Passing spending bills on time rare

WASHINGTON — The last time Congress spent your tax dollars the way it’s supposed to, the Cleveland Browns were in the playoffs. “Forrest Gump” and “The Lion King” were hit movies. Justin Bieber had just been born.

That was 1994 — 23 years ago.

Since then, Congress has scrambled every year to pass its 12 discretionary spending bills — paying for everything from agriculture to the legislative branch to defense — individually and on time. The spending bills are different from outlays for fixed

programs such as Medicare; they’re the items on which Congress has a choice.

Last year, though, Congress didn’t even bother to try to make that choice: Not one spending bill passed in the House or Senate. Instead, Congress approved a series of extensions of previous spending bills, finally passing the $1.1 trillion bill to pay for fiscal year 2017 this week — with half of the fiscal year past.

This year is no anomaly: According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, not one appropriations bill has been enacted on time since 2009.

“This is the only constitutionally mandated duty Congress has every single year,” said Steve Ellis, vice president of the federal spending watchdog Taxpayers for Common Sense. “Yet they really fail at this fundamental task.”

He said Congress has passed all of its spending bills on time only four times since the current budget system was created in 1974. In 1996, it passed them on time — but only after lumping several bills together.

“Clearly, something is not working,” Ellis said.

“I think it’s a broken process,” said Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Troy, the newest member of Ohio’s congressional delegation, who watched Congress vote to delay the 2017 spending bill three times after he was sworn in last June. “This is the primary responsibility of Congress, to hold the purse strings.”

The results are often utterly chaotic: Because of disagreement over the federal spending process, Congress has shut down the government or faced a government funding gap 17 times since 1976 — most recently in 2013. Some of those, however, have lasted less than a day.

When spending bills do pass, they’re often in the form of continuing resolutions — essentially, a continuation of the previous year’s spending, with a few tweaks at the margins. On Capitol Hill, it’s usually referred to as the “CR.”

Old programs received minimal scrutiny. New programs are hard to come by. It is a government on autopilot, stuck with previous years’ programs regardless of whether those programs are the best use of taxpayer dollars.

“It’s not like they’re going to come up with $1.1 trillion worth of new things to spend the discretionary budget on,” Ellis said. “A lot of stuff — I won’t say it’s on autopilot, but I will say it builds on what was previously spent.”

“I don’t like CRs,” said former Rep. David L. Hobson, a Springfield Republican who spent many years on the House Appropriations Committee. “There are a lot of things in there that I don’t think get the light of day like they should.”

Hobson and others say that the process is designed to provide proper scrutiny to ensure that the government is spending money on the things it should.

The current process — jamming spending through on a tight deadline — “is really an abdication of the basic responsibility of Congress under Article One of the Constitution, to appropriate money,” said Tom Schatz, president of the fiscally conservative spending watchdog Citizens Against Government Waste.

“Continuing resolutions are wasteful,” Ellis said. “They force agencies or delay agencies from making decisions because it’s harder to hire, harder to authorize travel or new budget expenses that might be necessary.

“It’s almost like it reinforces all the folks who are saying the government is wasteful and inefficient. They’re setting it up to be that way by not telling them what they have to spend for the first seven months and then saying, ‘OK, here’s what we have to spend, go do it in the last five.’”

Who’s to blame is another question.

Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, blames Republicans, saying they “have made a cottage industry of injecting uncertainty into the economy.” He said he hates the way the process works: The continuing resolutions are “loaded up, and then they say vote and then the vote takes place.”

“You can’t like the way this crowd is running the government,” he said.

Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, said the issue is indicative of a larger one.

“We just can’t seem to get to ‘yes’ anymore,” he said. “The country’s so hopelessly divided. … I think you see that reflected in the budget process.”

Rep. Marcy Kaptur, a Toledo Democrat who is dean of the Ohio delegation, said the change is more cultural. Because the last time Congress passed all its spending bills on time was 1994, most members have never actually seen it done. In the meantime, she said, “power has moved to the top.” Most of the spending bill that passed last week was written in private.

Kaptur, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, said that before the process collapsed, lawmakers had listening sessions in congressional districts. They’d bring in witnesses who were experts on what was being paid for. They would “listen to the public exhaustively,” she said.

“You should never have every bill wrapped up in a mass — what is it, 1,600-page — bill,” she said. “You should have 12 separate appropriations bills that are passed one by one, amended on the floor, with open rules which means any member can try to amend what the committee and subcommittee have done.”

In the absence of that, though, there’s the current system. And Congress has no real incentive to change it, Schatz said.

“There are no consequences for failing to pass the appropriations bills,” he said.

Some suggest that tweaks to the system might help. Congress has long considered — but not adopted — a system of biennial budgeting, which would create a budget for two years rather than the current one-year period. That’s how Ohio does it.

Portman, who backs a biennial process, has introduced a bill that would create an automatic continuing resolution to keep money flowing even if Congress misses the deadline to pass a spending bill. Under his bill, funding would be reduced if Congress still hasn’t passed a spending bill after 120 days — a penalty for not passing spending bills on time.

He said his bill would prevent the political jockeying that has caused both sides to hold the spending bill hostage. In the past, fights about policy issues, including Obamacare and abortion funding, have helped spur government shutdowns.

Ellis said his organization is willing to consider other options. But the institution, too, will have to change.

“In the end, no matter what’s the structure you create, it’s still about lawmakers being willing to get the job done,” he said.