Hearings of the Committee on Rules
Wednesday, February 16, 2000
The committee met, pursuant to call, at 10:30 a.m. in Room H-313, The Capitol, Hon. David Dreier [chairman of the committee] presiding.
Present: Representatives Dreier, Goss, Pryce, Diaz-Balart, Hastings, Sessions, Reynolds, Moakley, Frost, Hall, and Slaughter.
The purpose of today's hearing is to hear from our colleagues about their views on biennial budgeting and to examine various proposals for establishing a 2-year budget and appropriations cycle. I am very pleased that in just a few minutes we will be joined by the Speaker of the House, who will be for the first time since he has been Speaker testifying before a congressional committee.
We originally planned to hear member testimony over a 2-day period, but because there will be no votes scheduled tomorrow, we will try to complete this hearing today.
After the President's Day recess, we plan to hold at least one more hearing to receive testimony from the executive branch, congressional support agencies and outside experts in an effort to develop consensus legislation that will streamline the budget process, enhance programmatic oversight, strengthen the management of government programs and bureaucracies and reform the Congress
At the very end of the last session a bipartisan group joined with us, in fact there were a total of 245 members, in introducing a sense of the House resolution calling for the enactment of biennial budget process in the second session of the 106th Congress. Well, as we all know we have begun the second session of the 106th Congress, and we are committed to moving forward with that effort. There is, as we know, very strong bipartisan support in the Senate for a biennial budget process, and President Clinton as well as the major presidential candidates of both political parties are supportive of biennial budgeting, and the President specifically mentioned in his submission of his budget for fiscal year 2001 support for this biennial process.
The issue of biennial budgeting has received considerable attention over the past decade. Since 1977 more than 40 congressional or special committee hearings have addressed the topic of biennial budgeting. I would like to note most often what I consider to be the most significant recommendation which came from a committee, which I was proud to cochair along with Lee Hamilton and former Senator David Boren and our colleague Senator Domenici who chairs the Budget Committee in the Senate, in 1993 after exhaustive hearings we came forward with a recommendation that we proceed with biennial budgeting. The gentleman sitting right here to my left, the vice chairman of the committee and chairman of the Subcommittee on Legislative and Budget Process, Mr. Goss, has held several hearings on this issue over the past 5 years in the context of comprehensive budget process reform
I happen to believe that enactment of a biennial budget process could lead to the most significant governmentwide fiscal management reforms of the last quarter century. The enormous amount of resources expended by the executive branch in preparing multiple annual budgets at the same time would be diverted to long term strategic planning and improving the performance of Federal programs. Congress, which for this fiscal year appropriated $121 billion for programs encompassing 137 programs whose authorization had expired, would have more time and resources to do a better job of programmatic oversight.
For those citizens who are served by Federal programs, biennial budgeting will provide more predictability and peace of mind. States, localities and private organizations will become more efficient in the long term planning and management of their programs if Federal funding streams were more predictable, and obviously, as has been pointed out by the chairman of the Interior Subcommittee of Appropriations, Mr. Regula, there can be tremendous taxpayer savings, too.
While nobody believes that biennial budgeting is in fact the panacea for all the ailments of society or the Federal Government, if it is done correctly I believe that such a process can promote a more effective government and a less chaotic and repetitive budget process at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
As I said, we are looking forward to having Speaker Hastert join us in just a few minutes as our kickoff witness, and until then I am going to call on members for opening statements. Mr. Goss I know has a statement he would like to offer
Mr. Goss. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank you for taking the leadership and initiative for holding these hearings. This is a topic I think of very great interest to a growing number of members, and as you have mentioned, I think we spent a very large portion of our subcommittee looking for ways to improve our current budget process and dealing with this subject, ways to improve our current budget process, which I feel and I think many members feel is broken and broken rather badly.
I suppose the byword how quickly we forget around here is appropriate, but I can still remember 18 months ago when we had a very strong reminder about just how badly broken the budget process was. We did a little better last year, but I don't think anybody felt we had a system that was serving us properly or the people of the United States.
Working with our friends in the Budget Committee and bringing in a number of members on both sides of the aisle, I think we did develop a pretty good package last year. It was certainly fairly comprehensive. We called it H.R. 853, and the committee acted upon it, and I think there still is a possibility for some floor action down the road
That package did include a number of very significant changes that served as a benchmark for starting a discussion on how to change the process for the better, which is part of the purpose of it, and at that time we said that we had not been able to include everything in that bill. Obviously in order to get consensus we had to leave some things out. We did want to find a baseline consensus with committees of jurisdiction because that is what is necessary to get legislation passed, and I think 853 is a pretty good effort in that direction, but we also hope to develop a vehicle that will yield positive results if brought to a conference with the Senate, and that added another dimension of compromise.
I remain hopeful that we are going to have a chance to bring H.R. 853 forward or some of its component parts in some other vehicle as part of a larger discussion about where we are actually going with the budget process. I don't think there is any magic in looking back 30 years and saying, well, what we did 30 years ago suits the United States and America's Congress today because I don't think it fits, and I am afraid the evidence is before us
But with regard to the topic at hand today, I look forward to an informative series of hearings on biennial budgeting. This is obviously going to be a very profound change in the process, and if it lives up to its billings, and that is an if, it should improve efficiency, reduce redundancy, boost programmatic oversight and minimize frustration. That is a tall order for any process change, but I am encouraged by the broad range of Members and experts within this institution and across the country that has concluded that it is time to give biennial budgeting a try across the board at the Federal level.
This is not something that has not been discovered in other areas, and the question is whether it is now appropriate at the Federal level here
In my view the time has come to make a change, and I did not believe that when I started the process. This process has been instructive and informative to me, and I am now convinced that it is time to make a change. Given the totally predictable but somehow unavoidable train wrecks, near misses, chaotic late night sessions despite your best efforts to have us meet at normal times and nearly total public distrust that have come to characterize our annual budget attempts, it does appear that winnowing the process can be a tonic for what ails us
I would like to note for the record though, Mr. Chairman, that I do not believe any one process change on its own magically is going to right the system, and that is the reason I do this
Of course, we all know that nothing will substitute for good judgment, plain old-fashioned hard work and an ability to negotiate and compromise for the good of the order. That is part of our daily work in trade here. In addition, Mr. Chairman, lest we trade one set of problems for another in pursuing biennial budgeting, I hope we will couple any such change with other important process fixes, including a revamping of the way we budget for emergencies. We have had a lot of input on that, as you know. I think it is a very legitimate area. I think the way we talk about strengthening enforcement in an effort to put some teeth into making our budget a legitimate two-step, authorize then appropriate process work the way it was intended are areas to fix that we need to focus on as well.
Having said all that, I congratulate you again for bringing this slice of the loaf forward, and I look forward to some good input
The Chairman. Thank you very much, Mr. Goss. I know that in my remarks I mentioned the work that you and others have done on the overall issue of budget process reform, and I do believe that is a very important package, and as you know very well, I have been supportive of it all the way, but I feel very strongly about the need for us to address this question in light of the fact that we have not been able to move 853 as expeditiously as we would have liked
Mr. Goss. I would agree, Mr. Chairman. These are not mutually exclusive efforts
The Chairman. Mr. Moakley
Mr. Moakley. I don't have an opening statement, but I noted that 44 States had a biennial budget cycle in 1940 and now only 21 have them. They found that by having biennial budgets it led to more supplemental budgets and for less oversight by the legislature, and I just think that you are really going in the wrong direction. I think if we just work the system we have and work it diligently, we probably could accomplish a lot of things.
As I said, the biennial budget has not led State executives to do more performance evaluations of State legislatures or do more oversight. States that have shifted from biennial budgets, the annual budgets significantly reduce the need for supplemental appropriations. So biennial States still perform substantial annual reviews to balance their budgets or sea powers to others to make budget decisions for them in off years.
I think we are out flailing again, and I just think if we try to work within the budget procedure, no matter what deadline you set for the budget, we are always going to be up against it. Nobody ever does things on time. It is always a month after they are supposed to do it. So no matter what you to do in this situation, Mr. Chairman, I just think it is going to be cosmetic, and I don't think it will improve the budget system much, and I have dissenting views for your report
The Chairman. So I will put you down as undecided on this issue. Mr. Diaz-Balart
Mr. Diaz-Balart. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. This is an important issue obviously, and the legislative process obviously fundamentally has the role or should include the role of, in addition to legislating, overseeing the executive. One of the reasons I am supportive of this idea and am so pleased that the committee is going to have an opportunity to study the issue more in depth is that the oversight role of Congress and also the authorization role, which is very much connected I think or should be connected to the oversight role, is not working as well as I think it could or it should, and I would think that it would probably be the consensus position that the oversight and the authorization process also, the authorization process is not working well, and so perhaps if the authorization committees had more time, and I think that this structure will permit the authorization committees to have more time and devote more resources to their function, they could probably do a better job
So I am supportive of this concept. I believe that the biennial budgeting would provide Congress with great opportunities to do the kind of systematic and regular oversight that is necessary to ensure the best possible use of the taxpayers' dollars. So that is why, Mr. Chairman, I commend you for moving forward on this and for holding this hearing
The Chairman. Thank you very much. Ms. Pryce.
Ms. Pryce. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I come in a little late so if you want to go on to the others and circle back
The Chairman. We will come back to you. Mr. Hastings
Mr. Hastings. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I also want to commend you and Vice Chairman Goss for the work you have done on this. I am a very strong proponent of a biennial budget. If you look at how our process works, we come in in January or February. The President submits his budget. We go through the process of laying out what the broad parameters are, and then we get towards the end of the session, and we are nitpicking over small, little issues, it seems like, and finally we get done in October or sometimes even in November and sometimes even December, and we leave here totally exhausted and say, oh, we have done our work. Then we come back in January and do the same process all over again. It just seems to me that that is a waste of our resources to go through that process year after year.
A lot of us have served in our State legislatures I guess maybe kind of cutting our teeth on this process. Washington State, we do have a biennial budget, and it has worked really very well. In fact, because of the rules of our legislature, how it sets up, we have a fine period of time by which we have to get the process done, and to be sure, in the off year, we do have supplemental budgets just like we would have if we had a biennial budget here, but to me it makes a great deal of sense from an efficiency standpoint to allow the Congress which has the oversight responsibility of our spending to have at least another year or have a year that could be confined to more oversight. I know you have to go through the supplemental process.
So I think that the biennial budget is an idea frankly whose time has come, and I am a strong proponent of that, and once again, I want to congratulate you for the work that you have done, and hopefully we can move that this session
The Chairman. Mr. Reynolds
Mr. Reynolds. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am pleased to be part of the committee that is holding this timely hearing. As a former legislator and legislative leader in New York, a State which also conducts annual budgeting, I experienced a yearly frustration with the budget process long before coming to Congress. New York's budget process annually ties up the State legislature for months at a time, holding all other legislation virtually hostage. For the last 16 years New York has failed to produce a budget on time. That was my entire 10 years within State legislature.
That background combined with my first year, first experience with the Federal budget last year, as a freshman member of Congress, has convinced me more than ever that biennial budgeting is one of the best alternatives available to improving the Federal budget process. A biennial budget would allow Congress to more carefully and deliberately sort through all of the funding priorities and obligations but to do so only once during the Congress. That would allow a second session to focus on equally important concerns that unfortunately because of our current budget process often fall by the wayside, such as government oversight, reform and management.
I look forward to the testimony of speaker Hastert and my other colleagues in the House.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman
The Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Reynolds. Ms. Pryce.
Ms. Pryce. Thank you, Mr. Speaker
The Chairman. I am not the Speaker, Chairman
Ms. Pryce. Excuse me, I got mixed up because the Speaker just came in. Mr. Chairman, you never know, some day. Some day in the future. I am sorry. Mr. Chairman, I support --
The Chairman. Time has expired.
Ms. Pryce. I will put my statement in the record.
The Chairman. We are going to read that one
Ms. Pryce. And along with it, if you would be so kind, I have a letter from our Governor Bob Taft. In Ohio, we have biennial budgeting, and he supports it strongly, and if I put that in the record as well, and I will now yield back. Thank you.
The Chairman. Without objection, Governor Taft's letter will appear in the record, and I would like to say that our colleague Tony Hall also made a comment to me about the fact that you have that in Ohio and that Governor Taft is strongly supportive of that.
I am very pleased to recognize as our first witness for this very important hearing speaker Hastert. At the beginning of the 106th Congress, Speaker Hastert and I and others sat down and talked about the importance of programmatic and policy oversight, and that is a very important responsibility which the United States Congress has, and the Speaker has been very diligent in pursuing that, and I am pleased that he joined as a cosponsor of the resolution that we introduced last year. Biennial budgeting clearly can do an awful lot to enhance the oversight issue which is a priority for all of us
We are very happy to recognize you, Mr. Speaker, and look forward to your statement.
STATEMENT OF THE HON. J. DENNIS HASTERT, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF ILLINOIS
Mr. Hastert. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And it is an honor to be here, Mr. Moakley, members of the Rules Committee.
First of all, I want to take just a minute and thank you for your hard work. There are a lot of committees that do diligent work day in and day out to make this process work, but we ask you to do a little extra. You have weird hours from time to time to make sure that the rules get out in a timely basis so that we can move the bills to the floor, and many times those hours are after everybody else's hours. So I just want to say, first of all, we commend you for the job that you do and the ability to move the rules out to get the job done and appreciate that very much. I know it is sometimes above and beyond this task that we do
If you will excuse me, I want to read the testimony today because I think there are some important points that I want to make sure we are precise about in this legislation. As the House was concluding the appropriations cycle at the end of the last year, you, Mr. Chairman, along with Chairman Young of Florida and other Members of the committee on a bipartisan basis, introduced a resolution calling for the Congress to enact a biennial budget in the second session of the 106th Congress. Mr. Chairman, I recommend that this happen, and I commend you for initiating this inquiry and beginning a public dialogue on this subject.
The current budget process doesn't work well, and we needed to fix it. Since I became Speaker last year, I have emphasized the need for Congress to do its job under the Constitution, and I have used the word over and over again, regular order. That puts the faith in committees like yours and others to get their jobs done and do it in the process that the Constitution and rules of this House laid out. The public respects us when we get our work done, when we produce a good work product and we do it in an incredible fashion.
