President Trump signed the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2019 on August 2nd. The bill sets discretionary spending caps (limits on annual appropriations for the day-to-day operations of government – except for mandatory spending on programs like Medicare) for fiscal years 2020 and 2021.
 
The legislation implements a budget deal that congressional leaders and the Trump Administration reached on July 22nd, and it avoids a $125 billion cut in FY20 from current spending levels. Over FY20-FY21, the bill adds $325 billion above prior discretionary cap levels. The bill also suspends the debt limit through July 31, 2021, well past the next election.
 
The Bipartisan Budget Act may help avoid major short-term battles over spending and federal debt. But there are many key budget deadlines and potential fiscal fireworks to look forward to through the duration of this two-year deal.
 
Senate Action on FY20 Spending
 
The Senate held back on taking any action on FY20 appropriations bills while it awaited the spending deal. The Senate Appropriations Committee (SAC) has not taken up any FY20 bill so far this year. In comparison, the first FY19 appropriations bill was approved by SAC on May 24, 2018.
 
Senate inaction on appropriations will change in September when SAC Chairman Shelby (R-AL) and Vice Chairman Leahy (D-VT) start moving their bills. Indications are that the first three bills out of the gate will be Defense, Labor-Health and Human Services-Education, and Energy-Water Development, which will likely be considered in subcommittee and committee the week of September 9th. These three bills will likely be bundled together as a single bill to be considered on the Senate floor. Bundling the FY19 Defense and the Labor-HHS-Education bills was a formula for success for the Senate last year (the combined bill passed 85-7), so look for a repeat this year.
 
Next Steps for the House
 
The House already approved 10 out of 12 FY20 appropriations bills, but the bills were based on spending totals there were $15 billion higher for nondefense spending and $5 billion lower for defense spending than the totals in the budget deal. This means that the House Democrats will have to lower their expectations for nondefense spending in the final FY20 appropriations bills.
 
But don’t look for the House to do much before it starts appropriations negotiations with the Senate. The House won’t go back and revise the bills they’ve already passed. In closed-door negotiations this fall, the House and Senate will agree on total spending levels for each individual bill, and those levels will force the House to make nondefense cuts to match nondefense spending allowed by the deal.
 
The two appropriations bills not yet adopted by the House are the Legislative Branch bill and the Homeland Security bill. These bills were approved the House Appropriations Committee but never made it to the floor. It’s unlikely the House will try to move Homeland Security under any circumstances since that will continue to be caught up in contentious disagreements over immigration policy and Republicans’ desire to fund the President’s border wall request. The Legislative Branch bill is a priority for House Majority Leader Hoyer (D-MD), so there is an outside chance that will be brought to the floor. This bill was delayed earlier this summer due to a dispute over funding a pay increase for Members of Congress, which will need to be worked out before it moves forward. The House may simply wait to consider Legislative Branch funding as part of a final agreement on appropriations.
 
Keeping the Government Open
 
The budget deal significantly reduces the threat of a government shutdown this fall. However, it’s unlikely that any appropriations bills will be enacted by October 1, the beginning of FY20. We’ll likely see a continuing resolution (CR) adopted by October 1 to fund government programs at FY19 levels while negotiations proceed on the FY20 bills. The length of the CR is to be determined, but a reasonable guess is that it will last until mid-November, with an extension into mid-December possible if agreements on the FY20 bills haven’t yet been reached.
 
Also, while the chance of a shutdown is significantly reduced, it is not zero. Political disputes over policy (immigration is again a prime candidate) are still possible and could be tied to congressional (or Presidential) support for a CR. However, the odds of a shutdown are probably less than 10 percent, especially since Members of Congress still feel the sting from the 35-day partial shutdown that ran from December 22, 2018 until January 25, 2019.
 
Final Decisions on FY20 Bills
 
The budget deal sets up House-Senate Appropriations Committee negotiations this fall. Coming to agreement on numbers for individual appropriations, even with the House needing to scale back $15 billion from its levels, shouldn’t be too hard. In the past, the hardest differences to resolve have been over policy provisions in the appropriations bills.
 
The deal agreed to between congressional leaders and the Administration includes a line that says “relative to the FY 2019 regular appropriations Acts, there will be no poison pills, additional new riders, additional CHIMPS [Changes in Mandatory Programs], or other changes in policy or conventions that allow for higher spending levels, or any non-appropriations measures unless agreed to on a bipartisan basis by the four leaders with the approval of the President.”
 
This part of the agreement essentially means that no controversial policy provisions can be added to final FY20 appropriations. This should ease negotiations on policy provisions, but there is no guarantee. Within the minutia of appropriations bill language, there can be disagreements on, for example, what constitutes a “poison pill,” or whether a substantive change to an existing rider to reflect new information constitutes a “new rider” (a rider is a policy provision in an appropriations bill). Only one out of the five parties to the budget deal (Democratic and Republican leaders of both the House and Senate and the President) can potentially veto any policy provision that differs from FY19 bill language. That will not sit well with certain members of the House and Senate who have been advocating for policy changes in front of their constituents all year.
 
Immigration provisions are an example of where negotiations could potentially go awry. Will Democratic members of the House accept a bill that does not place greater constraints on the President’s ability to move money to fund a border wall? If rank-and-file Democratic House members decide not to support final appropriations due to the lack of stronger policy provisions, and Republican support is lost due to higher spending levels, the chance of passing the full slate of FY20 appropriations in the House grows dimmer. The outcome in this case may be a full-year continuing resolution for some agencies.
 
What to Expect for FY 2021
 
The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2019 implements a two-year agreement covering discretionary spending levels both FY20 and FY21. In theory, this means that major budget battles can be avoided next year – an election year. But, as is the case with FY20 bills, disputes over policy provisions can get in the way of smooth passage of FY21 bills.
 
Presidential politics could also have a big effect. Trump’s interests may be served by refusing to sign appropriations bills and pushing instead for a continuing resolution that goes past the election, or even the inauguration. Certainly, that would appeal to fiscal conservatives who believe the spending levels in the budget deal are too high and who hope that a second Trump term and Republican gains in Congress will lead to spending cuts. Trump could calculate that a long-term CR will solidify his support among those conservatives.
 
The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2019 raises expectations that the FY20 and FY21 appropriations bills will be enacted with a minimum of drama. The Act does reduce the likelihood of a shutdown and increases the chance that most, if not all, agencies receive their FY20 funding before the end of the calendar year. However, many opportunities for budget drama still exist. Federal agencies and those who do business with them need to be prepared for any possibility.

