Return to Regular Order Budget Process

On October 16, 2013, President Obama agreed to Congress’s plan to fund the government through January 15, 2014 and raise the debt ceiling through February 7, 2014.  The deal also included instructions to House and Senate leaders to appoint negotiators to meet and produce a long-term budget plan by December 13, 2013.  The budget conferees met for the first time on October 30, 2013 to discuss how an agreement could be reached to reconcile the two chambers’ budgets. 

The 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act established the current federal budget process, which requires that Congress annually adopt a budget resolution to set the funding levels for the federal government.  Since there are normally differences between the budgets passed by the House and Senate, the two chambers are supposed to go to conference to negotiate a budget by April 15 of each year that is capable of achieving enough support to become law.  However, the House and Senate have not agreed on a budget resolution since April 29, 2009.  Instead, the government has been relying on short-term funding mechanisms called continuing resolutions, which extend existing funding for federal programs, usually at the prior fiscal year’s levels.

The projected growth rate of federal spending is a grave threat to the future health of the nation’s economy.  According to the Congressional Budget Office’s 2013 Long-Term Budget Outlook, between 2009 and 2012 the federal government recorded the largest budget deficits relative to the size of the economy since 1946.  Federal debt held by the public stands at 73 percent of gross domestic product, which is higher than at any point in U.S. other than a brief period during World War II.  As entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare continue to grow, the national debt will only become an even larger threat to fiscal stability.

At a time when the gross national debt exceeds $17 trillion, lawmakers must act to put the nation back on a sustainable fiscal path.  The fiscal challenges that face the federal government cannot be addressed through ad-hoc budgeting procedures.  If Congress is serious about addressing these problems, the meetings of conferees that take place prior to December 13 should be pushed back to the mandated date of April 15 each year so that the budget process can return to regular order.

  — P.J. Austin