Sen. Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, the presumptive new Senate Majority Leader, stated in his election night victory speech that “the power of the purse” through Congressional appropriations was the key to defeating President Obama’s “rule by executive orders.” Mr. McConnell is correct that this strategy is the best leverage the Congress has in bargaining with the president. But talking and doing are not the same thing.
There is always much talk from politicians about “waste and abuse” in the federal budget — the phrase has become almost a mantra. But to find and eliminate the colossal “waste and abuse” in the federal budget takes hard and sustained work. Reviewing budget line items is drudgery. It is not the kind of work that lends itself to spotlights and publicity. And that is why it never gets done.
The bureaucrats know this, so they bury all sorts of absurd line items in their annual budget requests. The basic legislation which set up the current organization of Congressional oversight is the Congressional Budget Control Act of 1974. This law initiated the Senate and House budget committees and the requirement that a budget be voted on by both houses of Congress, as well as creating a nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). This legislation passed both houses of Congress with only six dissenting House votes. It set up a structure for congressional actions to exercise its constitutional responsibility to control federal spending. That law was a truly patriotic act of Congress.
It was also a pipe dream.
The federal deficit has risen every year since 1974, except for the years 1998 to 2000 as a result of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. It was based on Newt Gingrich’s seven-year deficit reduction plan. It was enacted by the Gingrich-led Republicans and grudgingly signed by President Clinton (who had to submit five budgets for FY1998 before he came up with one which Speaker Gingrich would support). The Gingrich effort was also based on budget caps, which has proven, except for 1998-2000) to be an ineffective way to enforce fiscal discipline.
The next step in deficit reduction is a line item analysis for two reasons: 1) all the duplication and runaway excesses (e.g. administrative leaves, lavish conferences, and unbridled tenure) in today’s department budgets can be corrected by a truly bipartisan committee, since these issues are not, for the most part, invested with partisan opinions; and 2) the only other means of reducing federal spending are raising taxes (a Republican taboo) or sequester-type caps on specific programs (a Democrat taboo).
Fortunately, thanks to the CBA of 1974, the mechanism for doing all the tedious accounting analysis which would be necessitated by a line item review of every agency budget in the federal government is already in place, namely the Congressional Budget Office. While the CBO might require additional funding to undertake such an immense project, the return on investment would be a hundred-fold.
The most famous example of scrupulous review of the federal budget was when President Calvin Coolidge and his Treasury Secretary, Andrew Mellon, in the 1920s personally searched the entire federal budget for “waste and abuse” and found enough to lower taxes for the middle class to 0.5 percent. While it is doubtful that such a goal could be reached today, substantial progress could be made.
The information gleaned from this exercise could be used to direct federal policies in many areas, particularly the elimination of duplicate services and agencies and the renegotiation of the federal union contracts. Anyone who has dealt with any of the vast agencies such as the Departments of Defense and Agriculture, not to mention Homeland Security, knows that the waste of public resources is glaring and astronomical. It may be that this project will require more than one budget cycle to establish the baselines for each agency, but it is still worth the effort. The influence of this fiscal discipline on new legislation would be an immense stimulus toward fiscal responsibility of the part of both the Congress and the bureaucracy.
Why undertake such a “radical” process? Because nothing else works! The Congress keeps passing new laws to force its members to take responsibility for their actions, but no sooner is one of these laws passed than it is ignored by the very same Congress which passed it. Two of the latest are the Budget Enforcement Act (PAYGO) of 2002 which became the basis of the Budget Control Act of 2011. If the Congress had felt bound by the PAYGO law, the 2011 law would not have been needed. But the Congress shows an amazing ability to ignore its own laws. The only enforcement of any kind of fiscal discipline in recent times is sequestration, which was the outcome of the 2011 law, and which has been received with almost universal angst and therefore will not be renewed
The time has come for a new approach. If the chairman and ranking member of the House and Senate budget committees can agree to charter the CBO for a line item audit of the entire federal budget, a new era of bipartisan cooperation for the good of the people of America may dawn through the darkness of the past few years.
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