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Vivek Ramaswamy, Elon Musk meet with Capitol Hill lawmakers on DOGE
Bạn đang xem: Crisis budgeting is intentional and dysfunctional
Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, picked to run the new Department of Government Efficiency, met with lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
In the past few days, a handful of Washington lawmakers have been crafting a temporary spending bill that would fund the government until about mid-March next year – likely less than three months.
It is not an accident that this funding “crisis” emerged just days before Christmas. The previous stopgap funding bill, passed in late September, was specifically crafted to require renegotiation in mid-December. This guaranteed there would be little debate on the bill, as lawmakers would be eager to leave town. And if the stopgap funding wasn’t approved, it would allow Democrats and Republicans to blame each other for shutting down the government at Christmas.
It is impossible to overstate the dysfunction of Congress.
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Even if the Musk/Ramaswamy DOGE succeeds only in irritating permanent Washington, disruption is sorely needed. Exhibiting haphazard management that would embarrass most PTA groups, the last time Congress properly completed the appropriations process was 1996. COVID further exposed all sorts of ugly things, including the political self-serving nature of “momentum budgeting,” where the extraordinary temporary budget measures enacted in 2020 have inexplicably become the new baseline for federal expenditures.
Before March 2020, the federal government spent about $5 trillion every 12 months. That figure skyrocketed to more than $9 trillion in the second quarter of 2020. A year later, annualized spending was still $8.7 trillion.
Four years later, annualized federal spending remains close to $8 trillion. Congress clearly continues to suffer from a case of “fiscal long COVID.”
The federal spending process has been fiscally dysfunctional most of the past 45 years. But the shock of COVID made it obvious to anyone paying even slight attention.
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Since pre-COVID, annual federal spending has increased almost $3 trillion. Even accounting for inflation, spending should be only about $1 trillion higher than in 2019.
While increased interest expense accounts for $400 billion of the increase, the source of the remaining $1.6 trillion in new spending is a mystery. One logical explanation is that $1.6 trillion of supposed temporary COVID relief spending has somehow morphed into a permanent part of Washington’s “budget.”
Except there isn’t really a federal budget, just a never-ending series of emergency spending authorizations. Continuation budgeting is an invitation for permanent waste, as once a program gets funded, it becomes almost impossible to defund it.
It is time for a reset. If our elected representatives insist on using this dysfunctional continuing resolution method to fund the federal government, they should at least return to inflation-adjusted 2019 spending levels – before pandemic-era budgets turned into a free-for-all.
Even better, they could stop ignoring the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, and at least demonstrate a level of responsibility akin to what most local PTA groups manage.
David Moon, president of Moon Capital Management, may be reached at [email protected].
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