WASHINGTON—Hundreds of billions of federal tax dollars will be spent this year on programs with expired legislative authorizations — including thousands from a law passed in 1985 — according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), but Congress appears to be in no hurry to fix the problem.
“CBO has identified $332 billion in appropriations contained in 2020 appropriation legislation that can be attributed to those expired authorizations—$233 billion for those authorizations with specified amounts and $99 billion for indefinite authorizations,” the report said.
Congressional appropriations set program funds each year. Prior congressional authorizations define a program’s purpose and resources to achieve that purpose. Authorizations typically are for one to five years and must then be renewed.
The CBO was first ordered by Congress in the Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 to prepare an annual report on unauthorized spending.
Spending Rules Ignored
The core problem, according to Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) President Tom Schatz, is Congress often ignores its own spending rules.“It requires the authorizing committees to do their basic job to determine which programs should be allowed to continue and which ones need to be modified or consolidated or terminated, and they are not doing that job,” Schatz told The Epoch Times Wednesday.
“Whole departments haven’t been authorized, so technically they are not allowed to operate but what the appropriations committee does is it simply says, ‘we’re going to waive the fact they have to be authorized and allow the programs to keep going,’” Schatz explained.
“It doesn’t allow for much to be done to modernize or update anything, and that’s part of the reason why the executive branch takes control of a lot of things and tries to do things with regulations and guidance and everything else because they don’t get the proper instructions from Congress,” he said.
Heritage Senior Analyst Justin Bogie agreed, saying, “technically, Congress can’t appropriate funds to unauthorized programs. However, the rules that prohibit it are weak and almost always ignored. They are enforced through a budget point of order, which can easily be waived. This is often done in the rule for a House appropriations bill and a simple majority vote in the Senate.”
Default to Continued Spending
As a result, continued spending on a program too easily becomes a default position for Congress, according to Elizabeth Hempowicz, Project on Government Oversight’s Director of Public Policy (POGO).“So, there’s this idea that authorizing statutes are optional now because in many ways Congress has slowed down to this trickle of legislation and most of them are spending bills. As long as they are appropriating, they can pat themselves on the back for doing their jobs,” she said.
The International Security and Development Cooperation Act of 1985 was the oldest of 15 laws, with 6,887 distinct unauthorized appropriations in the 2020 federal budget. Next was the Housing and Community Development Act of 1992, with more than 5,500.
Topping the CBO list was the Veterans Healthcare Eligibility Reform Act of 1996, with 82,586 distinct unauthorized appropriations, followed by the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act of 1998, with 31,293.
“For too long, hundreds of billions of dollars of federal spending has been on autopilot. By eliminating unauthorized spending, we can ensure every dollar of taxpayer spending is properly reviewed by the people’s representatives in Congress,” McMorris-Rodgers told The Epoch Times.
Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) told The Epoch Times “the way to stop this from happening is to go through the budget-making process,” but “Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats were so busy trying to impeach Trump last year that they forgot to write a budget.”
