Mark calendar year 2000 as the official death of the current congressional budget process. With the extraordinary liberties Congress is now routinely taking with virtually all of the process's statutory requirements, it is clear that the only thing left to do is give it a proper burial.
Consider the following: The House and Senate are in the process of passing a series of tax cuts that technically are still covered by the pay-as-you-go rules. This means that the projected reduction from the revenue baseline these bills would cause should have to be offset with other legislation that either cuts entitlement spending or increases receipts. But no one on Capitol Hill is talking about that. Rather, they are planning no legislated offset at all and instead will just lower the estimated surplus, which is prohibited by the Budget Enforcement Act.
Congress is also about to disregard the much higher limits on appropriations it set for itself in the fiscal 2001 budget resolution agreed to in April. The resolution, which required tricky negotiations to win majority support, assumed that discretionary spending would be $60 billion above the existing caps. Less than four months later, these higher levels are not enough to satisfy members of either house and so are either about to be ignored or changed again.
In reporting out many of the fiscal 2001 spending bills, the House and Senate Appropriations Committees have been complying with their allocations-the mechanism the process imposes to ensure that the budget resolution will be upheld-by assuming reductions that they themselves expect will not be sustained. In some cases the relevant appropriations subcommittee has announced in advance that it does not support the changes included in its bill and expects that it will be changed later.
Neither the House nor Senate Budget Committees, who up to now have been the defenders and protectors of the congressional budget process, have bothered to say a word in opposition while all of this has been going on. That might be because they have been told by the leadership of their respective houses not to make waves. It might be because they know that trying to force their colleagues to live up to the process's requirements would be futile. It also could be because budget committee members realize that trying to force the budget process to be followed could be personally damaging to their careers as their colleagues consider retribution for what surely would be more difficult votes than they want to take.
Regardless of the reason, however, no one-from the senior-most members of the House and Senate leadership to the junior-most members of the rank and file-is standing up for the budget process in any way that is meaningful. That has made it far more politically acceptable for Congress to run with impunity around and through what used to be a process that most everyone on Capitol Hill felt had to be made to work.
The fact that Congress met the April 15 deadline this year for adopting the budget resolution is not an indication that it considers the budget process to be a high priority. A resolution like this one, that is being routinely ignored or changed or was initially supported under the assumption that it would be changed, cannot be taken as an indication that the process is alive and well.
The same is true of the spending caps. The fact that Congress may go through the motions of amending the Budget Enforcement Act to raise the limits rather than ignoring them cannot in any way be taken as an indication that the budget process has wide or deep support. To the contrary, limits and procedures like these that are easily and frequently changed mean that the limits are not taken seriously, and that Congress gives the process little respect.
It also means that the budget process is not significant to the outcome of the spending, taxing and debt reduction decisions that are now happening in Washington. The congressional budget process has become little more than a ghost of what it once was. That may be the best indication of all that it is already dead.
Question of the Week
Previous Question. What does Congress do when the Office of Management and Budget and Congressional Budget Office come up with different estimates of the surplus? The answer is nothing. Congress is required to use CBO numbers and the administration is required to use OMB numbers. This means that Congress may pass legislation and adopt a budget under one set of assumptions but then find that the White House thinks it will cost far more or less or that the surplus will be very different from what it was assuming when the OMB estimates are used. Joe Luchok of the Health Insurance Association of America not only knew the correct answer, but his response was selected at random from all of the correct responses. He wins an "I Won A Budget Battle" T-shirt just in time for the dog days of summer.
This Week's Question. Last February, "Budget Battles" readers were asked to suggest the ingredients for a budget sandwich. This week's question again tests your budget culinary skills. The question: If you were asked to prepare an entrée appropriate for this year's budget debate, what would it be? For example, how about a heaping serving of pork that gets bigger the more it is cooked? Send your response to scollender@nationaljournal.com by 5 p.m. EDT on Saturday, July 29. Please include your address so we can mail you your shirt if you win. If there is more than one correct response, the winner will be selected at random from all of the correct entries.
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