US Government Debt Different - Finance Department - University of ...

52 Origins of the Fiscal Constitutioning cause of the brinkmanship and lack of fiscal prudence that werecently have experienced.The Budget Act process has four great virtues. First, it forces actionmonths before the fiscal year, thus giving all sides time to come toa resolution. Second, it disciplines congressional appropriations.Without a budget, congressional appropriators all feel free to spendmoney without taking into account competing fiscal needs (includingthe need to restrain growth of the public debt). The Budget Actreverses the process, requiring Congress to decide first how muchmoney to spend and how to divide it up among various functionalcategories, and only then to allow appropriators to determine thedetails. Third, it provides expedited procedures, including the eliminationof filibusters. And fourth, it increases transparency and publicaccountability. The Act requires public hearings, and “scoring” bythe Congressional Budget Office under uniform scoring rules. Thisforces the various parties to the process to make their budget proposalspublic. We have seen the political mischief involved when thePresident and the congressional leadership negotiate in secret, whilebeing able to make vague claims to the public about the contents oftheir proposals. The electorate cannot know whom to believe, andwhom to blame.Unfortunately, the Budget Act has no enforcement mechanism. Thedrafters of the Act assumed that congressional leaders would complywith its mandates. For the first quarter century of the Act, that was acorrect assumption – budget resolutions were publicly debated andpassed on time, and reconciliation bills conformed actual tax levels,spending levels, and borrowing to the budgets. When I was AssistantGeneral Counsel of OMB in the early 1980s, the budget process,with its deadlines, was sacrosanct. But for the last three years, theSenate leadership has simply refused to consider a budget. When theChair of the Senate Budget Committee, Kent Conrad, announcedhe would bring the Simpson-Bowles plan to a vote as the Senatebudget, the Majority Leader intervened to prevent the vote. Thissignal piece of reform legislation may well have become a dead letter.