Lawmakers advance two-year federal budget cycle

PDF: Biennial Budgeting and Appropriations Act

WASHINGTON — Seeking to fix what they call a “broken” budget system, U.S. senators from Tennessee and Georgia are supporting a bipartisan plan to move to a two-year federal budget cycle.

They say a two-year cycle would help provide more oversight of federal spending and cause Congress, which has failed in recent years to pass individual appropriations bills, to be more deliberate in making budget decisions.

“A two-year budget process would force Congress to spend more time fixing or repealing broken programs and less time spending taxpayer dollars,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

The Biennial Budgeting and Appropriations Act would mandate that lawmakers spend the first session of each Congress debating and adopting a two-year budget resolution, along with two-year appropriations bills. The second year would be spent reviewing the programs in the budget.

Currently, Congress passes annual budgets, but in recent years, partisan disagreements over spending priorities have caused the Senate to miss its deadlines for passing appropriations bills at the end of the fiscal year.

As a result, Congress has had to pass stop-gap continuing resolutions to extend those deadlines or pass “omnibus” appropriations bills that combine all spending bills into one giant measure, which critics say is ripe for fiscal abuse.

The act is mostly sponsored by Republicans, though Sens. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and Joe Lieberman, Ind.-Conn., are co-sponsors.

It is opposed by many who say it would make the federal government less nimble and more handicapped in its ability to respond to major crises, such as the current economic slowdown or Hurricane Katrina.

“I’ve been a little skeptical of a biennial appropriations process just because of the difficulties in anticipating that far in advance the programmatic needs of particular parts of the budget,” said Thomas Mann, a congressional scholar with the liberal-leaning Brookings Institutions.

He said adopting a biennial budget is a procedural cover for lawmakers reluctant to face growing deficits and greater strains on budgets.

“The problems we face in fiscal policy are enormous,” he said. “Few politicians want to talk about raising taxes or cutting back on benefits in social programs, like Social Security and Medicare, that have been promised. It’s hard to believe that biennial budgeting will help us in any significant way.”

Senators from Tennessee and Georgia, however, say it would help target wasteful spending by increasing lawmakers’ accountability in their spending requests with its yearlong budget reviews.

“Wouldn’t it be refreshing to have candidates seeking federal office talking about the oversight of federal programs instead of how they want to spend more of the taxpayers’ dollars?” Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., said.