Congress struggles to fix gridlock as another deadline looms

This is how badly broken Congress’s budget process has become: A Democrat and a Republican in the Senate have jointly proposed the radical idea that if Congress can’t come up with a budget by April 15 — a legal deadline now routinely blown — the national legislature would simply shut down.

No other bills would be considered. No post offices named, no judges confirmed. Congress wouldn’t even be able to abandon Washington and go home on recess.

“It’d be a pretty good incentive to get things done,” said Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.), who is sponsoring the bill with Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.).

In a Congress gridlocked in all kinds of ways, nothing seems more busted than Congress’s most basic responsibility of developing a federal budget.

Three weeks into a new fiscal year that began Oct. 1 and with a hard-fought short-term funding measure in place that will only last until Nov. 18, the government is now only a month from once again facing the wearying possibility of another looming government shutdown.

With the House on recess last week and the Senate away this week, there is now a broad expectation that the House and Senate might find it difficult to agree on spending to last through September 2012 before the deadline, which could mean adopting yet another short-term measure in November and forcing yet another painful debate about spending at its expiration.

And there is no guarantee that process will not break down along the way — as it did in April and again September — once again forcing high drama votes with the continued operation of the government hanging in the balance.

To a public grown disgusted by partisan bickering, Congress seemingly lurches from one of these confusing spending crises to the next. But congressional observers and many members believe the showdown-of-the-month pattern is merely a symptom of a much deeper sickness in how Congress goes about planning the government’s spending.

Last week, the Senate spent days debating a $182 billion spending measure to fund agriculture, criminal justice, transportation and housing agencies of government through next September — a once routine piece of legislating that is now rare.

The hope was to create a path to an agreement between the House and Senate on spending for at least some federal agencies before Nov. 18.

Though the Senate made progress on the measure, disputes over how many amendments to consider delayed a final vote until Oct. 31, when the Senate returns from a weeklong recess.

“It’s a very serious problem: The world’s greatest democracy cannot produce a budget,” said Lee Hamilton, who served 34 years in Congress and now serves as director of the Center on Congress at the University of Indiana. “When people say it’s dysfunctional, when they say it’s not working well, the budget process, I think is exhibit A in that charge.”

The current process dates to 1974, when Congress overhauled the way the government’s spending was planned in an effort to enhance its own role as keeper of the purse strings.

The process begins with the president submitting a recommended budget to Congress in February for the fiscal year that will begin the following Oct. 1.

By April 15, both chambers of Congress are supposed to adopt their own budget resolutions, which are to broadly outline how much the government will collect and spend for the year.

This is when the appropriations committees used to get to work in each chamber, drawing up 12 separate bills that outline how much money will go to different agencies for various programs.

Each chamber is supposed to pass its own versions of the 12 bills, then negotiate the differences between them and pass identical measures, by the time the year ends Sept. 30. That way, federal agencies start the year knowing what to spend in the 12 months ahead.

In truth, the process has never worked well.

Since 1974, Congress has followed the process as designed — passing a budget and all 12 spending bills on time — only twice.

In other years, they have bought time with short-term spending bills that keep government open while they work to hammer out spending priorities for the year.

Unable to complete work on the individual spending measures, they have also taken to grouping them into massive omnibus bills, allowing greater speed but less scrutiny of individual agencies and programs.

But budget observers say the process has gotten worse as Washington has become more partisan. With a new Republican majority in the House determined to make deep spending cuts, Congress could not agree on spending for the year that ended Sept. 30 until April — and then just an hour before government was set to close down.

For this year, the House has so far passed six of the 12 appropriations bills due Sept. 30, the Senate only one. No compromise measures have passed both chambers.

The gridlocked Senate has especially struggled — failing to adopt a budget to even start the process this year or last.

“The number of different steps you have to go through — each one of which makes sense on paper — turns out in the aggregate to be more than Congress can accomplish in all but the most fortunate of circumstances,” said William A. Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “And things haven’t been functioning in the the most fortunate of circumstances in a long time.”

Members of both parties agree the budgeting breakdown results in all kinds of troubling consequences.

Temporary fixes and frequent showdowns shake public confidence in the ability of government to handle its business.

Again and again, as the Senate debated amendments cutting or increasing funding for various programs during last week’s debate, senators rose to beg that they somehow find a way to make that kind of once-routine legislative give-and-take more common.

“We are showing that we can govern,” said Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.).

Members agree they now gobble up so much of the year locked in battle over how much to spend that the Senate has little time to do anything else — and that includes providing oversight to ensure programs work as designed.

The gridlock and last-minute crisis votes also discourages tackling the hardest issues bedeviling the budget. And the process excludes spending on entitlements — the fastest growing part of the federal budget.

“Right now, the process makes it very difficult to tackle our structural problems, which is the great challenge for our times,” said Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Budget Committee, which like its Senate counterpart, has been holding hearings on budget reform.

Various reform efforts — like the last resort proposal to shut down a budgetless Congress from Cardin and Ayotte — have been proposed.

One idea gaining traction would have Congress compile a budget every two years instead of every year. So-called biennial budgeting, which has been endorsed by bipartisan budget writers in both chambers, would let Congress spend a year deciding how to spend tax dollars and then a year on oversight of whether those dollars were being spent wisely.

But in a legislature unable to agree even on little things, finding agreement on changes to the very way business gets done is unlikely.

And for now, it appears Congress has given up on itself.

Even as it muddles through figuring out spending for the next year, it has abandoned its normal structure and assigned the task of actually straightening out the nation’s finance to a bipartisan panel of 12 senators and representatives, said Alice M. Rivlin, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who was the founding director of the Congressional Budget Office.

Established in the August deal that raised the nation’s debt ceiling, the panel has been afforded such broad powers it has been dubbed the supercommittee. Tasked with coming up with a way to cut the deficit by $1.5 trillion over the next decade by Nov. 23, the super committee can consider any proposal to accomplish the goal, including entitlement and tax reform.

The rest of Congress will have no ability to tweak its suggestion--simply vote it up or down in December.

“It’s evidence that the members of Congress recognized we can’t do this by the ordinary process,” she said. “We need to do something extraordinary.”