#congressional-appropriations

#congressional-appropriations

US Congress has rejected plans to slash NASA's science budget, restoring most funding with one notable exception: Mars Sample Return remains cancelled. A joint explanatory statement was released earlier this month, and lawmakers have passed the bill. The legislation, passed with 82 senators voting for it, 15 against, and three abstaining, reverses an earlier proposal that would have cut NASA's overall budget by nearly 25 percent and halved science spending - potentially shutting down many active missions.

ROGERS: Well, I mean TRUMP: Yeah, I'm thinking well, I did $1,776 for the military. PAGER: When will those Americans get those checks? TRUMP: Well, I am going to the tariff money is so substantial that's coming in, that I'll be able to do $2,000 sometime, I would say toward the end of the year. Just in time for Christmas, Trump announced he was sending $1,766 warrior dividend checks to military personnel, claiming those funds were dividends from tariffs.

Congress is going to have to send those monies to those peoples, Hassett said, before shifting to tout the current economy. But the thing we can say is that since July we have had a lot of positive news about the economy. We've had a couple of quarters of almost 4% growth. We've got a big government surplus actually running for a few months in a row. The deficit relative to last year is down by $600 billion, Hassett said.

Lawmakers opted not to include a reauthorization package for the Technology Modernization Fund in the final negotiated text for the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act that was released Sunday night. This means the fund's future is unclear with just four days to go until its authorization expires, as TMF backers were gunning for the NDAA as a way to get its reauthorization to the finish line.

On Tuesday, Chief Justice John Roberts rewarded the Trump administration's lawless revocation of $4 billion in foreign aid by freezing a lower court order that had required the government to distribute the money. Roberts' intervention is an ominous indication that the full court may soon greenlight the president's "pocket rescission" of funds expressly appropriated by Congress. This decision would hand Donald Trump a sweeping spending power that the Constitution does not assign to him