Funding Lapses: Analyzing Shutdown Reform
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House Appropriations U.S. House of Representatives
Follow its sittingsTom Cole
I would ask each of us to confine ourselves to five minutes of question. I want again thank you for your cooperation. With that, I would now yield to Ranking Member DeLauro for five minutes for any comments she wishes to make.
Rosa DeLauro
Thank you very much, Chairman Cole. As always, I appreciate your friendship and our partnership on this committee. Let me just say a big thank you to our witnesses. And what a delight to have the former director of the Office of Management and Budget, Shalanda Young, with us today. Thank you, thank you for your years of service, thank you for your direction of at OMB, and thank you for your direction of this of this committee and where we've had the opportunity to work together.
Senator Lankford, welcome to you this morning. And Congressman McClintock, delighted that you're here testifying before us today. We are convened to hear from sponsors of legislation to change the government funding process to put in place permanent automatic continued funding as a default position if annual appropriations have not been enacted. Fundamentally changes how the Congress funds our government. It replaces the current annual appropriations deadline with a standing default.
Continuing resolutions, often called CRs, are temporary extensions of funding that bring forward the prior year's funding agreement, typically with few changes. They are imperfect tools even under the best circumstances. They can be helpful when used sparingly and can be important to facilitate full-year funding agreements, but they should not be our first choice. They should not be made automatic. All of us here at least at one point in our careers have been charged under the Constitution with protecting the primacy of Congress's power of the purse.
Nearly every president has endeavored to undermine that primacy, but rarely have we seen one go so far as the current administration. President Trump and Budget Director Russ Vought have sought unprecedented control over federal spending, ignoring the Constitution and breaking the law in their effort to take the power of the purse for themselves. It is their goal, and I believe it is to abolish the appropriations process entirely.
Those of you who know me know the depth of my faith in the appropriations process. I view it as the center of government. Nearly all the government does is touched by appropriations. This administration has wrought havoc upon our system through impoundments, rescissions, reconciliation, and reducing federal grants to partisan weapons. Ceding authority to this administration and any future administration would all but complete their mission.
It would cement nearly complete control over government funding within the White House. Why? Why would we voluntarily forfeit that authority? Why would we choose to diminish the role of this committee? This is our responsibility, laid out in the Constitution.
The Constitution is unambiguous. Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7 states, and I quote, "No money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in consequence of appropriations made by law," end quote. James Madison wrote, and I quote, "This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people for obtaining a redress of every grievance," end quote. Giving the president power over the sword and the purse would make him, in effect, a king. The decision to separate these powers was not accidental.
It was a deliberate choice that is foundational to our system of government. The founders were wary of vesting too much power within any single branch of government, so they devised a system of checks and balances. The requirement that the president come to the Congress to ask for funding for their government was designed as a forceful check on their authority. Deferring to the executive through continuous automatic funding substantially weakens that check and empowers the president. It takes power away from those elected to represent the needs of the American people.
Providing a permanent and unlimited grant of funding would surrender essentially all of Congress's authority over government spending to the president, one individual making the decisions. The president could veto any spending legislation they even mildly disapprove of with little consequence. In fact, they would be rewarded with greater discretion over spending under the automatic funding measures proposed, creating a powerful incentive not to negotiate. Auto CRs are permission never to finish the process at all. There ought to be a reasonable push and pull between the branches of government.
That is what the founders intended. A permanent government-wide appropriation for the president would stack the deck in favor of the executive against the Congress, weakening the branch of government closest and most accountable to the American people. I also strongly believe that permanently funding the government would incentivize some in this Congress to harden their positions and refuse to earnestly engage in the difficult but important work of bipartisan compromise. The strength of the appropriations, and I emphasize bipartisan compromise, appropriations is the only piece of legislation where you need to have Democrats and Republicans, House and Senate agree before it goes to the president for a signature.
The strength of the appropriations process is that the House and the Senate, Democrats and Republicans, must work together. They need to forge that agreement. Forgoing that process would exclude the diversity of views represented in the Congress in favor of the fiat of one individual, the President. While the permanent continuing appropriation proposals before us would keep the government open on paper, in practice, they would sacrifice many government functions. From year to year, the funding needs of the federal government can change substantially.
Perhaps there is a submarine base in serious urgent need of repair, or maybe an economic downturn has pushed more families into poverty, forcing them to rely on nutrition assistance to feed their families. Automatic funding would fail to account for these changes. Additionally, the proposals do not account for community funding projects and congressionally directed spending that members rely on to meet their constituents' needs. Instead of emphasizing the need for members of Congress to engage with one another in that annual appropriations process, permanent funding would push members to lobby the White House directly for aid to their communities, giving the executive branch still more power. I am sympathetic to the goal of reducing government shutdowns, but the permanent funding proposals we will discuss here today would, in my opinion, create far more problems than they would solve.
I am eager to hear from our witnesses, and I thank you all again for taking the time to appear before us today. I look forward to your testimony. I thank you and I yield back.
Tom Cole
I thank the gentlelady for her remarks. I want to welcome our three witnesses for today, each of whom will provide invaluable insights into these thorny questions. First, we have Senator James Lankford from my home state of Oklahoma. Senator Lankford is the author of the Prevent Government Shutdowns Act, one of the proposed pieces of legislation to address the recurring problem of government shutdowns that we will be examining today. Second, we have our colleague, Representative Tom McClintock of California.
Representative McClintock is the author of H.R. 8380, a bill to amend the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 to establish certain procedures for consideration of annual appropriations bills in the event of a funding lapse. Finally, also with us today is the Honorable Shalanda Young. Ms. Young served as the 43rd Director of the Office of Management and Budget from 2021 to 2025. More importantly, she's a long-time staffer with the House Appropriations Committee, including service as the staff director and chief clerk of the committee. I want to thank all of you for joining us today.
Also just want to note, we extended invitation to Ron Johnson, Senator Ron Johnson, who very much wanted to be here and talk about his legislation. We all know the tragedy that has pushed him in a situation where he's probably not able to devote the time to this hearing, but we'd love to have his input at another time as well. He just could not make it today. I want to again thank you for joining us today. Your written statements will be made part of the hearing record, and you will each be recognized for five minutes to summarize your testimony.
With that, Senator Lankford, you're recognized for five minutes.
James Lankford
Chairman Cole, thank you very much. Thanks for holding this hearing. This is an exceptionally important hearing, and there are a lot of members that are here that want to get a chance to be able to talk about this. So thank you for holding this hearing. Ranking Member DeLauro, thank you for your comments.
You'd be shocked to know that I agree with almost everything you just said and want to be able to find a way to be able to resolve some of these differences.
I really do appreciate the time to be able to have this dialogue as we try to figure out what we're going to do about government shutdowns. This has been an ongoing issue for a very long time for us. This particular bill I've worked on since 2019, we've had multiple different versions for this, but we've got to be able to find some way to be able to end the perpetual cycle that we're in of government shutdowns. As we all know, when a shutdown occurs, members of Congress still leave to go on CODELs or we travel home to be with our families while federal workers and their families face real financial strain. It's not hard to be able to find different stories on this.
We just did a quick search. Sheree Quick is a TSA agent in Las Vegas. During the last shutdown, she showed up to work every day and had no pay. She had to make decisions every week how to be able to put gas in her car, pay the electricity bill. She went more than 40 days without a paycheck.
She didn't know how she was going to pay for her essential blood pressure medication. That happened because we didn't resolve our differences on time. That's both parties, that's happened over and over again. We all know it to be true. Federal workers and their families should not suffer when Congress has not finished their appropriation work, but they do.
Some of you in this room may even remember December 2018, that particular shutdown when we all left for Christmas and federal workers all got lumps of coal. It happens. So the question is, how do we actually solve this? And I say, solve this together. I'm bringing you something unique today, a non-partisan proposal.
