Part of the “Effective Budgeting” series.
As committees finish managing their portfolios, the Budget Committees must validate and compile all submissions into the budget bill. At this point, members of both parties will have substantial buy-in for their committees’ contributions from having pursued and achieved a variety of mutually beneficial policy changes.
Committee expertise: Effective budgeting harnesses distributed knowledge to build on what came before. Legislative committees cultivate expertise and relationships in defined areas of policy. Regularly applying these assets to managing programs can bring substantial benefits to the public.
Checks & balances: Holistic budgeting requires tradeoffs within and across committees. The budget resolution draws on committee submissions to harmonize or optimize across the full set of federal activities. Each committee gets a spending topline, which may incorporate budget targets and in the case of the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee, perhaps a revenue floor as well. Within those boundaries, committee members can manage their programs.
Enforcement: The Congressional Budget Act of 1974 purports to limit committees like that, but the House routinely waives its rules, the Senate operates on the principle of “if there are votes to pass, there are votes to waive the rules,” and Congress seldom adopts a budget resolution in the first place. The perfecting amendments of the Comprehensive Congressional Budget Act give every committee guaranteed access to the floor, subject to challenges via floor amendments, so long as they color within the lines.
Receive and vet: Within an effective budget process, the Budget Committees get proposals and revised line-items from other committees by May 15. Prior to the June 10 deadline to report the annual budget act, the Budget Committees review committee submissions with support from the Congressional Budget Office for compliance with budget statutes and the budget resolution’s spending allocations and other requirements.
Compliant submissions: A committee submission that meets expectations gets folded into the annual budget act without substantive changes. The Budget Committee may not alter policy decisions made in other committees.
Non-compliant submissions: If the Budget Chair determines that a committee submission does not meet expectations, the Budget Chair will insert that committee’s current law line-items from its views and estimates. Members of that committee can still pursue their priorities as floor amendments or wait until next year. Enforcing the rules may frustrate those who don’t follow them, but it’s the only way to maintain trust and the integrity of the process. It also supports intra-committee peer pressure for productive engagement so committee members don’t miss their shot.
System upgrades: Responsible for “budget process generally” and “special controls over the federal budget,” the Budget Committees could use the annual budget act as a vehicle to modernize the budget process. Unlike budget reconciliation, a real budget institutionalizes a path for Congress to cultivate itself.
Assembling the bill: The Budget Committees could also choose how to sequence committee contributions to the annual budget act. Putting the twelve Appropriations subcommittee bills first, for instance, ensures that appropriators manage floor time for any amendment touching provisions of annual appropriations. Amendments usually come up in the order of the first provision they address rather than in the order in which they are offered. Amendments dealing only with direct spending or revenue could be managed by members of other committees.
Reports for the floor: The Budget Committees’ reports would outline how the annual budget act maps to requirements of the budget resolution and applicable statutes, as well as to explain any process upgrades. It would also consolidate other committees’ revised line items to compile a line-item budget. Other committees, perhaps especially the Appropriations Committees, could file their own reports with congressionally directed funding and other information required for committee reports.
The Budget Committees would steward a fair process for all and make sure that when committees manage their programs, they do so within their allocations. Member expertise and relationships within committees would build the base budget bill, and then members could pursue fine-tuning on the floor.
Kurt Couchman is a Senior Fiscal Policy Fellow at Americans for Prosperity.
