Save up for emergencies: In September, NTU Foundation analyzed emergency spending by the 117th Congress and found that lawmakers had approved over $100 billion for emergencies – without corresponding spending offsets – from January 2021 through September 2022.NTU has also supported elimination of off-budget slush fund accounts (like the Overseas Contingency Operations account), reforms to the definition of emergency spending, and strengthening the mandatory sequester when Congress doesn’t play by the budget and spending rules. Reforms NTU and NTU Foundation have previously highlighted include a move to biennial (once every two years) budgeting, debt-to-GDP targets, and a special budget process for legislation to reduce deficits. Congress should make it a priority in FY 2023, in both the 117th and the 118th sessions, to fix lawmakers’ broken budget process. Unfortunately, there has not been a robust, Committee-led budget process reform effort in the current 117th Congress. Work out a new budget process: In 2020, at the end of the 116th Congress, the Senate Budget Committee advanced Congressional budget process reform legislation on a bipartisan basis, led by the late former Chairman Mike Enzi (R-WY) and Sen.New caps are the only responsible path forward for Congress, though, given historic and unsustainable debt and deficit levels. Discretionary spending caps are not easy to enact or implement, and require sacrifices in areas of spending traditionally favored by Democrats (e.g., health care, education) and Republicans (e.g., military spending, law enforcement). Jodey Arrington (R-TX) just introduced the Controlling America’s Perilous Spending (CAPS) Act, which would reinstate discretionary spending caps from FYs 2023 through 2032 and save taxpayers $467 billion over the next decade relative to current CBO projections.
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