The biggest congressional budgeting mess ever?
And on a lighter note...
I teach a Congress 101 course to Boston University undergraduate students. Not long ago, I asked the class, “Where is Congress and the president in the budget process?”
Mind you, my students are more tuned-in to Congress than the average American is. They are here in DC working internships on Capitol Hill and at organizations that in one way or another deal with Congress. A few students observed that the congressional budget process had started. Others mentioned that Congress had recently voted on a continuing resolution (CR) and that each chamber had passed a budget resolution. All true.
But, I prodded, “Why are we voting on a CR when we are starting the budget process? And why was there talk of passing two budget resolutions this year?”
A brief period of silence ensued, and then we collectively began to lay out the scope of the mess: Fiscal year (FY) 2025 began on October 1, 2024, but Congress did not adopt a budget for the year or pass individual appropriations. Instead, it muddled through by extending the previous year’s spending laws and then passed a CR to get through September 2025. Last week, it agreed to a FY2025 budget resolution, nearly a year after the legal deadline.
Not surprisingly, the FY2026 budget process is behind schedule. The president has not submitted his budget. Neither chamber has passed a FY2026 budget resolution. Further confusion flows from the cancellation of contracts and the downsizing of the federal workforce by the Department of Government Efficiency. Should appropriators set spending levels that assume the terminations stick? And what should they do with the budgetary authority previously given to agencies for funding that has been canceled?
All the more distressing is that the odds are good, Yuval Levin notes, that if Congress manages to use reconciliation deal it is highly likely it will make our nation’s deficits and debt even worse.
This is the biggest federal budget mess I have seen in my nearly three decades of watching Congress. Regular order has utterly collapsed. One student asked a question that may well have been on the minds of much of my class: Why are they doing things this way?
Why, indeed?
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-Kevin
It's quite a mess, isn't it.