The Government Needs Funding and the Budget Needs Fixing
Government funding is set to expire on March 14, meaning lawmakers will need to pass – and the President will need to sign – appropriations bills for Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 or enact a continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government to avoid a shutdown. The March 14 deadline comes nearly six months into the current fiscal year, well beyond the deadline by which government funding is supposed to be enacted each year.
The following is a statement from Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget:
At this point, it seems lawmakers are making a mockery of the budget process. It’s not just that they miss the occasional deadline, they don’t make a single one. They race ahead to pass tax cuts without putting a real budget in place. They borrow for new spending and tax cuts, when what the nation needs is a debt reduction plan. And they ignore every single one of their own budget constraints, whether it be from wiping the PAYGO scorecard clean to attaching the debt ceiling increase to a plan for more borrowing. The brinkmanship over government funding is so routine – we haven’t fully enacted appropriations before the start of the fiscal year in almost thirty years. At this point it is starting to feel like fiscal sabotage.
We must do better. Congress should start by passing a plan to keep the government open.
Budget negotiators should also agree on new discretionary spending limits that cement the savings from the Fiscal Responsibility Act’s caps. The enforcement mechanism for those caps will expire after this fiscal year – it’s crucial that political leaders agree to extend those caps to put our fiscal trajectory on a better path.
Then, in a perfect world, Congress would take no further fiscal actions before adopting a comprehensive debt reduction plan, which would deal with all parts of the budget and put the debt on a downward path. This would be a far better framework within which to consider tax reform and how to extend any expiring tax cuts.
It is time for our leaders to put an end to missed deadlines, reckless choices and selling out the future.
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For more information, please contact Matt Klucher, Assistant Director of Media Relations, at klucher@crfb.org.
