Barack Obama, Obama Administration | featured news

Florida governor Rick Scott created a stir this week when he said he’d expand Medicaid as requested by the Obama administration. But health policy experts say it's hard for any governor to say no to billions of dollars in federal subsidies.

When conspiracists suggested Friday that the Obama administration had engineered a sharp drop in unemployment to aid President Barack Obama's re-election, the response was swift. Career government officials, economists and even some Mitt Romney supporters issued a collective sigh. The staffers who compute the U.S. unemployment rate work in an agency of the Labor Department. Officials who have overseen the work say it's prepared under tight security with no White House input or supervision.

The Obama administration unveiled plans Wednesday to create an elite corps of master teachers, a $1 billion effort to boost U.S. students' achievement in science, technology, engineering and math. The program to reward high-performing teachers with salary stipends is part of a long-term effort by President Barack Obama to encourage education in high-demand areas that hold the key to future economic growth - and to close the achievement gap between American students and their international peers.

For Angelica Salas, it was a long time coming. The Obama administration's announcement that it would stop deporting illegal immigrants who were brought here as children was the culmination of more than a decade of persistent political organizing by Salas and her fellow immigrant rights advocates.

The Obama administration will relax enforcement of deportation rules for young people brought to the United States without legal status, a softening of immigration policy that is likely to appeal to Hispanic voters in an election year.

The Obama administration says a free trade agreement with Colombia can be fully implemented because of steps the Colombian government has taken to prevent violence against labor union members and improve workers' rights.

"In another attempt to re-fight the battles of the past, one former Bush administration official is wrongly claiming that some of the savings in the Affordable Care Act are 'double-counted' and that the law actually increases the deficit," said Jeanne Lambrew, a deputy assistant to the president for health policy. "This claim is false."

Tackling a huge logistical challenge, the Obama administration Monday released an ambitious blueprint for states to match up uninsured Americans with coverage that's right for them under the health care overhaul law....

Following GOP strategy, Fox News is again blaming the Obama Administration for rising gas prices -- a claim that has been repeatedly debunked by energy analysts. But back in the summer of 2008 when the average U.S. gasoline price hit a record high of $4.11, Fox said that "no President has the power to increase or to lower gas prices" and the only way to reduce our vulnerability to gas price spikes is to use less oil.

The Obama administration on Thursday announced an arms deal with Saudi Arabia valued at nearly $30 billion, an agreement that will send 84 F-15 fighter jets and assorted weaponry to the kingdom.