The US government has funded agricultural disaster aid programs for nearly a century, mainly on an ad hoc basis between 1970 and 2008. The new Supplemental Revenue Assistance Payments (SURE) program for crops is the budgetary and economic-efficiency elephant in the disaster aid policy room.

Kent Hill's response to Roger Bate's critique of USAID efforts to fight malaria contained a number of misleading statements and distortions of fact.

Under current law, the U.S. Department of Defense automatically faces significant spending cuts over the next 10 years—cuts that america's civilian and military leaders have cadidly described as "devastating" and "very high risk."

The Medicaid drug program wasted $329 million nationwide in 2009 from states all too frequently reimbursing for a version of a drug that is more costly than another product with the exact same active ingredient, dose, form and bottle size.

Ever since its founding in 1948, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea has maintained an aggressive and bellicose international security posture. Today, fully two decades after the end of the Cold War, North Korea's external defense and security policies look arguably more extreme and anomalous than ever.

There's a lot to deplore about President Obama's proposed military drawdown, but here's a possible silver lining: It may finally force the Pentagon to stop buying weapons and equipment in the wasteful way it has since the 1960s.

So the stimulus--the so-called American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 or ARRA--is starting to wind down. What are the results?

While a line-item veto would enable a president willing to take the political heat to excise the wasteful spending of pork-addled lawmakers, it is less fulfilling than it appears and would bring a major cost to the constitutional balance.