Congress and the Budget- A Process Broken by Both Parties

 

U.S. Capitol Building / Photo: National Park Service

I won't ever bend a knee to a King, but I would like to know why Congress, and specifically  the U.S. House of Representatives, cannot follow a budget procedure and has to complicate the process.  Both parties do this when in power, partially to avoid a Senate filibuster through arcane rules, but also because they are basically cowards when it comes to having to make tough budget decisions.

Oh, you thought they passed a budget on February 25, 2025 by a vote of 217-215? They did no such thing.  They passed a budget resolution and sent the budget back to the committees that oversee individual Departments.  The Committees are now tasked with the responsibility to find savings, trim the budget for the specific departments they have oversight on, and then return later this Spring with a Reconciliation Budget- and that is where the rubber meets the road.   

The debt limit increase is an imaginary budget number, a maximum amount that can be reduced by committees meeting their task of reducing the budgets of their respective departments. If the committees cannot find savings, then the debt ceiling will remain at the current proposed increase of 4.5 trillion dollars or even increase.

The Federal budget resolution also proposes spending and actual outlays for the next ten years which is our government's way of sprinkling cat shit on top of horse shit. An outlay is the actual amount already spent, and you can't spend in the future, although you can provide hard numbers on mandatory costs and estimate  the percentage those costs will increase based upon estimated inflation, estimated program costs, and other incidental costs. 

 For example, if a fighter jet costs a billion dollars to build and you have contracted with Boeing to build 100 jets over 4 years, then you will be outlaying 25 billion a year.  Of course, that contract has material, labor, and inflationary triggers built in that will allow the manufacturer to increase the cost per unit.  So the outlay is an estimate as well.   I am not an accountant and government accounting is its own animal, but I believe I am not far from accurate with this assessment.

The budget resolution may show no change to Medicare, but if left as is the debt ceiling increase is too low.  So those poor schmucks at committee central will be tasked with  cutting 2 billion dollars in order to balance the books or to reduce the amount the Treasury has to borrow.

But you don't have to take our word for it.  Here is how the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a non-profit, non-partisan foundation, views the current budget process,

The norm of applying the rules and procedures of the Congressional Budget Act on an annual basis has largely broken down. For the last decade or more, Congress has rarely followed the Act’s orderly process. Deadlines are routinely missed. Perhaps most importantly, Congress has sought to adopt a budget resolution mainly when it has chosen to create a reconciliation bill, which is not subject to a Senate filibuster. 

The mainstream press cannot report this convoluted mess of a budget resolution without confusing the public, so they simplify the story and ignore the process itself because they fear the public will never understand. No wonder we feel so dumb. They sell us short and grandstand on the few line items that people fear losing.   Sometimes we forget that the press needs ratings to make a profit and education is not possible in 5 second sound bytes.

Tomorrow into the budget we go anyway. And look, we will review what Reuters found- simple math errors!

Health Spending 2023/ Chart by Reuters