Update (9:03 pm): The Senate has gone with option 1 (see below), allowing for the transfer of $250 million from the Airport Improvement Program to end the FAA furloughs. More detail as it becomes available. House is expected to take the bill up tomorrow, likely under a “suspension of the rules” agreement.

It has been impossible to avoid the furor created by the sequestration-forced across-the-board-cuts now that air traffic controllers have been furloughed and flights are being delayed in cities across the U.S.

It’s useful to recall how we got into this mess. Congress and the President wanted a budget doomsday device so awful it would force lawmakers to come up with $1.2 trillion in targeted deficit reduction. Failure to do that would whack a bit of each program in fiscal year 2013 (known in Washington-speak as the sequester). Evidently, they underestimated their own pain threshold for stupid budget policy and so here we are. What can’t be underestimated is policymakers ability to procrastinate and try to find an easy way out instead of doing the heavy lifting that is required to actually solve a problem.

Policymakers have floated several bad to worse options for temporarily ending the furloughs and getting the controllers back to work for the rest of the fiscal year. Any way you look at it, they are budget gimmicks.

Option 1: Grant the administration flexibility to conduct a one-time transfer of $250 million from the Airport Improvement Program. Sens. Collins (R-ME) and Udall (D-CO) have been working on a bill along these lines.

Option 2: Give the Secretary of Transportation authority to move money from anywhere in the DOT budget into the FAA operations budget. Sens. Hoeven (R-NE) and Klobuchar (D-MN) have been working on this approach.

Option 3: Use a fake spending offset. Senate Majority Leader Reid (R-NV) has drafted legislation  that would replace the entire slate of across-the-board spending cuts and “pay” for it with money saved from ramping down the wars. This budget gimmick – the so-called peace dividend – is a popular offset for additional spending, having been proposed as a way to pay for additional infrastructure spending in the president’s budget. But in reality this isn’t an offset in any way. All of the realistic budget scenarios assume the war funding would not be spent, so these savings are just on paper, while the spending it would offset is all too real.

These options continue us down the same path that created the mess in the first place: putting off hard choices for another day. Some shared sacrifice is necessary to get our budgetary house back in order, and sometimes it’s going to be painful. For years we have been spending beyond our means. The blunt instrument of across-the-board cuts makes it more painful than necessary, but unless Congress is prepared to undo the sequester in a responsible, paid-for manner, reversing the difficult parts one by one just sets the expectation that eventually all of the cuts will be reversed. Here’s a plan for $2 trillion in deficit reduction that we came up with last year.

The administration is not blameless here either. Instead of reducing spending from the beginning of the fiscal year (which started on October 1), the FAA (and other agencies) sat on its hands and only implemented cuts when the sequester actually began. This made the effects worse because now all of the cuts – which were laid out a year ago – need to be squeezed into seven months of spending. Better planning would not have saved us from furloughs, but it may have blunted the impact somewhat.

The Senate appears on the verge of a compromise that will avert the furloughs and get the controllers back to work. The angry calls from constituents may have a role to play, but we are guessing their desire to get back home for the weekend may also spur action. Washington is, after all, one of the cities most affected by the resulting flight delays. Prospects for this approach in the House, however, are not as clear.
Once again, we are beating the drum asking Congress to roll up its sleeves and actually solve a problem instead of using budget gimmicks. Maybe they’ll surprise us. But if recent history is any guide, expect political expediency to win the day.