Book Description

The current federal budget process is widely believed to have contributed to the unsustainable fiscal future that many experts project for the United States. That assessment supported the Tea Party campaign to use the debt ceiling vote to force massive spending cuts, and has stimulated renewed attention on potential reforms of the process. Over the past several years, deficit hawks have proposed that special groups be empowered to develop deficit reduction plans and that special procedures automatically be invoked to force necessary savings. The Budget Control Act of 2011 included variants of these proposals. This paper argues that this approach is far from the best alternative for improving federal budgeting. It describes major flaws in the current process, and then advocates a radical reform: collapsing the appropriations and authorizations committees and processes, in order to support a budget process that would be more effective at allocating budgetary resources. It then seeks to describe why this radical reform has not been seriously considered, first by reviewing the path dependence literature, and then by interpreting federal budgeting since 1974 using the path dependence approach. The paper concludes that while politicians' aversion to radical budget reform may understandably reflect concerns about switching costs, just as important is the failure of politicians to think seriously about institutional alternatives. Political scientists should be more involved in budget reform, in order to improve the quality of discursive institutionalism.