Last year was a case study in how not to write the federal budget.
The House and Senate never agreed on a budget resolution, a blueprint that is supposed to be completed by April 15. That, in turn, slowed to a crawl any work on the 13 annual appropriations bills. When many of those bills were still not passed by September, lawmakers were forced to cede control of the process to a small group of congressional leaders and White House officials.
Six continuing resolutions were required to keep the government running beyond the Oct. 1 start of the new fiscal year before an overall spending deal was finally approved on Oct. 21. Most legislators in both parties voted for the huge omnibus spending plan, but few liked it. Conservatives, in particular, complained that GOP leaders had abandoned their priorities for the sake of getting out of town.
This year, Republicans on both sides of the Capitol who are feeling burned by the 1998 debacle say that they are determined to overhaul the budget process. Rep. Jim Nussle, R-Iowa, a leader of a bipartisan budget task force that was formed in the House last year, contends that "last year's process is the poster child for reform."
Meanwhile, new House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., has lost no time in committing himself to the goal of a better, faster budget process. Immediately upon accepting the gavel on Jan. 6, and amid cheers from his House colleagues, Hastert declared: "We have an obligation to pass all the appropriations bills by this summer. We will not leave this chamber until we do."
Other House leaders in recent years have made promises similar to Hastert's, however and, in the end, have been unable to fulfill those promises. And while a myriad of reform proposals are floating around Congress these days, it is not clear how, or whether, a consensus will emerge.
The proposals range from shifting from annual budgeting to biannual, to transforming the House Budget Committee into a subpanel of the House Appropriations and Ways and Means committees. Each of the reforms would affect someone else's turf--creating instant rivalries between lawmakers. Furthermore, the drive by many Republicans to change the budget law so that it would be easier to spend a portion of the budget surplus on a tax cut is sure to engender Democratic opposition.
In the Senate, Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., is already attempting to streamline the process. Lott introduced several Senate rule changes on Jan. 6. One rule change would require 60 votes, not a simple majority, for a provision in an appropriations bill to be designated emergency funding, meaning that the spending would not be subject to the budget caps. Another would limit Senate debate on the budget resolution to 30 hours, rather than 50 hours, and would require Senators to file amendments early during floor consideration.
Finally, Lott is attempting to reinstate the Senate prohibition on adding legislative provisions, or "riders," to appropriations bills. (Riders, which often involve controversial policies and bog down the spending bills, were banned in the Senate until 1995, when Senators supported an effort by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, to overturn the prohibition.) Several of Lott's proposed changes might be difficult for Senators to swallow, because they would limit their carefully guarded prerogatives.
But, in addition to the reforms that Lott is pushing by changing the Senate rules, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici, R-N.M., is expected to renew his effort to persuade Congress to adopt a two-year budget cycle. Domenici is likely to advocate a plan that would devote the second year of a budget cycle to the oversight of federal programs and that would establish an automatic continuing resolution in the event that appropriations bills were not passed by the end of the fiscal year. He insists that under such a schedule, Congress "would be liberated" to perform more oversight functions.
Domenici has touted his proposal for several years, and he managed, in the 105th Congress, to gain support from Senate Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Fred D. Thompson, R-Tenn., and 37 other Senators. He hopes to build on that success this year. "I just don't understand why we don't try it," Domenici said.
But standing in the Budget chairman's way are some formidable obstacles: the members of the Appropriations Committees. The appropriators have traditionally opposed two-year budgeting, since it would dilute their power. A House Appropriations Committee Republican aide rattled off an array of objections to Domenici's idea, including the fact that the appropriators would face an "insurmountable task" in crafting the supplemental spending bills that would be required in the off years. Furthermore, a key House Democratic aide predicted that two-year budgeting would fail miserably. "It's ridiculous," he declared. "We can't even do one-year budgeting."
While appropriators remain unhappy about the Domenici plan, one aspect of it is likely to please another influential committee chairman, Senate Finance Committee Chairman William V. Roth Jr., R-Del. Roth favors amending the budget rules to allow surpluses to be used for tax cuts--an idea that the Domenici plan also addresses. "One of our first orders of business should be to change the budget rules to remove the bias against tax cuts," Roth said on Jan. 6. "We should be able to return the surplus to the working Americans who created it."
On the House side, meanwhile, Nussle wants to renew the budget process reform proposal developed by the bipartisan task force appointed last year by the Budget Committee. Under the plan, developed by Nussle and Rep. Benjamin Cardin, D-Md., another task force leader, the annual congressional budget resolution would be sent to the President for his signature. That is currently not the case with the budget resolution, which is nonbinding and which in recent years has been more a Republican wish list than a compromise blueprint that must win White House approval.
Under the Nussle-Cardin plan, if the President disagreed with the budget resolution, Congress would simply pass one anyway, without his signature, by April 15. The point of the exercise, according to Nussle, is that it would force spending negotiations to start earlier in the year. "It forces confrontation to the earliest stages of the budget process, leaving quality time for legislating details," he said. The Nussle-Cardin proposal would also allow Congress to use the budget surpluses to pay for tax cuts, create an automatic continuing resolution to avoid government shutdowns, and establish a reserve fund for budgetary emergencies.
Before the task force developed the plan last year, Nussle said it would be difficult to focus attention on the budget process, since it appeared that the 1997 budget agreement between Congress and the White House had produced a budget surplus. But, recently he said that the 1998 budget problems will focus attention on the process and may help provide the momentum needed to pass a series of reforms. "It's going to be a very high priority for the Budget Committee," Nussle said.
The Nussle-Cardin plan is not the only such proposal being circulated in the House. Republican Policy Committee Chairman C. Christopher Cox, R-Calif., a veteran of the budget reform wars, will continue to push his own somewhat similar proposal. The Cox plan requires that Congress pass a budget resolution that the President would sign by April 15. Such a budget would be a one-page, binding document that would establish spending ceilings in broad categories. The proposal would also establish an automatic continuing resolution.
Cox is expecting to have about 200 co-sponsors, according to one of his aides, who pointed out that Cox has pushed budget reform since serving in the Reagan White House and that Hastert has co-sponsored the Cox bill in every Congress since 1989.
On the Democratic side, House Appropriations Committee ranking member David R. Obey, D-Wis., is suggesting that rearranging committee responsibilities would help. He wants to transform the Budget Committee into a joint subcommittee of the Ways and Means and Appropriations committees. That would allow the two committees to establish a budget that appropriators would follow in crafting their spending bills and that Ways and Means members would use in developing tax and entitlement legislation.
Obey contends that the current process allows the Budget Committee to draft a budget resolution that is simply ignored later in the year. "The budget process rewards liars," he said, adding that the budget resolution has simply become an "institutional press release."
The lack of agreement on budget process reform is likely to result in gridlock, according to Stanley Collender, who is the managing director of the federal budget consulting group at Fleishman-Hillard Inc. and who writes a column for National Journal's Cloakroom Web site. He said that during previous successful budget reform efforts, a consensus developed before Congress tackled the issue. "There is no such consensus now," he said, adding that "when Congress and the President haven't done anything on the budget, they do something on budget process reform."
Even without comprehensive reforms, some Capitol Hill insiders believe that simply injecting some discipline into the current system would help. "If the law says get it done on time, get it done on time," said the GOP Appropriations aide. A key House Democratic aide agreed, noting that if you do not pass an early budget resolution, "you're going to screw up the entire year." In recent years, that's exactly what's been happening.