Seven years ago I sat down with my Democratic colleague Maggie Hassan from New Hampshire to develop a plan to end government shutdowns in a non-partisan way. As we worked alongside Representatives Arrington and Panetta to get more input and ideas, we came up with a very simple idea. This bill has had multiple changes and a lot of input from both sides of the hill from countless members and from staff. It received technical assistance from the Office of Management and Budget under President Biden, and then it's also received technical assistance from the Office of Management and Budget under President Trump. The bill does not solve every fiscal and budgetary problem that we need to address.
It just solves one thing. It prevents a government shutdown. Very simply, if we get to the end of a fiscal year and appropriations are not complete, an automatic continuing resolution kicks in for two weeks. It self-renews. But, however, here's the, here's the part that I think a lot of people miss.
Members of Congress and the White House Office of Management and Budget have to remain in Washington, D.C. We have no official travel budget, nor can we use our campaign travel budget to be able to leave. We're in session seven days a week and we have to remain here working on one thing: appropriations. The bill actually prevents us from moving to other topics until we finish the appropriation work. The goal is not an automatic CR.
The goal is to finish appropriation. And if we haven't finished our constitutional responsibility of appropriations, we have to remain in session seven days a week until we finish appropriations work. Nothing is more motivating in this town than jet fumes. This is a opportunity that we have to be able to say the pressure will not be on members of the federal family that are working at TSA or other places. The pressure will be on us to be able to finish our work on time.
And as my mom, the Sunday school teacher and school teacher often said, if you don't finish your work during class, you have to stay after class until it's done. The proposal's just that simple. The bill's been endorsed by a growing list of think tanks, unions, and associations across the political spectrum. As we put this idea out over the past several years, we've been very pleased at the number of groups that have stepped in and said that would work. That's actually an idea that could actually get accomplished.
Let me just list a few of them to you. We've given you the full list of these and, Mr. Chairman, I'd like to ask unanimous consent that the full record of the letters we've received so far be put in the record.
Without objection.
James Lankford
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Let me list just a few of them that have so far endorsed this idea. The America First Policy Institute, the American Federation of Government Employees, Americans for Prosperity, Americans for Tax Reform, the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Committee for Responsible Federal Budget, the Association of Firefighters, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the Iraq and Afghanistan Retired Veterans of America, National Active Retired Federal Employees Association, the United States Steelworkers, the United States Travel Association. I can give you on and on and on. It's a very diverse group.
It's not a group that's all on one side or the other. It's a diverse body that says, let's figure out a way to be able to solve this problem. A national poll was recently conducted on this simple idea and 80% of the people liked this very simple idea. There's a lot of things we can talk about and I really do look forward to the dialogue here, but we feel like this is just a common sense, non-partisan way to put us in a position to finish our work, to do appropriations, but to also protect the federal workers that desperately want a solution to this. With that, I yield back, Mr. Chairman.
Tom Cole
Thank the gentleman for his testimony. We now move to Representative McClintock. Mr. McClintock, you're recognized for five minutes.
Tom McClintock
Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for co-sponsoring HR 8380 and thank you for affording me the time to discuss it with your committee today. I believe the Budget Act of 1974 establishes a methodical, logical, and powerful process to bring spending in line with revenues. It just doesn't work very well. And I think the biggest problem is, of course, that it requires hard tradeoffs and decisions, and sorry, there's nothing we can do about that. Whatever process we use, the decisions aren't going to get any easier.
Periodically, we hear calls for a new bipartisan debt commission. Well, of course, we already have a bipartisan debt commission. It's called Congress. And Congress does have a clear process. The Budget Act requires both houses to set limits on both discretionary and mandatory spending by April 15th each year.
The discretionary limits, the 302(a) allocations, go to this committee, which dutifully every year marks up 12 appropriation bills, and the House works overtime to craft those bills. Meanwhile, the mandatory limits are supposed to be sent as instructions to the committees of jurisdiction to adjust statutes to adhere to those levels, with all of those changes dropped in the reconciliation bill. But here's the problem. The appropriation bills are subject to cloture in the Senate, which means the hard work of the House can simply be blocked by a minority of senators. The clock runs out, and Congress is then faced with the Hobson's choice of a government shutdown, or in desperation, we simply throw away the appropriations bills and vote a continuing resolution, which is the path of least resistance.
This also wreaks havoc on the reconciliation process. Because reconciliation gets expedited consideration in the Senate, it's often used, as it is right now, not to comprehensively address mandatory spending, but rather to address whatever shiny object or exigency that presents itself at the moment. That's how the House got wrapped around the axle on Obamacare in 2017. It's how we passed the Big Beautiful Bill last year. Now, I happen to think the BBB was a remarkable accomplishment, addressing a variety of majority objectives through the Reconciliation Act.
Unfortunately, it didn't address the one objective for which the process is designed: a balanced budget, or at least a less imbalanced one. And of course, most recently, we used it to address the impasse over DHS funding, and currently for defense funding and election reform. In my opinion, those are all worthy objectives, but once again, they're not the objective of the Budget Act. So this bill makes one simple change.
It provides the same expedited consideration for appropriation bills in the Senate that we already give the reconciliation bill. Now this isn't a cure-all. The fiscal decisions attendant to the budget aren't going to get any easier. And since the Senate and House are designed to disagree, it's still going to require intense negotiation between the two houses. But it would at least remove the blockage that often prevents that discussion from taking place, and it reduces the temptation to misuse reconciliation in order to bypass cloture.
So that's it in a nutshell, Mr. Chairman. As the president would say, in all caps, thank you for your attention to this matter.
Tom Cole
I thank the gentleman very much for his testimony. We now turn to Director Young. You're recognized for five minutes.
Shalanda Young
Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member DeLauro, thank you for having me, I think. I think you all are my friends, but I somehow from private life I'm myself back here. But I'm back here because I love this committee. And I love this process. And the throughput you will hear in all three testimony is what we currently have is unacceptable, but we have different ways to get there.
And I hope this is the beginning of a conversation and that we continue to have conversations in various venues to try to find solutions to prevent shutdowns. I just have a different way I believe I'd go about it than Senator Lankford's and Congressman McClintock. You probably won't hear much disagreement about telling the Senate what to do from the House. It tends to be a favorite pastime of the House members and staff. So Senator Lankford can take that back to Senator Thune.
But look, I was director of the Office of Management and Budget. Before that, I was the staff director of this committee, two years in the minority, two years in the majority. For the newer members on the committee, it's nice to get to meet you in this position, but if you talk to your colleagues who've been here a while, they'll tell you I'm funny, so please be nice today. I opened my phone when I was writing my remarks and the headline pops up, what's wrong with Congress? It claimed nine in ten Americans say they're unhappy with Congress, and obviously shutdowns and the theater that come with them are play a big part in that perception.
I would however ask you to think of shutdowns as one of the many symptoms of what is broken. My child once had pneumonia. We took care of the fever. It made her comfortable, but if we didn't figure out what was causing the pneumonia, we would have continued in this do-loop. That's how I think about shutdowns.
For too long, congressional dysfunction has been shrugged off as the norm while congressional leadership uses workarounds as substitutes for the difficult work of legislating. Notice I didn't say a party. We've reached this point because it's devolved over time. For example, using the reconciliation process to bypass the appropriations committee. I consider that a workaround.
These tactics allow the institution to continue to limp along, deepening the dysfunction most Americans now expect. If the goal is institutional restoration, reclaiming Congress's spending authority is a logical starting point. Although this past year's shutdowns might suggest appropriations are especially difficult, I think the opposite might be true because federal spending directly affects your constituents. It offers one of the clearest opportunities for legislators to find common ground and demonstrate responsiveness to the needs in their districts. As we think through potential solutions, we also must refrain from making matters worse.
After all, more cameras in hearing rooms have resulted in a lot of theatrics. I'm sure today will be different. A reflection of good intentions but leading to awful outcomes. I view legislation creating automatic CRs in that light.
