Hearing of the Committee on Rules
"Biennial Budgeting: A Tool for Improving Government Fiscal Management and Oversight"
Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the opportunity to testify before your committee today. I wish that it were for the purpose of telling this panel that it had found a mechanism by which we could improve the decision-making processes of this institution. Unfortunately, today I cannot do that. I must instead warn you that you are considering a measure that will in my opinion:
- Seriously undermine the fundamental Constitutional responsibilities of the Legislative Branch of this Government, thereby giving the Executive Branch even more leverage than it has today.
- It will create more chaos rather than less because we will have a constant stream of supplementals going through this place, which will be much larger because so many things will change over a two-year period.
- Because so much can change in the economy over a two-year period of time, we will find ourselves often locked in to policy decisions that new circumstances will dictate changing.
Let me elaborate.
As members of Congress, we are unique among legislators around the world. We have far great individual power and responsibilities than our counterparts in virtually any country on the planet. This is not basically because we as members decided that the Congress should play such a role. It is because our founding fathers thrust it upon us. They had a deep and abiding distrust in the executive powers of any government, even one organized by an elected president. As a result, they not only made the Congress the first branch of government but they conferred on it the power of the purse and insisted that it keep the executive branch on a very short leash. It is the length of that leash that determines the balance of power in this government and this proposal would significantly lengthen that leash. Simultaneously, it would expand the discretion of career employees of the executive branch with respect to the policies and operations of the federal government.
The one argument that we hear repeatedly in favor of biennial budgeting is that the states do it so we should too. I would observe that this is not a state government and any argument to that effect is deeply flawed. This is a government that serves 280 million people. This is a government that maintains a political, military and economic complex that dominates the course of relationships among virtually all countries on the globe. While it is true that 21 states have some form of biennial budgeting (that is down from 44 in 1940), it is also true that most of the states that practice biennial budgeting have populations smaller than the 4 million people currently on the payroll of the federal government.
The fact that proponents of this legislation have not placed in perspective is that there are numerous agencies in this government that are not even responsive to their own appointed leadership. They are even less responsive to departmental management or the White House and still less responsive to the Congress and this proposition will make matters worse. The healthiest single event that occurs in this town each year is the annual budget review. It is the one moment in time when many senior program managers are confronted with the possibility that they were not ordained by God to set government policies on their own.
Removing this requirement will affect not only our ability to ensure that laws are fully and faithfully executed, it also diminish the ability of House Members to effectively represent and advocate for their constituents. Let me describe the calendar that you will confront in a biennial budget process. A member of Congress will win election in November and be "sworn in" in January. By May, the Appropriations subcommittee will have to complete action on program by program funding levels. Those will be subject to review by the full House in June. At that point House members are pretty much finished with their decision making with respect to most programs and agencies. To put it another way, most parts of the federal bureaucracy won't need you again until after you are re-elected. The only ones who will, will be those who are affected by the supplementals that go through here and those supplementals will probably not affect the portion of their budgets that agencies are most concerned about – their own administrative functions. Instead, they will simply be additions to programs which in many cases will be of more importance to constituencies in your district than they will to some of the permanent bureaucracy that runs these agencies.
Some proponents argue that biennial budgeting will provide the Congress with more opportunity to do oversight. Frankly, I don't think there is any claim with respect to biennial budgeting that is further off the mark. The job of insuring that federal agencies are conforming to the letter and the spirit of the laws that created them lies with the committees that wrote those laws. There are 16 committees in the House who have such jurisdiction and the list does not include appropriations. No proposal to date does anything that I am aware of to expand or in anyway enhance the ability of these 16 committees to perform their oversight function.
Biennial budgeting in my opinion actually diminishes the capacity of authorizing committees to conduct effective oversight. While the primary responsibility for conducting oversight lies with the authorizing committees, the enforcement mechanism for congressional oversight from any source lies in the annual Appropriations bills. If a program, agency or department is found to be in violation of its legislative mandate, the remedy is most often a limitation on its appropriation. This is just as true if an authorizing committee identifies the violation as it is when appropriators identify it. Biennial budgeting causes Congress to lose their enforcement mechanism after the first six months of a new Congress. For the next 18 months agencies can wait and see if the next Congress shares the same concerns. What we in essence have is a process that turns into a pumpkin—not at midnight—but at 9:00 in the morning.
There is also the question as to whether eliminating consideration of regular appropriation bills every other year will provide more or less time for the authorizers to conduct oversight. Right now, from January to May the Appropriations Committee is not on the Floor. It is in Committee doing its work. This is the time we need to have authorizations on the Floor so that we don't have to come to you as we do every year with virtually every bill asking for waivers because of lack of authorization. Committees say they can't get their committee together for quorums because there aren't enough votes. The Leadership says that aren't any votes because the committees aren't producing legislation. Right now the only time when we do have solid action on the Floor is when Appropriation committees are meeting every day. If they are meeting only every other year, it is going to be more difficult than ever to get authorizing committees together to do their work.
I must observe that the lack of oversight has been a persistent problem during the entire time I have served in this institution and I do not remember a time when there was less real oversight than there is now. But if you relieve the Congress of the burden of considering annual appropriation bills, you will also relieve the Congress of the only real opportunity that the calendar now provides to committees that sincerely wish to engage in oversight or passing authorizations for that matter.
Our problem right now is not that we have annual budgets. Our problem right now is that we are making numerous changes in the budget every few months because of changing circumstances or changing political judgements. And if you lock the Congress in a two-year budget, you will have an explosion of supplemental adjustments because our original actions will become even more out of date than they do now. Let me give you an example.
