GOP Rallies Support For Budget Reform

Calls for Congress to adopt a two-year budget process first emerged decades ago. But now Republicans are seriously pushing the idea in the debt limit talks.

Republicans in Congress have begun to force talks on budget process reform, starting with instituting a two-year (biennial) budget, instead of the present annual budget system.

The idea first emerged a couple of decades ago when then Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete Domenici and present House Rules Committee Chairman David Drier co-chaired a Congressional task force on budget reform.  The two pushed almost every Congress for the two-year idea, but faced consistent opposition from Appropriations Committee members in both chambers.

As the years have passed, however, more and more analysts and policymakers have urged re-consideration of the plan.

Proponents of the idea argue two major points:

1) The present annual system allows almost no room for oversight by either the Appropriations or Authorizing committees;

2) Congress finds it impossible to ever do its annual appropriations on time under the present system, leading to catchall bills that leave almost no time for serious consideration by members who aren’t on the Appropriations Committees.

Of course, appropriations staff and some members still oppose the idea.  Their arguments pale in the face of the failures of the committees to follow regular order almost ever during the past decade.

But, for the sake of fairness, here are the two arguments appropriation opponents of biennial budgeting make.

1) Two-year budgets would not give the Congress the ability to react with immediacy to changing circumstances;

2) Such a change would lead to more multi-thousand page Continuing Resolutions hitting the floors of the two chambers.

The proponents have an historical advantage on the arguments.

Since the passage of the 1974 Budget Act, the power of the authorizing committees has dwindled.  While Budget Resolutions and Appropriations Acts can get to the Senate floor either by statute or by necessity, literally dozens of critical re-authorizations in areas like military spending, housing, transportation, and education never get floor action during an entire Congress.

Therefore, the critical oversight aspect of the authorizing committees correspondingly has wilted.  Policy-making has migrated to appropriations bills, Senate rules notwithstanding; and appropriations bills have morphed into huge, multi-policy monsters that almost never get any reading in full by anyone.

Dreier has 38 co-sponsors and a similar measure has 31 sponsors in the Senate.

The two-year budget reform is long overdue. It surely isn’t a cure-all for the dysfunction that now baffles the Legislative Branch.  But one hopes that when Congress concocts this year’s debt ceiling increase package, biennial budgeting will be part of it.