The budget process isn’t broken: The problem is politics

Over the last year, Americans watched virtually everything that could go possibly wrong in the budget world either happen or nearly happen. 

In June 2023, House Republican leadership almost forced the country into default on its legally binding obligations. As a condition for suspending the debt limit, they forced two years of very tight appropriations caps. 

A week later, they walked away from their own caps and insisted on even deeper cuts. 

In October and November, this nearly culminated in government shutdowns. During the same time, House Republicans pulled five of their own 12 appropriations bills, unable to find the votes in their caucus. 

Now there appears to be an updated deal that reworks the budget agreement from six months ago but preserves the gamut of gimmickry included in the original deal. 

If so many things can go wrong and the process can be abused so much, doesn’t that mean there’s a problem with our budget process? 

No, the problem is politics. 

The reality is that nothing about the process made it hard for the government to avoid a default, avoid a shutdown or even just legislate. Nothing about the process made it hard for House Republicans to stick to their budget caps or pass their appropriations bills. It’s the politicians who made it so difficult. 

To illustrate, I want to zoom in on the budget deal. The specifics might not make perfect sense unless you’re a budget scorekeeping expert who’s been obsessively following ongoing budget negotiations, but it’s a perfect example nonetheless. 

In the budget deal, the White House and House Republican leadership agreed to a side deal so that non-defense discretionary funding could look artificially lower than it really was — a key priority for House Republican leadership. This side deal called to employ a series of budget scorekeeping procedures technically allowing us to adhere to the budget caps while still providing $69 billion in funding above those caps. 

It’s bad enough that we couldn’t just set the caps equal to the desired levels and instead chose to obscure the real amount of funding for political reasons. But even in pursuit of that, the side deal seeks to further obfuscate. 

Negotiators agreed to some phony “emergency” designations to increase the underlying level of operations. But they didn’t want to do too much of that, so they called for extra offsetting “savings.” But they didn’t want to do too much of that, so they created a new fund and laundered more “offsets” through it and then passed a law designating it to be classified differently so it looked different from the first set of “offsets.” 

They do all this so they can pretend they’re not doing “too much” of anything. 

And these offsets? They’re filled with gimmicks, and the non-gimmick parts actually end up losing more money than they save. At the end of the day, House Republican leadership chose levels that appeared lower with a series of workarounds rather than engage in a clear, clean process. No budget process change can fix that because Congress can ignore any rules it imposes upon itself if it has the votes to override them. 

To quote Rudy Penner, Republican Congressional Budget Office director under President Reagan, “The process isn’t the problem; the problem is the problem.” Even though he was arguing that high deficits were a problem, he was also explicit that there’s nothing wrong with our government’s process for considering and enacting budget legislation. 

Most members of Congress, former members and think tanks calling for budget process changes quietly agree with Penner. Yet they usually talk about how the process is broken, leading to bad outcomes, arguing that the best path forward is to make “bad” outcomes procedurally harder. 

This breaks one of the fundamental budget process principles: that the process should be both policy and outcome-neutral, meaning it shouldn’t make one policy outcome easier than another. And you shouldn’t design your process with a specific outcome in mind. 

Take for example an automatic continuing resolution, which we see suggested with bipartisan support every time Congress shuts down or nearly shuts down. Under an automatic continuing resolution, if Congress didn’t enact appropriations bills in time, instead of shutting down, funding would automatically continue at the prior year’s level — meaning the government could never shut down again. 

Sounds good, right? Except now you’ve made it so that it takes more votes to increase or decrease funding than it would take to freeze funding — which is a real cut after adjusting for inflation and population growth. This would bias the budget process and discourage Congress from renegotiating annual appropriations. 

In fact, you see this with most budget process suggestions. People rarely propose procedures that would increase the likelihood of debating and enacting new legislation. Instead, they tend to propose “solutions” that make outcomes they don’t want harder and outcomes they do want easier and sometimes automatic. 

If there aren’t enough votes to get the outcome you personally want when it’s placed on a level playing field with all other options, you shouldn’t be allowed to tilt the playing field to give special preference to your desired outcome. That is undemocratic. 

The path out of budget conflict doesn’t lie with promoting dysfunction by making congressional inaction easier and less consequential. Similarly, the answer doesn’t lie in delegating excessive power to the president, who for good reason is called the chief executive, not the chief legislator. And it certainly doesn’t lie with biasing the budget process toward cutting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. 

Instead, the solution lies in having better representatives. It lies with members of Congress who are committed to debating, voting and living with their negotiated compromises — in other words, who are committed to acting like real legislators. 

Bobby Kogan is the senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress. He previously served in the Biden-Harris White House and on the staff of the Senate Budget Committee.