Appropriations: The Old Congressional Budget Process

Thirty years ago, the "power of the purse" and "budgetary process" meant appropriations. Entitlements were smaller and, at any rate, they were not in the mainstream of government. The real work—building roads, testing drugs, forecasting the weather, defending our allies, paying salaries, and buying uniforms, tanks, and laboratory equipment—all

went through the appropriations committees. Because, as one current member puts it, "nothing happens without the money," those two committees were and remain among the most powerful and prestigious in Congress.

Their power and huge jurisdiction explains their structure. With fifty-seven members in the House and twenty-nine in the Senate, the two committees are easily the largest in Congress. They are big because they have so much work to do and because their members must have personal contacts throughout their houses. Appropriations committees have more subcommittees, which are particularly independent, because only the strongest of committee heads, with great knowledge and advantages in staffing, could hope to know enough to argue much with subcommittee leaders.

The heads of the thirteen appropriations subcommittees are known as the "College of Cardinals." The name testifies to the sense among other members of Congress that the Appropriations Committee is a priesthood of sorts, with its own rites and norms and with leaders wielding great power. That sense of appropriators as being different has always been much stronger in the House. Strength remains in the House because Appropriations is exclusive; a member of Appropriations cannot sit on any other House committee (except, under the new budget act, for five members who represent Appropriations on Budget). Before the vast expansion of congressional staff, members of House Appropriations did much of the budget review themselves. Time spent together and their involvement in a different kind of work built committee members' self-identification as appropriators, and nonmembers' view of them as forming an arcane priesthood. Even now the House committee, particularly its staff, remains an unusually unified and distinctive organization.^[11]

The appropriations and authorizing committees are inherently in conflict. House rules distinguish appropriations from legislation and forbid legislation on an appropriations bill, but the separation is murky. Not funding an activity or funding it only under certain conditions (e.g., under what circumstances medicaid will pay for abortions) are policy decisions. If the military construction appropriation does not provide funds for housing American soldiers in the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt, then Congress is obstructing the Camp David agreement; an appropriation is legislating policy. Yet a military construction bill that says nothing about what will be built would be a bit skimpy.

In general, Congress expects the appropriators to make policy if, and only if, that is necessary to do their job; that is, no authoritative statement of current policy exists. An appropriations subcommittee chairman expressed the distinction: "Appropriations says the most efficient way to

spend money … [authorizations] should say what the need is." Authorizations can provide limits on the need (e.g., a billion dollars for mass transit), and appropriations above those limits are not in order. Likewise, appropriations are not in order for a program that has not been authorized. These rules are weakened, however, by the fact that appropriations are laws like any other laws: they supersede older legislation. If Congress chooses to override its own rules about appropriations, it is within its rights.

Members of Congress frequently legislate on appropriations bills for various reasons. The authorizations committees may refuse to report legislation that would be supported on the floor. In cases of disagreement between the committee and chamber majorities, the latter can express its will through the appropriations. Thus U.S. aid to South Vietnam was ended in an appropriations bill. Opponents have extensively restricted federal funding for abortion through versions of the "Hyde amendment." Sometimes, authorizing legislation for a program has lapsed because of disagreement over some terms of its authorization. Everybody knows that the dispute will be settled but not on what terms or when. By funding the program (Housing, the Department of State, the Department of Justice) anyway, the appropriations committees technically legislate. Sometimes the appropriators just want some program change (rarely large) and can ram it through.

Appropriations, through which Congress exercises its power of the purse over the executive, can easily constitute a parallel legislative process for the president as well. A president who wants to kill programs would be crazy to push for new legislation; instead, a Nixon or Reagan proposes to zero out the appropriation. He can use his veto against appropriations, but he cannot force legislation.

Yet the veto is weakened for the same reason that members are tempted to use appropriations to legislate: the bills must pass. Almost every bill contains enough "must" items for enough members to make failure unthinkable.^[12] Opponents of postal subsidies generally want to keep the IRS and Customs Service, all from the Treasury-Postal-General Government bill. Opponents of housing tend to like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration or the National Science Foundation and the Veterans Administration, all in the HUD (Housing and Urban Development)-Independent Agencies appropriations act. If those bills fail, parts of government important to many people may fail with them.

Appropriations bills are targets of extraneous "riders" precisely because the appropriations train is going to get through—maybe not on schedule, but eventually. Ultimately the norms that say appropriations should be matters of economy, good management of programs, and routine financing of existing obligations conflict with the opportunity

that appropriations provide to get something done in a Madisonian system of checks and counterchecks.

The old system of House, Senate, president, authorizations, and appropriations was difficult enough to operate. Good times in the 1950s and 1960s helped, and so did a system of mutual expectations and roles that reflected substantial agreement (in retrospect) between Congress and the president on matters of budgetary priorities.^[13] From 1966 to 1973, the system broke down in what Allen Schick called "The Seven-Year Budget War." Congress responded in the Budget Control and Impoundment Act of 1974.