A pair of Republicans on the House Rules Committee recently discussed proposals to alter the rules for the consideration of spending bills. The effort drew attention – and opposition – from Rules Committee Democrats and Appropriations Committee Republicans alike.
A pair of Republicans on the House Rules Committee recently discussed proposals to alter the rules for the consideration of spending bills. The effort drew attention – and opposition – from Rules Committee Democrats and Appropriations Committee Republicans alike.
The controversy centered on a proposal that would have enabled the House to reduce expenditures on mandatory spending programs, the largest of which are Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, during the appropriations process.
While it would be a good idea to provide more opportunities for review of mandatory spending programs, the already troubled appropriations process is not the right vehicle.
As our chart shows, mandatory spending — which is set by formula and does not require approval through the annual appropriations process — has ballooned in the past several decades and is projected to continue growing faster than the economy. Many fiscal analysts regard the growth rates in mandatory spending as unsustainable, and several have called for reforms to bring costs down.
A good way to understand mandatory spending is through an analogy to a recurring charge on a credit card. Anyone who has signed up to pay an electric bill or a cable bill on a monthly, recurring basis knows that the charges continue until the account holder alters or cancels his or her service. Similarly, Congress has signed the American people up for automatic payments with mandatory spending programs. Of course, mandatory spending payments grow regularly as the population ages and more people become eligible for benefits. Most Americans would be alarmed to be faced with automatic, recurring and growing charges on their credit cards. And many lawmakers are understandably alarmed about the growth of the federal government’s automatic spending.
This brings us back to Rule XXI and the effort to change it. Reps. McClintock (R-Cal.) and Griffith (R-Va.) hoped to alter House rules to allow spending cuts in mandatory programs through the annual appropriations process.
The idea has a number of shortcomings.
For one thing, mandatory spending changes should be developed, debated and approved by the appropriate committees of jurisdiction, such as the Ways and Means Committee, which have expertise with these programs. Allowing mandatory spending changes to be tacked onto an appropriation bill could be viewed as a way to avoid this element of “regular order.”
Moreover, the likely effect of the rule change would not be to provide an incentive to cut mandatory spending but to make it even harder to pass appropriations bills. Congress has not completed all 12 appropriations bills on time since 1994, often because of controversial policy “riders.” It is easy to imagine how adding mandatory spending changes to appropriations bills would similarly make them more controversial and less likely to pass, particularly since the rule change is limited to spending cuts for popular programs like Social Security and Medicare.
Even if the House passed a mandatory spending cut using an appropriation bill, that bill would be subject to a Senate filibuster. Congress already has a more effective method of speeding spending cuts by using the reconciliation process, which gives a bill filibuster protection.
The challenge for Congress is to ensure that promised mandatory spending benefits do not exceed the revenues available to pay for them in an unsustainable manner. Congress could better tackle the government’s fiscal problems by coming up with long-term solutions on mandatory programs and passing them in a straightforward manner rather than adding them to an appropriations process that is already dysfunctional.
While more frequent scrutiny of mandatory spending programs might be helpful, annual reexamination would add an unnecessary element of uncertainty to beneficiaries and blockade progress on the appropriations process even further.
