The History Of Congressional Budgeting

The history of Congressional budgeting is a largely long and compounding series of passed laws and reforms like much of the rest of Congress. The early history of the Congressional budget was a story of decentralized requests from each consecutive administration. These requests were not coordinated or funneled through any specific agency. Budgetary requests were handled by Congress through its committee system meaning that committee chairs held supreme authority over any requests that came their way. This led to deficits in the late 19th and early 20th century that were the stimulus for the first budget reform acts by Congress. The Budget Accounting Act of 1921 was the first attempt at coordinating the budget process. It gave the president
the power to present to Congress all budget estimates and spending requests from the executive department. This acted in much the same way as the normal breakdown of legislative-executive relations, the Legislature took his suggestions to put together a legislative budget. It also created a Bureau of Budget that gave the President more control over the budget to coordinate executive agencies and collect data and budgetary analysis to the table. The next series of reforms came about during the 1940s that created the Committee on the Reduction of Federal Expenditures. This committee was soon sacked because it was untimely and too optimistic and the Joint Committee on the Legislative Budget that was made up of members of other committees already in place. This committee adopted the concurrent budget resolution which attempted to set limits for appropriations. It was passed every year and was like a blueprint of the budget. Congress however never followed it and was thus a failure and the Congress and the President fought over the Budget. It became clear that the decentralized nature of Congress does not lend itself well to centralized budget control. Soon they found that they could not respond to President Nixon’s process of impounding of authorized and appropriated funds. Congress found that this flew in the face of Congress’s constitutionally mandated powers over the purse. They responded by putting in place a way to review a president’s refusal to spend money Congress had authorized to spend, formalized the use of the concurrent budget resolution to help congress budget, established the Congressional Budget Office and set up a timetable for the budgetary process. In the 1980s Congress passed the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings agreement that established a new timetable and mandated sequestration if the budget deficit did not fall within a certain amount.
Sequestration was aimed at discretionary spending a spared interest payments and entitlement programs. This process failed because once again Congress found a way to avoid the rules that they set in place for themselves; they exempted most of the budget from the sequester process. The 1990 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act and Budget Enforcement Act attempted to further centralize power within Congress and forced more automatic changes to the budget to get things passed. The Budget Enforcement Act set further ceilings for spending that if passed would force sequestration, though only when new legislation forced spending beyond the limits. This process generally was unsuccessful at producing lasting change and deficit reductions. There have for as long as Congress has attempted to address the budget problem limits to what they can do. Those limits have generally occurred because the decentralized nature of Congress makes it extremely difficult to rein in the beast. As we can see, as soon as one way of doing business was closed Congress or the President found another way to get around the restrictions in place and eventually forced the issue to be addressed, closing a further loophole. As soon as Congress runs into issues with their current set of rules for budgetary matters, they just go and change the rules
again. Congress should be in a position to control government spending, as they are constitutionally mandated to have control over it. Giving the President control over the budget would most likely concentrate too much power in one position. However as with so many things in Congress there are thousands of competing agendas and interests and as soon as cuts hit a program someone likes they are no longer for spending cuts. Congress has also generally avoided going for the difficult spending cuts/re-evaluations like defense and entitlements, even though that is where the majority of the spending is. This is want leads to inadequate results and the continuing failure of the process. Perhaps as with many other issues in a democracy, Congress won’t actually address the real budgetary problems until the electorate throws them out of office for not addressing it, no matter the pain it may cause.