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Rifts harden over budget process reform
The push by budget committee members in both the House and Senate to put the federal government on a two-year budget has created rifts within both the Democratic and Republican parties.
Last week, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) and ranking member Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) proposed to the deficit supercommittee that it include biennial budgeting in its report due out next month.
The senators argue that the current process is broken, with Congress failing to consider a budget in most election years.
In the House, Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) favors two-year budgeting and he is working on a package of reforms that could include the switch. Ryan and supercommitee co-chairman Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) included biennial budgeting in a 2009 bill they co-authored.
Late last week, appropriators fired back and in their own letters urged the supercommittee to ignore all budget process reforms.
“In our view, many of these proposals would have unintended and counterproductive consequences…and may jeopardize support for whatever package of actual cuts that the Committee may recommend to Congress,” an Oct. 14 letter states.
All the House GOP appropriations cardinals joined Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) in a similar letter urging the supercommittee to include no budget process changes.
On Wednesday, Conrad told reporters that he is well aware that appropriators are loathe to give up their annual crack at federal spending. He noted that he has proposed a compromise option where Congress would take up a two-year budget in odd years, setting an overall spending level, but where appropriators could still enact two sets of spending bills to meet that budget.
Sessions meanwhile was struggling to get a vote on an amendment to an appropriations bill on the floor which would limit the ability of appropriators to claim reductions in spending by claiming credit for mandatory spending reductions outside a ten-year budget window.
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