 increased the budget caps for FY2014 and FY2015 by $45 billion and $18 billion, respectively. Concern was expressed that the BCA caps for defense ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the United States. He previously served as a U.S. senator from Illinois from 2005 to 2008 and as an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004, and previously worked as a civil rights lawyer before entering politics. Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. After graduating from Columbia University in 1983, he worked as a Community organizing, community organizer in Chicago. In 1988, he enrolled in Harvard Law School, where he was the first black president of the ''Harvard Law Review''. After graduating, he became a civil rights attorney and an academic, teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. Turning to elective politics, he Illinois Senate career of Barack Obama, repre ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
United States Congress
The United States Congress is the legislature of the federal government of the United States. It is bicameral, composed of a lower body, the House of Representatives, and an upper body, the Senate. It meets in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. Senators and representatives are chosen through direct election, though vacancies in the Senate may be filled by a governor's appointment. Congress has 535 voting members: 100 senators and 435 representatives. The U.S. vice president The vice president of the United States (VPOTUS) is the second-highest officer in the executive branch of the U.S. federal government, after the president of the United States, and ranks first in the presidential line of succession. The vice pr ... has a vote in the Senate only when senators are evenly divided. The House of Representatives has six non-voting members. The sitting of a Congress is for a two-year term, at present, beginning every other January. Elections are held every even-n ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Speaker Of The United States House Of Representatives
The speaker of the United States House of Representatives, commonly known as the speaker of the House, is the presiding officer of the United States House of Representatives. The office was established in 1789 by Article I, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution. The speaker is the political and parliamentary leader of the House and is simultaneously its presiding officer, ''de facto'' leader of the body's majority party, and the institution's administrative head. Speakers also perform various other administrative and procedural functions. Given these several roles and responsibilities, the speaker usually does not personally preside over debates. That duty is instead delegated to members of the House from the majority party. Nor does the speaker regularly participate in floor debates. The Constitution does not require the speaker to be an incumbent member of the House of Representatives, although every speaker thus far has been. The speaker is second in the United States presid ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Boehner
John Andrew Boehner ( ; born , 1949) is an American retired politician who served as the 53rd speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 2011 to 2015. A member of the Republican Party, he served 13 terms as the U.S. representative for from 1991 to 2015. The district included several rural and suburban areas near Cincinnati and Dayton. Boehner previously served as the House Minority Leader from 2007 until 2011, and House Majority Leader from 2006 until 2007. In January 2011, he was elected Speaker. Boehner resigned from the House of Representatives in October 2015 due to opposition from within the Republican caucus. In September 2016, Squire Patton Boggs, the third-largest lobbying firm in the U.S., announced that Boehner would join their firm. It was also announced that he would become a board member of Reynolds American. Early life and education Boehner was born in Reading, Ohio, the son of Mary Anne (''née'' Hall; 1926–1998) and Earl Henry Boe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Continuing Appropriations Resolution, 2016
The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2016 (, ), also known as the 2016 omnibus spending bill, is the United States appropriations legislation passed during the 114th Congress which provides spending permission to a number of federal agencies for the fiscal year of 2016. The bill authorizes $1.1 trillion in spending, as well as $700 billion in tax breaks. The bill provides funding to the federal government through September 30, 2016. The legislation contains the Protecting Americans from Tax Hikes (PATH) Act of 2015. History The bill began as a $78 billion spending bill for Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies, one of the twelve subcommittees of the US Senate Committee on Appropriations. The bill first passed the US House of Representatives on April 30, 2015, by a vote of 255–163, largely along party lines. President Obama threatened to veto the legislation as written, in line with his earlier statements opposing spending bills not preventing the autom ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Highway Trust Fund
