Would No Budget, No Pay get Congress to do its job?

OPINION:

Congress hasn’t passed all 12 appropriations bills on schedule since 1996.

Instead, temporary funding bills, eleventh-hour deals and shutdown brinkmanship dominate. This chaos contributes to a disorderly budget process in which Congress fails to set reasonable annual fiscal targets, much of the budget is on autopilot with no annual oversight and trade-offs between competing priorities are neither presented appropriately nor resolved.

The result: We are running roughly $2 trillion annual operating deficits. Essentially, each year, 30% of our nation’s annual operating budget is financed like credit cards. Step one to fixing this mess is to just pass our federal budgets on time and in an orderly fashion. When the federal government grinds to a halt, real people pay the price. Families may go without food assistance, federal employees miss paychecks, air traffic slows, small-business loans are delayed, and veterans can’t access new benefits. Yet no one in Washington is held accountable.

Before 2010, this was California’s reality too. From 1980 to 2010, the state passed just 10 budgets on time, and the result was chaos: credit downgrades, IOUs issued to workers and small businesses and a public exhausted by dysfunction. Finally, California voters said, “Enough.”

Proposition 25, enacted in 2010, required the state to adopt a budget by June 15 or legislators would lose their pay for every day the budget was late. No budget, no pay. It was simple. It was designed to protect taxpayers from the all-too-real costs of missed deadlines. It worked.

California has passed its budget on time every year since. The threat of lost pay changed incentives, restored accountability and saved the state from the procedural instability that once reigned. In the wake of the longest federal shutdown in history, that’s the kind of accountability Washington needs.

As Rep. Scott Peters, California Democrat, put it: “It would provide the right incentive for us. And it worked in California, beautifully. No one’s lost a paycheck since, since that first year.”

Mr. Peters has seen the effects in California, and now, with Rep. Bill Huizenga, Michigan Republican, he is leading the charge to bring the same accountability to Washington with the bipartisan No Budget, No Pay Act. There’s a companion measure in the Senate, introduced by Sens. Rick Scott, Florida Republican, and Jacky Rosen, Nevada Democrat.

These lawmakers recognize that when Congress fails to pass a budget resolution and move appropriations bills through committee and floor votes, it also fails to set priorities and fully consider trade-offs. Lobbyists are skilled at coming up with ways to game the budget scoring process, so “pay-fors” often fail to keep up with new spending. Spending bills routinely become free-for-alls, with negotiators and leaders tacking on more spending to advance a last-minute passage or dumping everything into a last-minute continuing resolution. Congress has now normalized CRs and shutdowns as merely part of the annual budget “routine.”

That’s why we need the No Budget, No Pay Act, a simple but powerful tool to finally give Washington the accountability of every other workplace in America and restore public confidence in a system that too often excuses failure. No Budget, No Pay doesn’t dictate policy choices or favor one party over the other. Rather, it restores a fundamental norm: You don’t get paid until you do your job. Right now, Congress isn’t doing it.

No Budget, No Pay is a pillar of Concord Action’s policy agenda, which lays out practical reforms on the spending and revenue sides, including a clear and achievable benchmark for getting our fiscal house in order: cutting the federal deficit in half by 2030 to 3% of gross domestic product. This is the level that can help stabilize the debt and prevent interest costs from overwhelming the budget. Reaching that goal will require tough trade-offs, but all credible paths begin with a process that sets priorities, enforces discipline and forces lawmakers to live within constraints.

In the 1990s, the U.S. ran a budget surplus as a result of bipartisan cooperation. Lawmakers had to talk, negotiate and compromise across party lines, but it worked because both sides respected the process, even when the parties fought bitterly over priorities. That respect for the budget process is what we’ve lost and what we need to rebuild.

From a policy perspective, there are many paths to reducing our debt, but we can’t begin without the basic accountability of meeting deadlines and accepting consequences when we fail to do so. Think back to California, where “no budget, no pay” revolutionized the fiscal culture.

Every American knows they don’t get paid for not doing their job. Congress shouldn’t either. Fix the process. Fix the debt. It’s time to hold Congress accountable with the No Budget, No Pay Act.

• Carolyn Bourdeaux served as the U.S. representative of Georgia’s 7th Congressional District from 2021 to 2023. She is the executive director of Concord Action.