When I came to Congress I was not sure if I would ever see a balanced budget in this town. Matter of fact, some people laughed at me when I talked about balancing the budget, and it was something that didn't seem that would ever happen, but we are fortunate now to live in a time of budget surpluses. These budget surpluses have been created by hardworking Americans, people that go to work every day, people who invest and people with good ideas, but they are also the result of positive legislation enacted by the Congress and by the President in recent years.
However, despite the positive budget forecasts, we continue to do our business under antiquated budget rules and procedures. It has become clear that we can't do our jobs with current cumbersome budget systems in place and every year the appropriations process consumes a great deal of our time with numerous and lengthy debates and often repetitive votes, and sometimes if you have been around here for a dozen years or so, and you listen to the argument year after year after year, it seems sometimes like the movie Groundhog's Day. It is the same argument, it is the same debate, it is the same people
Appropriations are obviously consumed with grinding their bills through committee, to the floor, the Senate and seemingly never ending conferences with the other body and all too often these conferences in particular are consumed with nonbudget, nonappropriations policy issues. This of course soaks up the time of congressional leaders, executive branch, budget experts, appropriators and of course authorizers whose laws these amendments often affect.
A biennial budget process would free up more time on the calendar for thorough consideration of authorizing measures. Under House rules, appropriation bills must conform to authorizing legislation, but all too often we dispense with those rules because the authorization bills don't get enacted. We need to restore the power and the purpose of the authorizing committees.
Mr. Chairman, I served on an authorizing committee, several of them in the House, and observed firsthand the difficulty of moving bills through the House and getting them considered in the Senate. Sometimes it is frustrating and hard work, and I am sure most authorizing chairmen are used to the thing that says get your bills done early or you are going to have to be behind the appropriation bills as they move through the House and to the conferences. If we have a biennial budget process, the authorizing committees won't have to get behind the appropriators as often as they do now
The House, through its committee system, must also do a better job of conducting programmatic oversight and management of the vast accounts of the U.S. government. One of the powers of the Congress is the power of the purse, and we need to ensure that we have a system in place which allows us to carefully scrutinize the programs we fund, and I can say probably one of the most productive experiences I have had in my congressional career is sitting on an oversight committee and making sure that the branches of government do the job, and I have to say in a bipartisan basis there were a lot of good things that we were able to put together and move through and to make sure that this government could run better
Biennial budgeting would give congressional committees the ability to devote more time and resources to programmatic oversight, and this must be a thorough and ongoing process. I have found that it is the most successful when conducted also in a bipartisan manner. Mr. Chairman, another area a biennial budget process would improve upon the current system would be in the area of budgeting for emergencies.
I am sure many of the members here remember the Mississippi flood situation of 1993 and the difficulty of moving the supplemental appropriations for flood relief through the Congress. Other natural disasters occur and create pressures to move expensive legislation quickly. Unanticipated military operations such as our intervention last year in Kosovo also created the need for supplemental appropriation bills during the fiscal year. Biennial budgeting would force the Congress and the President to plan ahead for unanticipated needs.
Mr. Chairman, the U.S. government should allow the model of 23 States who have a biennial budget cycle to go forward. The President's budget just 2 weeks ago recommended that the Congress enact a biennial budget. Your sense of Congress resolutions in support of biennial budgeting has garnered support of almost 250 members of the House, which spans the ideological spectrum and includes authorizers and appropriators. I urge you to use your expertise in the rules and the procedures of Congress to work with the House Budget Committee and with the Senate to continue to work on a bipartisan fashion and produce a biennial budget package for the House to consider.
I know there are some other questions out there, the questions of the whole idea of being able to move a tax bill in the second year and the issues of how you deal with the Senate rules, but I think those issues could be worked out. That is why it is important you not only work in a bipartisan basis but I think also on this issue in a bicameral basis
Mr. Chairman, thank you for your opportunity to appear before you today. I am greatly honored and thank you very much
[The statement of Speaker Hastert follows:]
The Chairman. Mr. Speaker, we are greatly honored. As I said before you arrived, this is the first time since you have been Speaker that you have testified before a congressional committee, and I think this is a very important issue to address because, as you stated so well, you want to proceed with regular order and you want to make sure this budget process works, and your support of our effort here is very much appreciated, and I think that the commitment that you have made to expand programmatic and policy oversight is enhanced greatly by your testimony and your commitment to support of this effort.
So I just want you to know how much I appreciate that personally, and we are going to continue working on a bicameral basis. I have been working closely with Senator Domenici on this and also a bipartisan basis, too. We have the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, who is going to be following you with testimony, and many Democrats have joined in working with us on it, too. So we appreciate that.
Mr. Goss.
Mr. Goss. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Speaker, it is a pleasure that you are here for us, and I very much appreciate you putting the weight of your office behind this. This is something I think we need to do. Those of us who have been studying it for a number of years may be a little slower to getting to the same position you achieved on this issue. I am there now. I think we have a lot of bedrock testimony. We have certainly canvassed a lot of Members. There is much discussion here because we are really talking about the work today, energies, how we channel them in our institution. I think you have come to the right conclusion.
The only question I would have is do you feel in your role as the Speaker of the House that you will be able to help us bridge the gap with the other body and get the same kind of leadership support that we are getting here? We know we have what we call bedrock support over there, but I don't know that we have enough at the top
Mr. Hastert. Well, first of all, yes, I will work with leadership on the other side of the Rotunda. I think they have some legitimate questions about reconciliation and how you deal with those issues in an off budget year for the situation. I think we need to address that, find ways that are satisfactory to both bodies, but I think there is some enthusiasm, and I think we need to work very diligently on both sides of the Rotunda to make sure that this thing works. It can't be something done here and not done on the other side of the Rotunda
Mr. Goss. Thank you very much. I know we are going to need your help
The Chairman. Mr. Moakley
Mr. Moakley. Speaker, it is nice to have you before the committee
Mr. Hastert. It is always an honor to appear before you, sir
Mr. Moakley. Couple of things that bother me, but one thing that bothers me is Ohio is the only big 10 State that has got a biennial budget, and since 1940 over 20 States have changed from biennial to annual because of the influx of supplemental budgets that keep coming up, and they don't have enough chance for oversight. So I was wondering, you know, since the direction seems to go in the other way, why you feel it is a good idea to go biennial
The Chairman. If the gentleman would yield, I think it is important to note that Texas has biennial. It is not a big 10 State but it is a big State
Mr. Moakley. But I said a big 10 State. Now you know what I have to put up with here. Half truths
The Chairman. He is surviving well
Mr. Hastert. Let me just say that since I have been in the Congress, since 1987, I think every year we have had a supplemental, even when we do an annual budget. I always believed that if you would work a little harder at the beginning and try to set aside and have the ability to address a rainy day fund or whatever type of way you would do that, and I am not the budget expert, the Budget Committee working with you can do that, but I think there are ways to anticipate that. Plus the fact, we have supplementals every time you turn around here as the way it is, and I think we have been able to handle those supplementals, but so many times I know that frustration that well, you know, if we can't get it done we will just stick it in the supplemental.
I think this will give us the discipline to try to look through a 2-year span of time, try to put the needs of the government in perspective, and if there is an emergency, then we can move forward. It doesn't prohibit us from moving a supplemental, but you know, we have those supplementals today. Sometimes we even see last year on both sides of the aisle, ours including your side of the aisle, we add on to the supplementals in ways that years ago would have made your head spin
Mr. Moakley. That is what I am afraid of, that a bill like this would just add to the supplementals and you know how they get that Christmas tree look and more things are hung up and it provides more chaos for the legislative body
Mr. Hastert. My reply to that is that I think probably you are warranted in your concerns on this, but we do have a supplemental process today. Every time we turn around, we have two or three supplementals a year which slows down our appropriation process to be able to get anything done. I know it slowed it done last year, and I think if we can move this process through with one major appropriation bill every Congress or process every Congress and then we can have some time to deal with the supplementals if they occur, but we need to anticipate what the needs are ahead of time, and it will give us the discipline to do that.
You know that is all theory. I have learned a long time ago in this business sometimes theory and practice don't come together. So I appreciate your concerns. I am not discounting them. I think maybe this is a possibility to do it a better way, and I would hope that we explore it and have the testimony on it
Mr. Moakley. Thank you very much
The Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Moakley. Ms. Pryce.
Ms. Pryce. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Let me take this opportunity to reassure everybody that I know the difference between our chairman and our Speaker, and they both do a fine job on that and may they continue in those jobs years and years and years to come.
Mr. Speaker, thank you for your support. This is an issue that will affect everything we do around here. It is so important that we examine it carefully. We in the Rules Committee have been looking at it through the years, and I have been working with Mr. Goss and his subcommittee, and it is something we should proceed with carefully, but it is wonderful to know that we have the support of your office.
I worked with you on committee projects in the oversight area before when I first came to Congress, and I know how very important that is to you and to us as a body, and I believe very strongly that this will give us the opportunity to do more of that, which is just as important as the legislative work we do.
So thank you very much for your support. I have no questions
The Chairman. Mr. Diaz-Balart
Mr. Diaz-Balart. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Speaker, appreciate you coming here and honoring us and also appreciate your support and agree with you
The Chairman. Mr. Hastings
Mr. Hastings. I just want to add my thanks to you, Mr. Speaker, for being here and supporting this because this is clearly when you look at the tradition of policy, and this is a huge change from the past. I congratulate you for being out in front
The Chairman. Mr. Sessions.
Mr. Sessions. Chairman, thank you. Speaker, I also want to thank you and say that I am delighted that through your leadership we have another example of a bipartisan approach solving the problems of Congress, and I appreciate your leadership. Chairman, I would also ask unanimous consent that my opening statement be included in the record.
[The statement of Mr. Sessions follows:]
The Chairman. Without objection, it will appear in the record. Mr. Reynolds
Mr. Reynolds. No questions, Mr. Chairman
The Chairman. Thank you very much. Mr. Speaker, thank you very much for being here. We appreciate your support and your thoughtful testimony and look forward to continuing to work with you on this issue. Thank you.
Now, we are very pleased to recognize the distinguished chairman of the Committee on Appropriations, the man who joined with me as a lead cosponsor of the resolution introduced in the waning days of the first session of the 106th Congress, and Chairman Young, we are happy to have you and look forward to your testimony.
STATEMENT OF THE HON. C. W. BILL YOUNG, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF FLORIDA
Mr. Young. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much, and I appreciate the lead you have taken on this issue, and I want to if I could personally comment to my friend, Mr. Moakley, I did not bring my cell phone this time.
The Chairman. So Beverly will not be calling you
Mr. Young. I don't think so. We still have a few minutes.
Mr. Chairman, when I came to the Congress I was elected in 1970 first and came here in the 92nd Congress. We did not have a budget resolution. We did not have a Budget Committee. We did have a lot of big spending. If a Member could convince the Appropriations Committee to spend we spent, but we had continuing resolutions even back then. We had supplementals even back then. At one point we changed the time of the fiscal year. Rather than beginning July 1 we made it begin in October 1. That might have been a plus. Sometimes I wonder about that. But anyway we did adopt a budget resolution. We have a Budget Committee. We have all these safeguards now. Our national debt has gotten considerably larger since that happened. We still continue to have continuing resolutions and we still have supplementals. So that didn't solve the problem. So I am happy that you are taking the lead in considering a different approach to the budget process and primarily the biennial budget approach.
So it is a pleasure to be here to give you my thoughts on this biennial budgeting, and, Mr. Chairman, you and I have discussed this many times in person so we pretty well know what each other's ideas are, but for the benefit of the committee, let me say the fiscal year 2001 budget is the 27th budget that I will have worked on since I began serving on the Appropriations Committee. During nearly every one of those budgets my committee was either rushed for time or was late in completing its work or both. We received the budget in early February. By this time over one-third of the fiscal year is already gone, and we have less than 8 months to get all the appropriations bills enacted.
We are supposed to receive the overall allocation against which we mark up our appropriations bills by April 15th, and I don't need to provide the history of how many times Congress has not been able to meet that deadline. The record is very bad. In some years we haven't even had a budget resolution. The reason has been it is hard to do a budget resolution given the conflicting priorities that are inherent in the effort and the fact that we have had a divided government for most of the recent past.
Even if we got a budget resolution completed by April 15th, we would have less than 5-1/2 months left to get our appropriations work done, and I have brought a poster I would like to show to you, and John, put it over here so all the members can see it.
If you look at this chart, this shows the 12 months of the year, but instead of starting in January the chart starts with October because that is the beginning of the fiscal year. October is red because October is gone. November is red, it is gone. December is red, it is gone. January is gone. It is red. February, well, we are past the 15th now. We were on the 15th when we colored this one up, but starting tomorrow, 17th, we are not going to be in session, across here, across here. We will be in session here. We will not be in session on these blue days. Look at the blue marks there, the House will not be in session and committees will be scattered and Members will be scattered.
Now, we are supposed to get this year, and I am satisfied the leadership will do this, a budget resolution by March the 15th and that is good news for us as appropriators, but let us say we get it March the 15th. If we get the budget resolution March the 15th, look at how much time is gone before the appropriators can actually begin to get their work because I can't assign 302(b) allocations to the 13 subcommittees until I get a 302(a) allocation from the budget resolution. So you see what happens here, and look at all of the blue space when there will be no sessions here. So we can't bring bills to the floor.
Now, with that limited amount of time, we have to do 13 regular bills, plus whatever supplementals we have, and then deal with not only getting them through the House but through the Senate and with the President. Thank you, John.
You can just leave that over there in case anybody wants to look at it more closely. Lean it against the desk there.
As you can see by the calendar, that would leave still only 6-1/2 months for appropriations. That is better but it is not enough. I think we need more time than this to develop and enact appropriations bills because one of the reasons that the Appropriations Committee goes into so much depth on appropriations is we are to provide oversight to determine if the money is being spent properly, if there has been adequate justification to prove that we actually need this amount of money because we don't want to spend any more money than is absolutely necessary.
