Pick Me! Pick Me! Vying for Unclaimed High-Speed Rail Funds

A tug of war over federal funds for high-speed rail projects has developed in recent weeks since Florida’s Republican Governor Rick Scott rejected $2.4 billion that was allotted by President Obama for a high-speed rail project that would have connected…
Read more ›Report: Without Earmarks, Small/Rural Communities Lose Out

(This guest post was authored by David Young, founder and CEO of Young and Associates/Solutions for Local Governments. Mr. Young is a former county commissioner for Buncombe County, N.C., where he served for 16 years. He is the former president…
Read more ›The Quest for Higher Quality Data

If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing correctly! Dot the Is, cross the Ts and get the numbers right! This seems to be the growing mantra in the federal government concerning reporting on federal awards.
Read more ›Breaking News: Budget Reprieve

Democrats and Republicans found common ground today on temporary measures to avoid a government shutdown.
Read more ›Proposed Two-Week CR Culls $890 Million from ED

(This post is excerpted from an alert to Thompson subscribers and was written by Charles Edwards, senior executive director for Thompson’s education products.) A two-week funding extension proposed by House Republicans last Friday would cut $4 billion, foreshadowing larger cuts…
Read more ›Comment before March 1 for free Grant Monitoring report!

Cloudy with a chance of crackdown… Are you reeling from all the talk of continuing resolutions, partisan politics, and D.C. one-cuts-manship? Disappointed that you stayed up to watch the Oscars and your favorite movie didn’t win? Disoriented by the wacky…
Read more ›Star-Studded ED Commission Takes on the Behemoth of Inequity

(This post was written by guest blogger Andrew Brownstein, one of Thompson’s federal education policy editors.) The chief federal mechanism to deal with inequity across public schools is called comparability. This requirement that school districts give Title I schools state…
Read more ›The Case of the Underfunded Schools

(This post was written by guest blogger Andrew Brownstein, one of Thompson’s federal education policy editors.) When a federal commission meets for the first time, it is customary for members to declare that they don’t want their work to “just…
Read more ›To Cut or Not to Cut Remains the Question

Like death and taxes, the federal government is one of those things that’s always certain to be humming along in the background, right?! If the D.C. powers that be don’t pass a spending bill by March 4, that humming will…
Read more ›That Hamburger May Be Costly (and We’re Not Talking Calories)

Food, glorious food! How can something so vital be such a problem? When it involves grant dollars, that’s when.
Read more ›