What is the Comprehensive Congressional Budget Act?

Sep 5, 2024 by Kurt Couchman

Americans are frustrated with Congress. They see the festering bloat, discoordination, and waste and think Congress ignores obvious problems. The growing debt burden makes us poorer, crowds out other priorities, and threatens stagnation or worse.

Members of Congress are frustrated, too. They often face up-or-down votes on deals they didn’t get a chance to shape. Equal representation doesn’t exist without open deliberation.

Budgeting is incredibly unproductive for the time it consumes. Each year, Congress tries to approve 12 separate appropriations bills covering just 26 percent of spending. It usually collapses into a bloated, year-end omnibus appropriations bill after short-term patches.

In the appropriations process, revenue and other spending are out of sight, mostly out of mind, and procedurally out of reach. Members of committees overseeing those policies have no regular way to manage their portfolios. Occasionally, one-party control of the White House and both houses of Congress unlocks a special process to fast-track partisan priorities. Still, that approach is polarizing, selective, and often produces poor outcomes.

Policy experts continue to develop options and proposals, but Congress has little routine use for them. Long periods of stasis punctuated by sudden changes drive a feast-or-famine cycle for journalists and those engaged in policy advocacy.

Enter the Comprehensive Congressional Budget Act

In January 2024, Representatives Blake Moore (R-UT) and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) introduced a bill that could transform federal budgeting into an inclusive, bottom-up, productive way for Congress to manage all aspects of the budget (see Figure 1). It would empower all members – especially through the budget, authorizing, and appropriations committees – to revisit outdated thinking and reshape the federal government’s budget and economic policies for today’s and tomorrow’s needs.

Figure 1: A budget includes all spending and revenue (FY2025, $ billion)

Source: CBO

The Comprehensive Congressional Budget Act (AFP release, two-pager) would provide an annual opportunity for members of every committee with spending or revenue authority to check up on programs and adjust priorities. The recurring chance to put proposals before colleagues and to negotiate deals would encourage members to invest in mutually beneficial relationships while discouraging off-putting behavior. It would reduce polarization while expanding Congress’ capacity to solve problems.

Regular review would expand congressional knowledge of federal programs, especially for members of relevant committees. Reinvigorating Congress’s policymaking powers would also help it check executive overreach.

Members would be more accountable for outcomes but finally have the tools to shape the results.

Putting everything together would encourage Congress to make sustained progress toward fiscal responsibility. The American public worries about deficits and the debt, but today’s budget dysfunction makes the tough but necessary work to control them politically perilous. A comprehensive budget would give members of Congress the political cover needed to survive—or thrive—as active managers.

After all, a budget is, by definition, a document to coordinate spending and revenue. The entire private sector budgets comprehensively. Several high-performing governments abroad do, including Sweden, Germany, Estonia, and Switzerland. U.S. state legislatures that budget more comprehensively tend to provide services more efficiently than others.

What would the CCBA do?

The CCBA would set up an annual budget act with contributions from all committees. The budget committees would develop each year’s concurrent resolution on the budget to guide and coordinate other committees through the process.

Appropriators would continue to manage appropriated (“discretionary”) spending through their twelve subcommittees. They’d also be responsible for bundling appropriations bills with other committees’ submissions, without any substantive changes.

Authorizing committees would manage direct (“mandatory”) spending programs in their jurisdictions. All committee members could propose policy changes during markups, bounded by the committee’s allocations. Non-fiscal changes would occur separately, but the knowledge and insights from better budgeting would support the authorizing process. Committees would transmit adjusted line items and statutory changes to the appropriations committee of their house.

The Senate Finance and House Ways and Means committees would also tackle revenue policies. Ideally, they would review tax rates, bases, and preferences against a revenue target, perhaps as well as the debt limit. The CCBA does not prescribe these details or several others, but it would create a framework to help navigate them.

Authorizers and appropriators would do their work within spending allocations and other requirements from the budget resolution. The budget committees would oversee committee submissions for consistency with all instructions. Naturally, microcosms of the caucuses on each committee would be well positioned to develop proposals that each house can accept.

Authorizers would gain the ability to manage their programs comprehensively and in coordination with the rest of the budget. Appropriators would have reinforcements from other committees to complete the budget process regularly, and members could focus on driving efficiencies in committees on which they serve. The budget committees would manage the entire process. Growing member and committee expertise would aid leaders in resolving disputes.

