Taxpayers may experience an unintended funding hangover from the stimulus passed in the New Year. On top of the $787 billion up-front price tag, one of its greatest legacies may be agency budgets binging on steroids like a slugger in major league baseball.

To turn the stimulus legislation around quickly, Congress jammed hundreds of billions of dollars into existing agency programs and projects. Using these pipelines streamlines the legislative process and avoids new political battles as well as growing pains from creating new program goals and parameters. In theory, this tactic also helps speed the dollars out the door to communities.  Some agencies saw their effective budgets doubled or more, creating first an administrative and oversight nightmare, and later an increased budgetary appetite.

As Congress  churns its way through spending bills,  it is quite obvious that lawmakers are cognizant of this stimulus spending. The Senate Appropriations Committee describes this pretty clearly: “The fiscal year 2010 Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related agencies appropriations bill was greatly influenced by the recent passage of the [stimulus]… the Committee generally did not provide additional large increases in this bill to those programs that received large increases in [the stimulus]…[But] expects to put a higher priority on these critical programs in the fiscal year 2011 appropriations bill.” In other words, stimulus spending allowed us to spend mostly at the same rate, but come next year, we’ll be looking for more cash.

The President’s budget projections show a steady spending increase. Over the last decade, the federal budget increased roughly $100 billion from year to year. But even when you eliminate the predictable spike for this year and next’s stimulus spending, you find that by 2012–when the economy should be humming–spending levels are roughly $300 billion higher than they would be under the normal trajectory. Considering the other spending priorities the President has identified, entrenching bonus stimulus spending could push budget totals – and deficits – even higher.

The problem is that, as witnessed by the hallelujahs and hosannas surrounding the recent vote to cut $1.7 billion for new jet fighters, it is almost as difficult to eliminate funding from existing programs as it is to step away from the dessert table. Lawmakers, beneficiaries, and agencies become acclimatized to the new funding levels, and attempts to bring budgets back to  more sustainable levels are interpreted as inflicting deep wounds. They adjust to the Cadillac lifestyle and have a hard time returning to a Chevrolet.

Oddly enough, the Defense Department provides a test example. After years of gorging on the emergency spending bills that funded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (as well as new toys for the Pentagon), Secretary Gates is reported to be pushing the services to deal with zero budget growth over the next five years. This assumes that to meet other defense needs, the services will have to identify $50-60 billion in offsets. We’ll see whether DOD gets the budgetary DTs when it tries to kick the addiction to the new spending.

The stimulus was an extraordinary budgetary response to the current economic crisis.  As the recovery takes hold, we need to return to normal, ordinary budgeting rather than allowing extraordinary expenditures to become ordinary through post-stimulus political inertia. Long term budget decisions should be based on policy priorities, not on how much we spent last year.