The Annual Appropriations Dance
Josh Huder | October 3, 2024
Congress has once again missed its annual deadline to fund the federal government for the entire fiscal year. This has become an all-too-familiar dance on Capitol Hill: Congress fails to adopt a budget; the House and Senate draft very different spending bills; nothing happens for a few months; then we watch as Congress fumbles around to avoid a government shutdown on September 30, the final day of the fiscal year. From the outside it can (and does!) look like dysfunction; observers assume Congress does not fund the government on time because it’s too polarized, too gridlocked, or too helpless as an institution to make decisions. But those critiques miss the mark. Congressional leaders choreograph this – it’s a choice, not a mistake.
The “normal” steps are straightforward and codified in law. The 1974 Budget and Impoundment Control Act states Congress will adopt a budget (via a resolution passed by the House and Senate but not signed by the President) by April 15th. That budget sets topline spending numbers for the appropriations committees in both chambers, which are tasked with passing, conferencing, and finalizing their bills by September 30th.
Stumbling out of the Gate: Budget Resolutions:
Today’s dance is different. None of the budgets Congress adopted since 2011 included top-line spending numbers to kickstart appropriations. Instead, budget resolutions have become little more than vehicles for partisan reconciliation bills. The five budgets adopted since 2011 initiated the 2016 attempted repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the second ACA-repeal attempt in 2017, the Trump tax cuts, the American Rescue Plan, and the Inflation Reduction Act. Not one appropriations bill was passed based on those budgets. Between 2013 and 2021, the Budget Control Act set discretionary limits on defense and non-defense spending, basically nullifying the need for a budget resolution. However, even after the BCA expired Congress is still not adopting budget resolutions. In the other years, no budget was adopted at all because the Senate essentially stopped trying and, more recently, the House has as well. Speakers Pelosi (D-CA), McCarthy (R-CA), and Johnson (R-LA) did not try to pass budgets during their stints (in Pelosi’s case, the 116th Congress) in charge of the House.
Instead, the chambers pass “deeming resolutions”: substitutes that have created budget limits in a single chamber on an ad hoc basis. This often lets the Appropriations Committees move forward with their work, even if the numbers do not match and need to be renegotiated between the chambers for final passage. In either case the effect is the same: Congress has begun skipping the first step of the normal budget dance.
Next Up: Appropriations Committee Work Gets Harder:
Appropriations bills then stall or fail to pass for a variety of reasons. Republicans and Democrats are often intractably divided on several of the spending bills; Labor-Health and Human Services, Commerce-Justice-Science, and Transportation-Housing and Urban Development tend to succumb to intense ideological divisions between the parties. Policy riders and poison pill amendments can, and have temporarily, derailed even politically popular spending packages like the Defense and Military Construction-Veterans Affairs bills. The general stalemate lasts until September, when negotiations between the chambers’ congressional leaders and appropriations chairs often, but not always, results in an overall budget number that should have been agreed to in April, at which point appropriators effectively go underground as they attempt to cram a year’s worth of decision-making into a month or two. Following the passage of one or more Continuing Resolutions, the twelve separate appropriations bills are ultimately crammed into an omnibus or several smaller “minibus” packages.
Appropriations Politics This Congress: Even Stranger Bedfellows:
This sure has the appearance of dysfunction and political gridlock, but if that’s the case then what explains how leaders, starting this Congress, ultimately manage to usher through both chambers a bipartisan spending package(s) with overwhelming majorities? If Congress is truly gridlocked, what makes a huge bipartisan coalition regularly come together to approve most must-pass legislation?
The answer is that this choreographed chaos, this “disaster theater”, is a choice. Chamber leaders could force these spending fights earlier – in June or July as Congress used to – rather than several months into the fiscal year. However, that does not help them manage the political pressures they face. Chamber leaders represent, as best they can, their partisan majorities. But as the ideological poles of both parties have moved further from the party’s moderates and vulnerable members, forcing difficult decisions early costs leaders politically. The reason both parties effectively gave up on the budget process is because the parties no longer agree among themselves on very basic spending decisions. Democrats gave up on the process in 2021 because they could not report a budget out of committee.[1] Republicans in the 118th Congress have likewise struggled to report budgets or bring them to the floor. If partisanship is defined a political party coalitions working as teams to pass legislation, it isn’t to blame for this cycle. A lack of partisanship is to blame.
For congressional leaders, this reality changes their calculus. Budget and appropriations bills expose divisions in their parties, fracture their majorities, and fail to appease the ideological wings of their membership. Rather than undergo a painful process that will likely end in failure, they choose to wait until deadlines force their hands and bipartisanship is the most reasonable choice when the alternative is a shutdown. This dance is the path of least resistance for those with the most institutional power. It is, unfortunately, how party leaders have learned to appease their partisan constituents in Congress while also facilitating the bipartisan dealmaking necessary to keep the government running.
Outside of eliminating the filibuster, there are no procedural fixes for this political problem, and none for the House. The parties have fractured on government spending, making them insufficient coalitions to regularly make spending decisions and all too happy to undermine legislation from the other side. Until congressional majorities can command unity, or bipartisanship is allowed to exist in the absence of a shutdown threat, the chaotic budget and appropriations process of the last decade will likely remain the dance party leaders prefer.
[1] Scholtes, Jennifer and Caitlin Emma, “Budget and Appropriations Brief: No votes to spare on a budget resolution — Liberals ready to leave GOP behind — House GOP pitches their infrastructure plan,” Politico Pro Budget & Appropriations Brief, May 19, 2021.
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