Here they go again. Congress has once again turned to budgeting by crisis, pushing through a gargantuan spending bill that keeps some wasteful programs in place, expands others, and offers no hope for restraint. All this in the name of “avoiding a government shutdown,” a ready-made excuse to justify all manner of profligacy.
It’s time to get rid of this false choice by enacting an automatic continuing resolution that, absent full-year appropriations, would kick in until Congress finishes the job.
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Instead of allowing these high-pressure situations to become political leverage that both sides use to enact bad policy, automatic CRs would prevent shutdowns, keep the government running, and keep Washington from lurching from one fiscal crisis to the next.
Budgeting by crisis is costly. The last three government shutdowns cost taxpayers more than $4 billion, including $3.7 billion in back pay for furloughed workers and over $330 million in other costs.
And that’s just the cost of shutdowns that actually happened. The mere threat of a shutdown disrupts agencies, forcing them into contingency planning weeks in advance. That costs time and money and pulls employees away from their regular duties, hurting productivity. It makes long-term planning nearly impossible.
Less concretely but perhaps more insidiously, the political shenanigans that invariably surround shutdown brinkmanship also erode our faith in government. It’s a cost we can’t measure, but it’s certainly harmful.
And for what? Not much, as it turns out. Shutdowns almost never yield the policy victories negotiators are looking for when they begin the game of fiscal chicken. But they do tend to exacerbate partisan division, helping to set the stage for even more gridlock.
There is a way out of this lose-lose scenario.
An automatic CR would provide the time to consider spending judiciously — lawmakers could even read the bills and debate them during daylight hours — without a potential shutdown casting a shadow over the proceedings.
That would eliminate the false choice between fiscal responsibility and keeping the lights on. It would hold members of Congress responsible for their votes. And it would give the president leverage he doesn’t now have. Congress doesn’t take seriously a veto threat against an omnibus spending bill under the existing system because lawmakers assume (correctly in almost every case) that any president is going to choose a bad spending bill over a shutdown.
But an automatic CR would work, if properly constructed.
A measure from Ohio Sen. Rob Portman would automatically allow a CR to take effect whenever an appropriations bill is not completed by the regular deadline of Oct. 1, starting at the previous year’s spending level. After 120 days, discretionary spending would be cut by 1%, with further, periodic reductions until the full-year spending bills are enacted.
Under no circumstances should any automatic CR allow for automatic spending increases. That would create too much of an incentive — one could even say too much of a temptation — for Congress to simply put the entire budget on the same kind of upward autopilot that entitlement spending is now on, with much the same sort of dire fiscal consequences. Portman’s automatic spending cuts create the right incentives for Congress to do its job on time in the first place.
The longest shutdown on record ended about 10 months ago. To ensure we don’t see another, Congress should adopt an automatic CR as soon as possible.
Alison Acosta Winters is a senior policy fellow at Americans for Prosperity.
