This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, June 27th,

2023. I'm Caleb Brown.

Congress's budget process is broken.

That's not exactly new information, but Congress won't have to address mounting

debt for more than a year, so now may be a good time to strengthen the process for new spending.

Caters Raminabacha details some ways to herd those congressional cats into the

deliberative processes they're supposed to be doing anyway.

There is a process that Congress is supposed to go through every time they approve spending

plans, a budget, if you will.

How often and maybe when was the last time Congress forthrightly went through that process?

Congress barely, if ever follows the budget process because there's a lot of fallback mechanisms.

I do recall that in 2013, both the House and the Senate

adopted budget resolutions. We haven't even seen any budget resolutions this year and the only reason they did

so in 2013 is because there was a law that specified that if they didn't put forth a budget, they wouldn't get paid.

So it demonstrates that incentives work, but without those, Congress is not likely to follow the budget process and in part it is because we're coming up on another election year.

We seem to be in an election year just about every other year and putting forth a budget is one way that Congress can put concrete priorities

on paper. Numbers don't lie and so members of Congress like to avoid that because it creates

accountability it creates transparency it creates something that others can

hold members of Congress accountable for so it's just easier to not follow the budget

process than potentially face criticism for budgetary ideas that people might disagree with.

The Republican Study Committee is sort of long reputed to be the budget hawks of Congress.

What are they recommending for Congress to adopt and what do you think of those proposals?

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