Continuing Resolutions: The Horror, The Horror

by CKR

As the budget battle between the President and Congress has raged through the summer and fall, I've thought about writing a post. So here it is.

I was working for a federally funded agency during the budget battles (parties reversed) of the 1990s and the Great Government Shutdown. It's not pretty when you're looking up from the trenches.

It's nervewracking to be expected to do work that continues over more than one year with a budget process that provides one year of funding at a time; fights that drag budget approval into the funding year make for nightmares.

I was working on environmental restoration projects; you get people out in the field to take samples, which then wend their way through analytical laboratories over periods of months. Then you get the statistical team to analyze the results, make maps of contamination, and get estimates of how much it's going to cost. Then you get the heavy equipment out into the field, dig up the stuff, and get it to the proper disposal sites.

There are certain places in this sequence where you can stop, at least theoretically. If you want to do things quickly and economically, many of these activities will be going on simultaneously. The statisticians can begin analyzing the numbers before all the chemical analyses are completed. You may be able to mobilize for cleanup of part of the problem early. But you could stop after the analytical results are in, and then dump them all on the statisticians. Or you could get the cleanup planned and then stop before you mobilize for the field.

The weather plays a part, too. It doesn't make much sense to hack away at frozen ground or pile snow into the trucks along with the waste, so the fieldwork, both sample collection and cleanup, has to be done in the summer. Which means that planning has to start in the winter, or maybe the summer before, or maybe earlier.

For any reasonably-sized site, this means more than a year of work. You also want to get as much as you can done with any single year's budget, because you don't know what next year's budget will be. And, oh yes, the contamination remains in the environment while you are planning and the President and Congress call each other names.

The one-year system could work if budgets were passed in the spring (the government fiscal year begins in October), so that you could plan for the fall. But that seldom happens, so you have to plan multiple scenarios, with sites competing against each other for prioritization. Which needs to be cleaned up first? This is a complicated calculation, because not only are the issues different from site to site, but regulatory agencies have their own priorities, which may or may not coincide with the calculated risks.

What is going on this year is the worst of all worlds. The continuing resolutions (another just passed) say that you can spend the same amount you spent last year. So say that most of last year, the chemical analyses came back and the statisticians were crunching the numbers. Not much field work, not terribly expensive. But the next step is the most expensive: getting the heavy machinery out in the field. So that won't happen, although you have to plan in case a gush of money and regulatory expectations requires you clean it all up next summer. Or you can do as the regulators say and get everything in place and spend all of what the budget eventually winds up being by the time it is passed. So you send everyone home for six months?

The weapons laboratories, this year in particular, are facing probable cuts in that not-yet-passed budget. But they don't know how much the cuts will be. So the management has to guess. If they cut too many people, they may be flush with money, but they may not get the work done. If they don't cut enough, the bleeding will continue through the year. In either case, the workers are uncertain about their jobs for the entire year. Not good for productivity.

The agencies play games to try to mitigate their losses. The most famous strategy is called The Washington Monument Strategy. Faced with budget cuts, the managers of the National Park Service stroke their chins and opine, "Well, I guess we could close the Washington Monument..." This strikes fear in the hearts of Congress because they know their visiting constituents will make a beeline from the closed tourist attraction to their offices to complain. Not to mention the news coverage.

It's not just the Park Service. Every agency has its Washington Monument Strategy. Here's today's word from the Defense Department. Every department has its own programs that it knows will get Congress's attention. This sort of warfare, of course, leads to ever more minute specification by Congress of how the money is to be spent and ever more rigidity in getting the work done.

The budget battles are thought to be good politics because they allow each side to make its own points. The Democratic Congress is working to do the people's will. The Republicans are working to keep government costs down. But it's counterproductive all around.

In the same way that costs go up when you have to stop and start a cleanup, the politics can backfire. It looks like President Bush's supposedly principled stand against new taxes will enlarge the deficits. And the agencies' inevitable disarray in the face of unknown budgets for half of the fiscal year supports the arguments of those who would have us believe that government is the problem.