Congress does double-take on two-year budgeting

Every couple of years, some lawmaker suggests overhauling the way the federal budget is written. Congressional leaders respond by saying, "Fine, go work on it." And then the reform effort promptly gets lost in the shuffle on Capitol Hill as more- pressing, or politically appealing, endeavors move to the front burner. This year, things may be different.

Members of the House and Senate remain thoroughly disgusted with the budget process, especially after the debacle last fall, when they held their noses and passed a massive omnibus spending bill nearly three weeks after the start of the new fiscal year. Their disgust has intensified in recent weeks as Congress has struggled with two supplemental spending bills that ostensibly were for the military mission in Kosovo and hurricane relief in Central America, but were loaded with unrelated items that many members wanted dumped.

"Make no mistake, the current budget process does not work," House Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier, R-Calif., said at a recent hearing on the issue. "It is a disorganized patchwork of decades-old rules and laws."

Both chambers are poised to pass vastly different budget reforms, but Republicans say they are open to compromise. Some key Republican members of the House Appropriations Committee have indicated a willingness to accept a proposal that appropriators have long opposed-a Senate plan that would transform the budget process from a one-year to a two-year cycle.

And the House Rules and Budget committees are working together on fine-tuning an overhaul proposal that was crafted last year by a bipartisan task force. That effort, according to Dreier, "represents the first time in almost a decade that the two committees of jurisdiction in the House have come together in a bipartisan manner to construct a comprehensive budget-process reform package."

Senate Republicans have made the proposal for two-year budgeting their top budget reform priority. "We want to remain focused," said G. William Hoagland, staff director of the Senate Budget Committee. The Senate Governmental Affairs and Budget committees have sent a bill to the Senate floor that would implement a two-year budgeting process. Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici, R-N.M., who has pushed the plan for many years, argues that preparing the budget and appropriations bills during the first year of a Congress would allow the second year to be devoted to oversight and authorization issues. "We basically have shortchanged the authorization process," Hoagland said.

In the past, appropriators have been the most vocal opponents of two-year budgeting. They have argued that under such a scheme, Congress would have to pass a myriad of supplemental spending bills in the off year to cover unforeseen expenses-a process that could become as troublesome as the current one. At bottom, the issue has been one of turf for appropriators, many of whom haven't wanted to cede control of the federal purse strings and thus see their power greatly diluted.

But this year, two key House appropriators-Chairman C.W. "Bill" Young, R-Fla., and Interior Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Ralph Regula, R-Ohio-have said they are open to the idea of two-year budgeting.

"I think it has a lot of merit," Young said in an interview. "As a state senator, I dealt with a two-year budget."

Regula agreed, telling the Rules Committee recently: "We need more time for effective oversight of the programs we fund. I would like to spend more time to ensure that the agencies funded by the subcommittee that I chair put in place quality management procedures."

Still, some longtime opponents are unmoved. House Appropriations Committee ranking member David R. Obey, D-Wis., noted that Congress has had enough trouble passing a one-year budget. Sen. Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., a former House appropriator and now one in the Senate, made a similar argument.

"It is possible that the appropriations process would become more contentious and protracted as Congress fought over what programs should be cut . . . to offset unanticipated spending increases needed in the off year," Durbin has said. He also argues that making spending decisions on an annual basis remains one of Congress's most effective oversight tools.

In the House, Republicans are concentrating on the bipartisan budget reform plan developed last year by a task force led by Reps. Jim Nussle, R-Iowa, and Benjamin Cardin, D-Md. That proposal would convert the current nonbinding budget resolution into a binding one that would be presented to the President for his signature. But if the President refused to sign the resolution, the bill would still allow Congress to proceed with the budget process. The Nussle-Cardin plan also establishes a rainy day fund to cover emergency supplemental spending requests, calls for an automatic continuing resolution when Congress cannot complete the appropriations process by the start of the new fiscal year on Oct. 1, and allows on-budget surpluses to be used for tax cuts.

The automatic CR remains among the most controversial provisions of the House bill. "It's a loser," said a senior Republican aide to the House Appropriations Committee. "Our opposition to it has not changed."

Appropriators and the Clinton Administration have argued that an automatic CR would take individual spending decisions out of their hands because it would use a preset, across-the-board formula to determine the funding levels for the appropriations bills that had not yet been approved. They also complain that an automatic CR would eliminate the pressure to finish spending bills on time. Advocates, though, say that such a CR "forever removes the specter of a government shutdown," in the words of another House aide.

Republicans in both chambers remain determined to move forward on budget reforms, and while they disagree on some points, a consensus could be building on two-year budgeting. Moreover, Clinton Administration officials have not opposed the proposal in the past.

Although two-year budgeting is "not the heart and soul" of the House reform plan, there is "not significant opposition" to it, said the Republican Appropriations aide. In the Senate, Republicans would prefer to pass the two-year budgeting proposal separately, but would probably be willing to accept other reforms in another bill, according to Hoagland. "We've recognized that some of these [other] provisions are very controversial with the Administration," Hoagland said.

Still, skeptics remain. "Until Congress and the President can agree on what the goals of the budget process should be, they're not going to agree" on reforms, asserted Stanley E. Collender, the managing director of the federal budget consulting group at Fleishman-Hillard Inc. and a columnist for GovExec.com.

But with this year's appropriations work already off to a rocky start, as demonstrated by the loading up of the Kosovo funding bill, even defenders of the current budget and appropriations process may decide it's time for a change.