The Budget year of the US Government runs from October 1st through September 30th. The Federal government is currently in Fiscal Year 2010-2011, which runs from October 1st 2010 through September 30th.
If Congress has done its job, it will have passed the budget and the appropriations bills before October 1st. If the system was working as intended, it would go like this:
- Each Department of the Executive Branch tells the President how much money they need for the coming year
- The President takes those requests and pushes back on the requests until He/She is satisfied the needs of the various departments have been balanced given the revenue that will be available in the coming year
- The President presents the budget proposal to Congress for approval in January
- The Congressional Budget Office looks at the President’s Budget proposal and publishes its analysis by March
- The Budget committees of the House propose spending levels by April 15th taking into consideration the President’s requests and the CBO report and what they think the government should spend
- The Senate passes the House budget resolution and the President signs it (or the Senate proposes changes and sends it back to the House for Reconciliation)
- With the budget in place setting the top line numbers by May 15th, the appropriations committees write the bills authorizing the spending contained in the budget. The House Appropriations Committee is headed by Harold (“Hal”) Rogers of Kentucky.
For FY 2010-2011, Nancy Pelosi’s House – whose party had a majority in the House, Senate and the President – failed to pass any budget resolution. They went into the 2010 election with government spending running on auto-pilot called a continuing resolution which says “Just use the prior year’s budget and copy/paste it into the current year”. It was a complete abdication of their responsibility, as the House was too busy doing things like passing Obamacare.
When the new John Boehner house took office in January 2011, the Budget process was almost a year behind where it should have been and government spending was already in the 4th month. Without control of the Senate or the President, their options were limited. They ended up negotiating “cuts” of $35 billion, most of which were fake – and passed a continuing resolution for the rest of the year – basically declaring that there was no budget for the last year and no appropriations bills.
Following the real process, the House Budget committee pulled together the budget for FY 2011-2012, nicknamed the “Ryan Budget” by the media trying to personalize the budget process. The House voted on the “Ryan Budget” on time along party lines and sent it to the US Senate for approval. The Senate has done nothing with it since then. Without an approved budget in place, the appropriations committees can’t pass their final bills and there is no chance to have a real budget in place October 1st.
With this massive process failure, how can any rational person be thinking a “Balanced Budget” amendment is going to solve anything?