This is the Kano Daily Podcast for Friday, February 16th, 2024. I'm Caleb Brown.

Federal spending is a trillion dollar problem and while Congress should address it directly with substantial cuts,

there are some opportunities to begin to, at the very least, put more spending through a regular

budget process.

Cato's Romina Bache explains.

The Schoolhouse Rock version of how money gets allocated and spent is almost totally wrong and that's been the case for how many

years.

Gosh Caleb over over the past 40 years Congress has followed the budget process I think twice for most

spending it doesn't follow that that process there's a large chunk of spending, a little over half, where Congress followed the process at one point, but that might have been decades ago. Social security, Medicare, Medicaid, those programs were put in place by following that model of passing a bill and authorizing the program and then appropriating the spending.

But since then, they've been allowed to grow on autopilot.

But there's another aspect of spending, discretionary spending,

that Congress is supposed to vote on every year.

And there we've seen more continuing resolutions

than actual funding bills, and they usually are late.

And Congress likes to mix several items together.

There's supposed to be 12 individual spending bills. They like to pass an omnibus

where they stick them all in one package or a so-called minibus where they at least

combine a few of these harder to pass bills, some that Republicans will like more, some that Democrats

will like more to try and get them past the finish line.

And then there's a whole another category of spending that they like to call emergency spending,

that in many cases is no such thing that's even further out of the

budget process and we're trying to shed light on that category which is much

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