GovernmentExecutive.com

Every couple of years, some budgeteer gets bored and decides to try to reform the budget process. Again.

Depending on the plan, he or she will be praised by one think tank or another and, if the legislator is really lucky, the plan might even get out of committee.

And there it will lie.

Congress will name post office after post office after someone's grandma, but nobody is going to take that sucker from the hopper. In this case, it's not a hopper, it's a cage. If some leader tries, an appropriator or somebody from Ways and Means or some transportation guru threatens to block the bill and it's dropped.

People might finally be getting serious this year. But there are two questions: What are they getting serious about? Will it have any impact?

Republicans in both Houses are pushing for some version of the line-item veto. Forget about whether what they're pushing for is a real line-item veto, but at least one noted budget expert has questioned whether the veto actually saves huge amounts of money when put in the context of overall spending.

"The experience with the item veto, both conceptually and in actual practice, suggests that the amounts that might be saved by a presidential item veto could be relatively small, in the range of perhaps $1 [billion] to $2 billion dollars a year," Louis Fisher of the Congressional Research Service wrote in 2005.

Fisher went on to note that, under some circumstances, horse trading over a possible line-item veto might result in Congress and the president accepting a congressional spending proposal, as well as a presidential spending plan. He also raised the question of whether the veto would shift a balance, leading to a preference being given to presidential priorities.

Supporters, most notably the Bush administration, disagree. Office of Management and Budget Director Rob Portman spent part of last week working over his former House colleagues to find the needed votes to pass it in the House. OMB, in its Statement of Administration Policy, pointed out that 43 governors have some version of the line-item veto. "The president needs similar authority to help control unjustified and wasteful spending in the federal budget," OMB officials wrote.

So, there's a difference of opinion on what the House is trying to do.

One thing the House hasn't done is repeal the Gephardt Rule. You would have thought that House Republicans would not like anything named after former House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, D-Mo. At first they didn't. But then they discovered the beauty of not having to actually have a floor vote on increasing the federal debt limit.

The Gephardt Rule allows the House to hide debt-limit increases in budget resolutions, thus depriving the minority party the privilege of banging them over the head because the debt has increased. It's a handy little device, even if it is named after a Democrat.

In the Senate, Budget Chairman Judd Gregg, R-N.H., is pushing his "Stop Overspending Act," which might have a difficult road ahead, since Senate Democrats -- especially Appropriations ranking member Robert Byrd, D-W.Va. -- traditionally have not been enamored with things like the line-item veto and two-year budgeting.

Let's take a look at some of the reviews.

"This package of budget process reforms would help lawmakers pare back spending trends that otherwise, within a decade, require tax increases of nearly $7,000 per household just to balance the budget," wrote Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation. "Serious budget process reform is necessary."

On the other hand, says the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, "examination of the legislation indicates ... that it fails to include common-sense budget reforms that proved effective in the past, such as restoration of the Pay-As-You-Go rules on both entitlement increases and tax cuts. Instead, it proposes radical measures that could lead to massive cuts over time in Medicaid and Medicare and reductions in the vast majority of domestic programs, while shielding tax cuts from any fiscal discipline."

The Gregg plan would insert all sorts of caps and cuts into the budget process. The change that might be felt the most is a conversion to biennial budgeting. Former Senate Budget Chairman Pete Domenici, R-N.M., has been pushing that idea for years, if not decades. The argument is that if you did a budget and appropriations bills every two years, congressional committees would have the time to conduct more oversight.

Opponents say that Congress already has to consider multiple supplemental spending bills every year. Converting to a two-year budget would only increase the number of supplementals that Congress would have to consider. And if you're having to consider all these supplementals, why not simply have a one-year budget?

So, you have your choice. Save us from debt or not? It really might not matter, because as any visitor to the House Rules Committee knows, many rules are made to be broken. And inserted in the mumbo jumbo of many rules that go to the House floor is a clause that waives all points of order under the budget act.

So, the question really boils down to this: If you're not going to enforce the rules anyway, why rewrite them? Or have them at all?