​President Trump on Wednesday attempted to sweeten negotiations with congressional leadership on ending the partial government shutdown. He handed out M&M’s, Baby Ruth bars, and Butterfinger bars at a White House meeting to discuss how to end the shutdown.

The President’s candy is the only sweet part of this shutdown. Everything else is sour. For example:

• 800,000 federal employees and their families are trying to get by without paychecks. Many are on the lower end of the income scale and live paycheck-to-paycheck.
• Thousands of federal contractors and other private businesses that rely on the federal government are hurt in a variety of ways, including decreased revenue, furloughed contract workers, and inability to access government services such as reviews of initial public offerings by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
• Many food inspections by the Food and Drug Administration are on hiatus.
• A significant number of TSA Agents have called out of work.
• Millions of Americans potentially face eviction from federally-supported housing if the shutdown drags on.
• The cost of the shutdown to the U.S. economy is about $1.2 billion per week (a small percentage of overall GDP, but to most people $1.2 billion is still real money).
• Fitch Ratings suggests that the breakdown in U.S. fiscal policymaking embodied by the shutdown could affect the Nation’s credit rating. The next test will be the debt limit, which comes into play in March and will require Washington to reach an agreement to avoid a default crisis later in 2019.
• Policy makers are at a complete impasse in talks to end this mess.

One possible way to end the shutdown is for President Trump to exercise emergency authority to construct the border wall he demands. An approach the White House has been considering involves authority to use military construction money in the context of a “national emergency” that “requires use of the armed forces” (section 2808 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code).

If he makes an end-run around Congress to find money for the wall, his next step could be to signal willingness to sign legislation to reopen government. It is questionable, however, whether the President has the legal authority to use a “national emergency” as the basis for moving money appropriated for other purposes to border wall construction. It’s certainly unprecedented to use military construction funds for this type of project. But he could make that decision, move on from the shutdown in the short term, and let the courts settle the legal issues.

Two things are likely to happen if he plays the “national emergency” card. First, Congress will object to it as an abuse of executive power. Certainly, Democrats will complain loudly and take legislative steps in the House and judicial steps in the courts to block the action. However, if he uses military funds, Democrats won’t be the only ones complaining. Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX), the Ranking Republican Member of the House Armed Services Committee, said that he is “against using Department of Defense dollars for any other purpose.” Other Republicans are certain to be against the move based on opposition to repurposing of military funds and because many have direct interests in military construction projects already approved by Congress.

A second outcome of a “national emergency” declaration, especially if it survives legal challenge, is the precedent that it will set. In this case, Republicans who support the border wall need to be careful of what they wish for. If President Trump can stretch a “national emergency” declaration to justify funding his signature domestic policy issue – illegal migration across the southern border – what is to prevent a future President from using the same authority to go around Congress? It’s not impossible to imagine a President Warren-Harris-Sanders-Booker-Fill-in-the-Blank considering a “national emergency” to advance, for example, climate change policies.

There is an old-fashioned way out of this shutdown, and that is for policy makers to get serious about compromising and reach an agreement where both sides can claim victory. The scope of such an agreement may need to go beyond border security or even broader immigration issues. Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) has offered an interesting suggestion when he said “one way to make it bigger would be, ‘Let’s talk about next year’s spending numbers as part of this.”

The discretionary spending limits that are set in law will drop dramatically in FY 2020. Absent a change in law, the defense limits will be reduced by $71 billion (11 percent) and the nondefense limits will drop by $55 billion (9 percent) relative to FY 2019. Both parties know that the FY 2020 numbers are unworkable and that a new budget agreement will be necessary. Unfortunately, it could take weeks to negotiate a new budget agreement, while there is an immediate need to end the shutdown.

​Until there’s a resolution to the shutdown, there will continue to be M&M, Baby Ruth, and Butterfinger candy wrappers falling out of overstuffed National Park trash bins. That’s not so sweet.

​Congress returns for a post-election session on November 13, just one week after Election Day. The lame-duck session’s to-do list includes finishing FY 2019 appropriations. For federal agencies that receive funding in seven of the 12 annual appropriations bills, operations are currently funded by a stop-gap continuing resolution (CR) until December 7th. The CR provides funding for those agencies at FY 2018 levels.
 
Five FY 2019 appropriations bills have been enacted thus far:

• Defense
• Energy and Water Development
• Labor-HHS-Education
• Legislative Branch
• Military Construction and Veterans Affairs

 
The seven outstanding FY 2019 bills are:

• Agriculture and Rural Development
• Commerce, Justice, and Science
• Financial Services and General Government
• Homeland Security
• Interior and Environment
• State, Foreign Operations
• Transportation and Housing and Urban Development

 
A conference committee met in September to work on a package that combined four of the seven bills: Agriculture, Financial Services, Interior, and Transportation/HUD. The conference committee made significant progress toward completing this package during August and September, but it was delayed mainly due to legislative riders and other contentious provisions in two of the bills – Financial Services and Interior.
 
By the end of September, as House members left Washington for the mid-term campaign, it appeared that one of two main roadblocks to completion of the four-bill package was a provision in the Financial Services bill that set aside $585 million for a “Fund for America’s Kids and Grandkids.” This Fund, championed by House Chairman Financial Services Chairman Tom Graves (R-GA), would prevent the money from being spent until the Federal Government reached a zero budget deficit or a surplus. Democrats cried foul over the provision, saying that it was a gimmick to reduce spending in the bill below the subcommittee’s budget allocation, thereby cutting nondefense spending below the level agreed to in the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018. Neither side budged from their positions on this issue.
 
The other roadblock came from House Leadership. Leadership prioritized the completion of another appropriations measure, a two-bill package that included the Defense and Labor-HHS-Education bills, as well as the CR. This measure was on a parallel track with the four-bill package (the conference committees for both held their official public meetings on the same day), but Leadership wanted to ensure that nothing stood in the way of completing the Defense, Labor-HHS-Education, CR package and avoiding a government shutdown. Completion of the four-bill package the same week as the other package became too heavy a lift, especially when President Trump was going back and forth on the whether to veto appropriations bills over his border wall funding request.
 
What will happen next with the seven remaining appropriations bills? Much will depend on the election results and the interest of House and Senate members in proceeding with the bills when they return for the lame-duck session on November 13.
 
The four-bill package has the clearest path to the finish line, although it is not guaranteed. Most of the negotiations have already been completed, and the House and Senate Appropriations Committees very much want to finish the work on this package. If negotiations stall on, for example, the “Fund for America’s Kids and Grandkids” provision in Financial Services, a decision could be made to pull that bill out of the package and proceed with the other three bills. Agriculture and Transportation/HUD are essentially complete, and my sense is that Interior is not far behind.
 
