Competition in Spending

April 18, 1955

The proposed constitutional amendment of Senator Byrd would make it possible for the President to veto any item in an appropriation bill without being forced to veto the entire measure. This would surely bring Washington much nearer to fiscal responsibility. But it would still fall short of that goal. We will not achieve a fully responsible budget until we are ready to accept the system that has long prevailed in Great Britain, under which the legislative branch can reduce, but cannot increase, the expenditures proposed by the executive branch.

The proposal that Congress should actually deprive itself of the power of voting appropriations not proposed by the President is so contrary to what we are accustomed to that it may strike some readers as shocking or chimerical. Yet it is our own Federal procedure that would seem shocking in most foreign countries. They simply could not afford the fiscal irresponsibility of the American system. Nor can we ourselves afford it much longer.

The rule that the legislature should not be allowed to increase expenditures beyond those proposed by the executive is not novel. It is accepted, in fact, in the overwhelming majority of governments in the world today. It prevails in many of our own states.

The rule rests on a fundamental principle of government. The only proper fiscal function of Congress is to be the watchdog of the people’s Treasury. Its members will not properly perform their function as watchmen if they can put their own hands in the Treasury. The Congressional “power of the purse” properly consists solely of the power to guard or to refuse the purse.

If this principle could once be established it would end forever the present shocking competition among the President, the House, and the Senate, and among individual representatives and individual senators, to outspend each other—to prove that each can be more generous than the others in appropriating the taxpayers’ money. If members were unable to introduce measures proposing handouts the change would leave unborn most of the bills now introduced. It would forever end logrolling. Congress would exercise far more than now its power of reducing proposed Presidential expenditures. As H.J. Ford put it in his Representative Government 30 years ago: “There is no propensity of human nature more marked than jealousy of opportunities that one does not share.”

We may put the political principle involved in another way. It is to encourage competition between the President and Congress in economy; it is to discourage, preferably to the point of making it impossible, competition between them in extravagance.

But why, some congressmen will ask, should this power be taken away from Congress, and not from the President? The answer is that Congress already can exercise an absolute veto over any appropriation proposed by the President (simply by refusing to vote it), whereas the President cannot exercise such an absolute veto over Congressional appropriations. He does not even have the power of item veto, which Senator Byrd wants to give him. And even if he had it, he would still have, as now, only a partial “veto” which can still be overridden by a two-thirds majority in both houses. This power to override has often been exercised by Congress in granting veterans’ bonuses or lavish Federal payroll increases. It tempts the President in advance to increase his own spending proposals.

If Congress could be persuaded to pass a self-denying constitutional amendment depriving itself of the power of increasing the President’s proposed expenditures, it should at the same time give itself the explicit power to return an unbalanced budget submitted by the President with directions either to balance it or to reduce its proposed total expenditures to some specified maximum.

To repeat, the basic principle to be followed to attain a responsible budget is clear. It is to eliminate the power of either Congress or the President to spend without restraint and to increase the power of each to restrain the spending of the other.