The President’s Budget Is Out – The 7 Stories You Need to Know

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• The White House released its fiscal 2015 budget proposal on Tuesday. The budget aims to “put a stop to short-sighted cuts to government operations” and to expand funding for federal-employee training. But the President’s budget begs the question, will any of this happen? We know that Congress appropriates the funding for agencies, so is the President’s budget proposal all pomp and circumstance? Insights from Deloitte.

The SEVEN budget stories you need to know:

1. Federal News Radio: White House budget aims to boost federal employee pay, training – “The White House’s fiscal 2015 budget proposal released Tuesday aims to ‘put a stop to short-sighted cuts to government operations’ and to expand funding for federal-employee training, which has been largely gutted by across-the-board sequestration cuts in recent years. Federal employees’ pocketbooks would also get a slight boost. For the second year in a row, the Obama administration is proposing a 1 percent pay raise for federal employees.”

2. GovExec: Obama Budget Offers a Refreshed Management Agenda – “As part of a bid to ‘create a 21st century government,’ the new budget documents repeat previous calls for Congress to give the administration authority to reorganize agencies, create a new independent federal property disposal board, continue a crackdown on improper payments and reform Defense Department procurement.”

3. The Washington Post: Why the Obama budget is already dead: Congress has passed a two-year budget agreement that sets spending levels through the end of 2015, meaning that members of the House and Senate can justifiably dismiss the budget President Obama unveiled Tuesday as irrelevant. But the White House is required by law to present a budget proposal each year….Next week, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is expected to follow up with a proposal that will focus on welfare reform and an overhaul of social programs, including Head Start and Medicaid. Neither proposal will go anywhere — and that’s by design.

4. The New Republic: Washington is Ignoring Obama’s Budget. You Shouldn’t: Some of Obama’s budget proposals could still become legislation—not as sweeping initiatives, for sure, but as scaled-down pilots or add-ons to other pieces of legislation.

5. FCW: IT spending dips slightly in Obama budget request – “The savings come on the defense side, with $35.4 billion in the 2015 request, down from $37.6 billion last fiscal year, according to federal CIO Steve VanRoekel.”

6. Federal Times: Defense budget routes at least $5B to cyber – “The $496 billion fiscal 2015 budget includes more than $5 billion in spending related to cyber, money that is spread across the various defense components and activities as part of comprehensive DoD plans to ramp up cyber operations. With the cyber funding distributed across the military – almost certainly including classified budgets – exact figures and programs are less than clear.”

7. The Atlantic: Obama’s New Budget is All About the Midterm Elections – “This document’s value for Democrats is that it gives the party something to campaign on during November’s midterm elections—something to talk about that isn’t Obamacare. Universal pre-K, higher taxes on the wealthy, and more tax credits for other people are popular; entitlement cuts generally aren’t. ”

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• The Wall Street Journal: Hack-Proof Phones? New Devices Try to Keep Prying Eyes Out: Privacy is emerging as one of the hottest new features in smartphones, with three new devices purporting to protect their users from the prying eyes of government and corporations, the WSJ reports. The phones incorporate multiple privacy features, such as text messages that vanish and the disabling of Web-browser tracking. Users can configure many smartphones to accomplish the same ends, but they would have to be technically savvy and these phones are set to maximize privacy, said Toby Weir-Jones, managing director of SGP Technologies, maker of the Blackphone. “There was a big demand for a turnkey solution—for something where, you take it out of the package, you turn it on, and with a minimum of setup, you’re up and running,” he said.

• The Wall Street Journal: Risk Modeling Advances for Natural Disasters, Terrorism: Technological advances are changing the risk-modeling business, allowing firms to create models with more complexity and sophistication than they previously could, while also taking advantage of much bigger data sets when contemplating risks, the WSJ reports. Adoption of cloud technology enables risk-modeling companies to put the data into a secure space where it can more easily be accessed by insurance and reinsurance companies, hedge funds and financial-services companies looking for the most up-to-the-minute information to help them decide how to shape and price policies and products, or whether to make investments, said Hemant Shah, chief executive of risk-modeling company Risk Management Solutions.

• The Los Angeles Times: 1 in 10 Americans think HTML is an STD, study finds