On the other hand, it is quite possible that Leadership will decide to further delay action on appropriations, including the four-bill package, until the border wall fight plays out.
 
The three remaining bills – Commerce-Justice-Science, Homeland Security, and State-Foreign Operations – have a more difficult path to completion. The Homeland Security bill funds the President’s border wall and other immigration enforcement activities. Commerce-Justice-Science could get caught up in debate over the DOJ Special Counsel investigation, as well as immigration issues. State-Foreign Operations includes several contentious issues such as funding restrictions on international family planning programs and funding that could get caught up in the immigration battle. If President Trump follows through on recent statements relating to cutting off foreign aid to El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, that debate will play out on the State-Foreign Operations bill.
 
These three bills have a good chance of being placed in a CR extension that goes into early 2019. There is also a chance that one or more of the bills will be placed in a full-year CR, which would provide level funding through next September 30. CRs that extend funding through the end of the fiscal year are more likely if control over one or both houses of Congress flips due to the mid-term election, as shown by two recent examples.
 
Following the 2010 mid-term election, Republicans won control of the House while Democrats maintained narrow control of the Senate.  The lame-duck Congress passed a CR through March 4, 2011, giving responsibility to the 112th Congress to make final decisions on FY 2011 funding. The 112th Congress ultimately decided to fund 11 of the 12 annual appropriations bills under a full-year CR (a regular annual Defense bill was passed at the same time as the CR).
 
When the House and Senate flipped to Democratic control following the 2006 election, the Republican-controlled, lame-duck 109th Congress kicked final decisions over to the 110th Congress with a CR to mid-February 2007. The Democratic-controlled new Congress passed a full-year CR covering nine of the eleven appropriations bills. Two regular bills – Defense and Homeland Security – had been enacted by the previous Congress (there were only 11 regular appropriations bills in the 109th Congress; the 110th Congress reorganized the Appropriations Committees, resulting in the current 12-bill grouping).
 
Clearly, the path for FY 2019 appropriations will depend on next month’s election results and how Members of Congress react to the results. If Republicans keep both the House and Senate, there is a good chance that most remaining appropriations bills will move by the end of December. The Homeland Security bill, which will be subject to a contentious border wall debate, may not be one of those bills. Under most scenarios, Republicans would need some Democratic support in the Senate to pass border wall funding, and that support is questionable at best. Republicans may choose to include Homeland Security in a CR rather than pass a bill without the President’s wall funding request.
 
If Republicans lose the House, which appears likely based on current polling, lame-duck Republican members may not have the appetite to attempt completion of any appropriations bills. Or, they could move a three-bill or four-bill minibus since negotiations on that package are nearly complete. Regardless of which path they intend to choose, House Republicans will focus first on passing border wall money, and that battle may deplete enthusiasm to get anything else done during the lame-duck session.
 
Another factor influencing appropriations decisions will be the House Leadership elections taking place soon after the House returns. If Democrats perform more poorly than expected in the elections, Democratic leaders such as Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Steny Hoyer (D-MD) may see more vigorous challenges to their positions. On the Republican side, there will be new leadership regardless of the election results since Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) retires at the end of the current Congress. Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is positioned to take Ryan’s place, but he is watching his right flank for conservative challenges. McCarthy is taking center stage on the push for wall funding to shore up conservative support. The strategy for completing appropriations bills will likely be caught up in Leadership election politics.
 
Yet another wildcard is President Trump. He will push hard for border wall funding and will be unlikely to throw his support behind completing other unfinished appropriations until that fight is over – and is decided in his favor. If Republicans suffer significant election losses, he may become even more dug in on his positions relating to the wall and other contentious provisions in appropriations bills.
 
Finally, there’s a possibility that we won’t know which party controls Congress until well after Election Day. If the margin of control in the House or the Senate is close, and several seats are subject to recounts or run-off elections, the lame-duck Congress may put appropriations decisions in a holding pattern until the results become clear. Under this scenario, the odds of all remaining bills being included in a lengthy CR extension increase.
 
The bottom line is that there are many forks in the road to completing FY 2019 appropriations bills. The final path will (hopefully) become clearer after the November 6 election. 

​The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 established the Joint Select Committee on Budget and Appropriations Process Reform to consider changes in the congressional budget process. Following many appropriations cycles of repeated continuing resolutions, threatened or actual government shutdowns, and huge catch-all appropriations bills, the Committee is tasked with determining how the budget and appropriations process can be improved.
 
The Committee is reviewing several budget process options, including a shift in the start of the federal fiscal year, a revised make-up of the House and Senate Budget Committees, and limitations on budget gimmicks. In addition, a switch from annual budgets to biennial budgets receives significant attention.
 
Biennial budgeting for the federal government is an idea that has been around for decades. Many advocates for biennial budgeting look to the example of states that have biennial budgeting in place. Over 40 states had biennial budgets in the 1940s, although the number is now down to 19 according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. States have made a shift to annual budgeting as more legislatures move toward annual sessions.
 
Senator Michael Enzi (R-WY), Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, proposes a biennial budget plan that is catching some interest. The Enzi plan would divide the 12 annual appropriations bills into two groups of six, with one group to be considered in odd-numbered years and the other group to be considered in even numbered years. Each appropriations bill would fund programs for two fiscal years.
 
Biennial advocates such as Sen. Enzi believe that making budget decisions every two years will give Congress more time to perform oversight over agencies, more time to get its appropriations work completed, and will improve long-term budget planning. But these notions are based on either wishful thinking or are not supported by facts.
 
Here are five reasons biennial budgeting should be viewed with skepticism.
 
There will be less oversight, not more. An effective congressional oversight tool is the annual review of federal agencies’ budgets and the enactment of annual appropriations bills. So far in 2018, the House Appropriations Committee has held 74 hearings. These hearings provide an opportunity for Congress to put agency heads on the record. While the stated purpose of most appropriations hearings is to review agency budgets, these hearings cover a much broader range of topics since policy and management issues inevitable come up.
 
Appropriations oversight also involves more than holding hearings. The committees study annual budget justifications prepared by agencies, receive briefings from agency officials, and hold officials accountable through directives included in bills and their accompanying reports. Appropriations bills and reports include a multitude of reporting requirements directed at the Executive Branch. Many of these reporting requirements are new each year or change from the prior year depending on new information and agency actions. Annual appropriations bills are an important tool used to enforce these directives – an agency may find that Congress is less willing to accommodate its budget request in the following year if it ignores an appropriations directive.
 