Automatic CR legislation is likely to empower bad actors looking to frustrate, compromise, or hijack appropriations for their own legislative priorities and will lead to worse, less responsive governing. Because of the need to reach compromise each year, annual appropriations are a key way that Congress ensures spending meets the evolving needs of the country. A minority in the Senate or a president wielding their veto can more easily obstruct enacting appropriations bills without risking blame. Even efforts by Congress to assert its power of the purse or rein in executive abuse through appropriations will require veto-proof majorities to overcome a resistant president. Ultimately, automatic CRs would risk making it easier for the president to hold annual appropriations legislation hostage, whether by insisting on inclusion of his or her priorities, demanding the passage of unrelated legislation, or resisting the inclusion of bipartisan oversight in those bills.
You know, sitting here, I think about 2023, when I was OMB director. Went in on a Saturday, September 30th, thought we were shutting down the government. Speaker McCarthy was speaker at the time. Got there 9:00, thought we'd do an orderly shutdown, and Speaker McCarthy said absolutely not and put a hard bill on the floor, and it passed. I'm not sure with a fail-safe like automatic CRs that day would have happened, and I believe we would have shut down.
And that was a tough vote and a tough thing for the speaker to do, and we didn't get all our priorities in that bill, including Ukraine funding, which was incredibly important to our White House, but I believe the speaker did the right thing, even if I didn't know it that day. The breakdown of the appropriations process reflects broader institutional atrophy, not unlike the decline of the authorization process before it. Let's be real, all we have is NDAA, and that's so far. We'll see how the year goes. One potential reform is to expand the size and representation of Congress's spending committees.
In addition to considering membership structure, congressional staff also require significant expansion. As executive cooperation has declined, Congress has lacked the staff capacity and resources to counterbalance that shift. There are also promising ideas on apportionment reform, changing the budget resolution schedule so it's not an impediment to appropriations. I know Mr. Womack has a legislation on that front, and frankly, providing more specificity in appropriations law and less reliance on reports that don't have the weight of law. Look, my recommendations, just like the others I've talked about today, are not a cure-all.
No process or structural change trumps political will. It never has. When I was OMB director, there were no shutdowns, and it wasn't because we got everything we wanted. We chose, and many of you chose in this room, to put the stability of the country over strongly held positions on both sides of the aisle. We have done it before, we can do it again.
I look forward to your questions.
Tom Cole
Thank gentlelady for her remarks. Let me begin the questioning. I want to start first with you, Senator Lankford. There's a lot in your bill that appeals to me, particularly the fact that it puts the onus on Congress and the punishment and the pain on us and not on the American people, because seven days here with all of my colleagues, as much as I love each one, followed by another seven and another seven, would probably drive me to a solution as quickly as I can. But there's also other causes to delay in this deal, and I'll give you an example.
We're supposed to get a presidential budget by February 15th.
We do not. Now, the first year of any presidency, I understand that. They don't even have their own people in place by February 15. But the second and third years, I don't find much excuse. We got it this year April 1st, something like that, six weeks late.
We're also supposed to have a top-line number from the congressional, from the budget committee. I don't think we've gotten that in at least six Congresses on either side. It was so divided when Speaker Pelosi was Speaker that Democrats could not literally get a budget out of their own budget committee, let alone across the floor, and she had to deem a budget. So we've got other players in this that set us behind and make life very difficult. Is there anything in your legislation that would force them to get their stuff to us here in a fashion that would actually give us the time to do our jobs?
James Lankford
There is not on that particular area. We tried to stay very, very narrowly focused on just working on preventing government shutdowns. I would be eager for us to reopen the 1974 Budget Act and to be able to reexamine when the President's budget's delivered, what we actually operate with that. Quite frankly, this is a totally different subject, but I'm a fan of having calendar year rather than fiscal year. We need to admit the obvious gravity that every year we're fighting this in October, November, and December.
This is now our 30th year that we don't have appropriations done on time for September 30th. But that's a different issue than what this is trying to address.
Tom Cole
Well, again, I would point, I mean, this committee actually proceeded this year. We did not wait on the President's budget. I wish we had it, but if they can't get it here on time, then it's going to become less relevant in consideration. We did not wait on the budget committee. I wish they had their deal, and I'm very specific, and look, we have a great relationship.
I'm not critical of the committee, but I told the chairman of the committee, if you can't pass it across the floor, I'm not writing 12 bills to a number that's out of committee, because if you can't pass it on the floor, I can't write 12 bills that'll pass the floor. And so, you know, we've been flying on our own a little bit here and sort of backing into a top line, doing what we can as we can and moving ahead. But that's not a good way to proceed. So that's something if any of you have additional thoughts on how we get the people that are supposed to do their job so that we can do our job to do it in time, because they always escape the blame. It falls on this committee.
Gentlelady from, well...
Shalanda Young
As a writer of four late budgets, you know, the excuse becomes chicken or egg. I remember having this exchange in the budget committee when I was presenting. Congressman was like, you need to submit it on time. I go, well, you need to give me appropriations bills on time. We need to stop pointing the finger and probably get on time with each other and come to some agreement.
But I will tell you as an example, though, I came from this committee. I had a predisposition to want this process to work. That is not, I believe, the norm for OMB directors. So the fight internally to make sure you got what you needed fell squarely on these shoulders. I cared about timing, not necessarily everyone else did.
And so if you know this about what happens at OMB and in White Houses and how crises take, you know, trump the basic work of budgeting and appropriations, that's what leads me to some of my concern about giving people more time and more access to workarounds. As someone who fought to get you what you needed and get it in a more timely manner, everything else becomes a priority.
Tom Cole
Thank you very much. I don't have a lot of time left, but Representative McClintock, I do have a question for you, and it really applies in a sense to Senator Lankford's proposal as well. Article 1, Section 5, Clause 2 of the US Constitution grants each chamber of Congress the sole, quote, "the sole and exclusive right to determine the rules of its proceedings."
Given that, how can we impose upon the Senate, or even ourselves, our other colleagues through statute, you know, you will proceed in this way? A lot of us have problems with the filibuster on both sides, just depends on who happens to be using it. But really, a lot of us do have those problems. But again, how would we constitutionally force the United States Senate to do something your proposal envisions, which is, you know, you can't have this artificial barrier here that does foul up the process, no question.
Tom McClintock
Yeah, well, the answer is you can't. The Senate has this annoying tendency to not see things our way. But this changes a statute that requires the consent of both houses and the president's approval. So the Senate does get a say in this. They get to either pass it, modify it, or reject it.
Rosa DeLauro
Thank you very much. And I ran a little bit over, I want to be mindful of the time of the committee, and recognize my good friend, the ranking member of the full committee, Ms. Lowey, for any questions she may have.
I just might add that we cannot get cabinet secretaries today to come up and testify before the Appropriations Committee unless we threaten their appropriations. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Thank you all for your testimony. So they don't feel the need or the necessity to come before us and talk about their proposals. Senator Lankford, in 1986, the Reagan administration wrote a letter to GAO voicing opposition to auto-CR proposals.
Specifically, Reagan's OMB expressed concern that, quote, adoption of an automatic continuing resolution option could actually reduce the pressure on Congress to make funding decisions in a timely manner. In other words, President Reagan's White House felt that an auto-CR would eliminate the pressing end-of-the-year deadline that forces bipartisan compromise and action. Can you explain how your proposal would facilitate bipartisan compromise when many of us think that it would likely facilitate more entrenched partisan disagreement? And Director Young, I'd love to have you respond to that as well.
James Lankford
That's great. Yeah, thanks for the question. It's a great question, actually. Back during the Reagan administration, shutdowns were a couple hours, a couple days. They weren't 35 days, they weren't extending out where they are now.
So they've continued to accelerate on it. This particular proposal puts the pressure on us, not on federal workers. Right now, the leverage to get our work done is TSA agents not getting paid, air traffic control not getting paid, federal law enforcement not getting paid. Those families are the leverage for us to do our work. Those families have nothing to do with our inability to be able to get things finished up.
