It looks like there is renewed interest among some Senators for biennial budgeting — that is, budgeting and appropriating for the federal government on a 2-year calendar instead of an annual calendar. The Senate Budget Committee held a hearing yesterday on the topic, and both Chairman Conrad and Ranking Member Sessions seems quite interested in submitting legislation to the Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction that would include, among other budget process changes, provisions for biennial budgeting . Two other biennial budgeting bills (S. 211 and S. 1274) are also floating around the Senate right now.
This is an idea that has been kicking around Congress for decades, and it has a very simple allure: if the budget and appropriations process only happened once per Congress, not only would there be more time to craft the appropriations bills, but there also would be an entire session of Congress in which no such bills had to be produced, allowing for better oversight and an overall reduction in the appropriations workload. Similarly, agencies would benefit from a 2-year perspective, as all three budgetary phases (development, execution, and auditing) would overlap less, allowing each to receive more careful consideration.
Count me as a skeptic. Five quick points, two big picture and three mechanical:
1) The institutional structure is probably not the problem. Everyone keeps saying that the current budget and appropriations process is broken. But fundamentally, the difficulty with the current process is ideological; it’s a political problem. People disagree on how much total money the federal government should spend, and to what priorities that money should be distributed. Yes, the Senate floor moves slowly and, yes, the committee calendars are quite crowded from February to July, but I’m not sure expanding the time available would remedy that. Part of the politics at this point relies on the idea of looming deadlines forcing concessions; if you move those deadlines back, you are just as likely to see the gamesmanship expand to fill that space as you are to see it remedy the problem. And thus you might end up with the appropriations process taking up more time than it previously did, and sucking the political oxygen out of an even greater portion of the calendar.
And look, I’m certainly not one to tell you that institutions don’t matter. Quite the opposite. But in this case, people are looking at the wrong institutions. The appropriations bills are hardly different than other legislation; in fact, they have some institutional advantages over regular legislation in terms of their ability to move through the chambers. The only thing that makes them different is that, unlike regular legislation that stands or falls against the status quo, if the appropriations bills don’t pass, the status quo shifts to shutdown. If your concern is that the appropriations bills get bogged down and eat up too much of the legislative calendar, then your concerns are bigger than the appropriations bills; it becomes a question of anti-majoritarian rules in the Senate, or inter-chamber gridlock, etc. All of which largely return us to an ideological fight. None of which disappear under biennial budgeting.
2) Biennial budgeting would probably raise the stakes. Presumably, the intensity of the political fight over a biennial budget resolution and any biennial appropriations bills would be pretty big. If you think the current, annual process has too much brinkmanship, what would the biennial process look like as the fiscal 2-year deadline approached? After all, it would be the only chance for Members elected to a given Congress to put their mark on regular appropriations legislation. Ditto for the lobbyist and interest groups, executive branch agencies, and the President. It’s hard to imagine it not becoming a crisis point. And without the threat of next year’s budget season starting, you’d have one less reason to end the standoff.
3) It might just spill over into an increase in supplementals. If you try to plan 30-months out, as the biennial process would force agencies to do, there’s going to be a lot of noise in the forecast. Which means that Congress will be faced with two choices: give the President / OMB / agency heads wider latitude in the off-year budgets, or write a lot more supplemental and emergency appropriations Acts than under the current process. Neither choice is great, but the latter is particularly worrisome; if the point is to streamline appropriations and save time/energy, moving supplemental bills through both chambers is a serious drag on any efficiency gains.
4) What would the calendar look like? Right now the president submits his budget in February for the fiscal year that starts in October. If you kept that but made it a 2-year system, then you wouldn’t gain any time on the front end; you’d still have to have it done by September 30. All the potential gains would be in the out-year. So we’d almost certainly see as much omnibus legislation and brinkmanship as we currently see, all else equal. And probably more because the outcome would be twice as important. Another option would be to make the 2-years funded by any Congress include the first year of the following Congress; in effect, the current Congress would not need to do any appropriations bills until October 1 of the second session. But this has problems too. It leaves the process looming over the entire Congress, and places the deadline right in front of the election. Second, it might encourage Members to run out the clock if political advantage was waiting in the next Congress; with the stakes so high, it might make delay until after the election and start of the new Congress very attractive.
5) What would be biennial? The budget and appropriations process has at least three components that could be made biennial. First is the authorization process. Would the Defense authorization bill go biennial? Second is the budget resolution. Would it be a single, biennial resolution? Or perhaps a single action that made two annual resolutions at once? Finally, would the appropriations all become 2-year appropriations, or would it be the two separate annual appropriations, one for each of two years? Any combination of these systems could plausibly work, but it’s not clear which would be best.