A shift to two-year budgeting weakens these oversight tools. The Executive Branch would have more of an incentive to delay responding to appropriations oversight in the hope that Congress focuses its attention elsewhere in two years. Matters that require a quick response from agencies may languish if agencies believe it’s in their interest to stall. And, while biennial budget advocates are quick to claim that there will be more time for congressional oversight during the second year, the appropriations committees will lack the enforcement tool of an imminent funding bill to encourage an agency’s cooperation. Further, for other congressional committees that exercise oversight, there will be the same amount of time available for oversight regardless of whether appropriations are on a one-year or two-year cycle.
 
Budget plans will be outdated. With an annual budget process, federal agencies typically start developing the Administration’s budget request 16 to 18 months prior to the beginning of the fiscal year. By June, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) usually gives agencies budget guidance for preparing the budget request to Congress that is due to be submitted the following February and enacted (in an ideal world) by October 1.
 
A lot can change within the current 16-month lead time, and, with biennial budgeting, that lead time becomes 28 months for year two of the budget. Add to that the fact that budgets are meant to allocate the resources an agency needs for the full fiscal year; therefore, biennial budgeting asks agencies to project their needs up to 40 months into the future. OMB policy makers, who typically make decisions on agency budgets in November, would need to use their crystal balls to foretell what funding is needed up to 35 months ahead.
 
It’s already a challenge for the Executive Branch and Congress to project resource requirements so many months before the funding is used by agencies. Adding another 12 months to this process would significantly reduce the reliability of the budgets agencies depend on to efficiently and effectively run their programs.
 
More frequent supplemental appropriations bills are likely. Outdated budget plans increase the likelihood that Congress will take up supplemental appropriations bills more frequently. Supplemental bills add money to programs that run short of funding for any reason. For example, supplemental bills have been used to provide more resources to disaster relief and recovery activities in the wake of natural disasters, although any funding shortfall could be part of a supplemental bill.
 
More supplemental appropriations diminish, at least in part, one key argument in support of biennial budgeting – that Congress will have more time to devote to other tasks, such as oversight, in years Congress isn’t working on appropriations (“off years”). However, some will say that even if biennial budgeting leads to additional supplemental appropriations bills each off year, the advantages of biennial budgeting, including the elimination of the need to consider regular appropriations bills in the off years, will outweigh the time and energy spent on supplemental bills.
 
Biennial advocates should be careful what they wish for. A supplemental bill in an off year will likely include funding adjustments for most or all 12 regular appropriations bills. The supplemental will be a Christmas tree that most members of the Appropriations Committees and Congress will want to decorate with their favorite ornament (funding for a favored program or inclusion of policy-related legislation). The bill may rival – perhaps not in overall size but in complexity – the omnibus appropriations bills that are criticized for being unwieldy and lacking transparency.
 
Adding supplemental funding for programs that are short on money will create another thorny issue. Presumably, Congress will have already appropriated the maximum-allowed funding levels for the off year based on spending caps that enforce overall discretionary spending. Congress will face a choice if it acts to increase funding for some programs: it can cut spending in other programs and move those dollars to programs that need the money, or it can evade the spending caps through budget gimmicks (such as “cuts” that don’t result in any actual budget savings) that get around the spending caps. Real program cuts that reduce lower-priority activities to free up funds for higher priorities are the better option for honest budgeting, but cuts will come with political landmines since there will always be a constituency supporting a program that is cut. Many in Congress will have an incentive to avoid the tough politics and look instead for budget gimmicks. Such incentives may be especially strong for congressional leaders who want to protect their party’s members from politically difficult cuts in an election year.
 
Another negative factor relating to supplemental bills is the potential for less transparency. Most recent supplementals have followed a truncated process where the bill doesn’t move through the Appropriations Committee. Instead, a bill is drafted and introduced by committee leadership and heads straight to the floor. One consequence of this approach is that Committee members have less opportunity for input. Another consequence is that there is no committee report to accompany the bill. As previously mentioned, committee reports and the directives they contain are important oversight tools. While there’s no reason supplementals have to shortcut the regular committee process, there’s plenty of precedent for doing so with supplemental bills if Congress wants to push a bill through quickly for any reason at all.
 
A “6 and 6” biennial plan (the Enzi plan) will have unintended consequences. The Enzi plan, which specifies that two-year funding will be appropriated in six bills in year one and in the other six in year two, raises a unique set of concerns.
 
Sen. Enzi’s proposal would specify the following appropriations bills to be considered in the odd-numbered years: 1) Energy and Water; 2) Financial Services; 3) Homeland Security; 4) Interior, Environment; 5) Labor-Health and Human Services-Education; and 6) State-Foreign Operations. The bills in even-numbered years are: 1) Agriculture; 2) Commerce, Justice, Science; 3) Defense; 4) Legislative Branch; 5) Military Construction, Veterans Affairs; and 6) Transportation, Housing and Urban Development. Therefore, half of the bills will become “election year bills,” while the other half will be more insulated from election year politics.
 
Enzi’s arrangement makes some sense since the bills that are currently the most difficult to pass (for example, Labor-HHS-Education) come up in non-election years. It also places two of the currently most popular and bipartisan bills – Defense and Military Construction, Veterans Affairs – in election years. Perhaps that’s a smart move since election-year politics can complicate Congress’s ability to complete appropriations.
 
However, good politics in 2018 doesn’t necessarily mean good politics in the future. National priorities and political control of Congress and the White House change over time. Bills that have bipartisan support now may not in the future. The Homeland Security bill is a good example. For several years after the bill was created in 2003, it had wide bipartisan support. In 2018, it’s one of the most controversial and difficult appropriations bills due to immigration issues, including the President’s request for a border wall. The Enzi plan would increase election year political pressures on the bills considered in even-numbered years, so even if the bills may be popular and bipartisan today, there will be election year incentives for Congress to find new political battles to fight on those bills.
 
The Enzi plan also locks into statutory law which appropriations bills come up each year, making the timing of appropriations bills difficult to adapt to changing political and other circumstances. The law would need to be amended any time Congress wanted to change the timing of any bill from one biennial year to another.
 
Biennial budgeting does nothing to fix the real problem. Proponents of budget process reform lament the absence of a working budget and appropriations process. They view process changes as increasing the possibility that budgets will be completed on time with fewer and shorter continuing resolutions, government shutdowns will be avoided, and massive end-of-year omnibus bills will be eliminated.
 
