Taxpayer-funded rides for bourbon-swilling journalists and international trips for indie music executives—federal funding for obscure programs like these is one reason why Heritage budget expert Romina Boccia has proposed a new budget commission modeled on the Defense Department’s Base Realignment and Closure Commission (BRAC).
Such a commission would be separate from Congress and composed of independent experts to present to Congress a package of spending eliminations and consolidations. A single up-or-down vote to adopt the measure would focus attention on the savings that could be achieved for the taxpayer instead of individual programs.
Why is such a commission necessary? Because lawmakers have incentives to constantly increase spending.
One problem is that lawmakers have a vested interest in continuing programs that benefit themselves or a narrow group of constituents, even if they are duplicative, wasteful, or outside the scope of the federal government. As Boccia explains to PJTV:
It’s political interest…. There’s this great incentive to establish new government programs and claim credit for [them by putting] out a press release. And it doesn’t matter that there are already 80 teacher improvement programs; if you can just add one more, you can say, “I added this important program to improve teacher effectiveness.”
Public choice theory further helps explain why it is so hard to cut spending. While taxpayers are nickel and dimed for individual government programs, the beneficiaries of these programs receive a much larger return for their lobbying efforts and have a bigger interest in maintaining them than taxpayers do to end them. Add them all together and you end up with hundreds of billions in excess government spending.
This problem is further compounded by Congress failing to use the budget and appropriations process as intended. Instead of debating 12 appropriations bills, as the process calls for, some lawmakers are already talking about condensing all the spending provisions into one omnibus bill or continuing resolution (which indiscriminately extends all spending provisions) at the last minute this September. Once all spending provisions are lumped into one bill that faces a single up-or-down vote, almost all federal programs “continue to get funded even if they’re handouts, or if they don’t work,” says Boccia.
Support for a BRAC-style commission to rein in spending already exists in Congress. Representative Doug Collins (R–GA) recently proposed the Commission on the Accountability and Review of Federal Agencies (CARFA).
As Collins told The Daily Signal, this commission
is the way around congressional log-rolling. It forces Congress to look at programs based on merit, not clouded by the context of who’s proposing this or attaching it to that. That’s how too many programs slide through the current process, and CARFA provides the check to make sure we’re not ending up with more than what we need.
A dedicated commission that succeeded at eliminating federal programs that are wasteful, poorly functioning, or properly within the purview of the private sector or state and local government could also help to improve Congress’s dismal job-approval rating. While reform through the appropriations process is at risk of stalling this year, Congress could break the dysfunction with a commission to improve government programs and save taxpayer dollars.
