The courts should, and probably will, constrain the Trump administration’s aggressive push in 2025 to diminish Congress’s constitutional role in appropriations. Nonetheless, it is a warning of what could occur without broader legislative branch reforms. The existing congressional appropriations process was constructed in the first half of the 20th century and is excessively insular, repetitive, rigid, and accommodating of waste and low-quality public services. It prioritizes the appropriations subcommittees’ jurisdictional control over efficiency, innovation, adaptation, and cross-agency collaboration. Relatedly, the Appropriations Committees have long resisted using incentives to drive performance improvements. Congress should explore changes that emphasize improving transparency, reducing the time needed to approve annual funding decisions, and modernizing federal services through better information technology.
Congress’s inability to process “regular order” appropriations bills on time has led to more frequent “government shutdown” standoffs that disrupt important public services. Minority factions in Congress can use these occasions to press their priorities in exchange for their support to reopen the government.
A solution to this problem would be to put into permanent law a bridge funding mechanism that would automatically keep government agencies open and operating when Congress fails to pass new funding bills before the new fiscal year or before the most recent funding measure’s expiration date. There have been two basic conceptions of how to design such bridge funding. One would authorize “automatic CRs,” which would become available to federal agencies on the assumption that Congress would eventually pass full-year funding for the affected agencies. The automatic funding would be set to become progressively more stringent to incentivize Congress to act on full-year funding.
A second approach would eliminate the need for annual funding action by Congress for every agency by building into permanent law backup funding that would grow at a predetermined rate (Taylor 2019). This “permanent” appropriation concept would be designed to supersede repetitive funding decisions for routine appropriation accounts and also create a default funding path that would likely be less than what would occur with annual adjustments approved by Congress. This concept likely would be seen as more appropriate for small, noncontroversial accounts that the appropriations committees rarely adjust in any significant way.