Government Funding Bill Should Not Include New Borrowing or Ignore Important Borrowing Restrictions

Having passed zero appropriations bills on time and another zero by the end of the fiscal year, Congress is currently operating under a continuing resolution that expires December 20th, at which point lawmakers will have to complete the appropriations bills, pass another continuing resolution, or face a government shutdown.  

In addition, Congress faces a long list of other possible end-of-year expensive fiscal policy decisions – from disaster relief, to health care extensions, to farm bill reauthorization, to tax cuts, and more.  

Then, in January, Congress will face the statutory PAYGO scorecard deadline, which has an astounding $1.7 trillion balance and is legally supposed to trigger a sequester to offset past borrowing. The scorecard balance is so large however, that it cannot be implemented as designed. Congress will have to figure out how to deal with this situation.  

The following is a statement from Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget:

It is bad enough that we are well into the fiscal year and operating without a budget; the least our elected leaders can do is commit to no new borrowing before the holidays. 

Quite simply, lawmakers should fund the government, avoid including unrelated items, and fully offset the cost of anything they deem important enough and appropriate to include. Our debt is now so large that even disaster relief should be offset to avoid new borrowing.  

And rather than shirking its duty to deal with the PAYGO scorecard, which has become an unfortunate bipartisan tradition, Congress should replace this year’s unworkable sequester with fiscal improvements, which could include a number of things such as a spread-out sequester on a broader base, a specific package of budgetary savings, budget process reforms, and/or a fiscal commission. 

There is not one single serious justification for why lawmakers should be adding to the debt rather than reducing it—and the end-of-the-year spending bill and the PAYGO sequester will be two important tests of their willingness to get serious about fiscal responsibility.

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For more information, please contact Matt Klucher, Assistant Director for Media Relations, at klucher@crfb.org.