With hours to go before a shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security last Friday, Congress adopted a continuing resolution to extend its funding for one week. This week, a spending bill to fund the department for the rest of the fiscal year was enacted. Of course fiscal year 2015 is half over, and agencies like the Coast Guard, FEMA, Transportation Security Administration, the Secret Service, and Customs and Border Protection have been operating with limitations and at fiscal year 2014 funding levels since September.

Regardless of the rationale for the delay (in this case President Obama’s Executive Orders on immigration law enforcement) continuing resolutions are not victimless crimes, and represent an abdication of the constitutional power of the purse that lawmakers claim to hold so dear. Agencies can’t budget, hiring is delayed, travel and conferences are put on hold, new initiatives can’t take off, etc. In other words, dysfunction and inefficiency are guaranteed. As a perverse consequence, lawmakers who rail against a wasteful and inefficient government are ensuring that they get exactly that with continuing resolutions.

As bad as continuing resolutions are, shutdowns are even more wasteful. Obviously government is hamstrung and not working for taxpayers. And even when federal employees are sent home without pay (and those continuing to work, including those in the military like the Coast Guard, do so without pay) history shows they are eventually paid for that forced time off when they return to work. Not to mention that when there is even the whiff of a possible shutdown, agencies are forced to spend precious time and resources planning for the scenario, even if – as just happened – the shutdown is averted.

And yet continuing resolutions have become an annual occurrence. We have had a shutdown and more than one threatened shutdown in the last couple years. This is not what taxpayers are paying for; this is not how our elected officials should govern. The last time that taxpayers saw regular order, when each of the spending bills was enacted individually and before the start of the fiscal year, was in 1994. It’s been two decades. Some lawmakers have had entire careers without ever seeing bills introduced on the floor, debated and amended, conferenced with the other chamber, and signed by the President. This ir-regular order has been perpetuated by both Democrat and Republican controlled Congresses, and under Presidents from both parties.

It has to change. Part of the solution is to stop making spending bills the go-to legislation for partisan warfare. The fact that appropriations legislation is actually passed every year makes it an attractive target for policy riders. But because the spending bills expire at the end of each fiscal year, they are a terrible place to try to enact policy change. To remedy the situation further, Congress should move toward biennial budgeting. Each Congress would set their budget priorities and enact spending bills in the first year and spend the second year conducting oversight. It has become painfully clear that Congress cannot get its work done (with all their recesses and short work weeks) during the legislative session.

But no matter how you change the rules and structure of Congressional procedure, in the end, it is going to require leadership and legislative courage. Done right, there are going to be uncomfortable votes. There are going to have to be tradeoffs. Last year, the House passed only half of the dozen spending bills; the Senate passed zero. You can’t hold that against the rank and file lawmakers. Those decisions come from the top. And the top should bring these bills to the floor and reduce waste and inefficiency in government by telling agencies what their budget is before the budget year begins.