For a Responsible Budget

November 23, 1953

The Administration is being forced to adopt all sorts of expedients to keep from breaking through the debt limit of $275,000,000,000. This does not prove that Congress was wrong in refusing last summer to grant immediately the President’s request for an increase in the debt limit to $290,000,000,000. The postponement has not reduced spending, but it has at least drawn increased attention to its prodigious rate and to the continuation of huge deficits and borrowing. And to act as a warning signal is, in fact, the chief function that a legal debt limit can serve.

The Administration will be forced to go again to Congress for an increase in the debt limit, and Congress now has no alternative but to grant it. But it would be folly to grant it without some quid pro quo. The minimum condition (which could be tied to the debt-increased authorization) should be the Coudert resolution or its equivalent. This would prohibit the Administration from spending more than it took in during any year except in time of war or of a grave national emergency declared to be such by a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress.

But even this measure would be only a stopgap. What is now imperative is a responsible budget system: Today the House of Representatives has the power to increase expenditures beyond those proposed by the President, and the Senate has the power to increase expenditures beyond those voted by the House. The result is a three-way competition in extravagance.

The only fundamental cure for this situation would be to adopt the wholesome British rule under which the Legislative branch may reduce, but cannot increase, the total expenditures proposed by the Executive branch. One of the foremost functions of a representative assembly is to act as watchman of the Treasury, and it cannot be depended on to perform that function as long as it is free to put its own hands in the Treasury.

The constitutional revision which this would imply probably goes beyond what Congressional or public opinion today is prepared to accept. But there are changes which have already been successfully tested in many of our states and which would at least bring us much closer to full budget responsibility.

We may cite as one example the kind of budget procedure that prevails in New York State. Under this system the governor’s annual budget must not only give estimated expenditures and revenues for the next fiscal year, but must be accompanied by a bill or bills containing all the proposed appropriations and any proposed new taxes.

The legislature (I quote the state constitution) “may not alter an appropriation bill submitted by the governor except to strike out or reduce items therein. . . .” Further: “Neither house of the legislature shall consider any other bill making an appropriation until all the appropriation bills submitted by the governor shall have been finally acted on by both houses. . . .” If the legislature wishes to increase or add any appropriation, it must be by separate items or bills “each for a single object or purpose” which “shall be subject to the governor’s approval.” And the New York constitution gives the governor explicit power to do what the President cannot do-veto individual items in appropriation bills.

Congress would probably be unwilling to submit a constitutional amendment to give the President these budgetary powers, unless it got in return added budget powers of its own. In such an amendment, therefore, it might give itself the explicit power to return an unbalanced budget submitted by the President with directions either to balance it or to reduce his proposed total expenditures to some specific maximum.

The basic principle to be followed to attain a responsible budget system is clear. It is to reduce the power of either Congress or the President to spend without restraint and to increase the power of both Congress and the President to limit the spending of the other.