And I believe that biennial budgeting legislation should be developed to provide additional time for Congress to consider appropriations bills and to give us more time to provide that oversight. How many times have we passed appropriations bills and then read in the newspaper a month later or 6 months later that such and such a project was in there and no one claims to know how it got there. Well, sometimes we don't know how it got there, but it got there because we didn't have the time to devote as much as we should to the oversight
Now, the legislation you consider, is this the total answer, do we have the final plan? Probably not but we have to start somewhere, and whether this means shoving the date for budget submissions back earlier, shortening the time for development of a budget resolution or moving the beginning of the fiscal year ahead as was done in the '70s or a combination of all of these, it is something we need to consider in order to make the proper decision. But we need more time for the appropriations process so that we don't get to the end of the fiscal year and be negotiating with the President, whoever that President might be, and Congress being in a real bind and not having adequate time to negotiate because the fiscal year is running out and the threat of closing down the government always hangs over your head.
While doing this might seem like we are taking more time on appropriations rather than less, which is one of the assumed goals of biennial budgeting, we would really be freeing up legislative time. This is because even though we need more time during the year for appropriations, we would only have a major appropriations effort every other year. The off years would be devoted to oversight and authorizing work plus fine tuning of the appropriations bills passed the year before.
While my main reason for looking at biennial budgeting is to get more time for the appropriations process, one of the stated reasons of others I have heard has been to give more time for oversight authorizing activities because oftentimes appropriations are ahead of the authorizers, which is not what our system is intended. One of the reasons appropriations takes so much time is because so many programs are not authorized at the time we consider their appropriations. So then we get hit with the controversial legislative issues that are inappropriately included in appropriations bills rather than authorizing bills where they should be.
I strongly believe that any biennial budgeting legislation should not only address the budget schedule of the Congress but also the authorizing process. If all that biennial budgeting achieves is a 2- year appropriations cycle, we will be as bad off with the 2-year bills as we are with the 1-year bills. We need multiyear authorizations and we need them in advance of the consideration of appropriations bills in order for biennial appropriations to work. While biennial budgeting will give additional time for oversight by authorizing committees, they must develop and get enacted authorizing legislation with this extra time so that appropriations bills do not become the vehicles for every controversial issue before the Congress.
I want this committee to know that the Appropriations Committee also does a lot of oversight. We will continue to do a lot under a biennial budgeting calendar. I think it would be good for authorizing committees to do more as well. They need to use the information they learned to review and modify the permanent legislation that is on the books and to pass authorizations to appropriate. Requirements to bring this about should be included in any biennial budgeting legislation.
I have also heard that biennial budgeting legislation might become the vehicle for other budget process reform. I want to make sure this committee understands that we need reform that will serve the American taxpayer better. I would urge you to be very careful not to load up any biennial budgeting legislation with other controversial budget process legislation. Support for and success of any biennial legislation may well be contingent on what else, if anything, might be included in this legislation.
For reasons I outline I believe that now is a good time to look at implementing biennial legislation. I urge the committee to hear from a broad range of experts on the matter, listen to their concerns and see if we can improve the budget and Appropriations process.
I thank you very much for your generosity with your time, Mr. Chairman. I have completed my statement
[The statement of Mr. Young follows:]
The Chairman. Well, Mr. Chairman, it is just the two of us at this point
Mr. Young. I noticed
The Chairman. The reason is we have got a vote going on downstairs. We have about five minutes left on the vote downstairs. We are going to try and continue the hearing process here, but let me just raise the one issue that you brought that I think is very important. It is the question of supplementals
Now, we in the past quarter century, since passage of the '74 Budget Act, have seen on average three supplementals per year, and what would you anticipate if we were to move to the biennial process?
Mr. Young. Mr. Chairman, I would anticipate that we would still continue to have supplementals, for this reason, that supplementals supposedly are just to deal with emergencies, and we never know when there is going to be a real emergency, whether it is here at home or whether it is abroad with one of our allies, one of our friends. So I don't think we can rule out the use of supplementals. We have one before us now that we will be bringing to the House as soon as we recover from next week's District home work period, and that supplemental is dealing with Kosovo, whether you support that or not, it has to be paid for because the money is already being spent. It also deals with the antidrug programs in Colombia specifically and other areas of that part of the world, but that is becoming a very serious emergency and does need to be dealt with. There are floods, there are hurricanes, there are earthquakes and we don't know when they might come.
So I think that still there will be calls for supplementals but I think this will give us an opportunity to focus on supplementals and try to make sure that they only come up when we deal with real emergencies rather than just someone's idea to spend more money
The Chairman. I would like to just raise one other question before we go downstairs to vote on the rule of the bill that we are going to be considering, and that is, I particularly congratulate you because there has been this view from members of both the Budget Committee and the Appropriations Committee that this step would somehow undermine their authority, their power, their opportunity to participate in the process. Do you have any thoughts on that at all?
Mr. Young. I do, and without going into a lot of detail, I actually believe this would help us create an environment where we would have a better working relationship with the agencies in the executive branch that we deal with. It would also give them an opportunity for their suppliers, people they buy goods from, for the military to buy spare parts or to buy parts for an ongoing weapons system, that they could plan ahead and buy in quantity lots rather than jumping at one buy at a time, 1 year at a time. Quantity purchases have proven to be very cost effective
The Chairman. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. We are going to continue the hearing. Mr. Goss is going to take over. You and I are going to go downstairs. We can proceed with Mr. Obey
Mr. Goss. [Presiding.] Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Obey, we welcome you to the committee. We are prepared to accept without objection your prepared remarks and your guidance on this matter before us.
STATEMENT OF THE HON. DAVID R. OBEY, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF WISCONSIN
Mr. Obey. Well, Mr. Chairman, let me say first of all that when I hear discussions about this, I am reminded of my old friend Archie the cockroach. Archie said once, he said did you ever notice that when a politician gets an idea he gets it all wrong, and with due respect to those who have testified, I think what is being contemplated would be a horrendous mistake, and I would like to make a couple points.
I do not come here testifying in my capacity as ranking member on the Appropriations Committee. I detest dung hill politics. I detest chicken blank jurisdictional debates. They belong in the ash can. But I have been here for 31 years, and I think I have learned a little something about this place, and I think I have seen many a process change paths which produce unintended and unforeseen consequences, and I am testifying here on a matter that I regard to have absolutely no partisanship. This is an institutional question. This institution that we are all privileged to be Members of is a very precious national resource, and we had better be very careful before we make dramatic changes that will weaken it in any way, and I think this will weaken it in the most profound possible way.
I would note in listening to the testimony so far that we have heard that the current process is a mess. I absolutely, totally agree, and I think it needs major changes, and I will be happy to discuss with you what changes I think those ought to be. I am concerned from having heard the initial statements that we are essentially talking to a closed jury here because it appears people already have their positions pretty well firmed up. I regret that. I hoped that I could help change some minds.
I want to say that I understand the existing process has severe problems, but in legislation, as in medicine, the remedy should not make matters worse, and I profoundly believe that this will
Secondly, I have heard that appropriations consume too much time. I believe that a 2-year budget process will lengthen, not shorten the time that we have to deal with our budgets each year, and I will explain why later
Third, I have heard that people want to make a change because they are tired of all of these nonbudgetary, nonappropriation riders being added to the bills. So am I, but this will create a situation where there will be more because if we have a 2-year appropriation, the stakes will be much higher. People will have only one kick at the cat, and so you can count on them to load them up and then you can count on those who missed to be doubly alert to their opportunities to do so on supplementals, and I will explain how that disadvantages the House
It has been alleged that this will create more opportunity for oversight. It will do nothing of the kind
It has also been asserted that this will help us to deal with emergency issues on a more effective and regularized basis. I would suggest that logic suggests if you set your appropriations in stone for 2 years, it is very much more difficult to anticipate 2 years down the road than 1 year down the road, and so I think you will have an even more chaotic consideration of emergency or so-called emergencies than we have right now.
I will do something that I very rarely do in this or any other committee. I want to stick fairly close to the text of my testimony because, like the Speaker, I think this is perhaps the most serious issue about which I have ever testified before this committee, and of all committees, this committee institution needs to be more concerned about the roles of the place than any other committee
I believe that is what is before you today will seriously undermine the Constitutional responsibilities of the legislative branch of this government. I think it will give the executive branch more leverage than it has today. It will create more chaos rather than less because there will be a constant stream of supplementals going through this place, and because so much can change in the economy over a 6-month period, not to mention 2 years, we will find ourselves locked into policy decisions that new circumstances will dictate changing, and Members will use that as an opportunity to Christmas tree every vehicle that goes through here with I think disastrous results to our reputation
If you look around the world, as Members of Congress, we are unique among legislators. We have far greater individual power, we have far greater responsibilities than our counterparts in any legislative body on the face of the globe. We didn't make it that way. Our Founding Fathers made Congress the first branch of government, and they conferred on it also the power of the purse to enforce that and insisted that it keep the executive branch on a very short leash, and it is the length of that leash that determines the balance of power in this town and in this government. This proposal will substantially lengthen that leash. It will expand the power of career employees in the government who feel that they are largely responsive to no one.
The one argument we hear in favor of biennial budgets is that States do it, we do too. Mr. Moakley has already pointed out that that argument is, in my view, deeply flawed. It is one thing to come from a State of four million or five million people or even Texas. Texas doesn't have to deal with 170 countries around the world. They don't have to deal with international economic crises. They don't have to deal with all of the broad, national issues we have to deal with.
Most of the States that practice biennial budgeting have populations smaller than the four million people currently on the payroll of the Federal Government, and as Joe has mentioned, at the State level we moved from having 44 States in 1940 who had biennial budgets to 21 today. I think it is fine for some of them. I think it is not fine for someone with our responsibilities.
Proponents of this legislation don't appear to understand that there are numerous agencies that are not responsive to their own appointed leadership within those agencies. They are even less responsive to departmental management at the White House, and they are certainly even less responsive to the Congress, and this proposition will make that worst.
The healthiest thing that happens in this town occurs each year in the annual budget review. That is the one moment in time when senior program managers are confronted by the possibility that they were not ordained by God to set government policies on their own without benefit of election. And removing that requirement for annual review will affect not only our ability to ensure that the laws be fully executed, but it will do some other things as well. And I would like to describe to you the calendar that we will have if this process works the way its proponents say it will work
We will get elected in November. We will come here and ideally they tell us by the middle of the first year we will have our appropriation process done. If that is the case, then ain't nobody in any of those agencies who is going to need a single Member of the House of Representatives for anything for the next year and a half, and that will make them far less responsive to the demands and needs of your constituents than they are today.
And I would point out that the only ones who will have a continuing interest in what we feel are the agencies that are affected by supplemental requests, and the problem with supplementals is that they are always focused on program increases to meet concerns that we have, and frankly, those program managers are a hell of a lot more interested in their own bureaucratic budgets and their own administrative budgets than they are whether you actually get an increase or a decrease in their programmatic budget, and so supplementals will not give you the leverage on agencies that the annual review of their operating budgets will give you
Now, some proponents say that that will give us an opportunity for more oversight. I don't believe that is true either. The principal job of oversight in this institution is done by the 16 committees in the House who have jurisdiction. They are not the Appropriations Committee. They are the authorizing committees. The Appropriations Committee does a lot of oversight, but it is a different kind of oversight. We oversee to see how they are spending Federal money and whether they do what we like or not, but often the Appropriations Committee is at variance with the authorizing committees in terms of how they want to see these laws develop. So the Appropriations Committee doesn't do oversight that benefits authorizing committees in enforcing authorizing committee demands and agencies follow the law the way they are written, and these programs are not supposed to be designed by appropriations. They are supposed to be designed by authorizing committees
And secondly, when authorizing committees and appropriations committees do agree, the appropriations process has been the primary vehicle by which agencies have been disciplined to make certain that they do follow the intent of the authorizing law, and when you lose your annual opportunity to get at them, you lose your ability to really discipline those agencies
We also have the question of whether authorizing committees will have more time for oversight if we pass this. I would point out right now we have a terrible time getting authorization bills to the floor. Authorizing committees will tell the leadership it is because we don't have votes here to keep committees going so Members go home, and the leadership will say well, my God, we don't have votes because you guys aren't producing your legislation, and the fact is the only time when we have a sustained period of votes on the floor is when we are going through the appropriations process, and with all of the interruptions and inconveniences that that causes, that is when your authorizing committees have the best opportunity to actually get their quorums to move legislation
I agree with Bill Young we need more long term authorizations. That is one of the changes I favor rather than this, but I ask you to remember that hard fact when you look not at the surface of the oversight issue but when you actually get down to the nitty-gritty about how it operates
Our problem right now is that we can't even get to annual budgets, much less biennial budgets, and let me give you an example. Last summer the Speaker and some of the members of the Foreign Affairs Committee decided we ought to spend more money fighting drugs and the insurgent guerrillas in Colombia. So they and the administration began putting together a plan for $1 billion in additional spending. They began discussions with General McCaffrey, the drug czar. Reports were leaked to the press about what they were talking about, and then it was decided that the fiscal 2000 budget was getting too dicey, it was already too hard to pass it. So rather than including that extra billion dollars in the regular budget, both the Republican leadership and the Congress and the White House agreed to hold off and handle it in a supplement. So in other words, while both sides, while both the White House and the House leadership are talking about we need to go to biennial budgets, they are not even committed to making an annual budget stick. And so what we wind up with is now we have got a package which is going to be about $4 billion going to be handled outside the regular appropriations process. That is going to jack up spending, not reduce it.
Now, I am not arguing for or against the proposition. I am simply saying that when you consider these items outside of the normal overall budget, annual budget, the costs will go up rather than down because it is easy then to shift money around in the last year and next year, and you get away with it, and that is not of credit to the U.S. congress
I also want to point out that what happens is that when supplementals move through this place, and this will greatly increase the number of supplementals, because if you are stuck over a 2-year period, every agency will be looking for a supplemental every day of the week, and you will be stuck here until the cows come home dealing with them, and what will happen is that there is a difference between the way the House handles supplementals and the Senate.