Last summer, the Speaker, some members of the Foreign Affairs Committee and others decided that we should spend far more fighting drugs and the insurgent guerrillas in Columbia during fiscal 2000 than the President's foreign assistance budget would permit. They began putting together a proposal for almost $1 billion in additional spending. They began discussions with the General McCaffry, the Drug Czar, and others in the White House on inclusion of that proposal in the final budget deal. Reports were leaked to the press that the group would soon put forward its proposal and that it would be formally requested by the President. Then it was decided that the fiscal 2000 budget had already gotten to dicey. Rather than include the extra billion and risk breaking the camel's back, both the Republican leadership in Congress and the White House agreed to hold off and handle the matter in a supplemental. In other words, while both side talk of going to biennial budgets neither is even committed to making annual budgets stick. The result is that we are now looking at more than $1.5 billion in spending for Columbia—a fifty percent increase from last summer—and that is driving a total package of a least $4 billion that will hit the House floor sometime next month. The real problem is that it is extremely likely that this package will grow well beyond $4 billion.
I would urge you to remember one thing. Every time a supplemental moves through this place it means that someone has attached a critical priority to it. That means it becomes a must pass bill which will draw other items like flies. The problem is that the House will have very little to say about that because we have a tough germaneness rule. But because the Senate has no germaneness rule, it means that the House will have essentially given up its traditional ability to originate most appropriations items. Because the more we deal in the world of supplementals the more we will deal with Senate add ons. That will make the world of appropriations more expensive and it will also mean that in the end most new initiatives will be undertaken by the Senate, not the House. I don't see why we want to do that.
Finally, there are numerous opportunities every year to save money out of the operating accounts of various programs and agencies that will simply disappear with a biennial budget. Virtually every Appropriation Subcommittee finds in the course of its hearings that one or more agencies have failed to maintain the program level for which they were budgeted in the prior year. So you will have a situation where the agency has demonstrated that they don't need the money and aren't using the money for the purpose for which it was appropriated. And yet, they will still have that money sloshing around in their budget for another full year. Now it's possible a recission could be passed, but I predict that we will not see the same kind of increase in rescissions that we will see in supplementals if this plan is adopted.
There is one other aspect of biennial budgeting that I find very troubling. As you all well know we have had a great deal of difficulty in putting the Appropriations process to bed for the year in recent cycles. While literally thousands of spending issues have been resolved, there are always a few which will drag on for weeks until the pressure builds for a final deal that will let us go home. Fortunately, we have usually reached compromise that did not force us to drag the whole process into the following year. One reason was that we knew we would have to begin work on the subsequent years budget as soon as we returned after the New Year. If we have biennial budgets rather than annual budgets, the stakes will be higher than they are now because the judgements that are made will supposedly last for two years. That will mean that people will be less willing, not more willing to compromise and in the end that means that the debate on the budget is likely to spill over into the second year and all we will have done is to lengthen rather than shorten our budget fights. I don't understand why we would want to do that.
I do want to say that I sympathize with the intentions of those support this proposal out of a desire to reduce the level of chaos in the current budget and appropriations process. It is a mess and those of us most directly involved in it are often made to suffer the most. There are three things that I would recommend this panel look at if it wishes to bring real order to our decision making on the budget.
First, we waste most of the time we now spend on Appropriation bills because we start out with unrealistic plans. Repeatedly in recent years we have had budget resolutions that called for unrealistic levels for discretionary spending. That meant that Congress spent most of its time developing appropriations bills that bore little resemblance to those that were finally enacted. The Appropriations process has in effect served as a show to eat up time until the end of the session when the pressure for action would be great enough for more realistic proposals to be considered. That is in large part a failure of individuals within the system rather than the system itself. But our current process lends itself to such a failure. We are among the only institutions left that have placed the responsibility for planning a process in different hands from those who are charged with executing it.
The Budget is in effect the product of the revenues raised by legislation under the jurisdiction of the Ways and Means Committee and the spending levels which are determined by not only Appropriations but Ways and Means, Transportation and the other committees with direct spending authority. If the people who craft the overall plan for the budget have no responsibility for its execution you can expect that they are quite likely to simply support a plan that they would personally like to see instead of one that might actually work. That is what has been happening on the budget committee for a quarter of a century and even if we change the players and do not address that fact, it will continue to make the process unwieldy and the debate over the budget hollow and misleading.
Secondly, we have to find a more rational way of dealing with emergencies. We cannot continue to debate whether or not we are going to rewrite the entire previous year's budget in order to offset unforeseen needs that have been created by a natural disaster. At the same time we need a better standard by which we respond to natural disasters and I believe the federal role which has been continually expanded over the decades is now too large. I would propose that we create a system by which states could insure themselves against natural disasters and that the bulk of monies need to address such problems come from that fund.
But the biggest problem with the budget and appropriations process is not actually in the House. The Senate has permitted far to much latitude to its members to inject any issue they choose into any legislative vehicle. This is much of what is wrong with the ability of Congress to enact authorizations. As a result the only process that is left to the Senate for the attachment of extraneous riders is the appropriations process and that practice is on the verge of sinking the appropriations process as well. Appropriation bills take forever to be considered. The rules are such that the Senate is not able to proceed unless every single Senator agrees. Routine decisions about proceeding with a budget that a majority of Senators support cannot be made unless 60 or more Senators concur. The way to resolve this mess is not to abandon our Constitutional responsibility for controlling the purse strings, the way to resolve this is for the Senate to adopt new rules.
Mr. Chairman, It would be a colossal mistake to make institutional changes that have far reaching consequences on our most fundamental constitutional power simply as a smokescreen to cover the real problems that plague this institution. If this committee reports this legislation I think it will be subject to precisely that charge.