Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, when I was in college, I remember watching a State of the Union speech by President Reagan in which he took a 43-pound stack of papers and set them on the podium. As he was giving his State of the Union Address, he said: This is the budget bill that has been given to me--43 pounds of it, all stacked up. It was a famous moment when the President said: Do not send this to me again.
Republicans and Democrats alike stood and cheered. They said: That is a terrible way to do government.
For 5 of the next 6 years there were no more Omnibus appropriations bills, but that did not last. Since 1986, there have been 22 Omnibus appropriations bills. People may ask, what is that?
By law, Congress is to do 12 appropriations bills. Each part of that has a section of the budget, and each one of those is passed as a stand-alone. First, they go through subcommittee, then committee, then to the full floor, and then they pass. But 17 times since 1998 and 22 times since 1986, all of those bills were just looped together to make one giant document--the 43-pound document that President Reagan dropped in 1988.
What is going wrong? We have another one of those omnibus bills next week, in which all of the appropriations bills have been looped together to try to simplify the process, but this actually provides even less transparency. What do we do with this? How did we get here?
The short story is that the Budget Control Act of 1974 was created right after Watergate in a fight between Congress and President Nixon over the fact that President Nixon was told that Congress wanted to be able to spend certain amounts of money in certain areas, and President Nixon basically didn't want to spend it. So Congress pushed back and put additional requirements on him to actually do what Congress was compelling him to do in that 1974 Budget Act, to try to create more transparency and provide greater leadership for Congress. Out of that was born this Budget Act, but also the House and Senate committees and the Congressional Budget Office were born.
All of those things were to create more input and create a system in which, each year, the President would create a budget and would submit that budget to Congress. Then that budget would lead to authorizing bills from the different committees. And then, from the authorizing, it would lead to appropriations bills and final passage.
Well, how is that working for us? It is not. It created a process so complicated and so slow that, although it makes sense on paper and in legislative language, it doesn't actually work year to year, and it pushes us into what is called continuing resolutions--or, as is commonly thrown around here, CRs. Every year since 1995, Congress has had at least one CR--one continuing resolution; that is, taking last year's appropriations bill, just changing the date on it, and moving it over. There is no strategic planning, nothing. That is a problem for us.
The budget process itself has broken down and has fallen into omnibus spending bills, with 12 bills, all combined. Some years, we fail to get budget bills done at all.
The authorizing process that is supposed to go between the budget and the appropriations process has completely collapsed for us. In fact, in the 2017 appropriations, it happens that there were 256 expired authorizations in the final appropriations bills. About $310 billion of what was appropriated was not authorized even last year. Some of those things hadn't been authorized for more than a decade. Finally, we have passed all appropriations bills only four times in the last 44 years.
We have a major problem with the way we do budgeting. Year after year, people visit me or people bring this to me in townhall meetings or at the grocery store or at Taco Bell; people catch me and say: What is going on with the budget process?
I can tell you that if it sounds as if you say that every year, it is because you have said that every year now for a couple of decades.
How do we get out of this? There is a bipartisan, bicameral committee that has been put together and met for the first time last week. There are 16 total--8 Democrats and 8 Republicans, 8 from the Senate and 8 from the House. Our mission is to revise the way we do budgeting. A lot of Americans probably will not watch this process, but it will be extremely important that we actually fix it.
I am convinced that we are not going to get a better budget product until we get a better budget process. This committee itself is designed in such a way that it takes out the partisanship, not just with equal numbers on both sides, but the agreement from the very beginning is that if we don't have a majority of Democrats and a majority of Republicans signing off on the final proposal, we will not bring it to the floor. If we do, we hope to fix the budget process itself.
The budget process is set up to create gimmicks in the budgeting rather than to fix them. We have a 10-year budget window, and there are all these gimmicks that have been created to try to move spending outside the 10-year budget window to make things look as though they are actually going to balance when they actually don't balance. I would like for us to consider some things like biennial budgeting. Twenty States budget every 2 years. It gives budget certainty for 24 months. We should get that. That helps our economy. That helps our businesses. That helps our agencies. That helps in contracting. That helps us avoid these continuing resolutions--if we can actually do budgeting in 2-year cycles.
I would like to get out of the perpetual focus on government shutdowns and the countdown clocks that happen. I proposed a bill 5 years ago called the Government Shutdown Prevention Act. It is designed to get us to a spot where we actually put the pressure on Congress to get the job done but hold agencies and hold the American people harmless while we work through the process.
Quite frankly, I think the President's budget is a meaningless document. It has never been passed by any President of any party. I don't mind the Presidents releasing their budget priorities--ways we can save money, duplication that they see, key aspects. That is entirely appropriate. But the President's budget every year just becomes a big fight, and when it is late, it throws the process off even more and gives Congress one more reason to say that they are not getting their job done because someone else was late in doing theirs. We should reform that.
We should reform the way we do debt limits. We are the only country in the world that does this. We have had some kind of debt limit since the 1920s, actually. But originally, when it went to the form that it is in now in the late 1930s, it was established as a way to protect us from adding more debt, and it did work for decades.
It has not worked for decades. It has been another fiscal cliff out there that has not resolved anything. We have to fix that so it does what it is supposed to do or take it away, but we can't destabilize international economies because we can't get our job done here.
We have to have some sort of focus on both revenue and spending. We should deal with real consequences when we don't get things done on time. We have to build internal processes that actually get things done. We have to pay attention to $20 trillion, and growing, in national debt.
These are things we can get done, but they will not get done if we don't actually fix the process. There is no moment to actually get the big things and hard things done.
My hope and my commitment, with this body and with this group of 16 of us who have grouped together from the House and the Senate-- Republicans and Democrats--is this: Bring a proposal to us that is a fair, nonpartisan proposal that is not focused on what party is in power at that moment but looks at the fiscal health of the Nation, how we can plan for the future, and how we can actually get off this endless cycle of nonaction and get back to a process of predictable budgeting and appropriations. We will bring some of those solutions in the days ahead.
Right now we are meeting and talking. I invite any Member of this body who wants to contribute to catch any one of us in this group. We are not saying that the 16 of us are exclusive to solving the problems.
I also say the same thing to the American people: Anyone in my State or anyone around the country who wants to contribute good ideas, bring them. Let's add these good ideas together. Let's fix the process. Let's get back to actually talking about how we solve the budget issues rather than how we solve our internal processes in the House and the Senate. That is the last thing we should be arguing about and the first thing we should fix.
With that, I yield back.
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