Those would be all great outcomes, but process change won’t address the real problem, which is the lack of political will to prioritize a functioning budget process over political gamesmanship. The past two decades have seen a sharp deterioration of Congress’s willingness to place appropriations for government operations – a constitutional requirement – before politics. Both political parties see and seize opportunities to use the appropriations process to score political points. The result is that compromise becomes harder and hyper-partisanship takes over. A significant reason for this trend is that there is much less incentive for House Members to strike deals across the aisle when those Members are elected to districts that are drawn to ensure safe majorities for one party or the other. Attempts to find a middle ground and to compromise with the other side lead to primary challenges from the far right or the far left, further driving the ideology of the parties to the extremes.
 
Former House Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D-WI) testified in July on this point (as well as on why biennial budgeting is a bad idea) before the Joint Select Committee on Budget and Appropriations Process Reform. He spoke on how bipartisanship helped ensure that all appropriations bills were finished on time when he chaired the Appropriations Committee in 1994, and how gerrymandered districts kill incentives to compromise. He recommended that the Committee “recognize that the main problem is not procedural, it is political. Little will change on the deficit without a change in attitude.” He asked the Committee to “remember your basic problem is not the budget process. The budget process is simply one example of how our political system has crippled the legislative system.”
 
I hope congressional leaders and policymakers considering changes to the budget process will agree.

On Tuesday, June 5, the Trump Administration sent Congress a revised appropriations rescission proposal to replace the rescission proposal it sent in early May. The Administration hopes that the revisions will earn the support of enough Republican lawmakers to ensure approval in the House and Senate.
 
Rescissions take away money that has already been approved by Congress. The Administration submitted the rescissions recommendations under procedures set up by the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 that allow the plan to pass the Senate by a simple majority vote, rather than a 60-vote majority that is necessary for most other legislation.
 
The original rescission proposal from May was billed by the Administration as saving $15.4 billion, but the number is shrinking. The $15.4 billion may be off by a rounding error – the actual sum of all the cuts is $15.3 billion. Recently, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated $15.2 billion based on scrubbing the numbers for the House bill based on the President’s plan (H.R. 3, the “Spending Cuts to Expired and Unnecessary Programs Act”). With the June 5 revisions, the plan is now down to $14.7 billion (using CBO’s estimating assumptions).
 
“The HISTORIC Rescissions Package we’ve proposed would cut $15,000,000,000 in Wasteful Spending! We are getting our government back on track.” – President Trump tweet, June 5, 2018 

But the plan’s budget impact is still well overstated if you claim it saves $15 billion. This is the amount of reduced budget authority, which is permission given by Congress for agencies to commit to spend money. While most budget authority provided through congressional appropriations results in spending (or “outlays” – money withdrawn from the Treasury to pay the government’s commitments), some budget authority sits around and is never spent. There can be many reasons for this, including the simple fact that the money isn’t needed any longer because of changed circumstances. Most of the proposed rescissions are to budget authority that will never be used and, therefore, don’t reduce outlays.
 
Outlays are the proper measure to use for budget savings and to assess this proposal’s impact on the budget deficit and debt. The outlay savings in the Administration’s rescission proposal are minuscule in the context of the entire federal budget.
 
For H.R. 3, CBO estimated that $15.2 billion in rescissions would save only $1.3 billion in budget outlays through FY 2028. That is merely 0.0021% of the $60.7 trillion CBO expects will be spent in total by the federal government from FY 2018 through FY 2028.
 
The revisions sent to Congress on June 5 don’t do much to change this analysis. The revisions reduce budget authority savings by $515 million and outlay savings through FY 2028 (using CBO’s previous estimates as a base) by $159 million. This nets to outlay savings of $1.1 billion (0.0018% of federal spending through FY 2028).
 
The Administration’s new plan changes the original rescission proposal in four notable areas (in addition to some minor technical changes):

1. A rescission was removed that would have eliminated $252 million appropriated in FY 2015 to fight the Ebola virus in Africa. The recent Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo led to reconsideration of that rescission. 
2. A $10 million rescission to EPA water quality research and support grants was eliminated. This rescission had raised concerns from Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), a swing vote in the Senate. 
3. The proposal no longer includes a $107 million rescission of FY 2013 appropriations for Hurricane Sandy recovery and relief. Lawmakers from New York and New Jersey questioned the merit of this cut. 
4. Two proposals totaling $134 million were removed because of a U.S. Government Accountability Office ruling that rescissions to Federal Highway Administration projects were not allowed under the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act. 

​Left unchanged is a $7 billion rescission (almost half of the total amount proposed to be rescinded) to two parts of the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). While Democrats have directed much criticism toward the CHIP cut, both OMB and CBO agree that the proposal would have zero effect on spending for children’s health insurance. Nevertheless, many lawmakers believe that the political optics of “looking to tear apart the bipartisan Children’s Health Insurance Program” (Senate Minority Leader Schumer, May 7, 2018 Facebook post) are bad – even if no children would actually lose health insurance.
 
Political optics aside, another CHIP rescission issue is in the esoteric realm of budgetary accounting. Congress uses CHIP as a bank to finance other programs. Here’s how that works: Congress has a legal cap on the amount of discretionary (annual) appropriations it can approve, but it also is able to spend more on discretionary programs and still be within that cap by finding budgetary offsets. The CHIP rescission is one such offset (a big one). The final FY 2018 appropriations bill (P.L. 115-141) included $6.8 billion in CHIP offsets (with no outlay savings, just as with the current rescission proposal). The offsets meant that $6.8 billion could be spent on other programs. Majorities of both House and Senate Democrats and Republicans voted in favor of the FY18 appropriations bill with these offsets, and in previous fiscal years many lawmakers on both sides of the aisle voted for similar bills with CHIP offsets.
 
If the President’s CHIP rescission proposal is enacted, there will be less money available to offset other spending in future appropriations bills. This may put the squeeze on other discretionary programs, but the actual impact of the CHIP rescissions is far from certain. Some CHIP funds may still be available to use as an offset, other offsets may be found, and the effect of any spending reduction could be softened by spreading it throughout the $600 billion nondefense discretionary budget.
 
The uncertain political and practical ramifications of CHIP rescissions will make it difficult for some Republican lawmakers to support a rescissions bill. There will be little support for the rescission bill from Democrats, so the loss of a small number of Republicans in either the House or Senate would stymie the bill’s passage. If Republican congressional leadership decides to bring the bill to a vote, that will be a good sign that they believe the bill can pass.
 
Whether or not the bill is enacted, the impact of these rescissions should not be measured in budget savings but in their influence on campaign soundbites leading up to the November election.

