Every other Tuesday, the team behind Civics 101 joins NHPR’s All Things Considered host Julia Furukawa to talk about how our democratic institutions actually work.

In recent months, the Trump Administration has tried and often succeeded in freezing federal money that Congress has already allocated.

So why does the government fund things like education, science and foreign aid in the first place? And what happens when those federal funds go away? Civics 101 host Hannah McCarthy joined Julia to answer those questions.

Transcript

So let's start with the basics of how federal funding works. How does the money get to these departments or programs?

So there are two kinds of government spending: mandatory and discretionary. Now mandatory spending accounts for about two-thirds

See Full Page