Volume XVIII No. 51

Considering it’s time for sugar plums to be dancing in our heads, we’d like to believe that our nation’s long budgetary nightmare is over, but it looks more like a brief respite. For the next year there will only be a few skirmishes, but the most recent budget deal means the big battles won’t reemerge until the beginning of 2015.

The Senate this week followed the House’s lead and adopted a budget framework for fiscal year (FY) 2014 and 2015. The package includes spending cuts and revenue raisers to increase the top line for spending above what was allowed under the Budget Control Act of 2011. Discretionary spending is set at $1.012 trillion in FY14 and at $1.014 trillion for FY15, but the legislation doesn’t dictate how much goes in each of the dozen spending bills, or how much goes to each agency. For FY14, those details have to be hammered out and bills written before the continuing resolution funding government expires January 15. We’re likely to see a massive omnibus of all spending legislation jammed together and sprung on the masses in the dark of the night a day before consideration. It’s sad, but that would represent progress.

Lawmakers will rehash the same arguments to set FY15 spending levels for the various agencies, but they’ll have months to hammer that out. There’s even a chance a spending bill or two will get enacted before the FY15 fiscal year starts. In fact, Congress could surprise us all and pass all of the appropriations bills before the start of FY15.

So you can put that one in very short “win” column for the 113^th Congress that began in January, but there’s little else to join it. You might count the  bill authorizing Pentagon spending that just passed as well. But you can’t really consider a 16 day government shutdown and finally passing a continuing resolution to fund government into fiscal year 2014 and raise the debt ceiling (for a few months) a “win.” On the other hand, you can’t really consider not passing the fiscal year 2013 spending bills until March a failure by the 113^th Congress, that was really just a legacy of the (also dysfunctional) 112^th Congress that didn’t do their job either!

A paltry 59 laws have been enacted this year, and that includes five naming things, four land conveyances or boundary changes, and a law that changed the size of precious metal blanks for National Baseball Hall of Fame Commemorative Coins. And who knew you needed federal legislation to do that?

Hopefully this eye of the budgetary storm will provide an opportunity for Congress to step up its game. Comprehensive tax reform waits in the wings. Making the code simpler and fairer while getting rid of the litany of tax breaks would go a long way to redeeming this Congress. Immigration reform is on deck. Lawmakers can conduct greater oversight of implementation of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) and where the billions in Sandy relief funding is being spent and why.

There are also opportunities in not doing the wrong thing. Don’t gut flood insurance reforms – an accomplishment of the 112^th Congress – by delaying the phase out of subsidies. Lawmakers seem poised to capitulate to a small, but vocal, group of policyholders who have enjoyed subsidies for decades and want Uncle Sam to continue to pick up the tab. Last we checked, the program was more than $24 billion in debt to the taxpayer while taking in $3.6 billion in annual premiums.

Also, don’t pass an irresponsible and unnecessary farm bill. Use the savings from getting rid of wasteful  and discredited direct payments for deficit reduction instead of plowing them into new Big Ag subsidy programs.

Enact a responsible transportation bill when the current one expires in the fall. One that does not dip into the Treasury, but rather stays within the gas tax means in the Highway Trust Fund. Along the same lines, enact a responsible Corps of Engineers authorizing bill that establishes priorities and eliminates much of the more than $60 billion backlog. 

There’s still a lot of the Congress left and with the albatross of budget bills off their neck, at least in the short term, there’s a lot that should be done.  2014 is an election year. Lawmakers are looking to get rehired. It’s time to prove that they are worth it.