House Republicans Lead on Budget Honesty

In a year that saw the most contentious budget fights in history, with six continuing resolutions driven to the brink, the seventeenth consecutive year of late appropriations bills, and over one thousand days since the Senate has passed a budget, there is optimism. Significant budget reforms have been proposed by the Republican-led House Budget Committee. These proposals are a response to the frustration of constituents and gridlock in Congress. This legislation seeks to address three of the monumental problems regarding our nation’s budget: our crushing debt, transparency, and more recently, brinksmanship.

The Government Shutdown Prevention Act sponsored by Steve Womack (R-AR) addresses the politicking and ‘doomsday’ conditions that consumed the media and Congress much of last summer. It states that if Congress does not fulfill its budget requirements by the end of the FY automatic funding kicks in, but with a 1 percent reduction in discretionary spending. For every ninety days Congress fails to act, spending will decrease an additional 1 percent. If this legislation was instituted before the end of the last Senate passed budget, taxpayers would have seen an 11 percent decrease in spending or roughly $300 billion in automatic savings.

A number of bills in the reform package attempt to make the budget process more transparent, and Congress more accountable. The Legally Binding Budget Act sponsored by Rep. Diane Black (R-TN) gives the budget a force-of-law by changing it from a concurrent resolution to a joint resolution. This will make the budget more visible and it will span across both houses of Congress and the Presidency. This makes it more difficult for budgets to be ignored because they will be law instead of points of order that can be waived as we have seen the past three years of the Democrat-controlled Senate.

Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-SC) is sponsoring the Balancing our Obligations for the Long Term (BOLT) Act which forces the CBO to look at long-term estimates beyond a ’ten-year window’ to show true cost of legislation such as Obamacare, where revenues were front-loaded and costs were pushed past the ten-year mark. The BOLT Act also caps overall long term spending to no more than 20 percent of the economy, and requires the CBO to report the federal government’s unfunded obligations, as well as institute a host of other stipulations that tighten the wiggle room our representatives have used to their advantage.

Other reforms in the package include: presidential line-item veto power on appropriations, inflation-limited spending on entitlements, overall spending capped to percentage of GDP, and the creation of a biennial budget.  These are among a few possible reforms in the ten-bill package proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and bi-partisan members in the House Budget Committee. It is clear with the CBO’s projection of a balanced budget this year as well as the above landmark reforms, House Republicans have been committed to their pledge for a smaller, more responsible government. CoGC recognizes these reforms as desperately needed to ensure our federal government (and politicians) do not spend us off the cliff of prosperity.

TAGS: Spending, Budget Reform