How would a comprehensive congressional budget process work?

Much of the federal budget process works well, or it could within a functioning system. The CCBA would retain CBO’s Budget and Economic Outlook, the president’s budget request, existing congressional committee jurisdictions, views and estimates, the concurrent resolution on the budget, committee allocations, appropriations suballocations, and more.

On that foundation, it would build effective, holistic, bottom-up, Congress-empowered budgeting. CCBA’s proposed changes are underlined in figure 2 and described below.

Figure 2: A comprehensive budget builds on existing foundations

From the Office of Rep. Blake Moore

The Comprehensive Congress Budget Act would strengthen the process:

Bulk up “views and estimates:” Each winter, committees send the budget committee descriptions of their priorities to inform the budget resolution. The CCBA would have them include current-law line items for direct (“mandatory”) spending programs, which they’d get from CBO through the budget committee. Committees would invest more in views and estimates to support a comprehensive budget.
Social Security and postal payments on-budget: All spending and revenue should be in the budget. Putting Social Security off-budget to avoid papering over deficits elsewhere may have made sense when it ran surpluses, but that time has passed. Enabling regular mini-deals to protect important programs is a key feature of a comprehensive budget.
Budget resolution: Allocations to committees, guardrails, and other features in the budget resolution would be more significant in this context. The budget committees would compile committees’ line-items into a line-item budget.
- Replace reconciliation with annual management: Budget resolutions would no longer carry reconciliation instructions, as the CCBA would repeal that process. Instead, budget resolutions would give each committee a spending allocation within which it could manage its programs.
- Backstop the budget resolution: If Congress fails to adopt a budget resolution by April 15, the budget chairs would issue allocations based on CBO baseline levels. This would keep the process moving and would discourage Congress from pursuing unrealistic budget resolutions.
Appropriators/authorizers check/adjust: Just as appropriators already do, the authorizing committees would review and adjust programs they oversee. Appropriations-like hearing schedules with academics, policy professionals, and others could inform authorizing committees about relative values and tradeoff opportunities. Authorizers would develop proposals, adjust line items accordingly, and send proposals and amended line items to the appropriations committee.
Budget Committees oversee submissions: The budget committees would ensure that authorizing committee submissions comply with the budget resolution’s allocations and other standards. It could return submissions to committees to fix. If an authorizing committee fails to submit a compliant submission by May 15, the appropriations committee could insert that committee’s current-law line items from its views and estimates, another important backstop.
Appropriations bundle budget for floor: The appropriations committee would bundle its twelve subcommittee bills with spending submissions from the 16 authorizing committees with spending authority and the revenue submission from Finance and Ways and Means. The appropriations committee would report the annual budget act to the floor by June 10.

Floor consideration and resolving differences between the houses would rely on established procedures. That said, rethinking the amendment process may be useful for the size and scope of an annual budget act.

A comprehensive congressional budget process leading to an annual budget act would unleash pent-up congressional energy and talent. It would transform the culture of Congress and substantially improve budget and governance outcomes. Even so, additional reforms would complement and strengthen comprehensive budgeting:

Leverage the State of the Union to get president’s reports on time with the SUBMIT IT Act.
End the cycle of shutdown politics with the Prevent Government Shutdowns Act.
Adopt smart statutory budget targets like the Responsible Budget Targets Act.
Enact a well-crafted balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.
Reclaim Congress’ power over emergency declarations with the ARTICLE ONE Act.
Include the debt limit in the annual budget act OR automatically suspend it when the budget has met reasonable targets.

Conclusion: Put Congress in charge with a comprehensive budget

The Comprehensive Congressional Budget Act would empower all members of Congress to become effective legislators. Some might specialize in coalition building, others in policy option development, and others in communications. All would have far more opportunity to play to their strengths.

Committees would be empowered to manage their programs within reasonable bounds. A comprehensive budget would have natural incentives for fiscal responsibility because it would make tradeoffs clear and tangible.

Civilization advances, in part, through better institutions. The Comprehensive Congressional Budget Act would substantially improve federal budget institutions and would help Congress reclaim command of federal fiscal policy.