Dysfunctional budgetary process is cause of the shutdown, and the source of all the power plays

OPINION:

By the time you read this, it is entirely possible — perhaps even likely — that the federal shutdown over funding for the Mexican border wall will have concluded. Having begun just before Christmas, by the middle of January it had passed the previous shutdown record (21 days) set in 1995-96. This version is different, however, for a couple of political reasons.

First, congressional Democrats, who tend to enjoy the strategic support of the press corps, are emboldened by their gains in the midterm elections; and second, the president is less likely than past Republicans to be influenced by media coverage or the vagaries of opinion polls. Accordingly, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer calculate that they have nothing to lose with intransigence while President Trump believes that he has everything to lose if he compromises on his signature campaign promise.

In that sense, the 2018-19 shutdown is a symptom of politics in the age of Trump. Or maybe not. For the fact is that while both sides might have avoided a shutdown by meeting the other halfway, the basic issue is neither a willingness to punish government employees for the failures of elected officials or a (comparatively) modest appropriation for border security. The basic issue is the budgetary process, which has been largely dysfunctional for the past generation — and for which both the legislative and executive branches share blame.

As often happens, the current system by which federal spending is proposed and appropriated is the consequence of a series of so-called reforms and counter-proposals which, in the guise of rationalizing and “streamlining” federal spending, have amounted to a century-long series of maneuvers for power.

Indeed, until the Harding administration in the early 1920s, the federal budgetary process — if that’s the word for it — was simplicity itself: Presidents sent their requests to Congress by way of the Treasury Department and Congress acted (or failed to act) accordingly. But with the establishment of the Bureau of the Budget, spending requests were planned and consolidated, along with revenue estimates, by civil servants. With the transfer of the Bureau to White House control by Franklin Roosevelt on the eve of World War II, this left Congress with limited recourse or discretion to add and subtract, in modest increments, to annual spending.

Since then, however, the balance of power has shifted decisively. The Bureau of the Budget, renamed the Office of Management and Budget in 1969 by Richard Nixon, is the largest apparatus within the White House bureaucracy and its chiefs are invariably political appointees, not civil servants. For its part, in the half-century since, Congress has instituted a series of measures which have effectively countermanded the imbalance: There are now congressionally-mandated ceilings on spending levels — except, of course, for special “pork-barrel” appropriations in selected districts and states — and since the law forbids line-item vetoes, presidents have limited control over whether, or how, federal dollars are spent.

To this must be added the invention of entitlement programs, which are financially sovereign, and the explosion of national debt, as well as the annual expedient of “continuing resolutions” when presidents and Congress fail to resolve their differences. Ever-expanding “debt ceilings” replace fiscal discipline.

The upshot is that, in our time, neither Congress nor the president exercises final authority, and legislative deadlines are seldom met. So it is not for nothing that, within living memory (1965) annual budgets had a ritual ceiling of $100 billion, or that limits on growth were not regarded as “cuts.”

All of which explains the present predicament — Congress and White House at regular impasse — and suggests, as a practical matter, there’s no way out. There is no sign that any president will reclaim power the office has lost, and Congress often exercises power most decisively by doing nothing. There have been 21 separate shutdowns of varying length in recent decades, and there’s no reason to doubt that, no matter who controls which branch of government, there will be more in the future.

In one sense, of course, the current conflict is the system of balances and checks the Founders envisioned. But long before the era of trillion-dollar budgets, politics governed our getting and spending and, in this moment, politics is more emotional than rational. Even if some deal is struck, and the parks and battlefields reopen, the 2020 presidential campaign is upon us, and we’re distracted as usual.

• Philip Terzian, former writer and editor at The Weekly Standard, is the author of “Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.”