Festering fiscal failure
Congress is once again failing its most basic responsibility: funding government activities on time and on its own terms. This year’s appropriations should have been completed last summer, yet key homeland security programs went unfunded for months, following a record-setting shutdown in late 2025. Congress is now turning to budget reconciliation as a simple-majority substitute for the traditional appropriations process.
Budget breakdown is no longer episodic. It is systemic. The House is advancing spending bills without an agreed-upon topline or a clear path to Senate agreement. A budget resolution was recently adopted, not as an overall blueprint, but simply to unlock a limited appropriations-through-reconciliation package. Meanwhile, familiar pressures continue to build: another debt-limit fight next year after the debt eclipsed GDP, looming cuts to Social Security benefits, and growing unease in credit markets.
Both parties point fingers, and neither is blameless. But partisan narratives miss the deeper problem: Congress does not holistically manage a federal budget — and the damage is compounding.
Isolated appropriations are brittle
The twelve appropriations bills collectively cover about one-fourth of federal spending and no revenue policies. They substantively involve one committee per house on which fewer than one-third of senators and one-seventh of representatives serve.
As a result, appropriations bills have tenuous support in both houses. Back when the House had open amendment debates, floor managers would often express personal support for this or that amendment while regretfully opposing it to keep the deal from collapsing. This fragility insulates programs and spending levels from challenge.
Updating appropriations every year is important. So is managing the rest of the budget.
Only 11 percent of federal health subsidies pass through appropriations. How, then, can Congress improve health access, quality, and cost while soundly stewarding taxpayer resources? Under today’s practices, it cannot, at least not without substantial efforts.
A real budget includes everything
Chronic problems often require institutional solutions. An intriguing option is based on a simple idea: Congress should do an annual budget where all members can contribute to managing all spending and revenue policies in their committees and on the floor. That is what Representative Blake Moore (R-UT) has proposed in the Comprehensive Congressional Budget Act.
Congress could consider tradeoffs throughout the budget: can the resources here be more useful elsewhere? It would expand opportunities to coordinate and rationalize programs that are distributed across committees.
Rather than trying to squeeze pennies from appropriations, members could save dollars by improving benefit targeting, closing loopholes, and rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse, including by redesigning programs to better serve their purposes.
Contributions build reliable and robust support
An annual budget act would let Congress chip away at problems a little each year.
The conventional wisdom holds that Social Security needs one big solution from some sort of commission. But making major changes all at once is politically risky, and members differ on what counts as “fixing” the program, so Congress keeps putting it off. With an annual budget, however, making a few changes this year, tweaking a few other things next year, and continuing to reshape programs gradually – and reversibly – can compound powerfully.
A real budget also illuminates the procedural nature of recent fights. Members who wanted to extend expiring health exchange subsidy expansions had no regular order way to negotiate alternatives to sunsets. Similarly, those seeking changes to immigration enforcement practices did not have a standard path to seek consensus. In both cases, lengthy shutdowns resulted from the impasse.
Conversely, a bottom-up, complete budget process would let members try to find a mutually acceptable way forward every year. Whether they succeed or not, they would have the chance, and this alone is often enough to make less-preferred outcomes tolerable and improve perceptions of legitimacy.
A real budget makes other upgrades work
A real budget would expand Congress’ options to get deficits and debt under control, especially with enforceable budget targets. Members of Congress would have more ways to represent their states and districts.
Routine bargaining on matters large and small could shift Congress’ culture toward policy-focused deliberation that can resolve challenges. It could also show that differences in worldview need not always prevent reaching agreement on specific policies.
A comprehensive budget is not a silver bullet, of course. But it would be a solid foundation for other congressional modernization. Ultimately, only Congress can adequately represent the diversity of this vast country, and an upgrade to help our representatives carry out their most basic responsibilities is a good place to start.
Kurt Couchman is a Senior Fiscal Policy Fellow at Americans for Prosperity.