The House has a tight rule of germaneness. That means when you have a supplementals come before the House, we won't be able to Christmas tree it with other items that are not germane because you have got the Rules Committee to stop that. Ain't got no Rules Committee that functions that way in the Senate. So what happens, they see a must pass bill. The administration wouldn't have asked for it unless they really wanted it badly. So they know the administration is willing to give damn near anything to get it. So what do they do, they load it up in the Senate side, and after the initial appropriations, the House will lose its traditional power to initiate appropriations, and you will have the Senate Christmas treeing these bills to death. We will be reacting to them, and we will have lost our constitutionally determined preeminence in originating appropriation items, and I do not see why Members of the House would do that
Also, there are numerous opportunities every year to save money out of operating accounts for a number of agencies, and those will disappear with the biennial budget process. Every appropriations subcommittee finds in the course of its regular hearings that agencies haven't been able to expend certain amounts of money, and so we take that into account in the program levels we provide for next year, but if once an agency has its money, it can sit there for 2 years before they have to spend it, you aren't going to have Congress being as aggressive on the rescissions as they will be on supplementals, and so money which you would ordinarily recoup to reduce the cost of next year's appropriation will sit in those agency coffers and it will be lost, and that will also elevate the cost of government.
There is another aspect that I find troubling. People say this is going to shorten the time we spend on appropriations. My eye. Right now, the only reason that we are able to finish our work in a calendar year most of the years is because we all know that we want to get the hell out of here by the time the holidays come. Now by God, if you wind up with a 2-year budget, all of those arguments are going to slop over the holidays, they are going to slop into the next calendar year, and we will have year and a half fights and 2-year fights before we finally get these resolved, and all of the time in the House will be consumed by appropriation processes, and frankly, I don't have that much energy. I have got a lot of energy, but by God we log more time on the House floor than any other committee now. I certainly don't want to increase that, and I deeply believe that it will.
I just want to say I fully understand the frustration with the existing process, but very often human beings duck responsibility, and we look for ways to blame the institution rather than looking at the way we ourselves deal with the problems that we face. And if you look at why it is a mess, I think there are a number of very good reasons.
First of all, the budget process, you saw that red part on Bill's calendar. The budget process starts all too often with unrealistic assumptions coming out of the Budget Committee and the administration. All the administration has to do to produce a budget is to produce a document which they say meets the targets, and if they do that, they get a bye from the press. Then the Budget Committee comes up and they don't have to answer the question, is this a wise budget. All they have to answer is, does this meet the targets. So they invent all kinds of assumptions. My high school history teacher told me, above all else in life, Dave, question assumptions. My God, if you look at what has happened, we have had a succession of appropriation fights that have been dragged out because very frankly what has happened is because the initial resolutions were so unrealistic the clock had to run until people were forced on both sides of the aisle to recognize what was real, and I think there is a way to fix that.
We are the only institution I know that places responsibility for planning a budget in the hands of those that are different from those that are charged with executing it. With all due respect to the Budget Committee once they pass their overall plan, they don't have to deliver on the results
So there is nothing that prevents them from simply -- I mean what they are -- if the people who craft this overall plan for a budget have no responsibility for its execution, then you can expect that it is quite likely to simply support a plan that they would personally like to see rather than one that might actually work and might actually pass. I think that is one fix we ought to make
Secondly, we have got to have a more rational way of dealing with emergencies, and it is not more rational to double the time because then you will have more emergencies, it will be an even more irregular process.
I think the Federal Government plays too large a role in dealing with natural disasters, for instance. I think that we need to have a system by which States can buy into an insurance program underwritten by the Feds on an experience rated basis, so that if they have natural disasters, they have already paid into an account. I don't see why Uncle Sam ought to shell out dollars every time somebody has a tornado or a flood or some other problem. We ought to help but the primary responsibility ought to be your State and local governments, and we ought to be able to structure an emergency process that deals with that
But the biggest problem by far in the appropriations process does not exist in the House. It exists in the other body, and the problem is that the Senate has permitted far too much latitude to its Members to inject any issue they want into any legislative vehicle, and what that means is that when bill after bill gets tied up, the only thing that they can do to get their input is to attach a rider to an appropriation bill, and that is what in my view has killed the ability of the appropriations process to function effectively
The rules in the Senate are such that you can't proceed under normal circumstances unless every single Senator agrees, and routine decisions about a budget have to be made by 60 percent. To me the way to resolve this problem is for the Senate to adopt new rules. It makes no sense to allow them to continue to do what they do.
But I urge you to remember, if you move to a world of constant supplementals, which this will create, the House will lose its traditional preeminence. The Senate will be in the driver's seat. It is the Senators who will determine what the add-ons are going to be to appropriations bills, and all we will be doing is reacting to Senate initiatives and that is not something that we, with our congressional responsibilities, ought to blithely hand over to them
[The statement of Mr. Obey follows:]
The Chairman. [Presiding.] Thank you very much, Mr. Obey. As you know, back in 1993 we served together on that Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress. We went through a debate at that point on this issue, and I would like to totally agree with the argument that you provided on the issue of disasters. I think that not only should the people be looking, instead of the Federal Government, State and local governments, but we also have been working on trying to encourage private insurance as ways to deal with disasters. So I totally agree with you on that question
On the issue of biennial budgeting itself, let me say that obviously we don't have a final plan put in place, and I very much want to take your concerns into the mix. That is one of the reasons I raised the question of supplementals with Mr. Young when he was here, because that is a question that is out there, and I think it is a very valid one because there are disparate views on that. But I would simply like to welcome your input, to say that as we do proceed with crafting something to address what you say obviously is a system that does need to be fixed, we do very much want to take your thoughts into consideration.
Mr. Hastings
Mr. Hastings. David, I appreciate very much your testimony. You have a reputation of being one who wants to guard the institution, and I do respect that very much. Obviously on this we have a difference of agreement because I am in favor of biennial budgets.
One area you focused a lot of your testimony on, the supplementals, in my opening statement I suggest that supplementals are part of the process, but what has not been said, which you do not say and I haven't heard anybody else say it, regardless of their view, is that supplementals just because they are submitted don't have to pass. In other words, the hard part of the biennial process is the first year. You pointed out some problems that we are going to have to overcome because I agree that the process could be extended, no question about it. One way to resolve that is for a concurrent resolution where the House and Senate agrees at every Congress on deadlines to take these things up. It demands self-discipline on both sides.
But once you get a biennial budget in place, once you get the biennial budget in place, the supplementals become more of a political issue rather than a policy issue. Let me describe them. The second year of any Congress is probably more political than the first year. I think that is obvious. The sitting Congress in the first year will really find out what the bar is as to what you can do in the next year of the Congress. We recognize that you know where you can go.
If the theory is that we can get a biennial budget in place, then we have set the spending limits for that Congress. If there is a supplemental that is being driven mainly by politics, one of the options is not to pass that supplemental budget, and yet the Congress will continue and we won't have government shutdown like we had in 1995. I have had two experiences with that when I was in the legislature where precisely that happened and the government ironically went on very well until the next year. So while you have concerns about that, those are valid concerns. Just because you have a supplemental budget does not suggest you have to pass it.
So I would like your comments
Mr. Obey. Yeah. I would say -- let me put it in crass political terms. Let me assume you maintain control of this place. Terrible assumption
Mr. Moakley. I agree with the teacher, question those assumptions
Mr. Obey. Don't you understand how you can be set up by a White House on this?
Mr. Hastings. Well, sure
Mr. Obey. I mean, if you guys are tired of shooting yourselves in the foot and want to shoot yourselves in the head instead, there isn't a hell of a lot I can do about that. But the fact is that if you have a 2-year budget and if I am the President, I will tell you what the hell I would do. I would do what the administration does with something like NIH, for instance. They ask for $1 billion increase and I would let the Congress work its will on that and other items, and I would hold in reserve for an election year all kinds of stuff that I want to put you right on the spot on, and come that time I would lay out those supplementals and I would dare you not to pass them, and what you have done in that instance is you have used the regular process to get through the nuts and bolts that don't have any political -- the stuff that has to run the government, and then the supplementals become a holy picture war on popular issues.
It destroys the legislative process. It makes the process even more gimmick ridden than it is now, and it puts you at one whale of a disadvantage vis-a-vis the White House, and I might like that from a partisan standpoint, but from an institutional standpoint, we need to strengthen the ability of Congress to deal with the budgets, not weaken, and I just think when you move to a supplemental, you strengthen not just the White House's hand but you immeasurably strengthen the bureaucrat's hand.
There is no agency in government that has driven me more crazy than the FAA except maybe for the Immigration Service. How would you like to have to deal with them if they don't have to deal with you for a year and a half? I mean the problems with these agency people now, they say, oh, hell, if the Congress doesn't like something we do and they direct us to do something, we can outlive them, we can outlast them.
You are going to make it a lot easier if they don't have to come up here on an annual basis and testify, not just on their program requests, which are largely political coming out of the policy makers in the administration, but what those guys care about is their administrative budget, they care about their operating budget. That is what they live or die on, and you have freed them from any worries about that for a year and a half, if this works the way you say it is supposed to work, and if it doesn't work the way you say it is supposed to work, then there isn't any reason to pass it
Mr. Hastings. Well, I would suggest that everything you describe we live under right now in annual budgets because the supplemental budgets last year, the farm bill, and I assume we will have some supplemental budget come down, that is the nature of the piece. I don't think that changes anyway. One way you have to guard against that and obviously the party in power whether it is you or whether it is us, I prefer the latter rather than the former, that is a political decision we are going to have to make, and that is, you don't have to pass the supplemental budgets
As far as not having agencies for an 18-month period, part of the process has to be a time when they spend their dollars and those things have to be worked out. That has to be part of the budget process, also, but I do respect what you say. You bring up some points I think that are valid, and I am certainly not one that suggests that this is the end all that will end all of our problems, but everything I have heard thus far exists so far under annual process
Mr. Obey. But there is a difference. Right now, you have to on an annual basis produce budgets which can at least pass the laugh test with the press. If you have a biennial budget, the White House will get the mundane stuff tied down the first year, and then the second year they will bring in those supplementals with the most powerful section political piece they can think of, and if you don't pass them, they will be happy to tell about it
Mr. Hastings. The only way I can respond to that is that is a political decision which, as I said in the first part of my question to you, is the first year you are having a policy year of Congress, second year is a political year, and I would suggest we are going through that same process this year
Mr. Obey. Well, except that this year in the end the administration has to get its basic stuff passed, and so in the end both sides have to come from their political positions to a more real position in the middle. I mean of course the second year is going to be more political. What I want to make sure is that the second year doesn't do immeasurable damage to the institutional requirement that we keep a tight reign on the power of the purse, and I think with this proposition you are giving it away forever, and it is like privacy, it is like liberty. We take it for granted but once you give up power, even inadvertently it is hard as hell to get it back
Mr. Hastings. And I think that argument does have some weight. I would suggest that some of the executive orders probably would be a way to counteract, but that is another argument. That doesn't deal with the appropriation process.
Well, I would say, Mr. Chairman, and I would say, Dave, that this is something that there is going to be a lot of discussion on, and I think there are some real differences obviously, but at the end I think what we need to remember is that our responsibility here going through the authorization and appropriation process, especially appropriation process, is to protect the taxpayer. We shouldn't ever lose sight of the fact that taxpayer is the one who keeps us giving the means by which we spend dollars, and I think this is one protection for taxpayer
Mr. Obey. I look at it just the opposite, the more expensive, the less control
The Chairman. As I prepare to call on Mr. Moakley, let me just do two things. First, we are very pleased to have the mayor of one of our Nation's great cities. The City of Pasadena is represented here. Mayor Bogaard has joined us and we are happy to have you.
And the second thing to do before I call on Mr. Moakley is simply ask you, David, what role do you see our authorizing colleagues playing in the budget process itself?
Mr. Obey. I think the authorizing committees are jammed by two problems. First of all, because budget resolutions, and this has happened under both parties, initial budget resolutions have been unrealistic, and so the leadership has to put so much energy into getting people to vote for a budget resolution that doesn't even have the force of the law, and so you get phonied up.
Let me give you an example, in '81, the last fight that was made in the Budget Committee to get the votes passed, a resolution, was in agriculture, and they were $400 million as I recall above where they needed to be in order to get under the cut. So the Budget Committee simply told the dairy guys that is going to come out of feed grains. They told the feed guys it is going to come out of the dairy. They used the money twice. They had an unrealistic assumption, and it tied up the appropriation process forever afterward. I think you simply have to have a more realistic budget resolution to begin with.
Second thing is I think we really need to ask authorizing committees to do multiyear authorizations. I think that what an authorizing committee ought to do is spend the first year getting their authorizations tied down, and then after they have got their authorization shaped, then they can do more effective oversight to make certain that the laws are being handled the way they were intended to be handled and interpreted the way they were intended to be interpreted.
I don't think the appropriations process has much to do with whether the authorizing committees move or not. I think the Budget Committee with its unrealistic assumptions force the Appropriations Committee, the Ways and Means Committee and a lot of the authorizing committees who also have access to direct spending responsibilities under the Budget Act, they have to react to an unreal budget and they have to spend a lot of time on that. I think that gets into their ability to do it.
To me, and this is a different subject, and I probably will cause myself trouble doing this, but I believe that there was a choice to be made when the Budget Committee was established, and the question was what should the composition of that committee be. And they decided there were two choices, either you could take the chairs and the ranking members of the committees with direct spending responsibility and put them on that committee. So you have got the committee that handles food stamps, Ag, I guess, Ways and Means that handled some of them, Commerce, that handle some of them. You need to put them on the committee or you could put members appointed by the leadership on the committee, and they decided to do the latter.
I think the system would be more realistic if they would have done the former. If the same people who put together the budget resolution then had to put together the actual legislation to implement it, you would end the baloney assumptions that go into building any budget resolution, the majority party or the minority party, and people would be much more likely to put together an initial resolution which reflected a real center of gravity in this place rather than just somebody's idea of what might be nice if they didn't have to deal with reality
The Chairman. Mr. Moakley.
Mr. Moakley. David, I agree with all of what you said except when you talk about the authorization committees becoming multiyear. Doesn't that automatically stir up a lot of supplemental budget requests because they are operating in a multiyear and the appropriation is in a single year?
