Will giving $150 million
to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration help win the wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan? How about spending $500 million to repair a shipyard
and an extra $2.3 billion for avian flu preparedness, on top of the $3.8
billion already appropriated for that purpose? Congress and the White House
think so. All those expenditures are part of a $94.5 billion supplemental
spending bill for the war on terror and hurricane relief signed by President
Bush in June.
Politicians may cry
crocodile tears about deficit spending, but their actions demonstrate that they
remain addicted to big government. The Republican Congress that has expanded
federal spending by 45 percent since fiscal year 2001, more than doubled
education spending, and enacted insanely expensive agriculture, highway,
energy, and prescription drug bills is still bingeing on our tax dollars. But
instead of working through the regular appropriations process, Congress is
hiding behind “emergency” supplemental bills.
Supplemental spending,
“emergency” spending in particular, has become Washington’s tool of choice for
evading annual budget limits and increasing spending across the board. Funding
predictable, nonemergency needs through supplementals hides skyrocketing
military costs and allows Congress to boost regular appropriations for both
defense and nondefense programs, thereby enabling the spending explosion of the
last five years.
In theory, supplemental
appropriations provide additional funding to an agency during the course of a
fiscal year for programs and activities that are considered too urgent to wait
until the next year’s budget. The Budget Enforcement Act of 1990 gives emergency
bills special exemptions from rules designed to restrain spending. For
instance, the requests lack the level of detail used to justify the federal
government’s annual budget requests, making accountability more difficult, and
supplemental funding is left out of the deficit projections that accompany the
annual budget.
Although there are no
limits on the amount or type of spending that can be designated an emergency
requirement, historically there has been an understanding that emergencies are
sudden, urgent, unforeseen, and temporary conditions that pose a threat to
life, property, or national security. Not anymore. For years, Congress has
abused its emergency spending powers. But things have gotten much worse since
Republicans won control at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Except for a sharp spike
in 1991 to fund the first Gulf War, supplemental appropriations remained at
roughly 1 percent of new discretionary spending during most of the 1990s. After
1998, they started to rise as the federal budget began running surpluses. But
in those days, the United States still enjoyed the benefits of a divided
government. After 2002 Republicans conveniently allowed the few budget rules
meant to constrain their behavior to expire. Hence supplemental appropriations
designated as emergency spending no longer count against the annual budget
limits set by Congress and do not trigger automatic cuts if they push outlays
above the caps. In fiscal year 2005, supplemental appropriations represented
16.7 percent of new discretionary spending and, adjusted for inflation, reached
an all time high of $143 billion—up from $7 billion in fiscal year 1998, when
supplementals accounted for 0.9 percent of new discretionary spending. And this
year’s $94.5 billion supplemental bill is the largest one ever.
The White House deserves
most of the blame. The Bush administration has used supplementals to hide the
true cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Three years in, the Iraq war can
hardly be called an emergency or an unpredictable event. This is especially
true since one of the largest expenditures goes to the salaries and benefits of
Army National Guard personnel and reservists called to active duty. Yet each
year President Bush leaves out all war costs when he presents his budget to
Congress, knowing that he will be able to secure the funding later through the
supplemental process. This year Congress will appropriate nearly 20 percent of
total military spending via supplementals.
Meanwhile, the lack of
detail in supplemental budget requests and their expedited approval process
have made supplemental bills a magnet for pork and other projects that wouldn’t
be funded on their own merits. No politician wants to vote against emergency
aid money aimed at supporting U.S. troops in Iraq or helping victims of
Hurricane Katrina. And because the president—especially this president—will
usually sign emergency bills without blinking at their cost, many wasteful
nonemergency spending items go through at taxpayers’ expense.
This year’s emergency
spending bill, for instance, contains $118 million to bail out private
fisheries, on top of tens of billions in disaster relief funds the Federal
Emergency Management Agency and the Small Business Administration are already
paying to that industry. It also includes $335 million to subsidize “volunteer”
work through AmeriCorps and a $703 million add-on for highway projects
unrelated to the Gulf Coast—some of them in Hawaii and California. Those aren’t
the only projects in the bill that aren’t anywhere near Iraq or the Gulf Coast:
There are Army Corps of Engineers earmarks for North Padre Island, Texas;
Sacramento, California; and water systems across Hawaii.
Expect more bills like
this in the future. Waste is endemic in Congress, and the White House has refused
to restrain the legislature’s spending explosion. Until that changes,
politicians will still claim with straight faces that $500 million for farm and
ranch subsidies or $500,000 for the Mississippi Children’s Museum qualify as
“emergency” spending.
Véronique de Rugy is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute..