Ground beef hit a record $6.90 a pound in spring 2026 and has stayed there — $6.89 in July. And in August, the Trump administration responded three times in eight days: a 300,000 metric-ton import quota, a signed proclamation, and a social media post promising ranchers could process and sell their own cattle. Objections came from inside the president's own party, with more than a dozen Republican senators and 21 House Republicans raising concerns.

So TCS went to the paperwork. Steve Ellis and Director of Research and Policy Josh Sewell pulled every presidential and agency action touching agriculture and food prices since January of last year: 16 presidential actions, four more from agencies, and not one requiring a new vote in Congress.

Josh sorts out what actually carries the force of law — executive orders, agency rules, proclamations, and Truth Social posts — and why the beef proclamations under Section 404 of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act don't touch the real problem. The smallest July cattle herd since 1973. A near-closed Mexican border since May 2025 because of screwworm. Diesel at $5.65 a gallon. The farm share of the retail beef dollar down to 51 percent. And $39.1 billion in farm subsidies since January of last year — including $12 billion in Farmer Bridge payments drawn from the Commodity Credit Corporation's $30 billion line of credit, with roughly none of it headed to cattle producers.

With the CCC checkbook sitting open, no farm bill out of committee, and lawmakers floating a cap increase to $90 billion, this isn't a story about beef. It's a story about who decides.

There is an iron law of building complicated things, and it applies to your kitchen renovation exactly the same way it applies to a nuclear-powered warship: the most expensive moment in any project is the moment somebody changes their mind after the work has started.

A new presidential memorandum directs the Navy to plan for ripping electromagnetic catapults out of carriers already under construction and putting steam-powered ones back in. The Washington Post reports the Navy is also quietly studying whether to move the island — the multi-story command tower — from the stern toward the middle of the ship, because that's how World War II carriers looked. Ford-class carriers are projected at $22 billion apiece, and the Navy plans to build up to 10.

Host Steve Ellis is joined by TCS policy analyst Gabe Murphy to read the fine print. They dig into why the island sits where it sits (stability, safer landings, more sorties), what a steam conversion would actually require — including convincing a manufacturer to restart a production line idle for nearly three decades — and why the USS Doris Miller, already two years behind schedule, could slip into the late 2030s. They also look at the Congressional Budget Office's new score for the Trump-class battleship: $275 billion over 30 years, with the lead ship at $23 billion — more than 31% above the Navy's own estimate from earlier this year. And they ask whether Newport News, the only yard in the country certified to build these ships, can absorb any of it without delaying the Columbia-class subs that carry the sea-based leg of the nuclear triad.

It's not all criticism. Gabe flags the parts of the memorandum a budget watchdog should actually like, including allied shipyard partnerships modeled on the Coast Guard's icebreaker deal with Finland.

America's shipbuilding problem is real. You don't fix a schedule problem by redrawing the blueprints on ships already on the way — and you don't fix a cost problem by ordering a new class of battleships the Navy doesn't want. Proven, reliable, affordable: we'd just like to see the receipts, especially in the week federal debt topped $40 trillion.

The House passes a CR with two months left on the clock.

A punt is a concession you make when you've run out of downs. The House made this one on first down. With more than two months left in the fiscal year and none of the twelve appropriations bills finished, it passed a continuing resolution funding the government at fiscal year 2026 levels through December 4th, largely on party lines. Appropriations Chair Tom Cole calls the bill clean. Steve Ellis and TCS Director of Research and Policy Josh Sewell take that word apart. Clean means no partisan poison pills. It does not mean neutral. Extending the current base level for the Pentagon, for the Justice Department, for every agency, is a choice about priorities — just one nobody has to vote on.