Mr. Obey. I don't think so. I think most of what the authorizing committees do is to draft long term legislation. I mean, the problem we have now is that we wind up having to carry so much authorization legislation because authorizing committees want to authorize every year, and so they can't get it done in time. And to me, if you had say 3 or 4-year authorizations as the rule, then the authorizing committees would have the time to do the digging on oversight to make certain that the authorization is being followed by the bureaucracy, and they would also have time to then deal with new supplemental requests they had to authorize before we could move on it, but they ought to be designing things for the long hall. When they don't, then we get people whispering behind their hands on the authorizing committees that we aren't including --
Mr. Moakley. Well, you get all those amendments, those illegal amendments to the appropriation budgets
Mr. Obey. Let me give you one example. When I chaired the Foreign Operations Subcommittee, the authorizing committee had not passed their authorizing bill in 10 years, and so one of the subcommittee chairmen, Steve Solarz, came to me and said, Dave, we can't get our bill moving, would you put our section on Latin America in your bill, would you carry our authorization in the bill? I made the dumb assumption that he was speaking for the committee, not just the subcommittee, and I said if that is what you want, let me check it out. It seemed reasonable. So we did. Three weeks later I walked into this room and here's Dante Fascell testifying against what I did and, who is at the table with him, Steve Solarz. There were three subcommittee chairmen who had asked me to do the same thing, and all three of those subcommittee chairmen who had asked me to do it then came to the table with their chairmen and raised hell with me for doing what they had asked me to do.
Now, I mean when you have got a committee that can't produce a piece of legislation in 10 years, does it make sense to blame the Appropriations Committee for that? What happened was very simple. You had an ideological fight between the liberal Democrats in the House and the conservative Republicans in the Senate, like Jessie Helms, when the Republicans were then running the Senate, and so rather than compromising, the administration said, ha, let them stew in their own incompetence and then we will get a better deal out of the Appropriations Committee. So that is what the Reagan administration did, that is what the Bush administration did, and they were smart to do that, but that didn't help the Congress meet its responsibilities. So that is why I favor longer authorization
Mr. Moakley. Do you know of any democratic country that has a biennial budget?
Mr. Obey. Do I know of what?
Mr. Moakley. I said are there any Nations that you know of that have a biennial budget, a democratic type nation?
Mr. Obey. I don't really know. All I know is that if you are the governor of Florida, if you are the governor of Wisconsin, I mean do we really want to imitate States? In my State my governor has had a veto so strong he can eliminate digits in numbers to create different levels of appropriation than the legislature required. He could until the legislature changed it a couple of years ago. He could eliminate words to form entirely new sentences to create law that the legislature had never passed. Now, I mean in most States governors like 2-year budgets because they deal with a weak legislature, they get them out of town in a few months, and then they run their States like kings. We don't want that out here
Mr. Moakley. But they are usually small States
Mr. Obey. Yeah, usually
Mr. Moakley. The major States, with the exception of Ohio, have annual budgets
Mr. Obey. The States don't deal with the economy, they don't deal with foreign policy, but my God, things change more dramatically at the national level. You could have a Kosovo intervene. You could have a Middle East war intervene. You could have the economy go to hell in a hand basket, require a totally different -- I mean, go back and look at Gerald Ford. Gerald Ford came out here pushing whip inflation out, and three months later the economy changed and he is fighting against unemployment. Jimmy Carter, I mean the same thing. So I mean with all due respect to our people who draw State parallels, they don't have nearly the complicated set of realities to deal with that we do
Mr. Moakley. Do you know why, if you know, why States changed from biennial to annual budgets?
Mr. Obey. I don't really know
Mr. Moakley. I thought it might have been the overload of supplemental appropriation bills
Mr. Obey. I would assume that it was in part because of supplementals. I mean, Wisconsin has a biennial budget, and I can tell you we have got a board on government operations, at least we did when I was there, and we were meeting every doggone week adjusting the budget and much less systematic oversight because we passed legislation creating a whole new system of technical powers. The administration had put in their language for the bill. We had totally rewritten it. We wanted a different kind of governing board. After we passed that bill, the governor on his own just administered the bill as though it was the originally passed bill.
Now, the only leverage we had on them for the remainder of the biennium was leverage on additional money they had asked for a few programs, but we didn't have a chance to get at their personnel levels in the agency, we didn't have a chance to get at their salaries, we didn't have a chance to get at their operating budgets. So we had no real leverage to make them follow the intent of the legislature, and I don't want to see Congress become a State legislature. I mean, we are the premier legislative body in the world with all of our warts, and I would like us to stay that way
Mr. Moakley. Thank you very much
The Chairman. Mr. Goss
Mr. Goss. No, thank you
The Chairman. Mr. Hall.
Mr. Hall. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As Dave knows, I figured we have worked together on a lot of issues. There is nobody that knows more about process and loves this House of Representatives more than him. I disagree with him on this. I am from a big State that has biennial budgets. Almost everybody I know from Ohio that has served in the State legislature likes biennial budgets. The reason why I like it so much is that I think that the second year is such an important year of doing oversight. I know that this sounds kind of redundant and trite, but the fact is everybody keeps talking about oversight, but we always did a lot of oversight our second year, and there are so many things that we ought to be investigating, ought to be targeted about, ought to be having hearings about, I myself have asked for hearings, and the answer I always get is we are too busy, we are trying to get our budget out.
And we spend all year trying to get our 13 appropriation bills out, and then after we get them out we adjourn, and that is normally October, November, and we don't do oversight on many of these programs. Only on the glaring issues do we have oversight. We don't have the slightest idea what some of these agencies are doing, whether they are good, bad or mediocre, and you talk about control. I think Congress ought to have a lot more control of these programs. The only way we are going to get control is to know about them. But the push is all year. It is all year, get our 13 bills out. When we get them out, it is over, we go home. What are we doing?
Mr. Obey. But there is nothing whatsoever in this proposal that increases oversight in any way, absolutely nothing. As I said earlier, there are two kinds of oversight. One is to make certain that agencies are administering the laws in the way they were created by the authorizing committee, and the authorizing committees have a right to expect that the laws are going to be followed the way they want, not the way the Appropriations Committee wants. As appropriations, we may finance them but we don't design them and we shouldn't because we don't know as much about them as the authorizing committee
This doesn't give authorizing committees any additional time to do oversight. All this does is change the process of the Appropriations Committee. Show me one thing in any of these bills that gives any authorizing committee one second more oversight
Mr. Hall. Sure, it does. It does it in the same thing in the biennial budget in Ohio. It doesn't give any more time or spell out the time that we are going to have oversight, but that is what they do the second year
Mr. Obey. How? Authorization committees don't bring appropriation bills to the floor
Mr. Hall. Dave, if we pass a budget every 2 years we will have a lot of time here now to look at some of the things we did. It makes sense that we are going to have oversight
Mr. Obey. If you don't have appropriation bills on the floor on a regular basis, you aren't going to have quorums in authorizing committees. You aren't going to get those committees to move because if you don't have business on the floor, this place isn't in session. You know that as well as I do
Mr. Hall. Well, then maybe we shouldn't be in session. Maybe the committees that have jurisdiction ought to be back and meeting
Mr. Obey. The committee chairman will tell the leadership time after time under Republicans and Democrats, if you don't have votes on the floor, we can't get quorums. You talk to anybody in the leadership they get that complaint every day in this week, and this will make that worse, not better
Mr. Hall. I think if a congressman is going to stay home, meeting constituents, he is going to have to say, well, I was back home taking care of the bridge when I know I should have been in Congress because that is where I belong. No way
Mr. Obey. All I am telling you is committees won't get quorums if you are not in session. Ask your committee chairman
Mr. Hall. Then that responsibility not only belongs to the chairman, but it belongs to the individual, and each person has to stand for themselves
Mr. Obey. That is correct
Mr. Hall. They have to stand up and say I have to be accountable
Mr. Obey. All I am saying is to say that this creates more opportunity for oversight is I think a phenomenal misjudgment in terms of what will happen
Mr. Hall. It happens in every State that has biennial budgets
Mr. Obey. If we are in session, the more we are in session, the more time authorization committees will have an opportunity to do their work, but this has become a Tuesday through Thursday club, and right now it has become a Tuesday usually at 6:00 until Thursday at 2:00 club. That is the problem. If legislators wanted to spend more time at home than they do here and then blame the appropriations process for that, frankly I think that misses the mark
Mr. Hall. Nobody is blaming the appropriation process. What they are saying is that I think we can have a better government, I think we have a more efficient government. I would like to know what some of these agencies are doing, and you know, if they are mediocre, we ought to get rid of them
Mr. Obey. So would I, but that is an ad hominem argument. You are defining a good goal and then saying this will accomplish it. I just don't believe that that will do
Mr. Hall. Good goals have to be done by good people, and you can have the greatest law in the world. If you don't have good people, nothing is going to happen
Mr. Obey. But good or bad people doesn't have to do with one or 2-year budgets
Mr. Hall. What are you talking about then? You can't make an argument with you, you are going to say this is not going to provide more time. In fact it will. You are saying it doesn't work. In fact it does work in big States. You are going to say we are not going to have more oversight because it doesn't say it. Now, it doesn't say it in the Ohio budget either. We do oversight the second year
Mr. Obey. I don't know what the separation of power is between your budget committee and your authorizing committees. All I know is that in here the oversight is done by your authorizing committees. Your authorizing committees don't put together the appropriation bills. There is nothing that prevents authorizing committees from meeting every day on oversight while the Appropriations Committee is considering appropriation bills, nothing.
In reality, the complaint that comes from committee chairmen is they can never get a quorum when this place is not in session, and if you have the appropriations right now, at least from May when the committee -- we are hung up until the Budget Committee produces a budget resolution. We are not supposed to bring bills to the floor until they do. That is our major problem because so long as the Budget Committee isn't producing something on the floor, you don't have much going on. Look at the schedules that have been cancelled this week. Look how light the schedule is. You have got to invent things to do to keep people here. If I were the leadership I would go nuts trying to do this, and if you are saying that the most intense legislative period when appropriations is on the floor is only going to occur every other year, then that is going to reduce the number of days when you must have legislation on the floor, and members are going to say to their chairmen, sorry, you can schedule that hearing, but I ain't going to be here, and you are going to have less time for oversight rather than more. I want more oversight, but this is not the way to get it
Mr. Hall. If I was chairman that is not a problem because I am going to be there. I am going to be there. Members don't want to show up, I am going to investigate. I am going to have oversight
Mr. Obey. You are going to have a quorum to hold a hearing but not to move any legislation
Mr. Hall. Would you agree that we disagree on this? We disagree vehemently and I have great respect for you, and we work together on a lot of issues, but I think you are very wrong about this, I think. You talk about losing control. I say we don't have very good control of it now
Mr. Obey. All I can tell you is if you move to biennial budgets, we will have supplementals running through here every day. Because we have a tight germaneness rule, if we have got an Interior appropriation bill up and you want something that is done in HUD, you won't be able to offer that amendment because it ain't going to be germane, but when it gets to our dear friends in the Senate, they have no germaneness rules. They will be able to add everything but the kitchen sink. If you think you are ever going to get credit at home for a sickle project, kiss it good-bye, baby, because your Senators are going to get credit for all of that stuff. If you think you are ever going to be able to create an initiative outside of the jurisdiction of a supplemental in the House you are not because the rules won't let you. The Senate will add Christmas tree after Christmas tree to the supplementals
Mr. Hall. That doesn't mean you can't put your own amendment in there. You don't have to have a supplemental. We don't have to have supplements that go beyond a year, period
Mr. Obey. If you want to be out of business for 18 years while your Senators are in business 365 days a year for 2 years be my guest. If I were a Member of the House I wouldn't want to do that
Mr. Hall. They can't do anything without us. They can't do anything without us
Mr. Obey. Well, with all due respect, the House, if it loses the ability to deal on the same terms with issues that the Senate deals with, we will lose not only our power relative to the executive branch, we will lose our power relative to the Senate, and I don't think that is what we ought to be doing
Mr. Hall. I don't believe that for a minute
Mr. Obey. Attend a couple of appropriation conferences and you will change your mind in a nanosecond. Every Senate authorizing chairman bypasses House authorizing chairmen right now, and they try to add their authorizations to regular appropriation bills. We can usually knock that off because you can say, look, if I do this for you, then you are going to have to do it for other committee chairmen, and you can back them off, but if you have got only selected agencies for which you have supplemental requests going through, the authorizing chairmen for those committees, the Interior Committee for instance, if you have got an Interior supp going, they will be able to add whole authorizations without impunity, and they will get away with it far more than they do now because those will be must pass items, and they will be much more visible than general appropriations are.
And so there is going to be much more pressure from the administration to swallow that stuff and for the House to buy into it, and I think that makes us spend more money and makes us be less disciplined and certainly doesn't give the House an equal shot at deciding whether it ought to be in their final product
Mr. Hall. Dave, you are so busy now and so are every Member of Congress, whatever committee they serve on. It is almost the tyranny of the urgent that create many of their own problems, and one of the problems I see is because you are so busy you don't have time, because I request hearings, you can't do them. I am not talking about you. You can't do them because you don't have time, you can't do hearings
Mr. Obey. Can't do hearings? Look at our schedule
Mr. Hall. I have requested hearings on things relative to the Pentagon, on foreign affairs, et cetera, and you don't have time to do them
Mr. Obey. Do you think we are really going to have time to do them if we are spending a year and a half to pass the regular appropriation bill rather than 9 months? If you have 2-year budgets, do you really believe we are going to settle all these issues by October or November of the first year? Not on your life. They will drift over into the second year. We won't have any time to do anything except negotiate
Mr. Hall. There is a funny thing, it works in other States. Why wouldn't it work here?
Mr. Obey. I mean, I don't think there is any point in my chewing the cud again and again. I just think there are different -- I see different institutional dynamics than you do, and I see them from the perspective of having been on this committee for 30 years. I recall when authorizing committees like George Miller and George Brown and John Dingell came in raising hell about the fact that Senate chairmen were adding whole authorizations to their bills, and I guarantee you if we move to a supplemental world we will be much more vulnerable to that than we are now, and the Senate will reign supreme on that because of the difference in germaneness rule.
