O.C.’s Rep. Cox Laboring to Reform Budget Process : Congress: The first-termer from Newport Beach says prospects for bringing common sense to the system are not bright, but he isn’t discouraged.

Even as bleary-eyed negotiators continued their efforts to write a 1991 budget, the reform-minded in Congress were starting to propose new ways to ensure that the government never has to go through the same herky-jerky process again.

For many in Congress, the current budget process is a major embarrassment, and any change would be a good change.

One such member of the House of Representatives is Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach), a young Orange County conservative. Just before the first budget agreement was reached, Cox lamented that under the current system, “the prospects for sane congressional management of our federal budget are gloomier than ever.”

But Cox, a thoughtful first-term back bencher, like a handful of others in Congress seeking budget change, has so far refused to become completely discouraged. Soon after he was first elected, he decided to make budget reform the central focus of his congressional agenda.

A former White House lawyer first exposed to the budget from the perspective of the Reagan Administration, he has quickly become co-chairman of the House Task Force on Budget Process Reform and has turned himself into something of an in-house historian on the subject. As a result, he has gained a rather dispassionate view of the whole mess--especially valuable in these times of mounting budget confusion.

Looking back over the last generation of budget failures and mounting deficits, Cox likes to point out how, because of the peculiar history of federal budget-making, logic has been left out of the system.

Today, Cox argues, everything in the way Washington handles the budget is backward: funding is authorized and money is spent long before the White House and Congress come up with a budget plan for that spending. At the same time, congressional authorizing committees freely approve new programs before the appropriations committees agree to fund them, putting further stress on the system.

Common sense should dictate that the budget should come first, Cox argues. Whether for a household or a government, a budget should predict how much money is available to be spent.

Yet, under the current setup, “we have never had a budget in advance of our spending decisions,” Cox observed.

“Now, we are in the middle of trying to negotiate a budget (for fiscal 1991) while we are already spending money for the year,” he noted. “When it gets this late, it’s hopeless. We have failed to provide a budget as a forecasting tool.”

Even the Gramm-Rudman automatic deficit-reduction strictures have failed to provide discipline; Congress and the White House regularly find ways to finesse them.

Yet stiffer guidelines can still get chewed up by the congressional buzz saw, especially since the current budget law, originally passed in 1974, has allowed more and more budget-making power to slip from the executive to the legislative branch. Fifty years ago, Cox observed, Congress, then bereft of staff, relied almost completely on budget figures and economic assumptions produced by the White House’s Bureau of the Budget--giving the executive branch the upper hand in any negotiations. “Back in (President Woodrow) Wilson’s time, the President basically set the budget,” Cox pointed out.

But today, a committee of 535, bulging with staff researchers and in-house economists and deeply split into dozens of fractious coalitions, has become the ultimate arbiter on budgets. It thus becomes virtually impossible to craft a spending plan that can gain approval.

“We need mechanisms to overcome Congress’ institutional disabilities,” Cox said. “Congress is best at setting broad policies, not micro-managing a budget.”

But while Cox has his own plan to simplify the process, he is worried that reform is rapidly becoming harder, simply because more people in Congress are throwing up their hands in disgust.

“There is a cynical sense that even good reform can’t be passed,” Cox cautioned. “It’s a real nihilistic view of Congress. Today, I think the biggest obstacle to reform is inertia.”