I want to put the leverage on us, not on federal workers and their families. And the best way to do that is basically to force us to stay in the room until we're finished negotiating. If I can say it this way, I go back to my mom again. All my best advice ever came from my mom on it. When my brother and I would have an argument in the living room, she would make both of us leave and go to one of our rooms and say, if you guys are going to fight, go over there and fight, don't disturb the rest of the family.
When you're done, then you can come back in here. This basically puts all of us, House and Senate, Republicans and Democrats, to say you can't do anything but appropriations. And you're going to stay there until appropriations is done. When appropriations is done, then you can go home or move to other subjects. But until you do appropriations, you can't leave or switch other things.
I think that puts the pressure where it needs to be on us to get appropriations done.
Rosa DeLauro
Well, it took us, took 35 days in the last go-around for my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to make a determination when there was a proposal on the floor to say let us fund TSA, FEMA, Coast Guard, CISA, etc., but let's hold because of the difficulties with ICE and Border Patrol. 35 days. And they finally on the other side of the aisle said, okay, we can go there. Those months, because of politics and political will, which the director speaks about, caused those families to suffer while we played around here with their lives. Let me ask you, Director Young, to respond to that same question of how does this, how does this proposal of an auto-CR facilitate bipartisan compromise?
Shalanda Young
So I think if you listen to Senator Lankford, I think the forcing mechanism is you have to stay due. The problem is I've kind of seen it all. I was OMB director, I didn't really travel. I viewed it as more of a central DC, the cabinet secretaries went out, cut ribbons, these things. I did a little of that, but I was mostly in DC, so if OMB operates the way I viewed the job, the restriction on travel wouldn't really impact OMB.
For members and senators, obviously it has more of an impact, but you know and I've known, if no bills coming to the floor two or three days, you stop seeing members around. If you have a child's birthday party, you're going to find a way to get home after you check in with leadership. So just trying to think through how we've seen these things work. During a shutdown, there is an expectation that members stay around. We start losing people because life happens, and if nothing's going to be on the floor, why would you miss a kid's birthday or wedding or any other event?
So I think there are limitations to this. So I don't think there's an additional mechanism here to promote bipartisanship, and you heard me before talk about the scenario in 2023. I have my doubts of whether that would have come along, which prevented a shutdown if there was a fail-safe that would have allowed the government to continue to operate.
Rosa DeLauro
I have very few seconds left, and maybe we can pick this up offline as well. In your testimony, Director Young, you say promising ideas of apportionment reform, and are there areas you think require greater specificity, or are you making a broader suggestion on how we can take a look at apportionment?
Shalanda Young
Mr. Chairman, I'll be quick here, I know we're out of time. I think this is incredibly important. Apportionment is yours. You gave it to OMB. What you also told me as director of OMB is you were sick of apportionments being hidden and you wanted us to put them online.
And we did it at your bipartisan direction. But I think when you think about apportionment reform, I hope as things come through Congress, you think of that as something that does not belong to any executive branch, it belongs to you as you think through reform. You don't have to allow OMB to apportion at all. It used to be appropriations to agencies and that's it. That's hard because the agencies have gotten so big and complicated, OMB served a role, but if OMB is not doing the job you want it to do, whether it be mine or this one, it belongs to you and you can take it back if they are not exercising that authority in the way that Congress wants it to.
So that's how I think. And also appropriations, this committee has always relied on funding reports, so the statutes aren't very long, so you encourage, you direct, you urge. If that's not being listened to, more of those things need to go into statute rather than the suggestive report language. And that's my suggestion.
Thank you very much, and I thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Tom Cole
Thank you very much, my friend. We next go to Chairman Arderholt, but before you're recognized, it is your birthday. And so the newly established tradition, the Boehner birthday song will be rendered. This is your birthday song, it doesn't last too long, hey!
Robert Aderholt
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would say that I'm usually not in Appropriations Committee meetings on my birthday, but looking back, I usually am in Appropriations Committee meetings on my birthdays. But I will say this is the first time I've been in a full committee hearing on my birthday. So this is a little bit different day, but it's great to have Senator Lankford, Congressman McClintock, former director OMB Shalanda Young. Good to have all of you all here today and for your testimony and your thoughts on this issue.
I know this is an issue that every one of us have dealt with, whether you've been here in one term or whether you've been here many, many terms. Let me address the first issue or first question to Congressman McClintock. Of course, you're an authorizer, and here we are as on the appropriation side here in this committee. How do you see the relationship between authorizing and appropriations in the process and as far as, you know, do you think there needs to be greater alignment between authorizers and appropriators and what do you feel like could be changed to make that more easy to try to maybe avoid a shutdown?
Tom McClintock
Well, of course, I've always been very critical of the tendency of the House to continue to fund programs that are unauthorized. Our House rules allow a point of order, but those rules are always waived in the rule that brings the appropriations bills to the House. So I mean, unauthorized appropriations are a big problem. And it's not the fault of this committee, it's the fault of authorizing committees that simply fail to look at the programs within their jurisdictions to determine which ones are efficient, which ones have become inefficient, which ones have become superannuated and need to be abolished. But within the budget process itself, there's a very sharp distinction.
The Appropriations Committee controls the discretionary spending. The authorizing committees are supposed to control the mandatory spending, that's the reconciliation process, and that's the process that's really gotten fouled up. But one of the problems that we face on both sides, discretionary and mandatory, is again, that impediment in the Senate that allows a minority, if it wishes, simply to block consideration of the appropriations bills that are sent over. That obviously thwarts the appropriations process, but again, it also puts pressure on the reconciliation process to be used not for comprehensive reform of our mandatory spending, but rather to chase whatever shiny object we can't get through the Senate. So I think that this reform, again, it's not a cure-all, it's not a substitute for political will, but it does remove one of the impediments that I think is keeping this process from working.
Robert Aderholt
Thank you. Senator Lankford, of course you've had the privilege to serve in both chambers, in the House and the Senate. How do you see the dynamics, you know, of course Congressman McClintock just mentioned about the issue with the minority being able to keep a appropriation bill from coming to the floor, but how do you see the shutdown dynamics play out differently from your perspective in the House and now being in the Senate?
James Lankford
I think I was in the House six hours as a member when I heard for the first time the other party is the opposition, the Senate is the enemy.
So that that has not changed over the years in the process back and forth and I and I get that dynamic. The two bodies do function very, very differently as Representative DeLauro had mentioned before, appropriations is always bipartisan. Always. When you go through the process on that and that is true in the Senate as well. The Senate requires both sides to have to sit down and talk like grown-ups and figure out our differences and to be able to solve those.
To be able to have to be able to remove the requirement to have 60 on appropriations, which is the gist of this proposal on this, would pull away that requirement that we have bipartisan conversation in the Senate. It also would add into it in this particular structure, one of the things the senators hate the most. The House has the convenience of when you do a reconciliation bill of voting it, sending it over to the Senate. The Senate rules require a vote-a-rama. That is an unlimited amendment exercise where we're often in continuous voting for sometimes as short as eight hours, most often 20 to 25 to 30 hours continuous one amendment after another on unlimited subjects.
You won't find very many senators that want to do another one of those because they're painful, long political exercises that don't accomplish anything. This particular proposal would add yet another set of vote-a-ramas into the Senate rules and that would be tough to get senators actually voting for. We're trying to get rid of that, not add another one.
Steny Hoyer
Thank the gentleman. Gentleman from Maryland, Mr. Hoyer is recognized for questions.
Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. First let me say I think we have two thoughtful members of the Congress of the United States presenting these proposals. Senator Lankford has represented that in the House and now represents in the Senate. And as I've told Mr. McClintock, I always enjoy hearing him speak because I think he speaks truth and with good analysis.
However, I agree, I disagree with both of you strongly. But Mr. McClintock, Congressman McClintock, you just said what I think is the real issue and you said that no legislation or rule can replace political will. Correct. Let me speak just a little bit about political will. Ronald Reagan, as Jim Lankford just pointed out, was president for eight years, Bush was president for four thereafter.