You want to give us more time, get the Senate off our backs with all of these blasted nongermane riders, get the Senate to change their rules, so that they don't have to beg on bended knee to get all hundred senators to agree on how to proceed every day. I mean that is the problem. The Rules Committee is the salvation of our House because it creates order. The disorder you have in the Senate is I think the fundamental problem we have in getting budgets, along with the fact that budget resolutions are essentially press releases from each political party, and they are unattached to reality in most cases.
Mr. Goss. Thank you. Mr. Sessions of Texas
Mr. Sessions. Chairman, thank you. I really should rest our case now after Mr. Hall has had an opportunity because I believe effectively at least this body, the Rules Committee has on its mind about the benefits that I believe exist. However, I would like to take just a second and talk about your testimony on page two, quote, 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
Mr. Obey. I agree with that
Mr. Sessions. Well, you wrote it
Mr. Obey. No, no. I am talking about the arguments made by the proponents of it
Mr. Sessions. All I am suggesting, sir, is that these are your words so I would expect you to agree with it. I was reading from your testimony. I would like to just as an opportunity here, and I don't expect to be any more successful than Mr. Hall in changing your mind, so this is just for the sake of going through this, to present one argument even though we say that one is not possible, that the move to annual budging from biennial budgeting stopped in 1987 when all but 19 States practiced annual budgets, and that since that time they have begun to shift back to biennial budgeting, and now there are 23. I know I think you said 20, but 23 States to my information operate under the same type and three more States as of now, California, Michigan and New Jersey, are currently considering moving to biennial budgeting.
States largely shifted from biennial budgeting after World War II as Federal and State programs became more complicated and as the predictability of the funding for those programs that are joint and Federal and State ventures became more unpredictable and changed. With biennial budgeting at the Federal level I think that the major factor that would allow efficiency, and that is what I would like to talk about for just a minute, we have talked about I think the institution of Congress and how the House of Representatives should maintain this standard that we have, and I believe that we are missing, I would think, through arrogance much like the same debate that took place about proxy voting. The same arguments that you employed in this endeavor I believe are the same arguments there are about why we should do or not do away with proxy voting.
The power of the institution, the power of those insiders, those committee chairmen, those people, and I believe it is a matter of efficiency, not power, and that this institution should continue to evolve and recognize as we look in the mirror and see ourself, not only that we straighten our collar and do those things that look good, but we have a tremendous responsibility to government and State governments for an efficiency ratio and efficiency model, and that if we are able to do the things since I was in college 20 years ago and gave a speech for a rotary club on -- a speech contest about the efficiency of government and way back then the Pentagon and the Labor Department argued about their ability to handle multiyear projects and to sign contracts that would more carefully resemble efficiency, not power, not arrogance, not their institution, but rather the efficiency for the taxpayers that they felt like that the savings, the cost savings from that money that had been appropriated would in fact increase. It would do those things in efficiency of the government
I am just going to give one example. I am sure there are lots of holes that anybody, including you, could inflict upon this example, but I know as a Member of Congress I am not allowed to sign any contract or do anything that would be outside the extension of a section which I was elected for, and I agreed with that. I am not arguing against it. But I also know that in instances of signing contracts, and I will just give probably the most egregious, that you may have a Member who wins election year after year after year, but they rent a vehicle for the official use in their district, they sign a 2-year lease and the 2-year lease costs in some instances three and four times the amount of money that it would if you signed just a 3 or 4-year lease.
I am not arguing that we should extend what we have today. What I am arguing is that the marketplace and an efficiency model and ratio for the States for their ability to be in tune with what we have done, for them to know that when we have put our model in place they can then do the same, it would be more efficient and I think better for the taxpayer. That would be my sole argument to you today. I did not ask that you have to agree with that. I do ask for simply that you understand that I believe Mr. Hall and I do believe this
Mr. Obey. But in fairness, you shouldn't be voting for this proposition. First of all, with respect to proxy voting, I have never favored proxy voting. We have never used it in the Appropriation Committee. I think if members want to vote there, they ought to get off their duffs and be there. I have always felt that way. I have heard a number of authorizing committee chairmen since the proxy voting has been abandoned who have said, boy, my job in getting a quorum is almost impossible these days, and so I would suggest I am not qualified to discuss the proxy voting
Mr. Sessions. I am just saying, sir, those same arguments were utilized in the same way for a different institution
Mr. Obey. I have been a raging reformer ever since the day I arrived here. I got thrown out of my own committee caucus for that reason, and we have had books written about people who had minimum high regard for reform. So I pushed it in place on financial disclosure and all the rest.
All I would say is your argument about multiple year procurement has nothing to do with this. We already provide multiyear procurement. The Appropriations Committee right now provides multiyear procurement. I am not against a multiyear budget
Mr. Sessions. I completely disagree, as Mr. Hall did, with that argument because things happen all the time where a plug is pulled the next year
Mr. Obey. Well, all I can tell you, you said the government agencies ought to be able to sign multiyear contracts
Mr. Sessions. What I am suggesting is that the appropriations process, not the contracts, will drive those things, and I believe that they will be more efficient
Mr. Obey. With all due respect, that is a very different issue. It is a very different question whether -- you said that agencies like the Pentagon would be able to save taxpayers money if they engaged in more multiyear contracts
Mr. Sessions. Sir, you know what I'm suggesting, and I think this is not fair for you to try and twist that. What I said is that the appropriations of that money on a 2-year basis would allow them to more carefully run through those contracts
Mr. Obey. We don't just appropriate for a 2-year basis. We allow them to proceed with multiyear contracts
Mr. Sessions. Yes, we do what, but what I am suggesting to you, and you know people change their mind next year and wipe out a program
Mr. Obey. Well, Congress can always change its mind
Mr. Sessions. I agree
Mr. Obey. I don't think you want to say that if we appropriate money to an agency and we find out that there has been the egregious management or faulty development of the program --
Mr. Sessions. Then what I will say is I believe we will become more efficient
Mr. Obey. Well, again, all I will simply say is that you don't need 2-year appropriation budgets to promote what you are talking about. You obviously think we do, so we have a difference of opinion on that, but that is a very different situation. I would simply point out if you think it is more efficient to have a 2-year budget rather than a 1-year budget, I would simply point out that the estimates 2 years ago for this fiscal year were that we would have a $70 billion deficit. We have now got $170 billion surplus instead. I would say the world has changed a little bit --
Mr. Sessions. Thank goodness
Mr. Obey. -- In 2 years and I don't think that having to make our budget the estimates and our revenue estimates 2 years out makes any sense given how fluid the nature of the economy is and how fluid the nature of the income and outflow is of the government. I don't call that efficiency
Mr. Sessions. I thank the gentleman for his indulgence. Thank you, Mr. Chairman
Mr. Hastings. [Presiding.] Mr. Reynolds
Mr. Reynolds. No questions
Mr. Hastings. We will now start the second round of questioning for Mr. Obey. Just kidding
Mr. Obey. Give me a martini.
Mr. Hastings. Mr. Obey, thank you very much for your testimony, and obviously the give and take was spirited in some cases, and there are some differences of opinion, but I appreciate very much your taking the time to come before the committee, and you can be excused.
Mr. Obey. Thank you.
Mr. Hastings. Next we will however call up a panel of the Committee on Appropriations, Mr. Regula from Ohio; Mr. Knollenberg from Michigan and Mr. Price from North Carolina. If you would come forward, we will be pleased to take your testimony. Your full statements will appear in the record, and if you choose to summarize, that would be appreciated.
Mr. Regula, we will start with you since you are a subcommittee chairman, and Mr. Price will go after that and then Mr. Knollenberg.
STATEMENT OF THE HON. RALPH REGULA, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF OHIO
Mr. Regula. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I ask unanimous consent that my full statement be made a part of the record
Mr. Hastings. It will and all of your statements will be part of the record
Mr. Regula. In the interest of time, I simply want to say that this is a management tool. I had an oversight hearing yesterday in my subcommittee and another one today.
It is clear that one of the challenges that confronts the appropriators and in fact confronts the Congress is how can we manage the resources more efficiently. The 2-year budget in my judgment would allow us to do that. The first year would appropriate. The second year do oversight and plan for the next budget cycle.
So from the standpoint of management on the part of the Congress, I believe that the 2-year cycle would be much more efficient, and as we are confronted with growing needs and less resources in the absence of tax increases, which we want to avoid, then these challenges to manage the resource most efficiently, and it is clear in our oversight hearings yesterday and today in our subcommittee that there is an opportunity. Along with that, I believe that the agencies could be more effective because it would allow program managers, agency heads to do their planning on a 2-year cycle.
They could just as a practical matter contract for supplies for a 2-year period instead of one. They wouldn't have to spend as much time in developing annual budgets, and they could, therefore, focus on their responsibilities as managers, whether it be a national park or a national forest or a defense system, whatever.
Certainly in the private sector I don't believe if they said to program managers you have 1 year that you are going to do this where it is a long term impact with that program. And so it seems to me that the 2-year budget cycle would make a lot of sense in terms of our responsibility as managers, directors, if you will, of the largest enterprise in the United States; namely, the U.S. government.
I think historically we have not looked on government as a management challenge. We have looked on it as a provider of services, but with today's world, with increasing populations and increasing needs, it seems to me that approaching this in a businesslike way to say how can we deliver the services to the people in the most efficient way is a 2-year budget offers that opportunity. My statement enlarges on this, but in the interest of time I will hold it to that.
[The statement of Mr. Regula follows:]
Mr. Hastings. Thank you, Mr. Regula. Mr. Price.
STATEMENT OF THE HON. DAVID E. PRICE, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA
Mr. Price. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the chance to testify here today on this question of biennial budgeting and appropriating and to urge this committee to resist the siren call of this so-called reform because I believe it does have some very real dangers.
Many goals and values have been discussed here today, consistency, continuity in policy, efficiency, both to guard our current surplus and evaluate future claims on resources very carefully, budget with some flexibility responsive to changing needs and conditions, and to preserve Congress' power of the purse and to enhance our oversight. These are goals in some tension with one another. They call for a mix of both long term and short term strategy. My main argument here today is that annual appropriations is an important part of that mix.
Now, we have made a good deal of progress in increasing our time horizons and adding some predictability, a multiyear time frame to the process. We work with multiyear authorizations in most areas, and I fully agree with those here today who have said we need to have multiyear authorizations in all of our areas. We have adopted multiyear budget plans 1990, 1993, 1997. Those were important instruments for long term planning and fiscal discipline, but as useful as these long term plans are, they shouldn't be confused with multiyear budget and appropriations cycle.
I believe to argue that we should go down that path is to draw the wrong conclusions from our recent experience. Instead, I propose to you that annual budget resolutions on appropriations are a needed complement to multiyear budget plans. They provide flexibility. They help us achieve savings and fine-tune our investment strategy, and they enable Congress to be a full partner with the executive in setting national priorities
Now, we have heard today, and ironically I think, advocates of biennial appropriating claim that it would actually give Congress more time and strengthen our incentives to oversee the executive. Now, I say ironically because surely the most careful oversight Congress gives the executive branch is through the annual appropriations process, the kind of work that Mr. Regula's subcommittee and others do every year. Agency budgets and performance and needs are gone over line by line, program by program. Without the need to produce an annual appropriations bill, this extensive oversight far from being enhanced would likely be less.
At the very least the political potency of oversight would be less, for oversight without the power to increase or reduce appropriations is toothless oversight. Oversight will be less engaging for Members, certainly less compelling for the executive branch
We know congressional decisions aren't written in stone. Appropriations decisions are no exception. We already, as many people have said here today, we already of course enact supplemental appropriations bills, but do we really want to increase the number of those bills? Former CBO Director Robert Reischauer once noted that even in the current annual process, forecasters are required to project changes in the economy and the budget 21 months before the end of the fiscal year; a biennial resolution would increase this period to 33 months for the second fiscal year of the biennium.
Pressures on Congress would increase to respond to changing economic or social circumstances, agency failures pr deficiencies in the law. The only available vehicles would often be omnibus or multiple supplemental appropriations bill in the off years, and we would have replaced the deliberative, well-ordered process of annual appropriations with sporadic, ill-considered supplementals. Biennial budgeting, while promising increased predictability, increased efficiency, might well produce the opposites
Now, I understand the frustration that has led many Members to turn to biennial budget as an antidote to our problems with the budget process in the last 2-years, and partisan and ideological conflict that uncharacteristically I might say has come to infect the appropriations process.
Chairman Dreier has suggested that biennial budgeting would reduce the number of train wrecks at the end of the year and the level of gamesmanship. Surely these fights would occur only half as often, we can't argue with that, if we were budgeting biennially. But would the abuses of the process be fixed? Not likely. Would the same problems crop out if supplemental appropriations were proposed and emergencies declared? Yes, in all likelihood, but in the meantime, we would have greatly weakened Congress' hand in shaping national policy and holding the executive accountable.
Now, I am well aware that President Clinton has expressed his support for biennial budgeting, as did Presidents Reagan and Bush before him. If this suggests that biennial budgeting is not a partisan issue, it ought also to warn us it is indeed an institutional issue. We are dealing here with the executive legislative balance of power, and we obviously need to consider this kind of institutional change totally apart from which party currently holds the White House.
Now, it is sometimes said that opponents of biennial budgeting are merely defending appropriations or Budget Committee turf. We have heard that. I have heard it. As a member of both committees I am sensitive to that charge, but the fact is we want to protect the legislative powers of the entire Congress. That is what this is about. The issue is not devolution of power from the Appropriations Committee to the rest of the Congress. It is a devolution of power from Congress to the executive branch.
So, Mr. Chairman and other members of the committee, I urge you not to allow recent budget disagreements and frustrations to lure us toward a supposed remedy that would make the appropriations process less systematic, less flexible, less potent. We must increase and enhance Congress' power and performance in both budgeting and oversight, but for the reasons that I have given and that are developed more fully in this statement, I believe that moving to a biennial budget on appropriations cycle would take us in precisely the opposite direction.
I thank you for your attention.
[The statement of Mr. Price follows:]
Mr. Hastings. Thank you, Mr. Price. Mr. Knollenberg.
STATEMENT OF THE HON. JOE KNOLLENBERG, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF MICHIGAN
Mr. Knollenberg. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I thank those members of the Rules Committee that are still here to hear us, but I appreciate having you hold this hearing because I think it is important that we do bring forth our reservations, and I do have some about the move to bring about biennial budgeting.
