The shutdown clock is still ticking and that causes chaos throughout the government – By Deirdre Shesgreen (usatoday.com) / Feb 19 2018
WASHINGTON— The Pentagon can’t order new weapons systems or ramp up ammunition production. Medical researchers have their budgets sliced and often scramble to reconfigure clinical trials. Highway projects get delayed and maintenance gets deferred.
That’s what happens every time Congress passes stop-gap spending bills instead of a regular, full-year funding measure.
And such nonsensical disruptions aren’t going to end just because Congress passed a sweeping bipartisan budget deal earlier this month.
Despite that deal, the government is still running on yet another short-term spending bill — one that bars most agencies from embarking on new projects and that flat-lines funding for existing programs, even those Congress has deemed outdated or unneeded. The latest spending patch expires at midnight March 23rd, setting up another funding cliff in five weeks.
“It is both frightening and embarrassing that the world’s most experienced democracy is currently unable to carry out even the most basic responsibility of funding the services that Americans are expecting from their government,” Alice Rivlin, a leading budget expert, told senators at a recent hearing on Congress’ broken budget process.
The cost of Congress’ spending dysfunction? “High and rising,” Rivlin said.
For one thing, it’s a huge waste of time.
“We lurch from crisis to crisis, wasting countless hours across the federal government as employees prepare for shutdowns or draft detailed, comprehensive yearly budget documents that are completely disregarded,” Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., said at the Senate hearing, titled the “Terrible, No Good, Very Bad Ways of Funding Government.”
For another, it’s a big waste of money and messes with everything from military readiness to scientific innovation.
Take these two examples:
• The Pentagon requested additional money this year for munitions. The White House agreed, and so did lawmakers in Congress. But stop-gap spending bills, called “continuing resolutions,” force the Department of Defense — and other federal agencies — to run on autopilot, unable to make adjustments or start new projects.
“Every account is stuck at last year’s funding and you’re specifically barred form starting new programs and from increasing the procurement rate,” said Todd Harrison, a defense budget expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. “So if you bought 10 of a certain aircraft last year, and you were planning to buy 20 this year, you can’t do that. You’re stuck.”
• At the National Institutes of Health, when Congress starts a new fiscal year with a CR instead of a full-year budget, the agency automatically shaves 10% off federal grants it has awarded to scientists across the country.
“The NIH will hold back money so they’ll have enough at the end the year to try to fund new research,” said Benjamin Corb, a spokesman for the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. So nearly every October, scientists suddenly “have 10 percent less money for either a student in their lab or for (materials) to do experiments.”
More broadly, the constant cycle of self-inflicted crises created by the weeks-long spending bills means Congress has little time to set broad spending priorities and shift funding levels to address emerging threats and new problems.
“We’re not paying attention to what we fund or how much, we’re not paying attention to whether it works or doesn’t work,” said Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who convened the Senate hearing. “And then we are never ferreting out misappropriated funds or funds that are going towards wasteful things. It’s sort of a sad state of affairs.”
Congress is required every year to pass spend a dozen separate spending bills to fund government agencies in time for the Sept. 30 end of the fiscal year. When they miss that deadline, lawmakers are forced to pass short-term resolutions to keep the government running while they work out a deal for the full fiscal year.
The last time the House and Senate passed all of the separate appropriation bills on time was more than two decades ago — in 1997. The budget process has gotten so bad that Congress now passes an average of four short-term spending bills every year.
In this Congress, lawmakers will be at least six months into the 2018 fiscal year before they pass a regular appropriations bill that gives government agencies a full budget and the authority to start new projects, eliminate outdated programs, and award grants and contracts.
To solve this problem of their own making, congressional leaders have called for creating a bipartisan “super committee,” with members from the House and Senate appointed to examine the problem and recommend reforms.
But there are a bunch of budget-fixing proposals already in the legislative hopper.
One bill would force lawmakers to go without pay if they don’t pass a budget and all the appropriations bills on time. Another would prevent Congress from leaving Washington for their scheduled breaks unless they’ve adopted a budget blueprint.
Paul has sponsored a bill that would put in place an automatic continuing resolution — with scheduled funding cuts set to hit a gamut of programs — if Congress fails to pass a regular appropriations bill by the start of the fiscal year.
Paul said those penalties could force lawmakers to get their act together, but the real problem is a lack of political will.
“Something has to change,” he said. “People have to have the will to do the right thing.”
