Government Executive - Authors - Kenneth Chamberlain

Obama tells Jon Stewart that administration wasn't 'confused' after Libya attack

Kenneth Chamberlain, National Journal — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 09:18:43 -0400

In an interview on Thursday with Jon Stewart for The Daily Show, President Obama told Stewart that his administration wasn't "confused" in its response to last month's terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, The Washington Post reports. Four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, died in the attack.

The president told Stewart that “every piece of information that we get, as we got it, we laid it out to the American people. The picture eventually gets fully filled in."

The otherwise-serious 14-minute interview, which aired on Thursday at 11 p.m., was punctuated by jokes, including quips about Vice President Joe Biden, The Post reports.

Watch part one of the interview here:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Exclusive - Barack Obama Extended Interview Pt. 1

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

Part two:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Exclusive - Barack Obama Extended Interview Pt. 2

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

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Where is Congress with spending bills?

Kenneth Chamberlain, National Journal — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 09:25:00 -0400

Click here to see what stage each chamber has reached in the 12 major appropriations areas. Note that some bills are considered together as a package, but are separated out here, particularly as parts of continuing resolution. Also, some bills that are introduced at the subcommittee level aren't the same ones that are passed on the House and Senate floors or agreed to in conference.]]>

Where does Congress stand with appropriations bills?

Kenneth Chamberlain, National Journal — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 08:46:40 -0400

Both the House and the Senate appropriations committees are off to strong starts in the appropriations process for fiscal 2013. Will both chambers pass all 12 major bills before the end of the current fiscal year on Sept. 30? Probably not. In most years, many key bills are passed well after the start of the new fiscal year, necessitating continuing resolutions to keep the government funded.

National Journal has produced a series of graphics showing the stage each chamber has reached in the 12 major appropriations areas. Note that some bills are considered together as a package, but are separated out in the presentation, particularly as parts of continuing resolution. Also, some bills that are introduced at the subcommittee level aren't the same ones that are passed on the House and Senate floors or agreed to in conference.

Click here to view the graphics

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Where is Congress with appropriations?

Kenneth Chamberlain, National Journal — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 08:27:48 -0400

Click here to see a series of National Journal charts illustrating the status of appropriations bills compared to previous years.

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Continuing resolutions passed by Congress through the years

Kenneth Chamberlain, National Journal — Tue, 01 May 2012 13:39:44 -0400

It's still early in the appropriations process for fiscal year 2013. But if history is any guide, Congress probably will not pass all of the major appropriations bills -- and maybe not any -- by the end of the current fiscal year on Sept. 30. If true, lawmakers will have to pass continuing resolutions, which generally provide funding for all or parts of the government at the current funding levels.

The first graph below shows the number of continuing resolutions passed by Congress and signed by the president in each fiscal year since 2000. The second graph shows the time between the enactment of a CR and a subsequent CR, as represented by color blocks (hover over each block for details).

Fiscal 2011 is noteworthy for the number of days after the end of the previous fiscal year that the federal government relied on funding through continuing resolutions. Going to the other extreme, Congress passed the most continuing resolutions for fiscal 2001, but many of them were for only one day.

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Japan, U.S. reach agreement on American military presence in Okinawa

Kenneth Chamberlain, National Journal — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 08:49:00 -0400

Japan and the United States have reached a long-anticipated security agreement that will lead to a “reduction of the American military footprint in Okinawa,” Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said in a speech on Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reports. Campbell didn’t provide many details of the agreement, which will be formally announced on Friday morning.

It’s unclear whether local officials in Okinawa, a southern Japanese island, will accept the terms of the agreement, Campbell said. Local opposition to the building of a new base on the island, part of a plan to reduce the overall American presence there, has stalled progress in implementing the plan.

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Where is Congress with appropriations?

Kenneth Chamberlain — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400

When Congress returns September 7 from its August recess, at the forefront of its priorities will be the completion of the annual appropriations bills. This is true in any calendar year, given that the federal government's fiscal year begins October 1, but may be especially pertinent this year with the new congressional super committee scheduled to meet.

Where is Congress in passing the 12 major appropriations bills for fiscal 2012 by September 30? They still have a ways to go. So far, the House has passed only six of the bills and the Senate only one. The first graphic below shows at what stage each bill has reached (subscribers can access a full-version of this graphic here ).

Is the lack of progress on appropriations legislation unusual? Not really. For the most part during the past decade, Congress hasn't been too adherent to the end-of-the-fiscal-year deadline, as shown below. The graphs represent a selection of the federal departments for which Congress appropriates funding for each year. The "0" position represents October 1, the first day of the fiscal year, and the blue bars represent the number of days before or after the deadline Congress passed, and the president signed, the bills funding those departments, based on information from the Library of Congress THOMAS website .

