President Barack Obama’s annual budget request takes the form of hundreds of pages of spreadsheets covered with numbers. But if you step back, the numbers tell a story. A theme in the President’s 2015 request is how to build a more efficient and effective government. To help explain that story and the work that led up to the budget request is Jitinder Kohli, a director in the public sector practice at Deloitte.

Does the federal budget process give agencies a spend-it-or-lose-it mentality? Rep. Reid Ribble (R-Wis.), a member of the House Budget Committee, says yes. He speaks to Federal News Radio’s Francis Rose as part of our special series, Now or Never: Ideas to Save the Failing Budget Process

Ribble says Congress created new budget rules in the 1970s. Since then, it has failed to pass a budget and all the spending bills on time.

Read Ribble’s column.

In ground-breaking studies, the Army reveals combat stress is not the leading cause of suicide among troops. In fact, a quarter of soldiers surveyed suffer from mental disorders. Many had never gone to war. The results of the study appear in today’s Journal of the American Medical Association. Survey leader Michael Schoenbaum offers a sneak peak. He’s a senior adviser for mental health services at the National Institute of Mental Health.

President Barack Obama recently announced the creation of two defense-related manufacturing ventures: one in Chicago, the other in the Detroit suburbs. With a mix of government and private funds, the Michigan hub will focus on making lightweight metals that could be used by both the military and the U.S. auto industry. Alan Taub is chief technology officer at the hub, formally called the American Lightweight Materials Manufacturing Innovation Institute.

President Barack Obama’s budget request for fiscal 2015 adds critical details to his second term management agenda. It describes customer service initiatives at the IRS and the Social Security Administration, plans for a new civilian property realignment board and ways to make federally funded data more widely available. Federal News Radio’s executive editor, Jason Miller, has details.

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The Defense Department’s 2015 budget plan tries again to shift some of the department’s health care costs onto patients in its TRICARE system. For years, the Pentagon has hit a wall with Congress on the issue. Federal News Radio’s Jared Serbu has details on DoD’s latest attempt to slow the growth of its medical costs.

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