View all Articles
Commentary By Brian Riedl

Take a Broom to Congress' Dysfunctional Budget Mess

Economics Tax & Budget

The congressional budget process is a dysfunctional mess. Lawmakers often juggle a series of continuing resolutions and occasional government shutdowns until finally crafting a single omnibus appropriations bill well into the next fiscal year. That 2,000-page, trillion-dollar bill is then quickly passed before lawmakers can read it and before outsiders can expose the gimmicks.

Congress finally acknowledged these problems in February when it created the Joint Select Committee on Budget and Appropriations Process Reform. This bipartisan, bicameral, 16-lawmaker “super committee” has spent most of 2018 identifying budget reforms that can achieve bipartisan support.

Unfortunately, the committee came up mostly empty. Months of hearings, testimony, and debate resulted in new legislation that contains only a single notable reform: a scaled-back version of biennial budgeting. Congress would replace the annual budget resolution with one that passes every two years (appropriations bills would continue to pass annually). This merely standardizes what has become common congressional practice and is completely insufficient to deal with the broken appropriations process and its missed deadlines, government shutdowns, trillion-dollar omnibus bills, and gimmicks.

Yet there is time to improve the bill.

The first priority should be to end the chaos of an appropriations process that has seen all annual bills completed on time only three times since 1985. The main problem is the congressional schedule. The budget resolution typically sets broad spending levels in April. Then, the House and Senate Appropriations Committees must write and approve 12 complicated spending bills. Next, a true open amendment process would often require a full week to process each individual bill on the House and Senate floor, before forming 12 conference committees to negotiate the differences, and then sending 12 conference reports back to the House and Senate for final passage.

Completing this all by Oct. 1 is nearly impossible, and leaves almost no floor time to address other issues such as taxes, immigration, or executive and judicial nominations. More typically, Congress passes a continuing resolution shortly before Oct. 1, and then later merges all 12 appropriations drafts into one large, unamendable omnibus bill that no lawmaker has time to read, but must pass quickly before a government shutdown.

Three reforms could end the appropriations chaos:

First, Congress could move the start of the fiscal year back, from Oct. 1 to Jan. 1, to accommodate the reality that the annual appropriations bills are almost never enacted before December anyway.

Second, consolidate the number of appropriations bills from 12 down to six or even four — which is still better than the one mammoth omnibus bill that Congress often ends up with.

Third, in the event that any appropriations bills still miss their deadline, have spending continue automatically at the prior year’s rate (or possibly slightly below that rate) until the late appropriations bills are enacted, rather than allow the programs to shut down. This would bring predictability to federal agencies and the citizens dependent on them. Furthermore, lawmakers would no longer feel pressured to vote for budget-busting omnibus bills they have not had a chance to read, under the threat of a looming shutdown.

The next priority is to eliminate budget gimmicks. That means banning timing shifts that make legislation appear deficit-neutral by shifting a payment or revenue collection a few days inside or outside of the timing window. Congress should also address its tendency to pass legislation with exploding future costs by applying all of its budget, spending, and deficit limits over a 20-year period rather than only 10 years. Also, after nearly two decades abroad, it is now time to move Iraq and Afghanistan spending into the normal appropriations process rather than classify it as an unexpected emergency, exempt from budget limits.

Lawmakers must also promote transparency. They should require that bill text be publicly available for 72 hours before a floor vote. Washington should also send each taxpayer an annual itemized receipt of where federal tax dollars are going, and what the long-term deficit projections mean to their family.

The final set of reforms would provide tools for deficit reduction. Congress should allow lawmakers who strike wasteful appropriations spending on the House or Senate floor to put the savings into a deficit reduction account, rather than toward new spending. Budget reforms should also require that legislation include a GAO “duplication estimate” showing whether the proposed new programs duplicate existing programs.

The current budget process also leaves mandatory spending (two-thirds of the federal budget) to grow on autopilot with no oversight. Lawmakers should set long-term spending targets for major mandatory programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and be required every five years to ensure that the spending levels remain on their track.

Finally, reformers should make permanent the 2011 ban on pork-barrel earmarks. Earmarks do not directly increase spending and deficits, but they put pressure on lawmakers to expand programs to accommodate all the pork. More importantly, earmarks have proven to be magnets for corruption and fraud by allowing lawmakers to distribute large government grants to friends and donors.

Congress has long resisted these reforms because they would make it more difficult to increase spending without oversight. But the current system is a disgrace that has contributed to Congress’ abysmal 21 percent approval rating. Taxpayers deserve a more rational treatment of their tax dollars.

This piece originally appeared at the Washington Examiner

______________________

Brian M. Riedl is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Previously, he worked for six years as chief economist to Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) and as staff director of the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Fiscal Responsibility and Economic Growth. Follow him on Twitter here. This piece was adapted from Economics21.

This piece originally appeared in Washington Examiner