The Continuing Resolution Is the Budget

A budget is supposed to be an argument that resolves. Priorities are debated, trade-offs are made, and the result is a set of decisions somebody can be held to.

What happens instead, routinely, is a measure that continues the previous year's amounts for a period, because the argument did not resolve in time.

The prohibition on spending without an appropriation is what makes the stopgap necessary. Without an appropriation, spending is unlawful and the activity stops.

That provision is the ultimate source of the deadline, and it is a good rule. A government that could spend without authority would not be accountable for anything.

The consequence is that the deadline is real and the pressure to pass something is overwhelming, which changes what gets passed.

The staffing consequence deserves more attention than it gets, because it is where the damage is least reversible.

Continuing last year's numbers looks like a neutral act. It is a decision to fund every programme at a level chosen for different circumstances, by a body that has since changed.

An agency that cannot commit to a hire loses the candidate, and the candidates lost are disproportionately the ones with alternatives.

Nobody argues for that allocation. It is what remains when nobody agrees on anything else, and it is enacted by people who mostly think it is wrong.

Repeat that annually for a decade and the workforce is shaped by who was willing to wait, which is not the same population as who was best.

The introduced text of such a measure is short, and its brevity is the point: there is nothing to argue about because it decides nothing.

None of that appears in any account of what a stopgap cost, because the cost is a capability that never formed rather than a payment that was made.

Except that it decides everything, for the period it covers, and the periods have grown long enough to cover much of a year.

The operational damage is real and specific. An agency that does not know its annual funding cannot let a multi-year contract, hire against a plan or start anything.

So the stopgap does not simply preserve the status quo; it suppresses activity that requires certainty, which is disproportionately the activity with long payoffs.

The proceedings record the debates, and the debates are almost never about the allocations. They are about the deadline and about what has been attached to the vehicle.

That is the second effect. A must-pass measure attracts provisions that could not pass alone, which is a subject this publication has examined and which compounds here.

A stopgap is the purest form of that vehicle, because opposing it means stopping the government, and no allocation is worth that to any individual member.

The budget documents present the request as though the annual process functioned, which makes them a description of an intention rather than of what happened.

Comparing the request to the eventual appropriation is instructive and is not a comparison anybody routinely publishes, because in a stopgap year there is nothing to compare it to.

The anomalies are the interesting exception. A stopgap can carry adjustments for specific programmes, and those adjustments are the only real appropriations decisions of the year.

They are made by a small number of people, negotiated privately, and enacted without the committee process that exists to examine exactly this kind of choice.

So the annual process fails, and the failure concentrates the surviving discretion in fewer hands than the process would have, which is the opposite of what its critics usually assume.

The reform most often proposed is automatic continuation: if nothing passes, funding simply continues without a vote, removing the shutdown threat.

That would end the crisis and entrench the drift, since a legislature that need not act to keep the lights on has one less reason to reach agreement about anything.

The honest alternative is worse for everyone involved, which is to require that a stopgap state, on its face, that it is enacting last year's judgement in place of this year's, and for how long.