Last week we saw another of the regular Congressional kerfuffles about government spending. Once again there was a brief panic over potentially shutting the government down for lack of a budget – followed by a continuing resolution (CR) which allows the people responsible for government budgeting to proverbially “kick the can down the road,” buying time before addressing the problem again in a few weeks or months. Eventually, both houses passed a $1.5 trillion “Omnibus Bill” that will fund federal government agencies through the rest of fiscal year 2022 – that means through September. At the same time, both houses agreed to a short-term CR that will allow the budget to be formally transmitted to the President and signed.
President Biden signed the bill on Tuesday afternoon, March 15, 2022. One thing to note: FY 2022 began October 1, 2021, so the government has been operating without an approved budget for almost six months. Another thing to note: the process for producing the budget for FY 2023 should be well underway, as you’ll see below. Observers believe that President Biden is unlikely to submit his budget to Congress until mid-April, approximately 2 ½ months behind schedule. Predictably, both parties blame the other party for the delay.
Creating and managing the federal budget is not supposed to work this way. There is actually a budget process that has dates and deadlines and everything to make it work well. What the process apparently lacks, however, is the political will in Congress to examine government revenues and expenditures, determine the best allocation of available funds, make some hard (and politically unpopular) decisions about priorities, and pass timely legislation that will allow government agencies to spend money efficiently.
Some Basic Information About Budgeting
In 1974, Congress passed – and President Ford signed – the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which overhauled an earlier bill dating from 1921. This was one consequence of Watergate, which revealed what happens when governments are not held accountable for their actions. This is the process this bill laid out.
These steps all have dates associated with them, as this next chart illustrates. I used to teach this process to my high school AP Government students. We watched it play out in real-time, as people involved in the process worked through these various stages of the process. Teachers can’t do this these days.
Things haven’t gone very well for decades. Here’s what one Senate report says about this problem:
This report only covers through 2016. According to Wikipedia, here’s what happened in subsequent years (the bold-faced type identifies the broken parts of each year’s process):
The 2017 United States federal budget is the United States federal budget for fiscal year 2017, which lasted from October 1, 2016, to September 30, 2017. President Barack Obama submitted a budget proposal to the 114th Congress on February 9, 2016. The 2017 fiscal year overlaps the end of the Obama administration and the beginning of the Trump administration.
The government was initially funded through a series of three temporary continuing resolutions. Funding for military construction and the Department of Veterans Affairs was enacted on September 29, 2016, as part of the Continuing Appropriations and Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2017, and Zika Response and Preparedness Act. The remaining funding was passed as an omnibus spending bill, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2017, enacted on May 5, 2017.
The United States federal budget for fiscal year 2018, which ran from October 1, 2017, to September 30, 2018, was named America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again. It was the first budget proposed by newly elected President Donald Trump, submitted to the 115th Congress on March 16, 2017.
The government was initially funded through a series of five temporary continuing resolutions. The final funding package was passed as an omnibus spending bill, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2018, enacted on March 23, 2018.
The United States federal budget for fiscal year 2019 ran from October 1, 2018, to September 30, 2019. Five appropriation bills were passed in September 2018, the first time five bills had been enacted on time in 22 years, with the rest of the government being funded through a series of three continuing resolutions. A gap between the second and third of these led to the 2018–19 federal government shutdown. The remainder of government funding was enacted as an omnibus spending bill in February 2019.
The United States federal budget for fiscal year 2020 ran from October 1, 2019, to September 30, 2020. The government was initially funded through a series of two temporary continuing resolutions. The final funding package was passed as two consolidated spending bills in December 2019, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2020 (H.R. 1158) and the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2020 (H.R. 1865). A series of supplemental appropriations bills were passed beginning in March 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The United States federal budget for fiscal year 2021 ran from October 1, 2020, to September 30, 2021. The government was initially funded through a series of five temporary continuing resolutions. The final funding package was passed as a consolidated spending bill on December 27, 2020, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021. The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 was passed as the budget reconciliation bill for FY2021.
The United States federal budget for fiscal year 2022 runs from October 1, 2021, to September 30, 2022. The government was initially funded through a series of four temporary continuing resolutions. The final funding package is in the process of being passed as an omnibus spending bill, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2022.
This is what the Washington Post has to say about this problem (I added the bold-face emphasis):
Under the Congressional Budget Act, fiscal work is supposed to proceed in an orderly, scheduled way each year. The president is to submit a budget proposal by the first Monday in February, and Congress is to adopt its own blueprint by April 15. This congressional budget resolution can, but does not have to, set up the fast-track reconciliation process, described in more detail below. The budget resolution is not signed into law, but it can represent an important statement of a party’s priorities — and has become a highly partisan document. No member of the minority party has voted for a budget resolution offered by the majority party since 2008. And 1997 was the last year that a budget resolution received more than a small handful of minority party votes in either chamber.
Without a functioning budget process, it is difficult for Congress to serve as a responsible steward of the nation’s resources. When short-term spending bills are the norm because Congress cannot complete its work on time, federal agencies, uncertain about funding levels beyond the next few months, are unable to plan effectively for the long term.
The root of the problem lies in the hyper-partisanship that has characterized the House and Senate since the 1990s. Spending bills – known as authorizations – can be filibustered, which means you have to get 60 votes to pass them. Budget resolutions cannot, so they can be passed by a simple majority vote. This means that minority party support is needed to get actual budget authorizations passed, as the timetable laid out in 1974 requires. People who have studied this process way more than I have – scholars and practitioners across the political spectrum – have suggested a wide range of options to solve this problem, including eliminating the opportunity to filibuster spending bills in the Senate and moving to biennial (rather than yearly) budgeting. But without changes in the partisan landscape, rule changes alone are unlikely to restore Congress’s budgetary discipline.
I usually try to come up with some pithy summation or recommendation at the end of these essays. But I got nothin’ today.
Gotta wonder what the military budget would be like if we were actually at war. I think that’s outrageous. Great piece for nerds like me.
I knew it! Ha!