White House and Congress

budget plan: Obama latest budget plan, for example, includes all kinds of innovative ideas on infrastructure, opioid abuse, and even a moonshot on cancer research, according to MSNBC. They’re the kind of ideas that would be the start of an important budget debate with Congress. Today, for example, the White House will unveil its final budget blueprint to Congress, and while the public at large probably won’t find this particularly noteworthy, these documents are routinely pretty interesting. Except, as the *New York Times* reports, Republican lawmakers have announced they’re not even willing to have this conversation: they don’t know what in the administration budget plan, and they don’t care Breaking with a 41-year-old tradition, the Republican chairmen of the House and Senate budget committees announced that they would not even give the president budget director, Shaun Donovan, the usual hearings in their panels this week. Hoagland told the *Times*, While the last budget of an outgoing president is usually aspirational, and sets a theme for what he or she hopes will be followed up by his or her successor, it nonetheless should be reviewed by the Congress. G. William Hoagland, who was the Republican staff director at the Senate Budget Committee for much of the 1980s and 1990s, and is senior vice president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, said he could not recall a year since the modern budget process took effect in the 1970s when a president budget director was not invited to testify before the budget committees. (news.financializer.com). As reported in the news.