The U.S. budget process has become increasingly dysfunctional, a large factor in Standard and Poor’s downgrading the U.S. sovereign credit rating in 2011. Budgets were always passed for each fiscal year from 1977 to 1998, but in the thirteen fiscal years since, Congress has failed to adopt a budget five times, including for FY 2013. A continuing resolution—a stopgap spending measure—was passed in late March to fund discretionary programs of the federal government through the end of September, the last month of the 2013 fiscal year. Read more »

This week the Council on Foreign Relations released its first Global Governance Report Card. Using input from fifty leading experts, the report card grades the response of the international community and the United States to six big challenges requiring multilateral cooperation: global warming, nuclear proliferation, violent conflict, global health, transnational terrorism, and financial instability. Read more »

The immigration bill introduced in the Senate this week – all 844 pages – is not a perfect piece of legislation. But it is the most serious effort in many years to create an immigration system that would better serve U.S. economic needs, strengthen the rule of law, and enhance security. Read more »

MILAN – The world’s developed economies, of which the United States is by far the largest and systemically most important, face a range of difficult political and social choices. President Barack Obama’s proposed U.S. budget acknowledges and addresses those choices and tradeoffs directly and fully for the first time in the post-crisis period. Obama’s proposal is an important, honest, and politically courageous document. The debate that follows will largely determine whether the United States shifts toward a strong, inclusive, and sustainable pattern of growth and employment, and how the burden of moving to such a path will be shared by Americans of various ages, educational levels, incomes, and wealth. Read more »

To most Americans, the typical college experience involves learning from a professor in a lecture hall and spending a set duration of time in class over several semesters. But that could soon change. Almost ten percent of last year’s graduates of Thomas Edison State College (TESC) earned their degree without setting foot on campus or even taking a course offered by the college, because the school uses a competency-based education model. Read more »