The Highway Trust Fund is a transportation fund in the United States which receives money from a federal fuel tax of 18.4 cents per gallon on gasoline and 24.4 cents per gallon of diesel fuel and related excise taxes. It currently has two accounts, the Highway Account funding road construction and other surface transportation projects, and a smaller Mass Transit Account supporting mass transit. Separate from the Highway Trust Fund is the Leaking Underground Storage Tank Trust Fund, which receives an additional 0.1 cents per gallon on gasoline and diesel, making the total amount of tax collected 18.5 cents per gallon on gasoline and 24.5 cents per gallon on diesel fuel. The Highway Trust Fund was established in 1956 to finance the United States Interstate Highway System and certain other roads. The Mass Transit Account was created in 1982. The federal tax on motor fuels yielded $28.2 billion in 2006. History Prior to the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 and the establishment of the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA; fa, برنامه جامع اقدام مشترک , barnāmeye jāme'e eqdāme moshtarak (, ''BARJAM'')), commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal or Iran deal, is an agreement on the Iranian nuclear program reached in Vienna on 14 July 2015, between Iran and the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council—China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, United States—plus Germany) together with the European Union. Formal negotiations toward JCPOA began with the adoption of the Joint Plan of Action, an interim agreement signed between Iran and the P5+1 countries in November 2013. Iran and the P5+1 countries engaged in negotiations for the next 20 months and, in April 2015, agreed on an " Iran nuclear deal framework" for the final agreement. In July 2015, Iran and the P5+1 confirmed agreement on the plan, along with the "Roadmap Agreement" between Iran and the IAEA. After the Trump administration twice certifi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
United States Debt Ceiling
The United States debt ceiling or debt limit is a legislative limit on the amount of national debt that can be incurred by the U.S. Treasury, thus limiting how much money the federal government may pay on the debt they already borrowed. The debt ceiling is an aggregate figure that applies to the gross debt, which includes debt in the hands of the public and in intra-government accounts. About 0.5% of debt is not covered by the ceiling. As of July 2019, it appeared that the government would default on its obligations within a couple months. The budget problem was caused in part by lower tax revenue (due to new tax legislation that took effect in the 2018 tax year under which many companies had their taxes drastically reduced) and in part by the government having already reached its borrowing limit ($22 trillion as of March 2019). Relationship to federal budget The process of setting the debt ceiling is separate and distinct from the United States budget process, and rais ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Government Shutdown In The United States
In the United States, government shutdowns occur when there is a failure to enact funding legislation to finance the government for its next fiscal year or a temporary funding measure. Ever since a 1980 interpretation of the 1884 Antideficiency Act, a "lapse of appropriation" due to a political impasse on proposed appropriation bills requires that the US federal government curtail agency activities and services, close down non-essential operations, furlough non-essential workers, and only retain essential employees in departments covering the safety of human life or protection of property. Voluntary services may only be accepted when required for the safety of life or property. Shutdowns can also occur within and disrupt state, territorial, and local levels of government. Since the enactment of the US government's current budget and appropriations process in 1976, there have been a total of 22 funding gaps in the federal budget, ten of which have led to federal employees be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Planned Parenthood 2015 Undercover Videos Controversy
In 2015, an anti-abortion organization named the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) released several videos that had been secretly recorded. Members of the CMP posed as representatives of a biotechnology company in order to gain access to both meetings with abortion providers and abortion facilities. The videos showed how abortion providers made fetal tissue available to researchers, although no problems were found with the legality of the process. All of the videos were found to be altered, according to analysis by Fusion GPS and its co-founder Glenn R. Simpson, a former investigative reporter for ''The Wall Street Journal''. The CMP disputed this finding, attributing the alterations to the editing out of "bathroom breaks and waiting periods". CMP had represented a longer version of the tapes as being "complete", as well as a shorter, edited version. The analysis by Fusion GPS concluded that the longer version was also edited, with skips and missing footage. Nonetheless, the vi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Planned Parenthood
The Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc. (PPFA), or simply Planned Parenthood, is a nonprofit organization that provides reproductive health care in the United States and globally. It is a tax-exempt corporation under Internal Revenue Code section 501(c)(3) and a member association of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF). PPFA has its roots in Brooklyn, New York, where Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, in 1916. Sanger founded the American Birth Control League in 1921, and 14 years after her exit as its president, ABCL's successor organization became Planned Parenthood in 1942. Planned Parenthood consists of 159 medical and non-medical affiliates, which operate over 600 health clinics in the United States. It partners with organizations in 12 countries globally. The organization directly provides a variety of reproductive health services and sexual education, contributes to research in reproductive te ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