We had 12 years, we essentially had eight days of shutdown or 12 days, eight years of Reagan, one and a half day average shutdown. Why? Because the political will of the president and the political will of the Congress was to reach agreement. That does not now exist. The director of OMB has made it clear, we want their funding to be shut down.
That's a quote of Mr. Vought. Mr. Trump said we had two shutdowns, excuse me, this was Mr. Gingrich, two shutdowns in 1995 and became the first re-elected GOP majority since 1928. Speaker Gingrich pointing out that that was a successful effort. Mr. McCarthy said nobody wins in a government shutdown, nobody wins in a government shutdown. I've been here.
He said that on September 14th, 2023. He believes partially he was removed for facilitating agreement between the two parties rather than a partisan shutdown and confrontation. I believe these proposals do exactly the opposite of what we need to do in the sense I think they weaken greatly the Congress and strengthen even more than has happened to date the presidency, making the executive extraordinarily powerful and the Congress much weaker.
Speaker 8
Essentially, it makes the Appropriations Committee irrelevant and powerless to carry out the founders' intent to give paramount and exclusive authority to the Congress for the spending of taxpayer money. Furthermore, I think that shutting the government down has been a tool of political choice by many Republican leaders, including Newt Gingrich, Donald Trump, and many others, including Vought, and it is a tool which has been employed by Democrats as well. So no one has clean hands, if you will, on this issue. But let me refer to the director of OMB. Director Young, when Congress provides only broad, outdated funding through CRs, who makes the operational decisions about what is delayed, reduced, or prioritized?
Shalanda Young
That is typically some combination of the agencies and the Office of Management and Budget and probably some insight from the White House if it is consequential enough.
Speaker 10
So in fact, what a shutdown does by the failure of the political will of which Congressman McClintock talked about, it enhances greatly the authority and ability of the President of the United States and through OMB and through his agencies to set policies for those agencies.
Shalanda Young
Yes, during a shutdown, each agency has to tell the American people what is open, what is closed, and as we all know, that is different even within the same administration. One year it could be this is and it was politically tough and they changed their shutdown plans to something else, so there is a lot of latitude for the President to make those decisions.
Steny Hoyer
Let me say to Senator Lankford, I represent approximately 77,000 federal employees. I feel their pain. I know their pain, and obviously that pain visited on not only government employees but on others as well is reflected in how many people are looking for a solution. But I really say that as we did under Ronald Reagan, I was here all eight years he was president, and George Bush, we rarely shut down the government. Under Joe Biden with a Republican Congress, we didn't shut down the government at all.
Not once, because we reached agreement. And political will, I suggest again, Congressman, is in fact the answer, not weakening the Congress of the United States, not saying somebody else will get government going. The incentive for the administration to undermine agreement is heightened by I think these proposals, although I would like to see the Senate, I'm one of those that thinks the Senate needs to reform itself so that it can do its business. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Speaker 9
Thank the gentleman. The gentleman from Idaho, Mr. Simpson, is recognized for questions.
Michael Simpson
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you all for being here. I actually like all of this discussion of what's going on. Mr. McClintock, I'm not optimistic the Senate would listen to us, but I agree with what you're trying to do. The filibuster rule has been changing forever. It was originally two-thirds vote, they dropped it to 60 because two-thirds was too hard, and then they decided, well, we shouldn't do it for judges or confirmations, so we'll drop it to 50 for those positions.
The appropriations process and appropriations bills are something that the federal government has a constitutional responsibility to do. And I think if we have a constitutional responsibility to do it, the Senate ought to do it with simple majority. If they want to change their vote-a-rama rules, I don't even know what those are, but they could change those too if that became a problem.
But I'm not optimistic that they will listen to us. So, you know, I talk to my two senators and they don't like the idea. So anyway, but I like your proposal.
A helpful suggestion.
Michael Simpson
It would be a helpful suggestion, I agree with that. And Senator, I agree with your proposal. I like parts of it. I think it's a good idea that it puts the responsibility back on us to do this. But if you listen to everybody in this room, I guarantee almost everybody in this room would say they're opposed to shutdowns.
They don't want government shutdowns. We want to make sure that doesn't happen. And yet they continue to happen. And they're getting worse and worse and worse. And when you get narrower and narrower majorities, they're going to become more frequent because all of a sudden any individual can become a king.
If I don't get something that has absolutely nothing to do with funding over in this bill, I'm not going to vote for this. And we've all seen that happen. Happens every day around here. That's a problem. But we even had shutdowns when we had some of our largest majorities.
And that, that is a problem. And I noticed that Rosa mentioned the shutdown where they proposed funding everything except ICE, and we didn't go along with that until the very last. It was because I don't think you can pick and choose. I don't think that's right. And ultimately, how did that work out for you?
We got ICE funded for two years, which I disagree with, because all of a sudden we don't have the ability to change and have oversight hearings of what the funding is for the next couple of years. I think that was the wrong thing to do, but we were kind of at odds of not being able to do anything else. And that's, that's a real problem. But I do want to compliment Tom and Ranking Member DeLauro, and actually Susan and Patty over in the Senate, Senators Collins and Murray. They have been working on trying to get us back to what's called regular order, what we all refer to as regular order.
I think one of the biggest problems that's driving this is we haven't followed the Budget Act of 74. We need a budget resolution. We need to know what the 302(a) is. They are hard to do. I listened to a speaker from one of our institutes here say that most members of Congress don't even know what a budget resolution is, have never voted for a budget resolution.
When I was a freshman, I came back early from my dad's funeral to vote for a budget resolution. That's how important they were. And then all of a sudden they became too hard to pass, so we stopped trying and we started deeming numbers. And the House deems a different number than the Senate deems. So consequently, how do you conference a bill if you don't have the same numbers?
And you don't have the same numbers until the four corners or leadership gets together and decides what that is. But if Senator Murkowski is marking up her interior bill to 40 billion and I'm marking it up to 38 billion, how do you conference that? You can't. We need to get back to regular order. And I will tell you, we have been moving in that direction.
I think Chairman Cole has emphasized that, and we've been trying to get back to having a budget resolution, but it includes other committees. And you talked about the authorizing committees and things that go in our bill that are unauthorized. I don't put anything in my bill that hasn't been approved by the chairman of the authorizing committees. I have to get their approval to put it in, or they could object to it on the floor. Now, is that right or wrong?
I will tell you one year I brought a bill down that defunded all the Endangered Species Act and critical habitat. And people thought I was crazy. The reason I did it, I was trying to make a point: the Endangered Species Act had not been reauthorized for 23 years at that time. It still hasn't. The authorizing committee need to get busy and do their job with the reauthorizations of some of these things.
And that's a challenge we all have, but I will tell you, it is too many people in Congress, frankly, have forgotten what the word compromise is. We work with compromise in this committee, our subcommittee, Chellie Pingree and I sit, as do all the ranking members and chairmen sit and work on a compromise trying to solve that. We have disagreements on what the 302(b) is. Sometimes they'd like to spend more, sometimes we'd like to spend less. So we have disagreements on that.
But within the bill, how we spend the money, we compromise. Too many people don't understand what compromise is. That's what this place operates on, or should. So anyway, I appreciate you all being here. It's good to see you again, Shalanda, and I look forward to working with you.
There is no one simple answer to this. It's going to take multiple things. Thank you.
Speaker 16
Welcome to all of our witnesses. Ms. Young, thank you for coming before the committee today. Your many years of experience working as professional committee staff for appropriators on both sides of the aisle, as well as your commendable service at OMB, is invaluable to this discussion. In your view, what is the role of the president in legislating government funding, and do the legislative proposals that are before us today put forward, do they discourage the president's participation? Put slightly differently, do these proposals promote a more functional political system that encourages accountability of Congress and of the president to the public?