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House panel slates Hubble successor for elimination in NASA budget

Kenneth Chamberlain — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope may be on the budget chopping block this week, and astronomers are more than a little unhappy.

Designed to be the successor to the enormously successful but aging Hubble Space Telescope, the Webb telescope was tentatively scheduled to launch in 2018. Work on it so far has cost $3 billion, but it's eventually expected to cost $6.8 billion, making it an attractive target for budget trimmers.

The planned appropriation for NASA by the House Commerce, Justice, and Science Appropriations Subcommittee eliminates funding for the Webb telescope. The full committee on Wednesday approved the subcommittee's recommendation.

The telescope "is billions of dollars over budget and plagued by poor management," the subcommittee wrote in its overview of the legislation for funding NASA and a host of other agencies.

Astronomers disagree. Such a cut "would waste more taxpayer dollars than it saves while simultaneously undercutting the critical effort to utilize American engineering and ingenuity to expand human knowledge," the American Astronomical Society complained. "The United States's position as the leader in astronomy, space science, and spaceflight is directly threatened by this proposal."

The Webb telescope sees in the infrared spectrum, and it is expected to be able to image objects that were created just after the Big Bang gave birth to the universe. Hubble has been able to see back in time to just 200 million years after the Big Bang. Webb is designed to see even farther back in space and time than that.

The telescope isn't the only pawn in play as the Obama administration proposals get hacked by the Republican-led committee.

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Estimates vary on the effect of the NASA stimulus

Kenneth Chamberlain — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

There's no doubt that NASA spending -- as with the spending of any government agency -- can benefit the economy directly through the purchase of goods and services, and indirectly by inspiring industries that spin off from its technologies.

But how much of a benefit is an open question -- one that most researchers have given up trying to resolve.

This question becomes more pertinent than ever as NASA proposes to issue a series of technological challenges through its $572.2 million Space Technology Program, an initiative modeled after the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Perhaps partly due to the experimental nature of the program, which makes it difficult to predict what technologies would make the cut for development and who would use them, deriving a specific return on investment isn't included in the agency's fiscal 2011 budget proposal. Instead, it promises Congress that the program will help build a "more robust national capability for space activities that will improve our competitive posture in the international marketplace, enable new industries and contribute to economic growth."

Most of the academic and NASA-related studies published between the mid-1960s and 1980s agree that NASA benefits the economy, but "economists are not in agreement in finding a clear and best approach to measurement," wrote Henry R. Hertzfeld, research professor for George Washington University's Space Policy Institute, in a 1998 compilation of economic studies focused on NASA. "It is also clear that no one measure is a comprehensive indicator of NASA impacts and benefits," he added.

"There are many things we just do better thanks to space investment, big things," such as telecommunications, Hertzfeld said in an interview. But separating out NASA's contributions to a particular industry such as telecom, much less to the entire economy during the past 60 years from all other contributions and influences is difficult and costly, he said.

Starting in the 1980s, much of the economic research and policy directives began to move away from the overall stimulative effects of NASA spending and focused on other issues, such as the agency's role in the commercialization of space.

NASA spending has caused "technological advancement to occur at an earlier time than it would have occurred otherwise" if it would have indeed occurred at all, an early Denver Research Institute study concluded.

But placing a monetary value on those benefits proved more difficult, even for one of NASA's greatest achievements. The "fact remains that we got to the moon in a decade, but are, as yet, unable to fully measure the present and future economic impact of the science and technology accumulated on the way to the moon (or the aggregate effect of technological progress in general)," noted the authors of a 1971 Midwest Research Institute study. No one's ever really resolved the uncertainty.

And as a result, researchers over the years have come up with a wide array of returns on investment for NASA spending. Estimated ratios of revenue generated compared to spending have been as high as 14-to-1.

Some early academic and other studies "made very 'generous' assumptions about the spinoffs, goods and services produced as a result of NASA's investments," G. Scott Hubbard, a consulting professor at Stanford University, said in an e-mail. A study commissioned by Hubbard in the mid-2000s when he was director of NASA's Ames Research Center in California on the center's local economic impact found a "more conservative" 2- to 3-to-1 ratio.

Trying to find a precise value for the economic benefits of NASA spending, though, may miss the point as long as it's acknowledged that the spending has at least some positive returns, Hertzfeld argues. He said that for a mission-focused organization like NASA, which isn't making a play for profits, any ratio of economic benefits versus spending that exceeds 1-1 "is a success."

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