I am concerned that in our haste to push forward this legislation we are overlooking many consequences that will drastically affect our budget process. I want to pose some concerns that I have. They are not new, but they are certainly ones on my mind, and having the benefit as I do of sitting on both the Budget Committee and the Appropriations Committee, I think I can see it from both ends. I am not an authority on this, and I certainly want to hear from everybody in terms of their suggestions as to what we do.
I know the appropriations process here is tough. However, we shouldn't let the frustrations of these past few years push us to pass a bill that may not work. Clearly, much of the current dissatisfaction with the budget process is the result of divided control of Congress and the executive branch that has been talked about, and it is unlikely that a shift to biennial budgeting would make any difference. We must ask ourselves, sit back and ask ourselves what are we trying to accomplish here and if this is the most effective way to accomplish that goal, and I truly believe then that biennial budgeting is not a clear answer. I recognize the frustration. I have it, too. I share it both on the Budget Committee and the Appropriations Committee.
The uncertainty of budget projections, biennial budgeting could jeopardize the very thing that many in Congress hold most dear; that is, preserving the surplus for debt reduction, for tax cuts and for other pressing needs. Despite today's projections of huge surpluses, these numbers will invariably rise and fall with the economic cycle, with emergencies, those have been talked about, and other factors that are really outside of Congress' immediate control. For example, I have been told that over the last 4 years CBO incorrectly estimated the deficit, or surplus for the upcoming fiscal year by an average of $99.5 billion. Given these inevitable fluctuations of economy and Federal revenues, Congress needs every tool at its disposal to ensure that there are sufficient surpluses each year to meet its target for tax cuts and for debt reduction.
The budget resolution provides the framework to make a year-by-year change or changes in entitlement programs, in tax policy, in discretionary spending level. Only through actually passing appropriations bills can discretionary levels be changed. In the case of entitlement reforms, the budget resolution can protect these measures from a filibuster. Welfare reform might never have reached the President's desk had it been considered in the second session of the 104th Congress under biennial budgeting. It did pass the Senate, as you know, in 1995 by a mere 52 to 47.
On the subject of oversight, one of the supposed advantages of biennial budgeting is allowing additional time to focus on oversight. The irony is that most experts think that biennial budgeting would actually reduce oversight because most practical oversight is accomplished through the appropriations process when the agencies are dependent on Congress for more funding in the near term. While the Appropriations Committee would continue to hold oversight hearings during the second session, they would lack the threat of an appropriation reduction for agencies that fail to adhere to the authorizing statutes or to consult with Congress on agency operations or to meet other performance goals
Further, with no regular appropriations bills in the second session, Congress would be forced to consider massive supplemental bills or correction bills to take care of changing priorities or unanticipated events and any emergencies. Supplementals tend to be more directly under the control of the leadership, which means less Member input and oversight
On the subject of cutting taxes, not only do I think that the biennial budgeting process makes it tough to keep the budget in balance, it can also eliminate any hope for tax cuts in election years. If the budget resolution includes an instruction to the Ways and Means and Finance Committees to report a tax bill, it is protected in the Senate from a filibuster. Any tax bill that is not reconciled by the budget resolution from the previous year will effectively need 60 votes to pass the Senate. This is a high hurdle for those who came to Congress with the mandate to provide tax relief for American families. For example, the marriage penalty relief bill could not have been possible under biennial budgeting. Leadership did not predict this piecemeal tax approach last year, and if it was not included in the budget resolution, Senate Democrats would have been able to filibuster the bill in the Senate
I will close here shortly. Biennial budgeting in States. I am aware that several of my colleagues have had positive experiences, as you have, Mr. Chairman, with biennial budgeting in your State legislatures, and you are aware of the current trend amongst States in shifting towards annual budgeting, even though there is talk of my State, Michigan, reconsidering that. I don't believe that is going to happen in the near term at all.
Currently 30 States, as you know, budget on an annual basis with 26 States dropping biennial budgeting in favor of annual budgeting over the last 40 years. According to GAO, the States tend to switch as you know to biennial budgeting when their legislatures move from a biennial to an annual session of Congress.
Mr. Chairman, I conclude with those remarks, and I just again want to thank you, thank the committee for the consideration of bringing hearings to our attention so that we could provide our thoughts about the consequences of any act that we move forward on, and my concern is that the first thing we should do is do no harm to the system we have. We certainly don't want a lot of unintended consequences to make things worse than they are now
[The statement of Mr. Knollenberg follows:]
Mr. Hastings. I thank you very much for your testimony. It has been raised several times, Mr. Obey mentioned it and, Mr. Knollenberg, you mentioned it, about -- my words -- the problems we have with the Senate. Our Founding Fathers were pretty wise. They developed a system like this so we would have problems. This of course ultimately protects the people, but I would just make this observation as far as the reconciliation process that you mentioned.
We have within our rules right now to have multiple reconciliations to take that issue away if we had, and I certainly wouldn't suggest that the biennial budget is the only reform, but the one thing I wanted to ask Mr. Regula because he is the subcommittee chairman here, and in your testimony you briefly alluded to the fact that you have more oversight, and then testimony of the others said that that probably wouldn't be as good as is suggested, and I would like you to elaborate from your perspective of having the more time for oversight in the second year of a biennial budget
Mr. Regula. Well, I think it includes not only having hearings, but it also includes visiting sites. So we simply don't have time to go to park sites. I know that what limited amount I have been able to do has always been very productive in terms of getting ideas, and there is no question we make policy with checkbook here because in the final analysis how we allocate the Nation's resources really establishes a lot of our policies.
I think Mr. Price mentioned about the fact that the authorizing committees will authorize 2, 3, 5 years, sometimes indefinite, but in a sense I think that supports the contention that we can operate on a 2-year budget cycle, and I believe that the executive branch recognizes that management; that is, actually putting programs into action in the ground, basically needs more than 1 year in terms of the resources available, in terms of the direction that is articulated through the appropriations process.
I know Ohio uses a 2-year budget, and it works very well and we are a large State with a very substantial budget
Mr. Hastings. One other observation that I made earlier and I want to make it again because it was alluded to in the testimony that while, yes, there will be supplementals, we have supplementals right now, one of the beauties of a biennial budget is that if the Congress chooses not to pass the supplemental, the world doesn't end, and I think that is in fact, I think that is a positive tool, and as I mentioned I experienced that at least twice in the recent memory in Washington State in our legislature where if you had annual budgets in both those cases you probably would have had a train wreck, but the fact they had a biennial budget and a supplemental wasn't passed, the world went on, and I think that argument needs to be made because it is a tool that works the other way.
You are not going to get rid of the supplementals, just like we don't in the annual process. So you will have to make those judgments when you go through the Senate. If anybody has a comment on that. Otherwise, if not, Mr. Price
Mr. Price. Mr. Chairman, the purpose of a supplemental, of course, whether it is on a 1 year cycle or 2-year cycle, is to fill gaps that were left by the regular process and to take care of emergencies and to make fine-tuning adjustments, and that, of course, need is going to be there whether we are on a 1 or 2-year cycle. I think my point is this will be far more common and far more problematic under a 2-year cycle because I think the frequency of these supplemental requests will surely increase, the sporadic nature of supplemental appropriating worries us all, and that would be increased, and I think our ability to respond to changing conditions would face a very high hurdle, whereas now it is done as a matter of course with the 1-year process.
So the need is going to be there for the responsible use of supplementals, no matter what kind of cycle we have, but I think a much greater institutional burden is placed on us with a 2-year cycle, plus all the other problems of deferring so much authority. I think we would be put in a position of seeking the sufferance of executive agencies or trying to get these supplementals jimmied up. Members would have that pressure on them far, far more than they do now where we have that regular process, that regular annual process that we simply plug into and that we plug into in the annual appropriations cycle
Mr. Knollenberg. Just a quick add-on to that, Mr. Chairman. I think that there is a tendency here to compare the States with the Federal Government, and one thing that the Federal Government has to consider and we do it periodically sitting, as I do, on the Foreign Operations Subcommittee, there are world events that change very quickly, producing the need to use the machinery, the vehicle of a supplemental to bring about funding that will get into those areas very quickly. It has been perhaps tame in terms of the fact we haven't had a war situation, not confrontational war, which was the case during the Cold War.
I can tell you this, there are more instances where that will be the vehicle sought for to use to bring about that funding, and when it takes place, then you have the interested parties from all over who go through the business of the Christmas tree which does begin to get bigger and bigger and bigger. I think that is something that is uniquely Federal, that the States don't have to deal with in quite the same way. As I mentioned previously, there are some 170, I think maybe 200, countries worldwide that we have an interest in. That is a problem I think that biennial budgeting really does not get a close look at
Mr. Hastings. Well, I want to thank you for your testimony and for your indulgence of waiting, especially, Mr. Price and Mr. Knollenberg, for testimony prior to yours. So thank you very much for your testimony.
Next we have Mr. Bass of New Hampshire.
Mr. Bass. You want to have all the other guys come up at once so we get it over with a little quicker?
Mr. Hastings. I have no objection if you don't have any objection. We will recognize Mr. Stearns and Mr. Barton, but we will lead off with -- there is Mr. Smith from the Budget Committee. You may as well join everybody else. We will lead off with Mr. Bass.
STATEMENT OF THE HON. CHARLES F. BASS, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF NEW HAMPSHIRE
Mr. Bass. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the opportunity to be here today, and I know that this has been a long hearing.
Mr. Hastings. I will say that without objection your full statements will appear in the record, and you are welcome to summarize your statements, but your full statement will appear in the record. Mr. Bass
Mr. Bass. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I know that this has been a long day. There have been a lot of testimony. I have a hearing in the Intelligence Committee in approximately 4 minutes. That is why Mr. Goss isn't here to beg your indulgence to allow me to be excused when I complete my testimony, which will be mercifully short.
I want to thank you and all the members of the Rules Committee for holding this hearing and hopefully more as we move this issue further forward. I believe that now the stars are almost in line to move forward on something that should have been done a long, long time ago, and that is implement biennial budgets and appropriations in the House and in the Senate.
I am not going to go through point and counterpoint on the arguments for or against biennial budgets and appropriations. You have heard them all by now. I would only say that there are Members, there are appropriators and there are budgeteers who are concerned about the concept of change, but every single one of the arguments that they give, no tax cuts in off years, no ability to conclude oversight in an appropriate fashion, incompatibility with the balanced budget, all of these arguments are refutable on exactly the same grounds that they give for the arguments in the first place. Clearly, if you plan a budget appropriately you can have tax cuts in the second year. Clearly, if you say that the CBO predictions are not good for long periods of time, if you use that argument you ought to have a budget every week, you ought to have a new budget every week or month or 6 months, but the fact is Congress meets as a Congress for every 2 years. It is good for the States and it is good for our institution to put together a plan for a 2-year period that we can adjust during that 2-year process, make this body work more efficiently.
And I know there are folks that love to spend a lot of time down here dealing in a reactive fashion with all the issues year after year after year. Congress needs to make policy. We need to be proactive. We need to take the President's budget on a 2-year basis, develop a plan, amend it during the 2-year process as necessary so we can pay more attention to other issues that Americans want us to address during a 2-year cycle in Congress.
I know that I have submitted my fuller testimony for the record, and with that I would like to thank you for holding this hearing and hope we can move forward with this important legislative proposal.
[The statement of Mr. Bass follows:]
Mr. Hastings. Mr. Bass, thank you very much. We will go to another member of the Budget Committee, Mr. Smith.
STATEMENT OF THE HON. NICK SMITH, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF MICHIGAN
Mr. Smith. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. The other side of the story, in addition to David Obey, Congressional Research Services testified, the National Association of Budget Directors, State Budget Directors have testified, as well as GAO has testified that 2-year budgets will transfer power away from the legislative branch to the executive branch. We already have an imperial presidency. So I think we need to consider very carefully going to the kind of budget where the executive is going to tend to insist that the second year of a 2-year budget be at least inflation.
If we were to have had inflation discretionary spending over the last 10 years, we would not have a budget surplus today. So I think one consideration is the transfer of power to the presidency.
Another serious consideration is asking the budgeteers 3 months after a new election for the President and the budgeteers to come up with projections that are 2 years into the future.
If you look at this chart on budget projections you will see the significant discrepancy between what has actually happened in blue in terms of deficits. The top of the chart, if we get above zero that means we have a surplus. You can see the far right top blue line, we are starting to move into the surplus. The red area represents the projection of deficits. The larger spaces in '92 and in '97 are a hundred billion dollars plus, and that is 1 year or 12 months projection on what our budgeteers expected. If you do a 2-year projection, CBO projected, for example, that the fiscal Year 2000 budget 2 years ago, 2 years ago they projected that it would be $70 billion unified budget deficit. They projected 2 years ago a $70 billion deficit, and of course we know that is quite the contrary. It is a $170 billion surplus that has happened.
So will we take up like the State of Ohio a Budget Adjustment Act? Ohio is the only State left in the Nation that, industrial state, that has a 2-year budget. 26 States have changed from a biennial budget back to an annual budget because the decisions of those legislatures had for one reason or another and in most cases, as I have talked to them, it is a power, regaining some of the power of the purse strings.
An argument that is given to a biennial budget is somehow it will give us more time to oversee the different agencies. I worked in the Nixon administration for 5 years, and we hopped to and did everything we could to become genial to Congress at budget time, and I see a danger that in those off years
In those off years we are not going to be as compatible and, Mr. Dreier, the other thing I would like to suggest is that the Budget Committee should also have jurisdiction over this consideration, and I hope we would have the kind of hearings in both places
The Chairman. [Presiding.] That is your prerogative
Mr. Smith. Mr. Chairman, what this chart says, just lays out how far off we have been in terms of our projections of deficit, and that is with 1-year projections. A 2-year projection has been 200 billion. Two years ago the Budget Committee was projecting a $70 billion deficit. Now we have $170 billion surplus. Huge problems in that kind of projection, which leads me to the next chart.
