This week on Facing the Future, host Bob Bixby spoke with Dr. Philip Joyce, professor of public policy at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. They discussed the breakdown of the federal budget process, controversies over the power of the purse, and the looming Social Security crisis.
Joyce emphasized that the problem with the budget is not rooted in the process itself but in political dysfunction. “The real issue,” he said “is that we’ve had an unsustainable budget for some time and we have chosen not to do anything about it. If we wanted to do something about it, there’s nothing about the existing budget process that would stop us from doing that.”
One notable breakdown in the process is the failure to pass appropriation bills on time, increasingly relying on continuing resolutions (CRs) that extend previous spending levels for a set period. He explained, “A continuing resolution is simply a declaration that we’re going to continue doing what we’re already doing.”
This practice, he said, “compromises the actual analysis of spending and the ability of the Congress to hold the executive accountable. It also seriously compromises the effectiveness of agencies. If you’re halfway through the fiscal year before final appropriation bills are passed, that’s not a recipe for either effective congressional oversight or effective management of the executive branch.”
Joyce observed that the process has been “made even worse recently because Congress is now using the [fast track] reconciliation process to appropriate large sums of money to agencies like the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security. That entirely takes the oversight away from the congressional appropriations committees, and in effect, gives these agencies big slush funds that they can use however they want.”
Moreover, Joyce expressed concern that the executive branch has been encroaching on the congressional spending authority enshrined in the Constitution. He believes that the Trump Administration has violated laws such as the Anti-Deficiency Act, which prohibits spending money not appropriated for a specific purpose, and the Impoundment Control Act (ICA), which requires the president to seek congressional approval before canceling appropriated funds.
“If the president can spend money on anything he wants to, and then refuse to spend money on anything he disagrees with, then the appropriations process is meaningless,” Joyce said, underscoring the threat this posed to the separation of powers.
One of the more controversial practices he discussed was the use of so-called “pocket rescissions,” where the administration submits rescission proposals to Congress at the very end of the fiscal year, leaving Congress no time to act, thus allowing the administration to cancel spending unilaterally. Joyce explained that this tactic has been used despite the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) ruling that such rescissions were not authorized by the ICA. He noted the complexity of enforcement, stating that although GAO is authorized to sue to enforce the ICA, it had not done so.
Turning to Social Security, Joyce expressed frustration that Congress has seen an eventual problem coming for decades and has done nothing to fix it. The program’s trustees have estimated that the Old Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund will become insolvent in 2032.
“It was about demographics,” Joyce said. “The people who would eventually be Social Security beneficiaries, the baby boomers, were already here and there was going to be an imbalance between the people paying in and the people drawing out. If the problem had been addressed 30, or 20, or even 10 years ago, the solutions would be less draconian than what would need to happen now. But I think that Congress and presidents just had their heads in the sand because all of the things that they could come up with as solutions were things that were not going to be politically popular.”
He cautioned against viewing Social Security’s challenges as separate from the larger federal budget problem, warning that borrowing more money to cover Social Security costs is “not at all a solution.”
When asked about the views of his students on these fiscal challenges, Joyce painted a rather bleak picture. He described them as largely numb or resigned, with many believing that Social Security might not exist at all by the time they retire. He observed, “the majority of the hands go up” when he asks if they think Social Security will be gone completely. He attributed this pessimism to the perception that older generations have deferred major problems, leaving younger people to inherit enormous challenges.
Hear more on Facing the Future. Concord Coalition Senior Advisor Bob Bixby hosts the program each week on WKXL in Concord N.H., and it is also available via podcast. Join us as The Concord Coalition team discusses issues relating to national fiscal policy with budget experts, industry leaders, and elected officials. Past broadcasts are available here. You can subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Pandora, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or with an RSS feed. Follow Facing the Future on Facebook, and watch videos from past episodes on The Concord Coalition YouTube channel.
