Ayotte Backs Legislation to Eliminate Budget Gimmicks

Press Release

Continuing her efforts to reform Washington's broken budget process, U.S. Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), a member of the Senate Budget Committee, is cosponsoring legislation aimed at eliminating budgetary gimmickry that has allowed Congress to mask deficit spending and claim false savings. The Honest Budget Act, which was introduced yesterday by Senators Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME), is a nine-step plan that improves the budget process by creating more transparency and accountability, and by strengthening scoring rules to make them more accurate.

"For too long, the budget process has been subject to manipulative gimmicks that end up portraying a misleading picture of the nation's spending habits. This legislation will help restore genuine transparency to the budget process and make it harder to spend money we don't have," said Senator Ayotte. "In addition to reforming the process, the single most important thing we can do to get our fiscal house in order is to actually pass a budget. It has now been 890 days since the Senate last passed a budget. This is a dereliction of duty to the American people, and I will continue to urge my Democrat colleagues to allow the Senate Budget Committee to put together a responsible fiscal plan for our country."

SUMMARY:

The Honest Budget Act would:

* Make it harder to move appropriation bills unless a budget resolution is already in place;
* Tighten the process for adding the "emergency" designation to spending measures, an often abused method for avoiding the fiscal restraints imposed by the budget resolution;
* Improve current law by measuring the cost of loan and loan guarantee programs using a market default risk rate that reflects the loans' fair value;
* Adopt a rule that would prevent scoring rescissions of budget authority as savings unless they produce actual cash savings in the budget window;
* Prevent changes in mandatory spending programs from being used as budgetary savings in discretionary (non-mandatory) spending bills;
* Establish a new scoring rule that would prohibit the use of timing shifts for the purposes of producing phony budget savings;
* Make President Obama's two-year federal pay freeze real by eliminating automatic within-grade step increases through the end of 2012;
* Require transfers from the General Fund for highways to be scored as new spending. Since 2008, turning a blind eye has led to $35 billion in transfers that were scored as "budget neutral."
* Prevent abuse of advance appropriations by reinstating the budget point of order limiting Congress' ability to defer increased spending to future years in order to make room for more immediate needs in the current year (and then argue later that the spending limits in subsequent years should be raised to accommodate the deferred spending).

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