Staffers’ pay would be withheld if Congress fails to pass a budget, in one possibility for budget process reform outlined by a U.S. senator Thursday.
Sen. David Perdue, a freshman Republican from Georgia, said that there needed to be “severe consequences” if Congress fails to pass a budget, which is why he included the no-pay provision in an outline of budget process reform shared with reporters Thursday.
Docking the pay of members of Congress or the administration would not be enough to sway lawmakers like himself, he said. Perdue, an accomplished businessman before being elected in 2014, is worth between $17 million and $47 million, according to disclosure records.
But those same officeholders “don’t want to see their staff blown up,” he said.
The no-pay-for-staffers suggestion is just one of the provisions in the sweeping overhaul that Perdue is contemplating, which would transform the current process for formulating budgets and appropriating spending in an attempt to move away from Congress’s recent practice of tempting fiscal crises and waiting until the last minute to pass massive spending bills for the entire government to prevent shutdowns.
Perdue said he ran for office out of concern about the mounting national debt, which stands at $19.5 trillion and is expected to rise indefinitely.
In his first months in the Senate, he had a front-row seat as Republicans passed the first balanced budget through the Senate and House in years. That budget, however, is just a blueprint for a partisan vision of taxing and spending. Democrats blocked actual spending bills that would have met the blueprint, leaving Perdue to realize that the system doesn’t work.
Only four times since the budget process was established in 1974 has Congress passed all 12 spending bills on time.
The fact that Congress isn’t actually budgeting the vast majority of the time is a “contributing factor” to the growth in debt, Perdue said. Reforming it, he said, is a necessary but not sufficient condition for lowering the federal debt.
Working with members of both parties and participating in bipartisan reform talks held by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., Perdue came up with the outline and says he has legislative text. His staff looked for lessons from other countries, states and corporations in developing it.
Under his vision, the budgets would no longer be blueprints, but actually law. The Finance Committee would set revenue levels, giving it a chance to review taxes and deciding which tax “expenditures” were justifiable. A new executive committee would allocate those revenues to the relevant committees, which would be merged in part with the appropriations committee, which would produce spending bills. Four spending bills — for healthcare, retirement, defense and everything else — would be given expedited time on the floor, with penalties if they were not passed on time.
The outline is meant to be a “politically neutral platform,” Perdue said, meaning that it wouldn’t give the majority or minority any more power than they have today.
But the plan specifically calls for programs that today are funded automatically, such as Social Security and Medicare, to be brought into the budget process. That is a major ask of liberal members of Congress who do not want to see benefits reduced. Such entitlement programs are the driver of the projected rise in debt.
Perdue’s plan is just the first to be set forward by a member of Congress, however. He said that it was a “product” of Enzi’s effort, which was undertaken with Democrats.
For his part, Enzi still aims to propose a reform measure during this Congress. Earlier in the year, however, he said that it would be necessary to pass any reform before the election, so that neither side would know whose majority would be constrained by it.
