Rescuing the Budget Process

There is no doubt that the budget process is broken. Congress has not even tried to agree on a Budget Resolution—the normal first step in the annual budget process–for several years. Instead, hopes of a major agreement designed to stabilize the rising debt have rested on the creation of special mechanisms outside the regular budget process. First there was the President’s Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (the Simpson Bowles Commission) in 2010. When no legislative action followed that report, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden tried to hammer out a deal withHouse and senate leadership. ThenU.S. President Barack H. Obama and U.S. Speaker John Boehner worked together on a “grand bargain” both political parties could accept. After these efforts failed—and the debt ceiling debacle in the fall summer of 2011 showed how deeply broken regular congressional processes had become—hopes were pinned on yet another special committee. Legislation created the Joint Select Committee (JSC), dubbed the “Super Committee,” and gave it a tight deadline and truly extraordinary powers. Optimists thought that the JSC might succeed. If it had had strong from the president and the leadership in both houses, it might indeed have been able to agree on actions to stabilize the rising debt and use its powers to set the federal budget on a sustainable path. But that support did not materialize, gridlock prevailed, and the JSC became one more entry on a list of failures. Gridlock is likely to last at least through the 2012 presidential election, perhaps longer. But even if one of these extraordinary mechanisms had succeeded in reaching a “grand bargain,” this dismal history simply illustrates how completely the normal budget process has failed. Our much-vaunted democracy should not have to abandon its normal decision processes and concentrate power in the hands of an ad hoc group to solve a budget problem.