​Update, Wednesday, June 6: The House Committee on Rules approved a rule this evening that sets up House floor consideration of H.R. 3, the "Spending Cuts to Expired and Unnecessary Programs Act." The rule includes an amendment to conform the bill to the President's June 5 revisions. The Rules Committee action signals that House Republican Leadership believes that the bill has sufficient Republican support to pass the House.

Final fiscal year 2018 appropriations were signed into law on March 23 by President Trump. He was not entirely happy about it. The President referred to the bill as a “ridiculous situation” and vowed never to sign another bill like it. He made these comments even though the White House posted on its website a lengthy list of talking points referring to the bill as a “win for the American people.”

​The White House talking points included several mentions of infrastructure spending in the bill, including the following statements:

"A WIN FOR AMERICAN INFRASTRUCTURE: The omnibus provides robust funding to rebuild our Nation's infrastructure:
     "· The bill provides robust funding for infrastructure.
     "· This includes $635 million in rural broadband and $2 billion to address VA’s maintenance backlog.
     "· The bill also includes substantial funding increases for traditional core infrastructure, such as highways, airports, railways, and waterways.
     "· A significant share of this funding increase is directed to competitive, merit-based infrastructure grant programs with no special advantage to certain projects."

In total, the bill increases nondefense infrastructure spending over last year’s appropriations by $21.2 billion, according to the House Committee on Appropriations. It’s a start on funding the Administration’s infrastructure plan, which called for $200 million in federal funding to leverage $1.5 trillion in funding from all sources to improve the nation’s infrastructure.

Exactly where is the infrastructure spending growth in the final appropriations bill?

Transportation:

Funding for highway projects increases $3.5 billion, including $2.5 billion for a new “Highway Infrastructure Programs” appropriation that is available for various road and bridge projects across the nation.

​High-priority construction at airports receives $1 billion in new appropriations, prioritizing small and rural airports.

The Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) program, which provides targeted grants to communities for transportation infrastructure modernization, has a $1 billion increase over FY 2017, for a total of $1.5 billion.

Rail and transit programs see increases in several areas including transit infrastructure grants (+$834 million), transit capital investment grants (+$232 million), consolidated rail infrastructure and safety improvements (+$525 million – including $250 million for Positive Train Control), a state-of-good-repair program to reduce the repair backlog on rail infrastructure (+$225 million), and Amtrak (+$447 million).

Information technology (IT) infrastructure:

A new rural broadband pilot program in the Department of Agriculture receives $600 million to improve internet access and support economic development, education, and health services in rural communities.

The General Services Administration (GSA) is appropriated $100 million for the IT Modernization Fund authorized by the recently-enacted Modernizing Government Technology Act. The Act authorized $250 million in both FY 2018 and FY 2019 to improve IT and enhance cybersecurity in federal agencies. While the FY 2018 appropriation is less than the authorized amount, it represents a significant amount of money considering the fiscal year is near half over.

The Social Security Administration has a $200 million increase for its IT modernization effort, which will update systems that are in many cases over 30 years old.

In the Department of Commerce, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) receives $7.5 million to update the national broadband availability map to help identify areas in the country that lack adequate broadband service. The bill also includes $8.2 million for NTIA for other broadband programs and allows funding under the Economic Development Administration to be used to support broadband infrastructure.

The Department of Homeland Security’s National Protection and Programs Directorate receives an increase of $54 million over last year, including +$47 million for the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center.

Federal facilities:

The bill includes an infrastructure general provision for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) that appropriates $2 billion for medical facilities ($1 billion for nonrecurring maintenance), minor construction ($425 million), and construction of state extended care facilities ($575 million). The $1 billion medical facilities appropriation, together with a $459 million increase under the VA’s regular Medical Facilities account and a $361 million FY 2018 advance funding increase in last year’s appropriations bill, brings the total FY 2018 increase over last year for VA medical facilities to $1.82 billion.

GSA’s Federal Buildings Fund has a $486 million increase for construction of new federal courthouses and land ports of entry across the country.

Other infrastructure:

Community development funding for state and local infrastructure needs: +$1.9 billion.

Environmental Protection Agency infrastructure funding: +$766 million, provided for the Hazardous Substance Superfund (+$63 million), State and Tribal Assistance Grants (+$650 million for clean and safe drinking water infrastructure), and Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation loans (+$53 million).

Army Corps of Engineers and Bureau of Reclamation water resources projects: +$918 million.

---
Compared to FY 2017 funding levels, the FY 2018 appropriations bill provides an overall increase of $138 billion (+13%) for base discretionary spending (i.e., appropriations subject to the spending limits set in law). Defense programs increase $78 billion (+14%), and nondefense programs increase $60 billion (+12%).

Infrastructure programs, with a $21.2 billion hike, receive 35% of the increase to total nondefense spending – a healthy boost to jump start improvements to the nation’s aging infrastructure. This level of infrastructure spending is likely to hold steady or increase slightly in the next budget cycle, since total FY 2019 nondefense discretionary spending is expected to increase by about 3% based on the spending limits in the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018.

"We'll do a shutdown, and it's worth it for our country. I'd love to see a shutdown if we don't get this stuff taken care of." – President Trump, February 6, 2018
 
At midnight on January 19, government funding lapsed and we had the first federal government shutdown since 2013. Fortunately, the shutdown was brief and mostly happened over a weekend. The impact on government operations and services was minimal. Perhaps more painful than the shutdown was watching the political blame game unleashed in full force.
 
There is very little interest in Congress in another shutdown, but the President’s comment today may indicate that he’s willing to take that step. If so, his views on the subject have changed. The President criticized the shutdown during last month’s budget drama. He also sent a tweet on January 18 that said: “House of Representatives needs to pass Government Funding Bill tonight. So important for our country - our Military needs it!” In spite of what the President said today, a shutdown is unlikely.
 
Most government operations are funded currently under the fourth temporary funding measure – or continuing resolution (CR) – thus far in fiscal year 2018, which began October 1. The current CR expires at midnight, February 8, and a fifth CR will be needed to keep the government’s lights on. This evening, the House voted of 245 to 182 to pass a fifth CR and send it to the Senate.
 
What would a shutdown mean for federal agencies and employees, those who do business with the federal government, and the public at large?
 
Not every federal program is affected by a shutdown. Activities such as Social Security and Medicare benefit payments, which are funded under laws other than annual appropriations bills, will continue. However, some annually-funded activities related to those programs may be stopped. For example, according to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Social Security cards were not issued during the 16-day government shutdown of October 2013 (FY 2014). Applications of new Medicare beneficiaries may be delayed since the employees who process them can’t report to work.
 
