A Budget Out of Control

December 24, 1951

In a few weeks President Truman will present Congress with the budget for the next fiscal year. If either precedents or predictions are any guide, the spending he will recommend will be staggering—somewhere around $85,000,000,000, or more than even Franklin Roosevelt succeeded in spending in the whole nine years from 1933 through 1941. But Mr. Truman will blandly announce that his budget has been cut to the bone—that any attempt to reduce it will bring on a third world war or military defeat. He will defy critics of his budget to make a single reduction. His Congressional opponents will, of course, eloquently denounce his “reckless spending,” A corporal’s guard, under the leadership of Senator Byrd, will unsuccessfully propose cuts. The appropriations will end up by being substantially what the President asks for. In fact, it will be unprecedented if Congress doesn’t make a few appropriations and handouts over even Mr. Truman’s veto.

This is the outlook we face. It is a budget out of control.

And none of the proposals that are being seriously considered to give us a responsible budget goes nearly far enough to achieve one.

We will not have a responsible budget in this country, in fact, until Congress has been deprived of the power to make any appropriation not recommended by the President. This is the wholesome rule that has long prevailed in Britain. No expenditure can be proposed in Parliament except by “the government.”

It is still not generally understood that the legislature’s only justified “power of the purse” is the power to withhold the people’s purse from the executive—not the power to put its own hands in that purse. If the watchmen of the Treasury are allowed to put their own hands in the Treasury, they cease to perform their function as watchmen. A congressman cannot be depended on to serve the taxpayers if he must also serve the pressure groups. Congress should have the power to reduce proposed Federal expenditures, but never the power to initiate or increase them.

Such a change in the powers of Congress would raise the whole level and tone of our political life. As Henry Jones Ford pointed out in his Representative Government in 1924, to disable members from introducing measures proposing any added appropriations or salaried offices would “of itself shut out most of the bills congesting American legislative calendars.”

It would do far more. It would eliminate the type of congressman who holds office mainly by promising or giving handouts of the nation’s money to pressure groups in his own district. We will never have a responsible budget as long as the President, the House, and the Senate are all encouraged or even permitted to compete with and outbid each other in spending schemes.

Other procedural reforms are needed and, fortunately, could more easily become realities. For several years there has been a lively debate between those who favor a single overall annual appropriation by Congress or, as now, a series of separate appropriation bills for special purposes. To achieve economy the best solution would be to have both. Each fiscal year Congress should authorize a total maximum overall expenditure not to be exceeded. But it should continue to require the President to get a separate authorization for each special purpose. The President should not be allowed to spend the whole of these separate authorizations if they exceed the total overall maximum that Congress has previously fixed. He would have to make his own specific cuts (but be permitted no specific increases) to bring the sum of the special authorizations within the authorized overall total. In other words, the President could spend only whichever sum was lower.

A third reform would be more full-time research assistants for the major Congressional committees-to try to keep the Army, for example, from again ordering enough front-axle-housing gaskets to last for 104 years.