This sounds good to me:
The plans include slicing and dicing appropriations bills into dozens of smaller, bite-size pieces — making it easier to kill or slash unpopular agencies. Other proposals include statutory spending caps, weekly votes on spending cuts and other reforms to ensure spending bills aren’t sneakily passed under special rules.
On some level, their plans may create a sense of organized chaos on the House floor — picture dozens of votes on dozens of federal program cuts and likely gridlock on spending bills. And don’t forget that a lot of these efforts will die with a Democratic-led Senate and a Democrat in the White House.
But the intent is to force debate as much as to actually legislate — and make Old Guard Republicans and Democrats uncomfortable with a new way of thinking about the size and scope of government.
The fact that the appropriators hate it is a point in its favor, as far as I’m concerned.
That’s a lot better than I had hoped for. God knows we need for debate and transparency in the appropriations process.
“John should talk with the professional appropriators about the complexities, rather than talk off the top of his head. His plans would take a huge amount of the House’s time, but what would it accomplish?” said a dubious former House Republican member of the Appropriations Committee who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Yes, because we’ve seen what a wonderful job those professional appropriators have done over the past decades, haven’t we? Our national debt is $13 trillion and rising rapidly, largely due to the actions of those so-called professional appropriators.
Smaller appropriations legislation covering manageable pieces of the budget is a good start. They could accomplish a lot more by switching from the current baseline budgeting process to zero-based budgeting. Make each bureau and department justify their existence instead of assuming their next budget will automatically be greater than their last one.
“His plans would take a huge amount of the House’s time, but what would it accomplish?”
Son of the woman who missed the point (even when he said it out loud in so many words!) It’s a recipe for gridlock, which is probably the most effective way we have extant of applying the brakes to the growth of government.
require funding on a department-by-department basis
More accountability and getting them on the record is certainly a good thing.