Hearings of the Committee on Rules
"Biennial Budgeting: A Tool for Improving Government Fiscal Management and Oversight"
Louis Fisher
Senior Specialist in Separation of Powers at the Congressional Research Service
1. You have been before this Committee on a number of occasions in recent years to discuss a variety of budget process reform proposals. On most of those occasions, you have raised a voice of caution–and even outright opposition–to the proposals being discussed. It appears that you believe the current budget process–the status quo–to be functioning well enough to be preserved as is. Are there any budget reforms that you advocate?
In previous testimony, when I raised a voice of caution, it was because my function at CRS is to identify consequences that may not be anticipated. Congress was considering actions that could transfer some of its spending prerogatives to the executive branch. I did express reservations, but not because I supported the status quo in budget procedures. It was because of institutional and constitutional concerns. Although I worked on the Budget Act of 1974, I have been probably the most outspoken critic of its results and processes. For example, see my articles "The Budget Act of 1974: A Further Loss of Spending Control," in Congressional Budgeting: Politics, Process and Power (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp. 107-89; "Ten Years of the Budget Act: Still Searching for Controls," 5 Public Budgeting & Finance 3 (1985); and "Congressional Abdication: War and Spending Powers," 43 Saint Louis U. L. J. 931 (1999).
What budget reforms do I "advocate"? As a CRS analyst, it is not my role to advocate any particular policy option. I do think that budget reforms that encourage Congress to exercise its constitutional power of the purse, including the prerogative to decide budget priorities rather than transferring those spending decisions to the President, are more consistent with constitutional principles.
2. You conclude that political appointees are perhaps more likely than careerists to function in good faith in responding to the intent of Congress and upholding the requirements of the law when it comes to managing their agencies and programs. What evidence to you have to support such a conclusion? Can you provide specific examples.
There appears to be some confusion here. I testified that political appointees are perhaps less likely than careerists to function on a good-faith basis. Part of the reason for making that statement comes from the Volcker Report in 1989, Leadership for America: Rebuilding the Public Service. This study discusses the steady increase in the number of political appointees in the federal government from the 1950s to the 1980s, particularly "at the lower level executive ranks, to which career employees could once aspire." As political appointees pushed lower into the bureaucracy, "the ability of agencies to provide continuity between Presidential Administrations has been impaired." The report recommended that the President reduce the number of political appointees and make greater use of the career services. The report pointed out that career executives "know the intricacies of the laws and regulations governing the programs they implement. They are the repositories of organizational memory." The report also highlighted the short tenures of political appointees, citing one study: "Appointees on the job two years have enough time to make mistakes but often not enough time to put the resulting lessons to use." Some political executives offered critical comments about their fellow appointees: "To tell the truth, I have more problems with political appointees because they are subject to political pressures. And they think they understand the political process, and most of them don't."
The report describes political appointees as "in-and-outers" who are recruited to serve a particular President and want to "make their marks quickly and to move on." In contrast, career executives have longer-term perspectives and are more likely "to pay attention to the health of institutions and to the integrity of the processes that ensure nonpartisan implementation of the laws."
Other studies have reached similar conclusions. In "Political Appointees and Career Executives: The Democracy-Bureaucracy Nexus in the Third Century," published in the January/February 1987 issue of Public Administration Review, James P. Pfiffner argues that "the balance in the United States has shifted too far toward a greater number of political appointees." Presidential candidates come to office with a distrust of the career bureaucracy, fearing that it might sabotage their initiatives. For example, Jimmy Carter ran as an outsider against the establishment in Washington, D.C. Pfiffner noted that Carter and "many of his appointees adopted an attitude of moral superiority toward Congress and the bureaucracy."
In hearings in 1989, Congressman Gerry Sikorski, chairman of the Subcommittee on the Civil Service, offered this perspective: "In the 98th Congress, this subcommittee held a series of four hearings reviewing the first five years of the SES. We were told then that the mix of political appointees and career civil servants was becoming poisoned by too many political appointees. These concerns are still valid. The recent scandal at the Department of Housing and Urban Development is a good example of what can happen when political appointees circumvent career executives shutting them out from agency management. The S&L crisis, Iran Contra, Burford and Lavelle at the EPA are other examples caused or at least aggravated by this same problem. We have seen that time and again a poisoned Senior Executive Service leads to poisoned public policy." "Relationship Between Non-Career Appointees of the Senior Executive Service and Career Senior Executives," hearing before the Subcommittee on the Civil Service of the House Committee on Post Office and Civil Service, 101st Cong., 1st Sess. 1 (1989).
Of course, we all recognize that generalized observations often do not fairly reflect the actions of individuals. However, this concern has been raised in enough areas to warrant mention.
3. Could you elaborate on the point you make on page 5 of your prepared testimony, where you conclude that within the agencies "everyone would be on notice that many accounts would be vulnerable to reductions the second year." Why do you believe that this would be the case?
The major reason is the difficulty of projecting spending for an additional year beyond the current estimates. The projections for the second year will not be as good as the projections for the first year. In the second year, it would be necessary for executive officials, working in conjunction with the congressional committees that have jurisdiction, to add funds to programs that are running out of money. To keep within a spending cap, these officials would have to take funds from other programs. I was referring to this heightened state of uncertainty and vulnerability during the second year.
4. What is your view of the argument that by reducing the number of repetitive budget votes, Congress will have less opportunity to spend the taxpayers money, making it more likely that overall government spending could decline?
I don't know why that would happen. Under biennial budgeting, Congress would have to vote on funding for Year 1 and Year 2. If lawmakers decided to adopt purposely restrictive totals for the second year, they would be faced with supplemental requests in Year 2 and perhaps agency announcements that they have insufficient funds to last the full twelve months. Faced with these "coercive deficiencies," Congress could ignore the agency requests and see what happens. I think it is just as likely that Congress would err on the generous side in adopting a two-year budget so that these second-year confrontations and crises did not occur. If they did, Congress would be distracted from the oversight which is the stated priority for the second year.
