As part of a bipartisan spending deal, lawmakers last week voted to create a new congressional committee charged with trying to find a solution to years of spending dysfunction on Capitol Hill.

Lawmakers are always hesitant when it comes to authorizing new committees, and they rarely do it.

But Republican and Democratic leaders are becoming desperate to find a solution to the escalating spending fights that have consumed Congress and contributed to low approval ratings.

Congress has for the past two decades relied on last-minute, omnibus spending bills to fund the government, smashing together the dozen individual spending bills into one big measure and typically adding billions of dollars for extra projects and programs that have not received full scrutiny.

The process has grown increasingly divisive, which has made it nearly impossible for lawmakers to agree on omnibus spending packages. As a result, consecutive short-term bills, or continuing resolutions, some of them only a few days long, have become the norm for keeping the government funded and fully operational.

Three times in the past few years, the brinksmanship has led to partial government shutdowns, most recently during the early hours of Friday morning.

Lawmakers say they want to examine the problem and come up with a solution by the end of this year “on how we can fix this broken process between the House and the Senate once and for all on budget and appropriations,” Rep. Chris Collins, R-N.Y., said.

Lawmakers last week voted to form a select committee on budget and spending as part of a six-week deal to fund the federal government.

It was the fifth short-term measure, or CR, passed this fiscal year, and lawmakers, who agreed to a two-year spending cap deal, hope it will be the last one for a while.

In the meantime, the new select committee would have until the end of the year to produce a report with recommendations for easing future spending battles.

“I think this budget process is broken,” House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said. “Here we are with another CR, CR, CR, and an omnibus. That’s why something we put in here that I feel very passionate about is having a budget process reform dialogue.”

Collins called the select panel “a big sweetener” that was aimed at luring votes for the spending deal from both parties that are eager to stop the seemingly endless spending showdowns that hurt both sides politically.

Congress rarely passes appropriations measures individually and on time. In fact, it has not done so since 1997, according to the Congressional Research Service.

But the partisan divide and the need for short-term measures has increased in recent years, culminating this year in five stopgap bills that have been used to fund the federal government in first six months of the fiscal year.

Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, is a longtime critic of House and Senate spending dysfunction and has argued short-term CRs and omnibus spending packages waste billions of dollars and diminish accountability.

Ellis said Congress should consider approving two-year budgets, rather than annual budgets. He also recommends Congress give their hard-to-reach budget resolutions the force of law. The resolutions only set spending guidelines that are often ignored in final spending deals.

“There have been commissions and panels over the years, but something has to give,” Ellis told the Washington Examiner. “If this is the way Congress wanders back from the budgetary wilderness, then great.”

Not all lawmakers share Ryan’s enthusiasm for reforming the budget process.

Critics of the plan point to the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, formed by congressional leaders in in 2011. The panel of lawmakers on this “supercommittee” were supposed to write a deficit-reduction deal to stop impending federal budget caps.

It didn’t work.

The talks fell apart after the two parties fought over raising taxes and cutting spending, which are the same unsolved issues at the heart of recent partisan spending fights.

“There is zero faith in that committee,” Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, said of the new select spending panel. “How does a bicameral, bipartisan committee do anything different than we’ve done for the last nine months? They couldn’t come to an agreement on the supercommittee. What makes them think we can come to an agreement on budgetary things, on Supercommittee II?”

Ryan said the select committee will bring both House and Senate lawmakers together, which is critical because while the House is often able to pass separate appropriations measures, they typically stall in the upper chamber where 60 votes are required for passage and the minority party has the power to filibuster.

“This bill brings the Senate and Democrats to the table to start advancing real reforms so that we can finally get back to a functioning budget, spending, and appropriations process,” Ryan said.