Congress looks at ways to fix budget process
WASHINGTON -- The last time Congress passed all of its spending bills by the Oct. 1 deadline, Seinfeld was on television and people were dancing to the "Macarena."
For the 14th year in a row, Congress missed the deadline for the fiscal year that began Saturday — as it did last year, passing eight stopgap spending measures that often brought the government within days or hours of shutting down.
Today, just four days into the 2012 fiscal year, the House will vote on the second "continuing resolution" to keep the government open — but only through Nov. 18.
And with Congress dancing dangerously close to default in August as it debated an increase in the debt limit, even members of Congress are concluding that its purse strings have become so hopelessly tangled that only a powerful deficit reduction "supercommittee" can untie them.
"It used to be that one of the ways Congress was judged was the number of appropriations they passed by the end of the fiscal year," said Stan Collender, a budget expert and partner at Qorvis Communications. "Now we say it's a success when Congress avoids a government shutdown. Talk about decreased expectations."
Today, the Senate Budget Committee will hold a hearing on ways to improve the federal budget process. The House had similar hearings last month, and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., says he hopes to have a package of reforms ready by the end of the year.
"When members of Congress don't want to confront the difficult policy decisions, they start talking about process, and we may be in that phase now," said Roy Meyers, a political science professor at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County.
Some of the specific proposals to fix the budgeting process that Congress could see this year:
•A two-year budget. Under current law, the president presents a budget every February — and Congress is supposed to pass it by July. That rarely happens. Moving the cycle to every two years would allow more time to get it done, said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., who wrote supercommittee members last week urging them to recommend the proposal.
Biennial budgeting will "give us the first year of a Congress to pass a budget, and the second year to do oversight and accountability," she said.
Ryan supports the concept. "What Congress basically does is spend all of its time spending, and very little time overseeing whether that spending is effective or not," he said.
Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., a former skeptic of the idea, said Congress has only passed a budget in an election year once in the last decade, so a two-year budget, "is in effect what Congress has been doing anyway."
•A joint budget resolution. Currently, the House and Senate pass the budget as what's called a "concurrent resolution" — a measure that deals with the internal operation of Congress. Making it a joint resolution would give it the force of law, requiring the president's signature.
"What we're trying to do is give teeth to the process, so we actually have a process," Ryan said. Getting the president on board early could "front-load" the difficult decisions, staving off contentious battles later on, he said.
