Part of the “Effective Budgeting” series.
Committees lead: A reliable, regular order for every committee to set the floor agenda for reviewing and updating its programs is the appeal of a real budget. Constraints and counter pressures keep it grounded.
Missing out now: Congress’ broken up, incomplete, and top-down budgeting robs the American people of their representatives applying their knowledge, talents, and relationships to deliver better results.
Committee-led policymaking: Members of a committee attend the same hearings, review the same legislation, and hear from similar advocates on policies the committee oversees. Many have backgrounds related to a committee’s work, which is often why they wanted to serve there in the first place. Knowledge is dispersed throughout Congress, but it is concentrated in committees for related topics.
Use talent: Members bring and build expertise. Effective budgeting, including checks and balances, can let them exercise it.
How does a real budget empower each committee?
Inputs: After getting needed information from the White House and CBO, each committee would give the Budget Committees views and estimates for its anticipated fiscal policy agenda along with current law line-items for its programs, which the Budget Committees would use to build a concurrent resolution on the budget.
Toplines: The budget resolution would include top-line spending levels for each committee, which could incorporate budget targets. If Congress does not adopt a budget resolution by April 15, the Budget Chairs would set committee allocations from the budget baseline.
Constrained tradeoffs: Between getting its allocation and May 15, each committee would review and could manage its programs within the top-line allocation. Anticipating this opportunity, members and staff would have held hearings and meetings, learned about issues and options, developed legislative language, and sought consensus with colleagues, often on a bipartisan basis to have enough support to succeed in the Senate.
Repeated game: Committee members know each other better. They repeatedly negotiate with the same people on the same issues over years. This increases the benefits of having a good reputation, reciprocity, and practical problem solving, and it increases the costs of inflammatory rhetoric or other grating behaviors.
Open access: With fewer members, a more limited scope, and less focus from the punditry, committees are much more open to amendments than the floor is. Building and sustaining the relationships needed to achieve shared goals in committees can be valuable elsewhere, including by making Congress a more internally cohesive organization and therefore a greater center of gravity in the federal government.
Shifting priorities: Within its overall limit, each committee could manage programs to improve value-added for the country. This would encourage them to reallocate funds from where they provide less value to where they can produce more. Members would have the means and the motivation to reduce waste, fraud, abuse, and other low-value uses of money so that they can preserve or expand more useful activities.
Submitting proposals: By May 15, each committee should have sent any proposed changes to programs as well as adjusted line-items to the Budget Committee of its house. The Budget Committee would make sure the committee’s submission complies with its topline and other applicable requirements from budget law and the budget resolution. If so, the committee’s submission gets bundled without substantive change with all others for floor consideration.
Not like reconciliation: Per the proposed Comprehensive Congressional Budget Act, matters included SHOULD have fiscal impacts, but that isn’t a hard-and-fast rule. Reconciliation, on the other hand, which a real budget should fully replace, requires fiscal impacts that are more than “merely incidental” to the purpose of the provision, among other complicated strictures.
Fallbacks for non-compliance: If a committee does not provide a compliant contribution by May 15, the Budget Committee can insert that committee’s current-law line-items. A non-compliant committee would have to pursue its priorities as floor amendments or wait until next year.
Floor challenges: Floor amendments could test possible improvements to committee-approved changes and the underlying laws. For any particular topic, committee members’ views would often prevail due to greater expertise. That said, no one is infallible, and a robust challenge culture can increase Americans’ confidence that Congress is doing its best to serve them.
To illustrate: The House Ways and Means Committee
Money committees: The Committee on Ways and Means is the House “money committee” that lacks an anticipated annual process. The other is Appropriations, but the appropriations process is anything but regular these days.
Jurisdiction: Ways and Means is responsible for most non-appropriated federal spending and virtually all revenue. The House Rule X(1)(t) outlines its jurisdiction:
- Customs revenue, collection districts, and ports of entry and delivery.
- Reciprocal trade agreements.
- Revenue measures generally.
- Revenue measures relating to insular possessions.
- Bonded debt of the United States . . .
- Deposit of public monies.
- Transportation of dutiable goods.
- Tax exempt foundations and charitable trusts.
- National social security (except health care and facilities programs that are supported from general revenues as opposed to payroll deductions and except work incentive programs).
Tax streamlining: The tax code is a mess. People with similar incomes have different tax liabilities due to legal preferences or punishments for their earning and consumption patterns. Tax preferences exceed $2 trillion per year as traditionally measured, and tax rates apply unevenly. Cleaning this up is easier with a regular, holistic budget process.
Health coordination: Ways and Means oversees Medicare and health tax preferences, but the Energy and Commerce Committee covers Medicaid, CHIP, pharmaceuticals, and medical devices, and other committees cover employer-sponsored insurance and remaining programs. Each would be bound by its respective topline, but members could coordinate across committees to rationalize and improve health policies. The budget resolution can easily empower the Budget Chair to adjust allocations for joint changes that shift funding between committees.
Social Security solvency: When the Social Security Trust Fund runs out of reserves in 2032, benefit payments must decline to match incoming revenue: a 25 percent cut. A regular, annual opportunity to reduce that imbalance could keep extending solvency indefinitely, especially with those tough-but-necessary changes in the context of a complete budget. An agreement this year could make a few tweaks, next year’s could build on them or go in other directions, and so on to avoid trust fund depletion and to otherwise update the program.
Other programs: The Ways and Means Committee is also responsible for trade policy, federal borrowing, various welfare programs, and more. Members could fine-tune activities within and across each category as well.
Support for authorizations: Beyond fiscal dimensions, many programs in the Ways and Means Committee’s jurisdiction could work better with updates to their programmatic language. As members grapple with the fiscal aspects in the annual budget act, they will develop greater expertise and build stronger mutual respect and trust. On this foundation, they will be more able to update programs for modern conditions.
Representation requires an effective resource-allocation hub
Self-governance: Members of Congress come to DC to represent a district or state. They bring diversity of geography, occupation, ideology, experience, and more. Only a bottom-up budget process can let them fulfill the purpose of a legislature: self-governance through a challenge culture and, ultimately, such mutual accommodation as is possible.
Competition and cooperation: Committee-led budgeting lets every member pursue better outcomes in their committee assignments, through colleagues on other committees, and on the floor. A process that empowers committee members to manage programs within clear boundaries and where committees check and balance each other can let the cream rise to the top. That’s an important way for Congress to become respectable – and respected – once again.
Culture change: Empowered committees can make Congress a stronger governing institution. A real budget would help members learn, negotiate, prioritize, and improve policy together over time. Committees with clear, bounded, regular responsibilities would improve expertise, trust, and bipartisan cooperation necessary for effective self-government.
Kurt Couchman is a Senior Fiscal Policy Fellow at Americans for Prosperity.
