Parties and budgeting

With this posting I launch into an area with which I have no first hand experience or expertise. It is the area of budgeting, or more generally the process by which a government raises revenue and allocates it to the programs the government provides to the people. In Britain, as I understand it, the budget is prepared by the executive departments in consultation with the ruling party. There is a special period during which the budget is presented to parliament, but it almost invariably approved, since the ruling party has the majority, and the budget is a high priority item. On approval, the budget, the appropriations, and the associated taxes to pay for the expenditures is set. These are all taken care of in one period. The rest of the time in parliament is taken up with legislating on new programs and policies that I suppose will be paid for in the next budget if they have not already been incorporated into the current budget.

In the US, on the other hand, the process of budgeting, authorizing, and appropriating are separated and chaotic. The House, especially lately, has come up with a budget, and then complains that the president and the senate have not produced a budget. One would think that it is especially the House’s responsibility to produce the budget, since it is responsible in the constitution for raising and appropriating funds, but this has become more and more blurred over our history. It used to be, before we began to have deficits, and needed to raise taxes to pay for them, that the allocation and appropriation of money for the executive departments was carried out by the individual House and Senate committees responsible for the departments, without much coordination between them, since, with a surplus, it was not necessary.

Once coordination became necessary, the question of who would do the coordinating became an issue, and since there were no strong ruling parties, the tendency was for the executive departments to do the coordinating. Congress resisted this, and tried to establish its own independent coordination process, but the result was only that the process became a contest between the executive and the legislative. This contest goes on today, and the process is chaotic. Often there is no budget, appropriations are delayed until the last minute, and then bundled into continuing resolutions that only continue the chaos. The House goes through a process of developing a budget, but it is only a sham, since it does not require that authorizations and appropriations conform to the budget, and usually they don’t.

Clearly the US government is dysfunctional with respect to the budgetary process at least. My contention is that it is so because the parties are not strong enough to force a rationalization of the process. The ruling party in the House has come a long way toward imposing order on the process in the House. If it were only up to the House, we would have a rational, organized, effective process. Unfortunately the House is only one of the parties currently involved, and it is overshadowed by the president and the senate. If the ruling party were stronger it would be able to diminish the power of the president and senate, and establish the proper dominance of the House.