June 30: House completes action on all annual appropriations bills. June 15: Congress completes action on reconciliation legislation. June 10: House Appropriations Committee reports its last annual appropriations bill. May 15: Annual appropriations bills may be considered in the House. Six weeks after president submits budget: Other House and Senate committees submit their views and estimates to the budget committees.Īpril 1: Senate Budget Committee reports concurrent resolution on the budget.Īpril 15: House and Senate agree to a concurrent resolution on the budget. 15: Congressional Budget Office submits report on economic and fiscal outlook to the House and Senate budget committees. Timetable of the congressional budget process (in law, if not always in practice)įirst Monday in February: President submits proposed budget.įeb. Instead, it’s a hodgepodge of late budget blueprints, temporary spending measures to keep the government running, and sprawling omnibus appropriations packages that often are passed in the waning days before one Congress ends and the next one begins. In short, the typical appropriations process isn’t the orderly one laid out in the 1974 Congressional Budget Act. And even those last three times, Congress was late in passing the budget blueprint that, in theory at least, precedes the actual spending bills. In fact, in the nearly five decades that the current system for budgeting and spending tax dollars has been in place, Congress has passed all its required appropriations measures on time only four times: fiscal 1977 (the first full fiscal year under the current system), 1989, 19. We used historical spending data published by the Office of Management and Budget to calculate mandatory and discretionary spending shares.Ĭongress’ chronic inability to follow its own appropriations process is hardly new. Similarly, we identified all budget resolutions agreed to since 1975 and when they passed relative to the CBA deadlines.įor explanations of how the budget and appropriations process is supposed to work, we relied primarily on a series of reports by the Congressional Research Service. We also noted which appropriations area or areas each measure covered, as well as the date it became law, so we could compare it against the deadlines laid out in the CBA. We coded each of these laws as a regular, continuing or supplemental appropriation. We identified every appropriations bill enacted since 1976, when the new process laid out in the 1974 Congressional Budget Act (CBA), began to take effect. With the federal government once again staring at a funding gap, we decided to update our historical look at the federal budgeting and appropriations process – and Congress’ chronic difficulties in adhering to its own rules.įor this analysis, we used, an official online repository of legislation and legislative data.
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