Today is the 1^st of April; the first day of the second quarter of the year. In Washington, Spring has sprung and things are looking up. The tourists are in town to admire the cherry blossoms and the Congress is out of session for a couple weeks back home.

At TCS we thought we would look back at the first quarter of the year and review what has already been accomplished in 2016 and what has been done to set us up for success by the end of the year.

1. The President’s Budget Request for fiscal year 2017 was released on time and Congress, while disagreeing with some of its substance, welcomed it as a thoughtful presentation of the Administration’s views and priorities. The Director of the Office of Management and Budget fielded in depth questions from Members in his appearances before the House and Senate Budget Committees. The Committees have drafted their Budget Resolutions and are working toward a Joint Budget Resolution. It looks like all the dozen spending bills that fund government will be done individually and on time – a feat not accomplished since 1994.
2. The Pentagon budget request successfully linked up the actual military strategy, as set forth by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with a realistic budget request. The budget dodge of the Overseas Contingency Operations account was abandoned and the Navy declined to ask for any money for the F-35. Instead, that service requested a mix of Super Hornets and Growlers to bridge them through to the future of unmanned aircraft.
3. The Department of Interior protected taxpayers from being saddled with coal companies’ mine clean-up costs by overhauling its controversial and unreliable practice known as “self-bonding.” Now taxpayers will not have to cover a dime of coal companies’ looming self-bonding reclamation liabilities–100% of these liabilities will be paid by the companies themselves, not taxpayers.
4. Recognizing that the 2014 Farm Bill cost projections were not matching up with spending realities, the Agriculture Committees reopened the legislation to reform crop insurance subsidies and achieve real deficit reduction.
5. To maintain the preferred biennial authorization cycle, House and Senate Committees took up a truly reform oriented U.S. Army Corps of Engineers authorization bill that established a prioritization system for funding Corps water projects.
6. The Forest Service has taken steps to stop offering timber sales that cost more to administer than they earn in revenues, ending a decades-long practice of money-losing timber sales in our national forests. Instead of losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year, the federal government is now making sure taxpayers receive a fair return for federally owned timber.
7. Congress put a reformed tariff relief system in place that doesn’t rely on the earmark-esque, pay-to-play system of old.
8. Every Congressional committee has been holding rigorous, thoughtful, in-depth oversight hearings on the agencies and programs in their purview.
9. The House Ways and Means and Senate Finance Committees have worked with the Administration and rolled out aggressive tax reform packages that eliminate many of the special interest tax expenditures, adjust international taxation to remove incentives for companies to game the system and move offshore, implement a price on carbon, and responsibly reduce rates. 
10. Congress is working with the Administration on an infrastructure plan to create incentives for states to invest in maintenance over new construction, sustainably and responsibly fund the country’s infrastructure priorities, maintain the user-pays principle, and reduce existing cross-subsidies.
11. Congress made Congressional Research Service reports available to the public online and also enacted far-reaching Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reforms that make more information available to the public than ever before. Similarly, the Administration has revamped USASpending.gov to make tracking federal expenditures more transparent and accountable.

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April Fool’s!

Sorry, Congress and the Administration have not accomplished any of the items listed above. But they should! None of the items are unattainable, they just require will, action, and a willingness to reach across the aisle and work together – something that has been sorely lacking in 2016. But, there is time yet to get some of this done before the November elections suck all the oxygen out of the Capitol. No fooling.