I understand that we very well might again pass a balanced budget amendment to the United States Constitution. We know what it says, outlays for any fiscal year shall not exceed total receipts for that fiscal year unless. With the problem of projections, with an administration that tends to want to spend, insisting that it be at least discretionary spending plus inflation, with the history of supplementals, 25 billion each of the last 2 years, I don't think it is going to fix the problem of reducing spending. This country for 220 plus years has had an annual budget. The problem that we faced in the last dozen years with increased spending isn't because we have had an annual budget rather than a biennial budget.
Thank you.
[The statement of Mr. Smith follows:]
The Chairman. Good. Thank you very much. How are we going here? Ms. McCarthy.
STATEMENT OF THE HON. KAREN McCARTHY, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF MISSOURI
Ms. McCarthy. Actually, Mr. Chairman, I thank you. I have the least seniority of this group.
The Chairman. Karen, you are recognized
Ms. McCarthy. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am going to just make three points, and I have submitted my entire testimony
The Chairman. Without objection it will appear in the record. Appreciate that
Ms. McCarthy. Missouri is one of 23 States that has benefited from a biennial budget, and I served for 12 years on the Appropriations Committee in the Missouri House. So I know firsthand the benefits that can be gained when you move to this particular 2-year program. We use it mainly in Missouri, as with most States, to work on capital improvements and to be able to make major plans for capital investments and to improve program oversight.
So at the Federal level that means the Defense Department will be able to budget more effectively, and that will save dollars. We are finding savings at the State level and that is why so many States, 23, are using this.
You still are able to fine-tune the budget each year but you have taken some of those major initiatives and allowed them to go forward and plan properly. That will be I think of benefit to all of us.
I am here in support of the measure, Mr. Chairman. I hope this is the year that it is possible to make it become law.
[The statement of Ms. McCarthy follows:]
The Chairman. Thank you very much. We have got Republican, now Democrat, we have three other Republicans, and all three of those Members were very involved in encouraging us to proceed with this effort, Mr. Barton, Mr. Stearns and Mr. Whitfield, and I would like to recognize them.
Mr. Barton. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would ask unanimous consent that my written statement be --
The Chairman. Without objection your entire statement will appear in the record.
STATEMENT OF THE HON. JOE BARTON, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF TEXAS
Mr. Barton. I will be very brief. I would just like to say that what Congressman Smith said totally misses the mark. We have the most inefficient, ineffective, anachronistic, ill thought out budget process of any major institution in the United States
The Chairman. So you think we ought to tweak it a bit then?
Mr. Barton. I think we should junk it and start over. I would love for this committee to move to the floor the major budget process reform bill that I have put in 10 or 15 times, but if we can't be comprehensive, we can at least start in the right direction, and here your biennial budgeting bill is a really good first step.
To say that we can't put a 2-year budget cycle in when the House is elected for 2 years is inane. We could do it. We can monitor it. The State of Texas, which last time I looked had a little industrial production, has a biennial budget
The Chairman. Not a big 10 State I found out this morning
Mr. Barton. They have had balanced budgets for over a hundred years. They hit the mark. They have got good estimates. They have got an appropriation committee on the House and the Senate that does a good job. I think we could do an equally good job, if not better.
So suffice it to say that I am a strong supporter of your bill. I am an original cosponsor. I think it would send a great signal to the American taxpayer to see that the Congress this year does one thing that makes sense in terms of budget efficiency, and I quite frankly think if you will put the bill on the floor you are going to get an overwhelming vote, and with Senator Domenici in the Senate, with his position on the Budget Committee over there as chairman, if the House takes the lead, I think the Senate will follow, and we will set the tone to do more comprehensive reform, if not later this year, in the first session of the next Congress.
[The statement of Mr. Barton follows:]
The Chairman. Thank you very much. Joe, I appreciate your support. As you and Cliff and Ed know very well, Pete Domenici and I go back to 1993, when we started on this process. We had that Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress. In the past 7 years we have had many different proposals that have been introduced for aspects of biennial budgeting, but all sort of focused on that same issue that we spent a great deal of time on in the early part of the last decade, and I think it has taken a while to get to where we are, but to have the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, to have what was a very strong statement that came here from the Speaker of the House as our lead off witness this morning, I just want you all to know it is a very, very encouraging sign, and obviously there is still opposition to it by some, but I think that we have some very valid arguments to respond
Mr. Barton. Mr. Chairman, do you have an indication of when this might come to the floor?
The Chairman. Not yet. We still want to try and address concerns that have been raised, but as you know, the resolution which we introduced, as the Speaker said today, nearly 250 cosponsors, and it simply calls for in this second session of the 106th Congress for us to move ahead with biennial budgeting, and you know to put a time frame on it will be tough at this juncture, and also, we want the Budget Committee to work its will, and there are some Members who are for it, some against it. I just had a conversation with the chairman of the Budget Committee 10 minutes ago about this issue and other concerns raised.
We have authors of two bills dealing with this here. Cliff Stearns and Ed Whitfield have each introduced legislation. We are happy to recognize you, Mr. Stearns.
STATEMENT OF THE HON. CLIFF STEARNS, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF FLORIDA
Mr. Stearns. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have made my statement part of the record
The Chairman. Without objection it will appear in the record
Mr. Stearns. I think you have heard all the arguments. Listening to Nick Smith, there are two points I would make. One is that if CBO is not accurate, we should try to work harder to make CBO better accurate instead of saying that the CBO is not accurate as an argument for not having a biennial budget.
As far as constitutional amendments, we can still under biennial budget project and to enforce a balanced budget each year.
In my home State of Florida they passed a biennial budget and then they rescinded it. As I understand, there are 21 States now that have biennial budget. I think for us to win this argument we are going to have to take those States like Florida where they did not succeed and were not happy with the biennial budget, we have got to identify why and make sure that when we get on the House floor and we pass this legislation, that we fully explain all the reasons why this will work and why a lot of the States who implemented it and then rescinded it did not work.
So we have got a challenge here because like many pieces of legislation, the States will implement it, more States will pass it, and eventually the majority will sustain a piece of the legislation, but here we have it starting out States enforcing it, passing a biennial budget, and lo and behold, they are rescinding.
So those rescinding of these pieces of legislation dealing with the biennial budget didn't occur in a vacuum. I talked to our speaker of the Florida House about it. He has a myriad of reasons why the biennial budget will not work. So I think, Mr. Chairman, when we go further on this we have to probably do hearings to determine why it didn't work in the States and preclude those arguments in the House.
So I urge you when we bring this on the floor that we have a hearing to even bring speakers from the States forward to say, Speaker Thrasher from the State of Florida, why didn't it work and why didn't you rescind a biennial budget, and hear all that before we get on the floor because we want to make our piece of legislation foolproof. We want to learn from what happened in the past, and I, like many Members, support this but I do want to understand all the problems in the past.
[The statement of Mr. Stearns follows:]
The Chairman. Thank you very much, Clifford. Again, thank you for being so diligent in pursuing this issue vigorously, and I look forward to meeting Speaker Thrasher
Mr. Stearns. He will be glad to come
The Chairman. I would like to have his thoughts on this issue, too. I am happy to recognize my very dear friend, a man who is so intelligent he married a Californian, a lovely Californian at that, as are most Californian women, all Californian women, and Ed Whitfield is again, as I said at the outset, one of those who provided me with a great deal of encouragement to charge ahead with this issue, and having worked on it for so many years, the encouragement that you provided really helped get us going again. I am happy to recognize you again.
STATEMENT OF THE HON. EDWARD WHITFIELD, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF KENTUCKY
Mr. Whitfield. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. I am sure I am not going to say anything this afternoon that has not been said by many Members before, but I wanted to come over here, and I broke away from meeting with some constituents, which I infrequently do, because I do not think there is any more important piece of reform that we can do to help Congress as an institution than to pursue this reform, and I would make one comment in addition to that.
While I support controlling spending, I am not supporting this legislation primarily because I think that that will help control spending necessarily. I think that this type of legislation will help us stop being a reactive Congress and give us the time to look at substantive policy to help solve problems like Medicare and health care and education, give us more time to come up with substantive solutions instead of Band-aid approaches
In addition to that, they need a time for oversight to determine which programs are working and not working. Right now I believe everything is driven by the appropriation process, and even in discussions that I have had with people in the executive branch, at the Defense Department, at the Treasury, at Education, while it may not be their official position, unofficially everyone that I have talked to thinks it would be a tremendous benefit to go to a 2-year budget in an appropriation cycle.
So I am here simply to lend my support to do anything I can do to adopt this reform because I think it is essential for the American people, and thank you for your leadership.
[The statement of Mr. Whitfield follows:]
The Chairman. Thank you. Ed, as I said, you have done it. You have been very, very encouraging and helpful in this process all along, and I appreciate the thoughtful remarks that you have made, not only here, but through the deliberations. I know we have had a colleague Walter Jones who has joined with us in our first meeting that we had, and again, in response to Joe Barton's question, we don't have an absolute time line put into place, but we are hoping that we will be able to do this this year
Mr. Whitfield. Thank you, Mr. Chairman
The Chairman. And our next witness is the gentleman from Ohio, Mr. Ney, and we welcome you. If you have prepared remarks, they will appear in the record in their entirety, and we would enjoy hearing a summary from you.
STATEMENT OF THE HON. BOB NEY, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF OHIO
Mr. Ney. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This is important. I came away from a meeting with constituents to be here, too, and so important, if I was with contributors, I would also be here and break away from that meeting, anything to get here.
Let me just say on a serious note, it is an issue that its time has come for a vote, and I would also personally from my point of view just say we ought to vote the thing, and I like your resolution. We ought to just vote. We are going to have a 2-year budget or not. Having hearings and having the States' input on what worked and didn't work is fine. We I think feel internally, know what they feel about the biennial budget, and they should cast their votes in due direction.
I was chairman of Senate Appropriations Committee in Ohio. Twenty years ago I was elected to the Ohio House and was the first freshman in 32 years to serve on Approps at that time in the Ohio House, went on to chair Senate Appropriations Committee. So I have been in the throes of biennial budgets all those years. Ohio has no intention to overturn ours.
I know you know all the arguments. I just want to make a couple points, and I used to be a bureaucrat. So I can say this. I worked for the State of Ohio on a couple of occasions as a bureaucrat, and we have got a lot of good Federal and State workers. However, they are not dumb, and a lot of people run over here and tell Members of Congress, wow, you wouldn't believe how we fear you during a budget cycle, if you went to a 2-year budget we would get away with a lot of stuff, and that is kind of a lot of nonsense when they feed that to Members.
You know as a Member of Congress and I know these schedules. They are far more intense than when I was in the State legislature, and your staff schedules are intense. So you spend the entire year spinning your wheels, you do it the next time, and it just consumes all of your time. Now, if you make the argument, well, in the second year, you know, they can do what they want, that is not true. You have got better budgeting and all of these arguments. In the second year you have the power of the gavel. If there is something going wrong, it is called a budget corrections bill. If you want to really stir them up and correct anything, you can do it in the second year
The other point I wanted to make I guess, too, the biennial budget has nothing to do with whether we spend more money or less. Creating a biennial budget I will tell you doesn't mean necessarily we can tell you we will spend more or less money. That is a decision of the Members of Congress, and it is a vote, and there are a lot of factors that come into play.
I think for the good of the institution, to free up true oversight, to really dig in the next year into the bowels of the government to find out how it works and to have the time, that is the key issue, not the time to relax, the time to do our job and really dig into the government in a constructive way, not necessarily always a negative way, and see how the agencies can work better. It gives them more time and us more time.
So I fully support any efforts. I think it is good for our country and good for the institution.
[The statement of Mr. Ney follows:]
The Chairman. Well, thank you very much, Bob. I appreciate that and appreciate your Ohio experience coming here.
The only thing I will say on your issue of just going right to the floor with a vote, there were some issues and concerns raised by a number of people who have been opponents. I want to do everything that we can to address those concerns if possible, and there may be some modifications that could be made in legislation that we would bring forward that could again assuage some of those issues that have been raised by them, and that is part of the deliberative nature of this institution. We don't plan to immediately go to the floor for a vote.
What we plan to do is -- and we have spent years on this, that is basically what we are here to do. We are supposed to spend time thinking about these things and plan to get as much input as possible, but the resolution to which you referred, which you joined as a cosponsor of, and again, the Speaker, had we 250 cosponsors, I am happy to say, called for us to act in the second session of the 106th Congress, which means in calendar year 2000, and it is my hope we will be able to act within this calendar year on this issue.
So we appreciate your thoughts and your time and input
Mr. Ney. Mr. Chairman, I would note if I could that your approach is the better approach and the correct approach by the way. It is just that you are much more patient than I am
The Chairman. Well, it has taken me a while to get patient. I will tell you one little story. There are often times that I get to be impatient and frustrated, and I live behind the Supreme Court, and when I walk across the East Front coming in here, I look up at the Capitol dome getting ready to damn a colleague in the other body or maybe even one who serves in the House, although not as often as those in the other body, and I get --
Mr. Ney. Never a staffer of course
The Chairman. No, no, they are damning me is the way that works, but the thing that I think of when I look at the dome is that this is exactly what James Madison, the father of the Constitution and the first branch of government, this institution, envisaged for us, and he wanted it to be a process which was very, very tough. Fleeing the tyranny of King George, as we all know, was in part to make sure that no single person got total power, and so that is why it is working, and that is what has made me a little more patient. Thank you very much.
I don't see any more witnesses here. I have a statement, there is nobody here to object to my putting in Ms. Pryce's statement in the record, and I have got two very important charts here which talk about supplemental appropriations and continuing resolutions. Without objection, I would like both of those to appear in the record, and our plan is to proceed after the Presidents Day recess with another hearing, which will consist of representatives from the executive branch and several others, and we might even entertain some other Members of Congress then at that hearing, too.
So anything else? Oh yes, and I am to state that the record is to remain open for colleagues of ours who might want to enter something into the record, and with that, since I have been informed votes will end by 3:00 o'clock today, virtually everyone is going to leave town. So have a wonderful Presidents Day break, and the committee stands adjourned.
[The information follows:]
[The statement of Mr. Castle follows:]
[The statement of Mr. Spratt follows:]
[The statement of Mr. Luther follows:]
[Whereupon, at 1:25 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]
