2001: A budget odyssey

The Hill recently published an op-ed comparing the congressional budget process to the killer shark in the movie “Jaws.” Although the analogy is entertaining, a better pick would have been “2001: A Space Odyssey” — not because of its prophetic warnings about artificial intelligence, but because of the iconic year, 2001. That is the year when the White House and Congress entered into an unholy alliance to abandon fiscal responsibility.

The law which created the congressional budget process — the 1974 Budget Act — was never intended to achieve a particular fiscal result for the nation. It was established to give Congress its own set of institutions and procedures to establish an overall budgetary (“fiscal”) plan for the nation.

The act created the Congressional Budget Office, which continues its vital mission providing nonpartisan projections of the nation’s debt picture and estimates how proposed legislation would impact the fiscal outlook.

The act also created budget committees for the House and Senate, tasked with drafting annual budget plans — called budget resolutions — to guide subsequent actions on spending and revenue bills. 

Following adoption of a budget resolution, the Budget Committees give each committee of Congress — including the Appropriations Committees — a spending allocation consistent with the budget plan to guide their legislative work.

To enforce the spending, revenue, and deficit levels set in the budget resolution, the Act also created an optional procedure — called budget reconciliation — enabling the budget committees to instruct the spending and tax committees to report legislation making budgetary changes to programs in their jurisdiction. The committees package the legislation into a single bill for the House and Senate to consider under expedited, filibuster-proof procedures.

By 1985, a bipartisan group of Senators — Phil Gramm (R-Texas), Warren Rudman (R-N.H.), and Fritz Hollings........

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