Sometimes Congress does not bother to adopt a budget resolution. Legislators rarely enact individual spending bills. Instead, they ball them up into omnibus spending packages or pass continuing resolutions. Reconciliation has devolved into a vehicle for the majority party to ram through policies that spend money and grow the deficit. Processes exogenous to the 1974 budget process, such as deeming resolutions and statutory budget caps, have become typical. “Unorthodox lawmaking,” as the late political scientist Barbara Sinclair called it, has come to budgeting in spades.
Presidents also pay little heed to the statutory budget process. Their budgets are loaded with partisan messaging and are often delivered late. President Donald Trump did not even submit a full budget this year. Rather than veto spending bills they dislike, presidents often simply refuse to spend money or move dollars from one purpose to another. The recent pocket rescission is the continuation of this trend.
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The people who wrote the 1974 act are long gone from Congress, and their shared understanding of how things are supposed to work further dissipates with each passing year. Indeed, few legislators today have ever experienced anything resembling a regular budget process.
