When Congress returns after Labor Day, topping its agenda will be to complete work on 12 major spending bills before the end of the current fiscal year on Sept. 30 to avoid a government shutdown crisis for the fourth time since 2013, when President Barack Obama was in the Oval Office.
But those incomplete spending measures are only part of the unfinished budgeting business on the congressional agenda. There are also more than 1,100 federal spending programs and agencies worth an estimated $510 billion that Congress keeps funding, even though their authorizations expired many years ago.
Such programs are “on autopilot,” House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers told The Epoch Times in a recent interview, while budget experts outside of government describe them as “zombie” federal spending. They agree that it’s past time for Congress to make hard decisions about which programs and agencies should live and which should die.
She notes that “the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ... hasn’t been reauthorized since 1998, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) hasn’t been reauthorized since 1984, and the National Telecommunications Information Agency (NTIA) hasn’t been reauthorized since 1992.”
Perhaps the most egregious example of a “zombie” federal agency is the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC), which has never been authorized.
To put the total of zombie spending in context, $510 billion is only 7.9 percent of the about $6.7 trillion the federal government is expected to spend in 2023.
However, only $1.7 trillion of the total federal budget is represented by “discretionary spending,” that is, expenditures not mandated by entitlement programs such as Social Security. The $510 billion of zombie spending equals 30 percent of the discretionary portion of the budget.
The USAA “establishes a three-year cycle, and if [a program isn’t] reauthorized in the first year, there is a 10 percent reduction in their overall spending, and then 15 percent the second year.” If the program still hasn’t been reauthorized by the end of the third year, it would be terminated.
Ms. McMorris Rodgers says enacting USAA would change “the burden of proof so that the agencies are going to have to be more responsive. At times now, the executive branch, the administrative agencies have become very skilled in delay, in hiding the ball.
“I believe it would be a game-changer; it wouldn’t be business-as-usual if we, as the elected representatives, were really exercising this accountability tool as a part of the power of the purse. When you are talking about hundreds of programs and agencies that are on autopilot, every year continuing to get funded, then it’s going to be a big shift. But it’s always difficult when you are fighting the status quo.”
While Ms. McMorris Rodgers has reintroduced the USAA in each Congress since 2016, just last month, all 23 Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability voted to send her proposal to the House floor for consideration.
Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) is chairman of the oversight panel.
“It’s been several Congresses that we’ve introduced it, and it is something like an idea whose time has come. It shouldn’t take a bill, but it’s never before had a committee chairman who was willing to pass it out to the House floor,” she said.
“Now, we have Chairman Comer, who is supportive and we have House leadership that is supportive. As we think about the fiscal crisis, Republicans are looking at the fundamental reforms that we can make that will address the fiscal crisis,” she said.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) also is a supporter, according to Ms. McMorris Rodgers.
“We’re talking hundreds of billions of dollars, hundreds of programs and agencies that are basically on autopilot because they are unauthorized. For me, being chairman of Energy and Commerce, I campaigned on this, I’ve been talking about the unauthorized spending in the committee, and I’ve made it a priority,” Ms. McMorris Rodgers noted.
“Funding is fundamentally the Article One constitutional responsibility of the representatives of the people, and we have the oversight responsibility to ensure that these agencies are operating within the statutory directives that are given to them by Congress.”
“Why the bill failed to move in 2017-18 when the GOP held the House is not clear to me. Democratic control of the House from 2019-2022 no doubt kept this bill from passage,” he said, noting that it remains to be seen if the House Rules Committee will support the proposal and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) will put it on the House floor schedule.
Mr. Kosar, an AEI senior fellow and former Congressional Research Service analyst, suggested two major obstacles to reforms such as USAA.
“First, there are hundreds of programs whose authorizations have expired. No doubt there are some Republicans who support some of those programs and who do not want to see them axed,” he said. “Second, this bill may well upset appropriators, who have been using their power to continue funding these programs. People who control the purse often do not like to see their authority reduced.”
Similarly, Romina Boccia, director of budget and entitlement policy for The Cato Institute, points out that “it’s also easier for Congress to avoid conflict over reauthorizing programs. The status quo becomes the default. Taxpayers are the ones to pay the price.”
