Paul Ryan said Wednesday that he is working with members of both parties on legislation to institute biennial budgeting for the government, instead of the annual spending bills that Congress is now required to pass.
The House speaker said in an appearance at the Economic Club of Washington that he was a “big fan” of the idea of two-year spending bills, which would be a feature of the budget process reform legislation.
The reform, he said, would institute enforceable spending caps and create “a process where we actually don’t just keep kicking cans down the road.”
He called for a system that can “endure divided government moments like we typically have.”
The budget process has broken down in recent years, which has forced Congress to pass end-of-the-year spending bills that encompass all government agencies rather than the individual funding bills that are supposed to work their way through the regular budget process.
Having failed to pass regular appropriations bills this year, Congress must move legislation this week to avoid a partial government shutdown. Ryan blamed that breakdown on Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid and the “partisan incentives” to stop spending legislation.
One advantage of biennial budgeting is that it would cut in half the number of times Congress needed to reach agreement on contentious spending items.
It would also provide more certainty to agencies, and could be structured so that lawmakers would only have to vote on spending legislation in years in which they were not campaigning, lessening the partisan pressures to halt the process.
Some conservatives also favor biennial spending bills because agencies have an incentive to spend down unused funds before the end of each spending period in order to be ensured the same or more funds during the next spending period. Two-year spending bills would make that dynamic play out less frequently.
Biennial budgeting is among the ideas that bipartisan members of the Senate Budget Committee have discussed in working toward budget process reform.
