Budget Chicanery

With fewer than 10 days remaining to come up with the budget for fiscal 2000, Congress is using every gimmick in the book to fit federal spending within self-imposed limits. What’s missing in the deliberations is honesty. Congress should stop inventing black holes in bookkeeping and, instead, acknowledge that its limits are flawed; then it should raise the ceiling to more realistic levels.

Imposing limits on spending, as Congress first did in 1990, was the right way to go. It was time to put discipline into the runaway spending that had plunged the nation into an ever-deepening deficit. But meeting those limits then was easy. It could be achieved just by cutting defense spending.

Once the “peace dividend” was spent, however, the flaws built into the limits--twice extended since 1990--were exposed. In fact, the appropriation for the current fiscal year has exceeded spending limits by some $31 billion. Congress masked the splurge by classifying the excess as “emergency” spending and removing it from the limits. Robert D. Reischauer, a budget expert at the Brookings Institution, estimates that more than half of the $31 billion could not be defined as emergency funding by any stretch of honesty.

Instead of imposing financial discipline on a profligate government, the spending ceiling has become the catalyst for smoke-and-mirrors budgeting. While overall government spending has dropped by nearly 10% in real terms since 1990, the decline was entirely due to a 27% drop in defense spending. Excluding defense, discretionary domestic spending--mostly the money the government spends on itself and its programs--has increased by almost 18%.

In cobbling together the fiscal 2000 budget, Congress is once again considering the artifice of emergency spending, along with stretching the year to 13 months to balance the budget.

This not only deceives the public but, just as important, makes a mockery of the original goal of reining in spending. Congress should recognize that its existing limits on domestic spending are unrealistic, especially now that both political parties agree that defense spending should rise. It should adjust those limits to reasonable levels--though of course without falling into deficit spending again--and stick to them. Just as important, it should keep its hands off Social Security surpluses and put on hold any tax cut.

Time is running out for Congress to meet the Sept. 30 deadline for passage of the fiscal 2000 budget. But it is not too late to inject honesty into the appropriation process.