How to Curb Spending

March 7, 1960

Every January, since the passage of the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, the President has been required to submit to Congress an estimate of the Federal government’s expenditures and receipts during the next fiscal year. But the results have seldom corresponded with his estimates. In 1959, for example, actual expenditures were $6.8 billion more than his estimate and receipts $6.1 billion less.

The extent of these errors was unusual. What has not been unusual has been the tendency of expenditures to exceed the incumbent President’s estimates year after year for the simple reason that the President in fact lacks the power to control the budget.

SET UP FOR SPENDERS

Today the President, House, and Senate can all compete against each other in recommending or appropriating money to favored projects or groups. It is difficult to fix responsibility for the resulting extravagance or budget deficits. The strongest arguments against the wastes in farm subsidies, veterans pensions, foreign aid, or other programs are impotent against a system that seems precisely set up to favor the spenders.

We urgently need a responsible budget system in which the President and Congress are encouraged to compete with each other in economy rather than extravagance. This is not a utopian dream. Such a responsible budget system has existed for years in Great Britain. It has long prevailed in many of our own states. President Eisenhower, who asked in his Budget Message this year for power to veto individual items in appropriation bills, pointed out that the governors of 41 states now have this power.

But to attain a truly responsible budget system, the President should be granted even more power than this. He should have the power not only to veto any individual item in an appropriation bill, but any increase in any item beyond the amount first proposed by him in his Budget Message or in any special message. If Congress wishes to increase any appropriation beyond his recommendation, or to make any appropriation not recommended by him at all, it should be constitutionally required to do so in a separate bill subject to his veto.

There would be nothing extraordinary or unprecedented in such a grant of power. It is almost precisely what is required in the constitutions of some of the states.

In New York, for example, 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 add any appropriation, it must do so 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.

STOP, LOOK, LISTEN

The late Senator Vandenberg, in advocating such power for the President in 1936, wrote in The Saturday Evening Post: “The item veto does not give the President one single additional, affirmative power. He cannot start anything as a result. He can only stop something long enough to focus the attention of the country on it, and long enough to force two-thirds of the House and Senate to agree to it in spite of him and his reasons, if they should persist in their adverse judgments. Its only harm, if any, would lie in the temporary delay while Congress and the country stop, look, and listen.”

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.