The House of Bloat
Perhaps it is fitting that the House Administration Committee would wait until the day last week when White House Budget Director Mitch Daniels resigned to release its new spending plan. Daniels is an impassioned believer in fiscal discipline, and was known around policy circles as “The Blade” for his knife-edged approach to fat budgets and Congressional negotiators. The big spenders in Congress disliked Daniels and his tough approach, his departure is another sign that spending restraint has collapsed in Washington.
Congress watchers know that a return to Indiana residency for Mitch Daniels is just another sign of the current budget freefall. In fact, Congress has added $782 billion in new spending in just the past three years. No wonder the House Administration Committee was weeks late with its proposal for the 108th Congress— a large 15 percent increase in spending on the operations of all House Committees. Even with a record budget deficit, the House of Representatives can’t stop the spending train.
As part of the spending increase, the House will create a new Select Homeland Security Committee. That’s necessary, given the fact that there’s a new federal agency in need of oversight. But, shouldn’t that also mean that a number of other Committees should see some reductions because their responsibilities are reduced? Yet the budget roars on across the board.
The discipline with which Congress approaches its own operations has a relatively small impact in overall budget terms, but it is hugely symbolic of the institution’s willpower and approach on runaway spending. This symbolism is why House Republicans significantly reduced the size of the Committee budgets upon taking power in 1994.
But today, one by one, the positive reforms of the 1994 Republican revolution slip silently into oblivion. In fact, the House Administration Committee actually describes those prudent reductions of the past as “drastic cuts” while it argues for the new spending.
To be fair, the 108th Congress funding level of $222.7 million is still lower than the funding levels in the 103rd Congress in both real and nominal dollars. (for the sake of comparison, this number excludes the new Homeland Security Dept.) But the 103rd Congress was funding the Committees at levels that represented 40 years of bloated Democrat rule, and now we’re almost back.
GOP House Administration Leader Bob Ney (R-OH), who was first elected to the breakthrough 104th Congress, describes the current plan as “very modest.” To my thinking, “modesty” would be a growth rate equivalent to inflation— say 2 percent a year. But 15 percent? That’s about as “modest” as a bikini on Miami Beach. Even excluding the dollop of funds for the new Homeland Security Committee, the 108th House Committee funding is fully 9 percent over the 107th level.
And, what’s even scarier than 15 percent overall growth is that the different House Committees actually requested a staggering 24 percent increase in their operations budgets.
The final bitter irony is that, amongst all this growth, there is one Committee that will see cuts, at least in real dollar terms: the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight.
Mitch Daniels, we hardly knew ya.
