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Hearing of the Committee on Rules

"Biennial Budgeting: A Tool for Improving Government Fiscal Management and Oversight"

Statement of Congressman C.W. Bill Young (R-FL)

Mr. Chairman, it is a pleasure to appear before your panel to give you my thoughts on biennial budgeting.

The fiscal year 2001 budget is the 27th budget 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 receive the budget in early February. By this time, over one-third of the fiscal year is gone, and we have less than eight months to get all the appropriations bills enacted.

My committee is supposed to receive its overall allocation against which we mark up our appropriations bills by April 15th. I am not going to provide the history of how many times the Congress has been able to do that, but the record is very bad. The reason is that it's 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 have less than five and one-half months left to get our work done.

This year we are trying to get the budget resolution done by March 15th. As you can see by the calendar, that would leave still only six and one-half months for appropriations. This would be better, but may not be enough.

I think we need more time than this to develop and enact appropriations bills. This is why we should take a look at how biennial budgeting might help us.

I believe that any biennial budgeting legislation should be developed to provide additional time for Congress to consider appropriations bills. Whether this might mean moving the date for budget submission back, shortening the time for development of a budget resolution, or moving the beginning of the fiscal year ahead or a combination of all of these, I don't have a preference. I just feel that we need more time for the appropriations process.

While doing this might seem like we're 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 a 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 some fine tuning of the appropriations bills we 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 reason of others I have heard has been to give more time for oversight and authorizing activities. One of the reasons appropriations takes so much time is because so many programs are unauthorized at the time we consider appropriations for them. The controversial legislative issues get inappropriately included in appropriations bills rather than authorizing bills. I strongly believe that any biennial budgeting legislation should not only address the budget schedule of the Congress, but also the authorization process. If all that biennial budgeting achieves is a two year appropriations cycle, we will be as bad off with the two year appropriations bills as we are with the one year bills.

We need multi-year 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.

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 the authorizing committees to do more, too. But, they need to use the information they learn to review and modify the permanent legislation that's 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 the success of any biennial legislation may well be contingent on what else, if anything, might be included in this legislation.

For the reasons I outlined, 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.

Thank you for the opportunity to testify.

I would be happy to answer any questions you may have.



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