I've begun posting at the Heritage Foundation Policy Blog, and have two new posts there on budgetary issues. The first post reviews a paper written by Brian Riedl and Baker Spring, showing that four years after the war, Congress still appropriates for the war as if they didn't know it existed. We need to stop funding war efforts through emergency appropriations, which as we saw this session, create too many opportunities for pork-barrel mischief.

The second paper I highlighted at Heritage rethinks the entire process of attacking unnecessary spending. Brian Riedl and Michelle Muccio have an inspired idea about how to gain political clout through the bundling of spending reductions, gathering enough programs to jettison so that the sum of the expenditures excites enough passion to overwhelm the natural constituencies of the programs themselves. It sounds impossible, but Riedl and Muccio show how the BRAC process did just that -- and saved the Department of Defense billions of dollars.

We're coming up to the summer recess for Congress, and afterwards the budget will be front and center. We're going to spend Congress' vacation showing them how to do their jobs, and hopefully we can save Americans a significant amount of money. Stay tuned -- and if you want to keep track of my posts at Heritage, bookmark this link. I'll have the blog listed on the right sidebar shortly.

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