If an employee’s salary is not funded through annual appropriations, or if it is funded by money remaining in an appropriations account from a previous year, they will report to work. Exceptions are also made that allow other employees to remain at their jobs. OMB permits agencies to keep employees who perform activities expressly authorized by law, “necessarily implied by law” (e.g., processing payments of Social Security benefits), or to protect life and property.
 
The most significant disruption will be to everyday government operations – most federal offices will close and many federal employees will be furloughed. About 40 percent of the federal workforce was furloughed during the October 2013 shutdown.
 
National parks will close or have services severely curtailed. Small businesses will be unable to have their loan applications approved by the Small Business Administration. Veterans’ disability claims appeals review will stop. Clinical trials at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will be delayed (nearly 75 percent of NIH workers were furloughed in 2013). Statistical reports relied upon by businesses and issued by federal agencies including the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Energy Information Administration, and the National Agricultural Statistics Service could be delayed if a shutdown extends over several days.
 
The Department of Defense will also suffer. In 2013, DoD lost $600 million in productivity due to employee furloughs, according to its Comptroller at the time. Approximately 400,000 civilian employees were initially furloughed, although all but 5,000 returned after Congress passed legislation authorizing their salaries. Weekend training and drilling for about 850,000 reservists did not occur. New contract awards and some activities on existing contracts, such as inspections and approvals, were delayed during the shutdown.
 
Companies that do business with any government agency could feel the pain of delayed decision-making, contract administration, and payments. The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management (EM), for example, stopped issuing work orders during the 2013 shutdown. This led to layoffs of contract employees at EM facilities. NIH reported that an administrative support service contract expired during the shutdown and a stop work order was issued.
 
Businesses other than federal contractors will also experience negative effects. Many small businesses rely on a federal presence near their location. National parks closures hit such businesses hard. The National Park Service estimated that Acadia National Park and the surrounding communities lost nearly 200,000 visits and $16 million in visitor revenue during the 2013 shutdown ($414 million lost nationwide). Near Acadia, a hotel reported losing $33,000 and another reported as many as 182 room cancellations, according to the Bar Harbor, Maine, Chamber of Commerce.
 
Shutdowns also weaken economic growth. The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) reported in January 2014 that the 2013 shutdown reduced real gross domestic product by 0.3 percent in fourth quarter of that year. This estimate was based solely on lost productivity of furloughed workers; BEA could not isolate other, indirect economic impacts of the shutdown, such as lost earnings of furloughed contractors or other businesses.
 
In the event of a shutdown, the magnitude of impacts and costs described above will depend largely on the length of the funding lapse. A weekend shutdown, as was the case with the shutdown in January, will be barely noticed. A several-day or multiple-week shutdown will be damaging and expensive – both in monetary terms and, for the party that’s blamed for it, politically.

If you listened to President Trump’s State of the Union speech Tuesday night, you heard about immigration, national security, the war on terror, international trade, rebuilding infrastructure, and other items on the President’s policy agenda.
 
What you didn’t hear was any mention of the nation’s growing annual budget deficits and debt. New annual deficit estimates will be released soon by the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office, but the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) now estimates that $1 trillion annual deficits are possible by 2019.
 
CRFB also estimates that legislation enacted into law in 2017 will add $1.9 trillion to the national debt through 2025. Most of this increase is due to the $1.5 trillion cost of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Economic growth generated by that Act will pay for part of its cost, but it won’t pay for all of it. Estimates vary depending on the economic model used, but the nonpartisan congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that economic growth will reduce the budgetary cost by just $385 billion over ten years.
 
The federal government’s budget picture is clearly getting worse. The initiatives envisioned in the President’s speech, if they are not paid for, will add to the problem. Let’s look at what the President said:
 
Infrastructure: The President called for “Congress to produce a bill that generates at least $1.5 trillion for the new infrastructure investment.” Part of the $1.5 trillion would come from state and local governments and the private sector; the rest would come from the federal budget. The President’s infrastructure plan has not yet been released, but the President said earlier in January that the plan would cost the federal government $200 billion.
 
National defense: The President asked Congress “to end the dangerous defense sequester and fully fund our great military.” We’ll see specifics when his budget is released (February 12 is the expected release date), but early reports suggest a $716 billion fiscal year 2019 defense budget, which is 7 percent more than the Administration’s 2018 request and 13 percent more than the 2017 level.
 
Border security: The President laid out a four-pillar immigration plan: “[t]he second pillar fully secures the border. That means building a wall on the Southern border, and it means hiring more heroes… to keep our communities safe.” He is expected to ask for $18 to $20 billion for the border wall along with additional funds to hire more border patrol and immigration enforcement agents.
 
Paid family leave: The President wants to “support working families by supporting paid family leave.” His fiscal year 2018 budget plan included a proposal that cost $25 billion a year.
 
Disaster relief:  In his speech, the President said “[t]o everyone still recovering in Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, California, and everywhere else -- we are with you, we love you, and we will pull through together.” After one of the most severe hurricane seasons on record and serious wildfires in the West, there is an unquestionable and immediate need for disaster relief funding. Two disaster relief appropriations bills totaling $52 billion were enacted in 2017, and the House passed a third bill in December to provide another $81 billion.
 
Additional spending in these areas may have merit – that will be debated in Congress over the coming months. But, if additional spending is approved without being paid for with increased tax revenues or spending cuts in other areas, the budget’s red ink will get worse, hurt long-term economic growth, and leave future generations with the bill. This is the deficit in the State of the Union.

The practice of congressional earmarking – Congress designating money to go to specific recipients, such as water and sewer districts or public universities – ended in 2011. This “earmark moratorium” was the result of years of pressure from anti-earmark crusaders, both inside and outside Congress.
 
The demise of earmarks was cheered by groups such as Citizens Against Government Waste, which said “the eradication of earmarks is a victory for all taxpayers, one that will shave $8.6 billion off our nation’s bloated budget.” (“CAGW Reacts to Inouye’s Statement,” January 26, 2011)
 
There are two problems with CAGW’s statement. First, the earmark moratorium did not shave one penny from the budget. The money was simply redirected to other programs.
 
Second, earmarks were not eradicated. They continued to thrive in the Executive Branch.
 
Earmarking by Presidents and other officials of the Executive Branch existed long before the congressional earmark moratorium, and it persists to this day. Most Executive Branch earmarking is done far from public view - deep within the federal bureaucracy. Unlike procedures that were followed for congressional earmarking in the years prior to the earmark moratorium, there are no requirements for the Executive Branch to publish earmarks, identify recipients, or disclose potential financial conflicts of interest.
 
