Bold Reforms for Better Budgeting

Senator Sam Ervin, co-author of the bill, proudly calls it "one of the most important pieces of legislation considered during my service in the Senate." Republican Senator Charles Percy, another coauthor, claims that it is "one of the historic turning points in the evolution of our institutions." The bill has been hailed by many liberal Senators, notably Maine's Edmund Muskie and California's Alan Cranston, as well as by such conservatives as Virginia's Harry Byrd Jr. and Tennessee's William Brock.

With this kind of broad agreement, the Senate last week passed by the remarkable vote of 80 to 0 a bill that may well turn out to be as revolutionary as Ervin and Percy claim. It would for the first time in modern history make Congress an active partner with the White House in drawing up the federal budget, instead of merely approving or denying presidential proposals or developing isolated and improvised programs on its own. A similar version of the measure swept through the House last December by a vote of 386 to 23. When the differences are ironed out and the bill reaches the White House in the next few weeks, it is likely to be quickly signed into law by President Nixon, one of its longtime supporters.

The rate of inflation, the level of income taxes, the size of the national debt, the price of cheese--all are affected by the size and shape of the budget. With so much power at stake, politicians of such differing plumage would never have agreed to change the system if it was not inexcusably bad--and it is.

At present, the President draws up his own budget, using the 428-man Office of Management and Budget to do his staff work, and dumps the huge volume into the lap of Congress in January. The document presented by Nixon this year is intimidating: it has 1,071 pages, weighs 2 1/2 Ibs. and calls for spending $304.4 billion. Congress now has the power to revise the President's budget completely, but it lacks a centralized staff to analyze such a massive tome. More important, Congress is simply not organized to consider the proposal as a whole--or to perform the essential job of setting goals, weighing priorities, and figuring out where the money is going to be raised to meet specific needs.

Instead, the various House and Senate committees extract those parts of the budget that bear on their special responsibilities and then rearrange items, raise or lower the dollar totals, or tuck in new projects. Rather than producing a final and coordinated budget, Congress normally passes 13 separate appropriations bills that fit no overall plan. Until they are added up, no one knows how big the budget will be or how much of a deficit it will cause.

Master Plan. What is more, in the past ten years, only six of these money bills have been passed before the date that they were needed: July 1, the beginning of each fiscal year. Congress has regularly had to whiz through temporary funding measures that kept programs going. Nixon is not the first President to accuse Congress of "fiscal irresponsibility."

Under the Senate's bill, many of these flaws would be remedied. The

President would submit his proposed budget on Feb. 15. In both houses, the budget would be referred to newly created budget committees, which would analyze its proposals with the help of economists and other experts in a new congressional Office of the Budget. The two budget committees would meet by May 1 to issue a concurrent resolution setting spending levels for all 14 major categories of programs, including health, defense and space. The committees would also specify the revenues that would be needed and the expected deficit, if any, and its effect upon the national debt. The master plan proposed by the budget committees would have to be passed by both houses by June 1.

As the summer went on, the various appropriations bills would move through Congress much as before, with politicians pushing their favorite projects; then the bills would go to the President for his signature or veto. By mid-August, after adding up the appropriations that had been passed, the two budget committees would report out a second concurrent resolution that reaffirmed or revised the earlier goals. If Congress agreed that too much money had been spent, it would have to pass a "reconciliation bill," which would reduce expenditures that had already been approved, or raise taxes--or perhaps do a bit of both. If the President went so far as to veto the reconciliation bill, Congress could either revise the measure or try to pass it over his veto. The whole complicated process would have to be finished by Sept. 25, just in time for the beginning of the new fiscal year, which would start on Oct. 1, thus giving Congress more time for deliberation.

Limit the President. Each faction in Congress has its own reason for supporting the budget reform, which would go into effect in October 1976. Conservatives see the new system as a means of battling the White House and the big spenders in Congress to achieve a balanced budget. Liberal Democrats believe that the reform would enable them to reshape Republican budgets along more progressive lines. The bill would drastically limit the President's authority to impound funds--refusing to spend money appropriated in bills that had become law. Although the political infighting over budget making is bound to go on, the skirmishing will at least take place within a more systematic framework. That is a prospect that every politician--and taxpayer--can applaud.

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