The painful joke in Washington, D.C., is that while there are
two political parties in America, there are actually three
political parties in the U.S. Congress: Republicans, Democrats, and
Appropriators.
This provides no challenge to the modern Democratic Party.
Democratic appropriators are professional lifelong spenders of
other people’s money. Ordinary Democratic congressmen are too. They
are simply jealous of the appropriators’ proximity to the cookie
jar.
For Republicans, appropriators who wear the Republican jersey
became a fifth column — congressmen who saw themselves as
“spenders” in a party whose platform, leaders, and press releases
tried to brand the party as the one dedicated to reducing
government spending. When Republicans controlled Congress, GOP
appropriators also found that they could raise campaign funds in
return for sticking earmarks into legislation. This meant that the
36 Republican appropriators in the House and the 18 Republican
appropriators in the Senate found they could afford to spend less
time appealing to conservatives back in their districts. Over time,
appropriators tended to become spenders first, Republicans second,
and conservatives less and less. Worse, the trading of earmarked
appropriations for campaign contributions, a practice known as “pay
to play,” is considered an art by Chicago Democrats but corruption
by suburban and rural Republican district voters. And eventually
such pay to play does in some cases become undeniable corruption
very much damaging to the Republican brand, as in the tragic case
of Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-CA), who resigned in 2005 after
admitting to taking millions in bribes.
Beginning during the height of Republican control of the House
— before most Republicans were willing to see the problem — there
was an on-again, off-again campaign to term limit membership on the
Appropriations Committee to six years, on the theory that no
Republican would then see himself as a permanent member of the
spending class. The Budget Committee, created in the 1974 Budget
Act, limited its members to six years, not just for the chairman,
but for membership on the committee itself. Perhaps the power held
by appropriators and the resulting corruption could be limited
through term limits.
A different approach now gaining support builds on an example
from recent history of a successful structural reform that actually
saved taxpayers money and eliminated government programs.
When the United States declared war on Japan, Germany, and Italy
during World War II, U.S. senator Harry F. Byrd (D-VA) wanted to
pay for more of the war effort not by raising taxes but by reducing
non-defense government expenditures. He designed the Joint
Committee on Reduction of Nonessential Federal Expenditures, which
he chaired from 1941 to his retirement in 1965. This committee,
also known as the Byrd Committee, was a bicameral body with members
from the House and Senate. It had subpoena power to compel
bureaucrats to testify and open up their books. Its sole mission
was to identify nonessential federal expenditures and recommend
their elimination or reduction. The committee published
scorekeeping reports on congressional action flowing from their
recommendations.
The committee had 14 members: three from each of the House and
Senate Appropriations committees, three from the House Ways and
Means Committee, and three from the Senate Finance Committee. There
were eight Democrats and four Republicans, as the Democrats held
the majority in Congress. The secretary of the treasury and the
director of the bureau of the budget also served on it.
The Byrd Committee had real accomplishments. In its “Economic
Progress Report of 1945,” the committee reported that in 1941,
1942, 1943, and 1944 the committee spent $45,913.08 dollars “for
all purposes” and made recommendations resulting in direct savings
of $2,457,623,568. The committee cheerfully pointed out that this
was “an expenditure of less than $20 for every million dollars
saved.” The committee further claimed “indirect savings” of $600
million, thus claiming total savings of $3 billion (in 1945
dollars). The equivalent in today’s dollars would be $38.5
billion.
Congress followed the committee’s recommendation and abolished
the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1943, saving $238,960,000. One
can only imagine how large the CCC would be today if it had not
been strangled in its oversized crib early on.
In 1943 Congress followed the committee’s recommendations to
drastically cut back the Work Projects Administration (WPA), saving
$540 million, and in 1944 the committee “urged the complete
liquidation of the Work Projects Administration’s activities,”
which recommendation was accepted by the Congress. The unexpended
appropriation was returned to the treasury, saving another
$106,168,499.
In 1944 the National Youth Administration was eliminated, saving
$56,744,000.
This real record of accomplishment came with Democratic control
of both houses of Congress and Mr. Big Government, Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, in the White House.
Sadly, the committee lost its potency after the end of World War
II, possibly because Congress was not required to take up
its proposals and the sense of urgency had dissipated with the end
of the war. While doing little more than submitting monthly reports
on the number of federal employees and publishing statistics on
government spending between 1945 and 1974, the committee still
listed an impressive 45 proposed reductions and eliminations that
were enacted by Congress.
When President Bush invaded Iraq, there was no demand from the
White House to find offsetting reductions in federal spending. And
there was no structure in Congress to compete with and push back
against the appropriators who viewed the increase in military
spending as an argument to increase all other spending. How does
one tell the appropriators focused on education and labor that the
military appropriators get five ice cream cones and they still only
get one?
Republicans are looking at recreating a version of the Byrd
Committee as part of any new “Contract with America” or “Contract
from America.” As Republicans are increasingly confident of
capturing the House, and winning the Senate remains a possibility
(albeit a long shot), the modern Byrd Committee is being proposed
as two committees, one in the House and one in the Senate, with
full subpoena power and the ability to draft legislation with
recommended cuts that might be given an expedited up-or-down vote
on the floor.
This would change the dynamics and the politics of the fight for
lower spending. With such an anti-appropriations committee in
place, a congressional candidate could campaign announcing to his
district that he wishes, once elected, not to join the
Appropriations Committee to steal stuff and drag it back to a
privileged few recipients in the district, but to serve on the
anti-spending committee bringing lower government costs to everyone
in the district.
The next generation of self-promoting camera hogs could become
regular guests on week-end television shows and talk radio by
bragging about how many billions they saved America rather than
speaking to the local chamber of commerce about how they snitched a
few hundred thousand to give to a local nabob and his favorite
charity.
Giving the anti-spending forces their own committee with
congressional staff and the all-important subpoena power would
begin to stem the tide of growing spending. Promoting the
establishment of a new Byrd Committee as a campaign issue would
also displace Obama’s attempt to undermine America’s growing
antipathy to big spending, the “Deficit Commission.”
The goal of the Democrats over the next year, and in the next
set of elections, is to misdirect America’s anger over the
overspending, the bailouts, the stimulus, the budget increases, and
the trillions for government health care, not to mention the
trillions of corporate welfare for energy made from pixie dust paid
for with taxes on reality-based energy. The Democrats wish to focus
on the “deficit” rather than on “spending.” They have a solution to
the deficit — a value-added tax to pay for the overspending.
The return of the Joint Committee on Reduction of Nonessential
Federal Expenditures would put the focus correctly on spending,
create a constituency in Congress for popularizing the fight
against spending, and arm the members of the Anti-Appropriations
committee with the weapons of choice in Washington: staff,
subpoenas, and the ability to grab headlines.