Then there's the White House anomalies list, transmitted before every CR. Some items are housekeeping: updating a program date, dropping funding for an inauguration three years away. Others are not. The list includes $1 billion to start building a Trump-class battleship whose design isn't finished — the same concurrent-design approach that produced an F-35 fleet fully mission capable about 30 percent of the time. It includes $3.2 billion in defense-wide procurement justified only by information available at a higher classification. And it would shield unobligated One Big Beautiful Bill Act funds from the standard 8 percent sequestration clawback, while the Pentagon sits on $89 billion of that money unspent and asks separately for $73 billion for the war with Iran.

Steve and Josh also dig into Senate Majority Leader Thune's threat to fall back on reconciliation if Democrats won't deal, the Lankford-Hassan bill that would make automatic two-week CRs painful enough to keep members in town and working, and the record underneath all of it: Congress has finished all twelve appropriations bills on time four times in more than fifty years. The last was 1997.

The Pentagon's FY2027 budget request comes in at $1.54 trillion — a 45% increase over current spending. TCS teamed up with the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) on a new report, How to Cut a Half a Trillion Dollars from the Pentagon Budget Request and Strengthen National Security, identifying nearly $500 billion in defensible cuts to acquisition programs.
Gabe Murphy (TCS) is joined by POGO's Greg Williams and Virginia Burger to walk through the methodology and the specifics: munitions replenishment in the wake of Epic Fury, an F-35 procurement freeze tied to a 1-in-4 fleet readiness rate, the unproven sixth-generation fighter program, cost overruns on the Sentinel ICBM, redundant B-21 bomber spending, Ford-class carrier production issues, the newly proposed Trump-class battleship, Golden Dome missile defense, and Pentagon contractor subsidies.
Full report and cut list at taxpayer.net.

America turns 250, and the fiscal ledger is sobering: $39.3 trillion in national debt — 85% of it accumulated in just the last 25 years. TCS President Steve Ellis and Director of Research & Policy Josh Sewell set aside the holiday Wastebasket they planned to write and instead take a hard look at how the republic arrived here. From the $430 million in daily debt averaged across 250 years, to $8 trillion in interest payments since 2010, to a new $88 billion emergency supplemental that stretches the definition of "emergency," Ellis and Sewell make the case that the nation's fiscal trajectory is a bipartisan problem requiring bipartisan solutions — and that the next 250 years depend on the choices made now.

The House Armed Services Committee spent all of Thursday, June 4th, marking up the National Defense Authorization Act, and what happened inside that room was anything but routine. TCS Policy Analyst Gabe Murphy was there for the debate, and he joins Steve Ellis to break down an unprecedented fight over the Pentagon's $1.14 trillion top line, a bipartisan push on military right to repair that actually passed by voice vote, and a series of amendments on Iran war funding that exposed just how politically charged this budget season has become.

America has spent $1.5 trillion on federal surface transportation since the early '90s. Roads and bridges: same condition as 2001. So where did the money go?

Steve Ellis talks with Beth Osborne of Smart Growth America about Repair Priorities 2026, a new TCS-partnered report tracking how states actually spend federal highway dollars — and why expansion keeps winning over maintenance, no matter how much Congress appropriates. They cover the data gaps, the accountability failures, and a House committee's quiet vote against a basic "fix it first" requirement — all with the program's September reauthorization deadline approaching.

The funding is close. The policy to use it right isn't.

The U.S. economy grew at a solid 2% annual rate in the first quarter of 2026. So why is Taxpayers for Common Sense sounding the alarm? Because at the same moment, the national debt held by the public crossed 100% of GDP — a threshold once considered unthinkable. TCS President Steve Ellis and Director of Research and Policy Josh Sewell break down why good economic news and a historic debt milestone aren't reassuring — they're a warning. If we're running a $1.9 trillion deficit when times are good, what happens when they're not? Steve and Josh examine the structural drivers behind the debt, the systematic dismantling of every fiscal guardrail Congress has ever built, the misuse of budget reconciliation, and why Washington's political class — in both parties — keeps finding new ways to avoid the hardest decisions. This isn't a partisan story. It's an arithmetic one.