Politics today is less about the age-old question “Who governs?” and more about who controls the budget.
The budget has become the battleground between the two political branches — the legislative and the executive — as they fight over control of an ever-growing and increasingly centralized federal government.
Over the past several decades, Congress has delegated more and more of its lawmaking powers to agencies and bureaucrats under the purview of the executive branch, and in so doing, it has also ceded many of its responsibilities over the government’s purse strings.
This is deeply troubling from a constitutional perspective because, under the separation of powers, our governing charter created three branches of government, each of them vested with independent authority and unique powers that cannot be given away or delegated to others.
Because controlling government expenditures (and thus its operations) is so central to the act of lawmaking, the Constitution placed the power of the purse in Congress, the legislative branch.
In abdicating its budgetary responsibility, Congress has allowed an unprecedented fiscal situation of endless spending and debt that threatens the long-term economic and political health of our country.
It wasn’t always so, however.
From 1790 until the 1950s, the U.S. government maintained budget surpluses twice as often as it allowed deficit spending. Congress generally allowed deficit spending only during times of war and financial panics. Those surpluses enabled Congress to pay down the debt incurred during wars and recessions.
Moreover, the prosperity fostered by fiscal responsibility meant that debt as a percentage of gross domestic product declined dramatically with even modest surpluses or balanced budgets.
Contrast that with the near-doubling of the national debt, from about $10 trillion to about $20 trillion, in the past seven-plus years alone. Congress — first under the control of Democrats, then Republicans — gave essentially a blank check to a free-spending President Obama, who has been anything but shy about using his pen and his phone to circumvent the legislative branch.
For historical context, this loss of congressional control of the purse strings began in earnest in the 1930s as progressives pressed for centralizing spending authority and moving it into the hands of the president. Under Franklin Roosevelt, the creation of emergency spending programs and the authority to raise or lower tariffs to reach trade agreements were both important steps toward allowing the executive to spend money without explicit authorization or appropriation by Congress.
But the shift in the balance of budget power in favor of the executive branch vastly accelerated with the arrival of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in the 1960s. Under Democrat LBJ and then Republican Richard Nixon, the creation and expansion of innumerable programs (especially, entitlement programs) and agencies to manage a panoply of socioeconomic policies further expanded the bureaucratic state and centralized authority in the executive branch.
Congress delegated legislative powers to these myriad agencies in the form of broad regulatory authority. As this bureaucracy expanded, Congress sought — with, at best, mixed results — to maintain its power over the administration, not through the authorization or appropriations process, but through post-budgetary oversight of, and after-the-fact “regulatory relief” from, the bureaucracy. (Devoid of even this minimal level of congressional control is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created in 2010, which circumvents the power of the purse through funding from the Fed and is insulated from any meaningful legislative oversight.)
Unlike the proverbial frog that didn’t realize until it was too late that the heat had been turned up, the legislative branch has in recent years sought to reclaim its budget authority — albeit through unsustainable attempts to turn to automatic budget cuts, such as Gramm-Rudman-Hollings, and lately through sequestration.
Reviving the power of the purse as a tool to help return lawmaking powers to Congress and to restore budget control and fiscal responsibility will be a battle that must be fought on many fronts. One such front will be litigation, as in the case of House v. Burwell, the welcome recent federal court ruling on which held the administration had violated the Constitution by funding the Affordable Care Act’s cost-sharing program without specific appropriations from Congress.
But the legislative branch can’t (and shouldn’t) over-rely on the judicial branch to reclaim its own rightful institutional powers from the executive branch.
Congress must, first and foremost, cease delegating its powers to bureaucrats and administrative agencies. It can also no longer flinch from using its spending powers to rein them in and cancel their decrees, such as the recent outrageous assertion of federal control of local schools’ bathrooms and locker rooms through a deliberate misreading and misapplication of civil rights laws and Title IX.
Finally, Congress must relearn the lost art of lawmaking and budgeting, and replace its current practice of offering very general spending authority to the president each year with much more direct and detailed lawmaking and budgeting.
An added benefit of regular legislative order, as envisioned by Article I of the Constitution — the authorizing, funding and overseeing of the operations of government — will be preventing Congress from getting backed into large, messy and unacceptable continuing resolutions, omnibus spending bills and threats of government shutdowns at the end of the fiscal year. (These all work to the advantage of the executive branch and the administrative bureaucracy.)
The bottom line is that the fundamental goal of budget reform should be budget control.
Matthew Spalding is associate vice president and dean of educational programs at Hillsdale College’s Kirby Center in Washington, D.C. This column was adapted from testimony delivered recently before the House Budget Committee. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
