Yesterday, the Joint Select Committee on Budget and Appropriations Process Reform failed to pass even modest legislation to change current budgetary procedures. More ambitious ideas were set aside weeks ago when it was clear they couldn’t pass. The committee will therefore cease operations with nothing concrete to show for its work.
Expectations were never very high, so this result is not particularly surprising. Still, the committee’s failure should be seen as yet another indication that political polarization is making it very difficult for House and Senate members to engage in the normal give-and-take of a functioning democracy.
Despite the failure to produce a bill, the joint committee may not have been a total waste of time. Some of its members engaged in serious discussions about what it would take to fix today’s broken budget process, and the ideas that came out of those discussions could prove to be useful when the time is right to consider a serious reform plan.
The joint committee was created in February of this year in the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 because both parties have become exasperated by the dysfunction that plagues the current process. Congress wastes time on political trivialities and partisan jousting while the country’s actual fiscal problems go unaddressed. The law establishing the committee tasked it with developing a reform plan by November 30th.
The joint committee was constructed to be a strictly bipartisan exercise. The committee had eight Republican and eight Democratic members, and its rules required majority support (i.e., at least five members) from both parties to advance legislation.
That proved to be a high threshold. The committee’s members developed numerous plans which had some level of bipartisan support, but not enough to meet the five-and-five test. As a result, some of the more interesting and bold ideas were never put to a vote.
For the past several weeks, there was an expectation that a minimalist package assembled by Co-Chairman Steve Womack would make it through the committee and might actually get enacted into law. The most notable provision in that legislation was the conversion of the congressional budget resolution into a plan which would be approved by Congress every two years instead of every year.
In recent years, Congress has regularly chosen not to take up a budget resolution, for a variety of reasons. Approving a budget resolution only once every two years would align the budget resolution calendar with the two-year cycle of every newly constituted Congress. Under the proposed plan, appropriations would have remained on an annual cycle. But there’s no reason to expect a two-year budget resolution would have made much difference in the quality and timeliness of budgetary decisions by Congress.
The biennial provision served as the base bill during the committee’s legislative mark-up. The committee then approved an amendment, offered by Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse and David Perdue, which would have created an optional “bipartisan pathway” for the budget process in the Senate. The amendment would have allowed the Senate to choose, at the beginning of the process each year, to pursue a bipartisan budget plan requiring support from both parties to advance, instead of a simple majority as is allowed under current law. The idea was to create an expectation that both parties would need to take responsibility for assembling the budget plan, which might help change the partisan dynamic which has made compromise on budget matters so difficult to achieve in recent years.
In addition to the Whitehouse-Perdue proposal, the committee also approved amendments that would have changed the membership of the Senate Budget Committee, required an annual “fiscal state of the nation” hearing with the head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and included tax expenditures as a budget item that would be tracked in the congressional budget resolution.
These changes weren’t going to make much of a difference, but even this modest package failed to get out of the committee on the final vote. Only two Democrats on the committee supported the final bill, three short of the number necessary to advance it to the full House and Senate. Some Democrats were worried the legislation could be changed substantially against their interests in the Senate.
The most interesting and promising work coming out of the committee’s deliberations never came close to getting approved. In particular, Democratic Sen. Michael Bennett (D-CO) authored a plan with many similarities to a plan sponsored by House Republican Pete Sessions. The Bennett plan is worth highlighting because of its potential to attract bipartisan support and because it would focus Congress on the right goal.
The central idea in the Bennett plan is the establishment of a permanent joint select committee on fiscal responsibility. The committee would be constituted in much the same way as the joint committee on process reform. It would have eight members from both parties. Any bill that received the support of five members from both parties, and which reduced the level of federal debt relative to GDP by at least 5 percentage points 10 years after the current year, would be considered privileged legislation, which means it would get a vote in the House and Senate and could pass with the support of a simple majority. Put another way, these privileged bills would not need 60 votes in the Senate. The joint committee could make recommendations on Social Security changes too, but those would be separate from the rest of the budget and would need 60 votes in the Senate.
The Bennett plan is not perfect. It has many features that fiscal conservatives won’t like, including ceding too much authority to the appropriations committee. (Bennett recommends allowing the appropriators to set the caps that control how much money they can spend!)
But it also has a few big ideas that conservatives should find attractive. Most importantly, the bill would get Congress in the business of trying to write fiscal plans that lower the debt-to-GDP ratio over a 10-year period. This is absolutely the right way to think about the nation’s fiscal challenge. It would also establish a permanent institutional structure to facilitate legislative responses to this problem. These changes in the budget process wouldn’t guarantee Congress would act, but they would make it a lot easier to pass a meaningful deficit reduction plan than under current law. The plan from Rep. Sessions had a similar orientation.
Because the joint committee on process reform was unable to approve a bill, it will be viewed, for the time being, as having failed to do produce anything of lasting value. But that might be a premature verdict. Members on the committee from both parties thought more seriously about the failings of the current process, and what to do about them, than anyone in Congress has done in many years, and they developed some interesting and promising reform plans as a result. That work may yet bear fruit.
James C. Capretta is a RealClearPolicy Contributor and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