Executive Branch earmarking takes multiple forms. Decisions on how and where to award discretionary grants may be politically slanted, favoring the party in power at the White House. Decisions on contracts may have a political influence, or, worse, be tainted by personal relationships between public officials and contractors. The most troubling cases are bribes or favors granted in exchange for favorable contract decisions.
 
When these issues come to light, the details aren’t pretty.
 
In 2016, a U.S. Navy contracting officer was sentenced to 72 months in prison for bribery in a case that involved him steering contracts to a defense contractor in exchange for cash, prostitutes, and other favors.
 
A 2009 Department of Justice Inspector General investigation found that an official in charge of grant decisions for the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention violated ethics rules by accepting a gift from an organization that received grants from that office.
 
The same official reportedly may have used political and ideological considerations over merit-based factors when awarding grants. The Inspector General noted that merit-based factors need not be the only determinants of the grant awards, but the IG also said there was no documentation to support how grant decisions were made. Without documentation, questions of impropriety potentially overshadow those decisions.
 
Political factors in grant decisions were raised by a 2014 Associated Press analysis of “Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery” (TIGER) grants. Despite Republicans controlling the majority of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, more grants were awarded by the Democratic administration to Democratic congressional districts than to Republican congressional districts, according to the AP. While there was a competitive process for evaluating grant applications, in 2013, out of the 136 applications ranked as “highly recommended,” only 33 were funded. TIGER grants with lower rankings were awarded, but there was no documentation regarding why those applications were given preference over higher-ranked applications.
 
The Executive Branch could also potentially use the leverage of potential contracts or grants to encourage support for its policies. According to the Boston Globe, officials of the New Balance shoe company said in 2016 that the Executive Branch promised them “serious consideration” for a shoe contract from the Department of Defense – if they withdrew their objections to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). While New Balance remained neutral on TPP for a time, the company renewed its opposition to the trade agreement when the contract didn’t materialize.
 
The Washington Post reported last week that the Department of the Interior issued new guidance for political appointee review of grantmaking so that financial assistance “better aligns with the Secretary’s priorities.” To be sure, any administration may promote its priorities (within authority granted by Congress), and the guidance states that it applies only to discretionary grants where there is “legal authority to direct funds for particular purposes or to particular participants.” However, the newly-developed guidance and the accompanying “Top Ten Priorities” are likely to raise questions in Congress regarding how far unelected officials within the Department might go to direct grants to recipients who align with their views – and whether those grant decisions are consistent with, or are in place of, congressional priorities.
 
What can Congress do to better exercise oversight over how the Executive Branch uses its grant-making and contract-awarding powers?

• Congress can set stronger and clearer criteria in law with regard to who is eligible for grants and how competitive awards should be made.
• Congressional committees can develop legislation and perform rigorous oversight to support the principle of merit-based decisions for contract awards.
• Congress can boost the staff and resources of agency inspectors general and the Government Accountability Office so that possible abuses are more fully investigated.
• Congress can also reclaim their constitutional power of the purse by ending the moratorium on congressional earmarks.

 
The restoration of congressionally directed spending, along with strong transparency and accountability rules for that spending, would give the people’s elected representatives, rather than bureaucrats, better say over how tax dollars are spent.

What would your local community leaders do if your water and sewer agency is directed to comply with a government mandate to upgrade its sewer system – at an expense of over $70,000 for households and $300,000 for businesses?
 
What if you live near an abandoned mercury mine that leaks toxic waste and acidic water, contaminating nearby waterways, and the cleanup cost runs in the millions of dollars?
 
What if the federal government tells your community that a freeway must be raised by 10 feet – so it can accommodate a 500-year flood – and the price tag is around $10 million?
 
Now imagine that you’re an elected civic leader – a mayor or a county supervisor, for example – and you have no way to obtain crucial financial support through your representative in Congress to help fix these specific problems.
 
This is exactly the situation facing communities across the nation under the seven-year-old “earmark ban” in Congress.
 
The earmark ban was put in place by the House of Representatives and the Senate early in the 112th Congress after years of attempted reforms aimed at making the practice of congressional earmarking – the designation of funds for specific, local entities – more transparent and accountable. These reforms were extensive, and they included requirements such as publication of earmark requests and certification by Members of Congress of no financial interests in entities receiving earmarks.
 
Reforms, however, did not go far enough for anti-earmark crusaders inside and outside Congress. So the entire practice was shut down.
 
The end of earmarking came with a steep price to communities. Each of the three scenarios above describes real-world situations facing localities. The sewer upgrade, which was for a small township in Ohio, received $700,000 in earmarked funds through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 2009. The mercury mine cleanup project received earmarked money in 2008 and 2009, also from the Corps of Engineers. Communities that face similar problems today can no longer be helped by funds directed for those needs by their Member of Congress.
 
The third example – elevating a freeway at an estimated cost of $10 million – is a clear-cut case of assistance being lost directly due to the earmark ban. The project, benefiting Highway 101 in Santa Barbara County, California, would have been the beneficiary of a $650,000 earmark request made by a local Member of Congress for fiscal year 2011. That was the first year of the earmark ban. No earmarks were granted in that year – or in any year since.
 
More significantly, there are thousands of similar local projects throughout the nation that are stalled because they cannot get the financial support they need. These may be projects related to water quality, flood control, harbor dredging, highway and bridge repair, law enforcement, healthcare facilities, community redevelopment, and so on.
 
It does not have to be this way.

Efforts are underway in the House of Representatives to consider a limited return of congressional earmarks. Prior to the beginning of the 115th Congress, proposals were considered by House Republicans to create limited exceptions to the earmark ban. One proposal permitted earmarks for authorized water resources development projects of the Corps of Engineers or the Bureau of Reclamation. Another proposal allowed earmarks that went to the Federal Government, a State, a unit of local government, or any other public entity (excluding recreational facilities, museums, or parks).
 
These proposals were received favorably by many members of the House, and they might have been adopted, except that House Leaders intervened to insist that the proposals be withdrawn in exchange for a review and a future vote on a possible return to earmarking. As part of this process, the House Committee on Rules will hold hearings on January 17 and January 18, 2018.
 
The most desirable outcome for this review – desirable to thousands of communities in every State, and desirable to taxpayers – is for earmarks to return in a limited fashion. Strong measures of transparency and accountability should be part of this effort, including requirements for disclosing on congressional websites the details of projects and who benefits, and certifications of no financial interest by requesting Members of Congress.
 
Article 1 of the Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse. Elected Members of Congress are the most familiar with the needs of their constituents and of the communities in which they live. Congress should have the ability to attend to those needs.