Congress Could Learn From Arkansas
By David Ferguson
Congress is working to pass the federal budget bill. The bill is always massive and includes spending subjects from A to Z. One news outlet reported the current bill to be about 1,500 pages, but I read a few years ago the annual budget bill was presented with 4,000 pages.
Have you ever read a federal budget bill in its entirety? I thought not. Me neither. Don’t expect your congressman to have read and studied it all. It is so large they have to rely on staff, colleagues, bureaucrats, and lobbyists, and on summaries of the bill.
After a federal budget bill is passed, there have always been surprises (mostly unpleasant). Lots of boondoggles and liberal nonsense have been included deep inside the pages of previous budget bills.
There will be funding in any proposed federal budget bill that will be contrary to your values and contrary to your congressman’s stand. If your congressman is unable to convince leadership to remove the offensive parts, the congressman is then faced with the choice of voting against the entire federal budget and possibly shutting down government or holding his or her nose and voting for a budget that includes some offensive provision. This ridiculous choice happens every year.
Arkansas does its general revenue budget differently. Thanks to the Arkansas Constitution, the Arkansas general revenue budget is divided into a few hundred spending bills, called appropriation bills. An appropriation bill is the authorization for a state agency to spend general revenues. The Arkansas Constitution mandates that each appropriation bill can embrace only one subject.(i) This single subject rule is why there are many appropriation bills in Arkansas. The single subject rule gives legislators a much better “opportunity” to know what they are voting on and to have a meaningful debate about the budget for an Arkansas agency and its programs.
“Opportunity” is the key word. It doesn’t mean in actual practice that Arkansas appropriations are scrutinized with a fine-tooth comb. In fact, it is rare for an appropriation bill to be blocked until a budget item is removed. Almost all appropriation bills quickly sail through the Arkansas General Assembly. It is also important to note that Arkansas budget bills usually have an easy path to passage despite the Arkansas Constitution requiring appropriation bills to be approved by a three-fourths vote of each house.
Currently, the Trump administration is slashing federal programs deemed wasteful and cutting the federal workforce. Perhaps the drastic measures being taken at the federal level would never have been necessary, if Congress had been reviewing agency budgets one at a time instead of lumping all the budgets into one massive bill for an up or down vote.
I think there is no chance Congress would adopt a single subject rule for agency budgets or start dividing the federal budget into several reasonably sized budget bills. But, I never expected to see federal programs scrutinized the way President Trump is doing, so maybe improving the federal budget process could be a possibility. Reminding our Congressional delegation how Arkansas does its budget is worth a shot.
i Arkansas Constitution Article 5, Section 30
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David Ferguson is a former Director of Arkansas’ Bureau of Legislative Research, having a thirty-two-year career as an attorney for the Arkansas legislature. After retirement from state service, his primary focus has been beef cattle farming. He is also a former officer of Conduit for Action.
