A Note on Budget Madness

Right now the attention is all being directed at last-minute maneuvering in the House and Senate, ahead of a midnight government shutdown. But let's not forget that what they are debating is not the budget. No, all of this name-calling is about a continuing resolution to extend last year's spending bills through November 15. It is highly unlikely that the twelve main budget bills will be ready for a vote in six weeks, considering that the House has not passed a single one of them. Not even the defense bill has yet come up for a vote, even though it was effectively complete last month and defense is the one part of the government Republicans claim to care about. They haven't even finished committee markups of the rest.

When the government operates under a continuing resolution, its spending directives haven't changed from the year before. So say that last year an agency needed to buy a thousand computers or a thousand Hellfire missiles, but this year it wants to buy desks or smart bombs. It can't, because it is still operating under a budget law that allocates money for Hellfire missiles and computers. It can only keep buying what it was directed to buy last year. It's a crazy way to run anything, let alone the most powerful institution in the world.

So even if a continuing resolution is passed after a long or brief shutdown, that will not end the problem:

“I’m expecting the federal budget bedlam to last through the fall and into next winter,” said Stan Collender, a partner at Qorvis Communications and a former staffer to both the House and Senate budget committees.

No doubt this is amusing to government-hating millionaires in Texas, but my crew is going to be laid off next week because the national parks will be closed. They don't think this is funny.

Incidentally, the reason the House hasn't marked up the spending bills is that the Republican committee chairs are finding that they can't comply with the spending limits set by the Paul Ryan budget plan that they all voted for. Democrats said that the spending cuts in the budget were unreasonable, and now all of the Republican committee chairs agree with them. But the leadership is trying to insist that the committees comply with the overall budget. Hence, no bills.

I understand tough negotiating over the budget, and I wouldn't expect the Republicans in the House to meekly accept all of the President's spending requests. But this isn't about the budget, because the House hasn't passed a budget, and they haven't even done committee markups of most of the bills. This is about staging a fit and demanding lots of "concessions" because they haven't done their jobs.

And then there's the debt limit ceiling. . . .