And to Mr. Lankford, related to my question to Ms. Young, while your legislation goes into quite some detail on the restrictions on members of Congress and congressional procedures during a lapse, it is completely silent on the president. Yet the president has an immense role in negotiation of appropriations legislation and has many tools to hinder the process. Why does your legislation provide no carrots or sticks to encourage the president's participation in the appropriations process? In fact, the 2018 shutdown happened because President Trump refused to work with the House and Senate of his own party. After Mr. Lankford's response, Ms. Young, I'd like for you to let me know your thoughts on ceding Congress's role in appropriations without providing any mechanism of accountability for the executive branch.
Shalanda Young
I'll go first. So, to combine kind of what you and Congressman Simpson talked about, look, there are lots of things that come through White Houses that are difficult. White Houses like to operate in six-hour sprints a day. When you have something complicated like the appropriations process and the budget, I've seen it firsthand: it is difficult, it requires intense engagement to get all 12 bills done, and sometimes, it does not matter the party, it would be easier to find an off-ramp. So I look at all these proposals.
I don't want to provide any more off-ramps for people not to do the hard work. That's how I look at all of it. I don't want the same thing, this authorization process that Chairman Simpson talked about, to happen to this committee. And we all know we can say it, we all know once you stop doing something and you give people an out, it does not stop. Once you say you don't have to vote on this amendment and forget open rules and this and that, it doesn't go back.
So I, we have seen this tale. And my fear is presidents, White House's OMBs, of the thousands of things they have going on, this becomes a distraction. And if you give them an easy way to deal with it, and I'll put congressional leadership in that box, that is the path they will take. That is how I look at the lens of all recommendations that come up, worthy aim to prevent shutdowns. I want people to do more work, more rooms together, more CODELs so we know each other and have relationships and can find compromise.
I want more, not less, interaction.
Senator Lankford.
James Lankford
Yes. Great question, by the way, on it. If I can just clarify just a couple of things on this. I don't want this proposal to be misunderstood. This is not the government on autopilot, this is us sitting every day at our desk having to work.
It puts the, takes the pressure off of federal workers and their families and puts the pressure where it should be, on us. Right now, the pressure's on federal workers and their families and we leave and go home and go to birthday parties and go to other things. And so I think this is being misunderstood. This is not just autopilot, this is pushing us towards appropriation on it. The one change is the pressure point is on us rather than on them.
That's why the American Federation of Government Employees Union strongly support it.
Speaker 20
What about the pressure on the president? What about the executive branch?
James Lankford
The pressure on the president is, this is actually long discussed in it, we've done a bipartisan way and it's been several versions of this, is the members of Congress, our staff, we can't travel, official travel, whatever it may be, OMB, their staff doesn't travel. Now OMB doesn't travel much on it, but we looked at who are the budget negotiators that are there, but we did not put a limitation on the president of the United States. That is a different role.
Speaker 18
That means if he's not interested in pushing it or his budget director doesn't want to get it done, they can just sit on it and do nothing.
James Lankford
Well, I would only disagree in the sense that whoever the political party is of the president, if we're all sitting here looking at each other for a week, we will find a way to be able to press the president into being able to say the people that support you are stuck in this spot. We've got to be able to find a way to be able to work together.
The gentleman is recognized for 30 seconds.
Shalanda Young
Thank you. I've done lots of these negotiations. Members when they're sitting around waiting to see if the smoke from the chimney comes. When I was OMB, I was on the phone with Ken Calvert, I was on the phone with like every one of you who sit in rooms. Most members aren't in those rooms.
And what happens is they are waiting just like the American people are waiting. So I think in practicality, most members are not going to sit, we don't sit on the floor and have these negotiations. We have these conversations, negotiations by our subcommittees, congressional leadership, you know, if the president is engaged, it's at the White House. My, you know, I get the point, but the way they have tended to operate is the majority of the members aren't beholden to this process like the members of this committee are in OMB. So if you're sitting around for five days, you don't see the Pope smoke.
Are you really going to miss a family event, like you're not engaged in any meaningful way and probably have other things that this isn't going to stop you from participating in. That's my, that's my worry.
James Lankford
Right now, it's TSA agents waiting for the Pope smoke rather than us. And I'm trying to take that away from them.
Speaker 9
Gentleman yields back. Reclaiming the committee's time. We will now go to gentleman from Texas, Mr. Carter, for any questions he may have.
Speaker 15
The federal contractors who work for them are some of the hardest working people we got anywhere in our county. Could you explain how your legislation would protect the government contracts of these governors in these government shutdowns? What's happening to those people? First, that's my first question.
James Lankford
So it this proposal actually uniquely does that because it provides the funding for the programming as well as the pay. And as we know, we we just had a time where we determined we were going to pay employees, but we weren't going to pay contractors and we weren't going to pay programming. We had a situation where literally in the Coast Guard, for instance, the Coast Guard, the Coasties, they were actually paid, but they couldn't take their ships out because they didn't have gas because that was a contractor that provided the gas for it. They were getting their utilities cut off at some of their stations because they were getting paid, but they weren't actually getting any of the contractor pay that was actually going to it for programming. So what I've tried to do here is to say the functioning of government continues.
We all have to stay here. And it is required in this we have a quorum call every day. We cannot go into recess for more than 23 hours. So it requires everybody to be here. And I know folks want to be at birthday parties, but they literally have to tell their constituents, I left the work.
That that is not required now. Now if you head home for a birthday party, that's not a violation of what we're doing. This actually changes it. It also takes away all official funding and campaign funding for travel and puts a quorum call here. So it puts us here at work where we should be to resolve our differences until appropriations is done, but it holds the programs, the contractors, and the federal family, the workers that are out there, holds them harmless because they can't do anything about us not resolving things, only we can.
So the pressure goes on us.
Well, I'm hoping anybody else want to talk about what their proposal does to protect the contractors?
Tom McClintock
Well, to your point, the continuing resolution introduces a great deal of indecision in in contractors' relationships to the federal government. How do we get to these continuing resolutions? Because the good work of this committee goes over to the Senate and then it just sits there. Now they're supposed to to amend it to their liking and send it back to us, but if it can be blocked for lack of cloture, you can't have that discussion. And then we again have the Hobson's choice.
We either accept a shutdown with all of its devastating impact on the government, or we go to a continuing resolution and the contractors go from continuing resolution to continuing resolution, not knowing what is next.
Shalanda Young
Yeah, well, I don't have legislation, but commenting on it, I would say, Senator Lankford, as we've sat here, there's nothing to prevent us from thinking about ideas to require if the idea is to keep members and OMB and the administration engaged, let's start that September 15th of every year rather than a new process to take the pressure off. If the idea is to make sure people don't leave, I don't know why we leave September 10th through 15th for random holi- you see what I'm saying? There are ways without taking pressure off if the idea is to insist that people show up every day. Let's do that September 1st through September 30th. And this idea that we're arguing between automatic CRs and CRs, this committee knows that CRs are bad regardless.
So I also don't want us to leave this room thinking that is the choice either. We want regular full-year bills done because whether it's automatic or whether it's a CR, we have never found those the way to operate government because Fort Hood told us about their funding needs almost two years ago in order to be in the budget process. To keep that in place through CR after CR is also not showing up for Fort Hood.
Amen. Thank you.
Speaker 9
I'd just ask the members do their best to- the conversation's good, but we got a lot of people here that have questions and I'd just ask that we try to stick within the five minutes. Gentlelady from Minnesota, Ms. McCollum's recognized for questions.
Betty McCollum
Thank you, Mr. Chair. And I want to thank you and the ranking member for making this happen. It gives me great solace to be able to go home and tell my constituents we care about the Constitution, we care about our duties here in Congress, and we know we need to get our job done on time. It's clear we all know continuing resolutions are not the way to fund government. And I want to talk about some of the people that we talk about our constituents a lot, but our constituents also live in local communities, local governments, our communities at large, hospitals, schools, transportation dollars.
They're all impacted. We make a mess, having served in local and state government and even county government, which I didn't serve in, we take their budgets and we put them in total chaos. And so sometimes we fail to think of the partners that we have in making this democracy work. I want to just take a second to talk about, you know, Trump and OMB. They used, in my opinion, and I can back it up, the full-year CR as an opportunity literally to break appropriations law.
The impoundment of funds was rampant. And agencies that were established by Congress, like the Department of Education and USAID, they were just torn apart in the shutdown. And this is, in my opinion, was completely unconstitutional. We didn't stand up for the Constitution. We didn't do our Article One responsibilities.
Because Article One does give Congress, not the administration, the power of the purse. So let me just take this down a little bit of a notch here and talk about my subcommittee that I'm proud to serve on with Chairman Calvert and how this is bad for the Department of Defense. When we do a full-year CR appropriations bill as being kind of, you know, or even going into December, it throws away the work that we do bipartisanly to work carefully to respond to all the specific activities that the Department of Defense covers. So let's think about what that includes. It includes dual-use technologies for small businesses like advanced manufacturing, microelectronics, cybersecurity, life-saving medical treatments that impacts the lives of our service members and benefits the civilian healthcare sector.
And when a CR happens, none of this happens. Under a CR, we can't stop spending in areas where no longer it's needed, like old legacy platforms that should be retired. We fail to at the same time to invest in critical needs that we have to work on. So Russia and China don't operate on continuing resolutions. I don't agree with the president's decision of what he did in Iran, but we're at war.
And now we're talking about a CR. They're bad for the Department of Defense and they're bad for the United States of America. So President Trump didn't have any problems endorsing a full-year continuing resolution for 2025 for the entire federal government. And with the discussions that I'm seeing taking place, or the lack of communication from the Department of Defense to this committee when we request important things in order to plan our budgets, I have to wonder how engaged the administration really is in helping us put pressure, as you talk about, Mr. Lankford, for all of us to get together, sit down, and do the job. Bottom line, it's a complete disaster for the taxpayer.
And, you know, without this, I want to reiterate again, money doesn't move on time to businesses. Contracts are late, costing the taxpayer more money. We lose an entire fiscal year. So I'm going to ask you a question, Ms. Young, because the bottom line is we're cycle after cycle after cycle of this. So if we really went back and looked at the inefficiencies, the wasted money from all of these CRs, I think the taxpayers would be enraged, but we don't do an accumulation.
We don't run a clock on that. So your experience, Director Young, on continuing resolutions, could you give us our thoughts on some of the impacts that it not only has on the employees that are getting paid, but the long-term impacts of the inefficiency and the waste of tax dollars that happens? And I use the Department of Defense as an example, but you can use whatever you want.
Shalanda Young
Sure. You can look at any drafted CR that's been passed, you carry a provision that rightfully says agencies can't make big decisions until full-year bills are done. So if that's six months later, the Army, Navy can't go into long-term procurements on new things. Most of your state and locals won't get their LIHEAP funding or any other large grant because if agencies, if OMB allowed that, it basically pre-presumed where you would land in the final bill.
So I'm not suggesting you take that out because you don't want us dictating the final legislation. But if we can't make big long-term investments, including grant programs that most state and locals just depend on from year to year, it's incredibly impactful to local units of government who can't make those long-term decisions if they're waiting on an EPA state revolving fund loan or the Army or Navy who are looking to make a large-scale acquisition. We all know CRs, whether it be the new proposal or the current way of business, prevents the government from operating in an efficient way. A private business would never do that.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Ms. Young.
Tom Cole
Thank the gentlelady. I would ask members to try not to pose questions the last 10 seconds of your time. It puts the witness in a very difficult spot. So with that, the gentleman from California, Mr. Calvert, is recognized for questions.
Ken Calvert
Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank our witnesses for being here today. I'll carry on with what Betty was talking about. Obviously, our House Defense Appropriations Committee is half the discretionary budget. It's always good to see you, Shalanda.
And we've had many discussions in the past. And the frustrations that we have in attempting to operate the largest enterprise in the world under a continuing resolution or in a shutdown scenario shouldn't happen. And we've been forced to do this because we unfortunately have given away our Article 1 authority more and more to the executive branch in a dysfunctional congressional process at this point. And our global competition, whether it's China or Russia or Iran, North Korea, they don't have continuing resolutions or shutdowns. And so I'm sure they're amused to watch us go through this process as we attempt to make sure that the men and women of the United States military are paid, that we can operate our procurement process in an orderly fashion, which unfortunately is not occurring at the present time.
And then we've now fallen back on extraordinary new ways to fund the federal government. We used to pass, you know, appropriation bills. And if we needed to have a supplemental in order to deal with a conflict, as the gentlelady was talking about, Ms. McCollum, we would do a supplemental. And we would pay for it, whether it was in the war on terror through the OCO process or in previous wars. And reconciliation, I don't think was ever an intention to give the authority to OMB to determine how those dollars are going to be spent.
Because one thing that I think the American public doesn't understand is that the appropriators, we don't control the reconciliation process. The authorizers really don't control the appropriations process. And I would submit that the Department of Defense doesn't control how the outlays work under a reconciliation process. OMB does. They in effect make the final determination of what money will be spent for what.
We can make a list of suggestions. They may or may not follow it. But that's what we've fallen into over a number of years. So how the hell do we get out of this thing and get back to regular order, all of us? Because this is not good for the process.
This reconciliation process we're going through right now is, I don't think it's healthy for us. And so here we are on a potentially a verge of another shutdown in a time of conflict.
And so all of us, I think this is a problem within the family, really, that we have to come to a determination that this cannot continue. And I'm going to go with what Mr. Simpson said to my friend Mr. Lankford, that maybe we ought to rethink the filibuster. That's your decision to make, I know that, it's not our decision. But it was never the intent of the founding fathers or I think of previous Senate that we would be held hostage to a 60-vote process in order to pass needed appropriations, especially at a time in conflict that we're in today in Iran. So what would you, how do we get, we don't have time to keep talking about this, we need to do something.
How would you respond to that?
James Lankford
I'd respond to that that we have become allergic to having bipartisan conversations because the filibuster is not an issue if you're actually having bipartisan dialogue and you're allowing grown-ups to sit down and talk to other grown-ups and be able to figure out how we're going to solve things where we disagree with it. The filibuster really came into position, of course it was part of the Senate rules from the earliest days and it used to be four or five members could actually hold the Senate hostage because they could just rotate around and be able to speak. In 1917, that was changed over to a two-thirds and then in 1974 was changed over to the three-fifths, the current rule that we have now. I would say that we've had some conversation about this. My predecessor Don Nickles, who's two senators before me, served on the Appropriation Committee in the Senate for 20 years.
They never had a single cloture vote in appropriations in his entire time that he was in the Senate. The rules were the same, the behavior was different on this. And now we've practiced bad behavior so many years in a row. That's why I'm looking for how do we actually help guide us back to this because I don't think it's just going to be a situation where we say let's just figure out how we're going to cooperate together. I think we've got to be able to put some new boundaries around us.
And the suggestion that Maggie Hassan, my Democratic colleague, and I have, and it's a bipartisan suggestion from multiple of us in the Senate, is to say let's put the pressure on us to be able to stay here until our work is done. We all know how important it is to get home and see our family. If we were to say no one leaves this week until all the work is done, we would somehow find a way to be able to get the work done. But we don't. We leave and the work is undone and the pressure goes on federal employees.
We're trying to solve that.
Speaker 24
Thank the gentleman for his questions. The gentlelady from Florida, Ms. Frankel's recognized for her questions.
Lois Frankel
Thank you and thank you to our witnesses today for being here. First, I want to just say in regards to leverages on members, I want to respectfully suggest that no leverage should occur that would affect members unequally. So for example, someone from Maryland can go home overnight to see their family. Someone from California or Alaska wouldn't do so. A wealthy member could afford to travel.
So unequal leverage is not right, not fair, and our decision should be based upon what is best for our constituents and for the country, not our own personal considerations. And I want to add that I do think the people on this committee, it's been said before, that we understand that the dynamics and the circumstances of the present-day Congress, we have to have a bipartisan agreement to get a spending plan done. And it seems to me the approach should be to get to that position earlier. That seems to me the reasonable thing to do. We are allowing, and I'm not going to point fingers, but we have people in the process, not on this committee, who just hold us up on everything.
With that, I'm going to ask a question. Welcome back, the Honorable Shalanda Young.
One of the greatest strengths of annual appropriations is to allow Congress to respond to a changing world, as some of my colleagues have said, and every year brings new challenges. We've seen the attacks of September 11th, Congress increased funding for Congress. We've seen Benghazi and having to increase security for embassies. We've seen disease, Ebola, COVID outbreaks, where we've had to invest more in global health and pandemic response. War in Ukraine, we've had to respond to that.
Year after year, we respond to hurricanes, earthquakes, famines, and other humanitarian disasters that sometimes we could not have anticipated. And that's why I think the people on this committee believe that annual appropriations matter. And I'm bringing this from the perspective of our NSRP committee, you knew it as SFOPS. And I'd like to get your opinion in terms of how a continuing resolution would affect these kinds of decisions, especially in this foreign assistance budget.
Shalanda Young
So I assume you mean if my prognostications about how the auto-CR would play out, that a bad actor, a president, or a minority in the Senate, or a leadership who does not like what appropriations bills come up could gum up the process and keep us on CRs. I think what happens is eventually you get to a work-around, right? If you see a problem and your regular appropriations bills can't deal with it, you probably start doing more supplementals or figure out rules to exempt this or exempt that or exempt this and that. Someone asked me about automatic apportionments. I go, it works until it doesn't, until you're out in August and an agency goes over its funding and its automatic apportionments and you don't let OMB do these things, exceptions start happening.
So does it happen in year one, does it happen in year two? So if you believe what I believe, what happens with auto-CRs, that a president or a few people could keep you in it. If there's something big enough, I think supplementals and other work-arounds start to become more prominent if you are just stuck in the appropriations do-loop and you cannot move regular appropriations bills. And I don't think that's a good thing either. Supplementals, we, you know, without budget caps, one doesn't really need them.
You can do a regular appropriations bill, we've just gotten used to it. And they're not a bad thing if they are easier to get done than regular appropriations bills, but I'd hate if they start being used because we just can't do regular appropriations bills.
Lois Frankel
I think what you're saying, I think what I've heard my colleagues say, is continuing resolutions keep us stuck many times in a wrong, dangerous place. And I would just, I know this committee, that we can find bipartisan agreement. And I would just say we've got to figure out how we get the rest of our colleagues to do that.
Speaker 30
But you've pointed out the problem. You have lots of places coming into this process that aren't necessarily as big a fans of this process as members of this committee are.
Tom Cole
I thank the gentlelady. It's my understanding, Senator Lankford, that votes have been called in the Senate and you will need to go, and please go at your discretion whenever you think's appropriate, it's perfectly appropriate. I'm going to proceed the following way. Mr. Diaz-Balart is next up for questions. I'm going to recognize him.
I have to step out myself, so when he is done with his questions, he will come and take the chair. We'll continue as long as members want to continue, he'll be running the meeting, the vice chair. I would say again, you've all of you been exceptionally generous with your time.
So, and I'm not sure we've managed your time as well as we should have, but I want to thank you for your patience. But we'll continue to proceed. I think this is a really important topic. I think the bipartisan exchanges have been very helpful, and I'm very grateful for that. So with that, I'm going to recognize Mr. Diaz-Balart for any questions he might have.
Mario Diaz-Balart
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Actually, great to see Director Young. I will, I have to admit that I also too am always reluctant to give off-ramps because off-ramps are taken, right? Because it's tough. This is tough.
You mentioned this is not a new issue, and it's not going to get any easier. Unfortunately, you also mentioned the issue of cameras, right? And that's, that's a factor that, that there are some folks who are less interested in getting the job done, more interested in just, you know, being celebrities. And so that's always been one of my concerns is on any of these proposals. But let me start with you, Mr. McClintock.
You talk about the issues of our authorizing committees not being able to get the job done, how frustrating that is, and how, frankly, negative that is. And then, but yet your proposal deals with, in essence, appropriations, correct? For those that might not be clear, why is the appropriations process different than trying to force, for example, you know, the authorizers who don't get their jobs done, with very few exceptions, to do that? Why the appropriations process? Is it the constitutional issue, if you would just very briefly explain that?
Tom McClintock
Well, because that's where the system is seizing up. To Mr. Bishop and Mr. McCall's point, the president is not the central figure in the appropriations process, nor for that matter is the United States Senate. Appropriations begin in the House. The buck literally starts here. And the process that we put into place in the '74 Budget Act has the Appropriations Committee working through all of the discretionary spending once they're given a budget resolution with those limits by the Budget Committee, which very rarely gets done too.
That's a whole separate matter. The point is your work, you've always marked to the levels. You take these bills to the floor. We pass them after many, many hours of debate and amendment. And then they go over to the Senate.
Now, what's supposed to happen in the Senate? The Senate is supposed to say either send the bill back to us with their modifications or send it on to the president. If they send it back with their modifications, we either agree to those or we send it to a conference committee and we have a discussion with them. But the problem is the system seizes up when we send the bill over to the Senate. Without 60 votes, they can't even take it up.
So they don't send us their alternative. They don't send the bill to the president. It just sits there until the clock runs out. And as I said, we're then given a Hobson's choice. That's the central problem that I see in the Budget Act.
There are a lot of other issues as well that get back to that question of political will, and there's no way around that.
Mario Diaz-Balart
Let me now again, and Senator, thank you for your leadership and for being here as well. Again, as I said to the director, I'm always fearful of off-ramps. But that's not what you're doing from what I see. You're actually trying to create a different pressure point.
Right. And I get that. But let me then... But the appropriations process can't happen in a vacuum. You know, the chairman talked about that, about the things that have to happen, the budget committee, etc.
I'm not going to... I'm not going to restate that. So... How... and then going back to some folks who really are more interested in being celebrities than legislators, right? Because I will tell you, there are some folks... I think... I think Congressman Frankel brought up a very interesting point.
Folks that maybe are close, they can go home regardless. But also, there are some folks that might relish being here, not to get things done. Because if you actually look at kind of what the impediments are, it's usually a relatively small group of people, right? Some of those, frankly, are celebrities. And so how do you deal with that aspect to not... not create a system that actually empowers celebrities even more to not get their job done, but to just be on television more?
And so have you put some thought into that?
James Lankford
I have, in the sense that I remember saying to my constituents at home, I don't pick the people I work with, other people pick the people I work with, I've just got to figure out a way to be able to work with them. We have a wide variety of opinions in 535 members, and some folks love their social media feed more than they love anything else. And I get that. That's just the reality of the society that we live in. My focus is the pressure point should not be federal workers and their families.
And that's what it is now. And the argument is we want to keep federal workers and their families as the pressure point, and if we take that pressure point off and put the pressure on us instead to be stuck in a room with each other, we don't want that. So my option is, if not this, what? And I do understand the leverage issue. I've had this conversation.
There are some members that have more ability to be able to fly on their personal expense to be able to come back and forth on it. I had somebody that serves on the West Coast that said, if you can move the capital to the West Coast, I'm willing to support this proposal on it. I get that dynamic. My issue is our constituents have to hold us to account to get the job done, and if the law says you have to be there and you have to stay until you get it done, we will push each other to try to figure out how to do that. We always have.
The last CR got resolved when we all stayed over a weekend and we all said, that's not going to happen twice, and it got worked out. And by the way, Mr. Chairman, if I can apologize, I'm going to run vote and then come right back. I'd be glad to be able to be here.
Tom Cole
We appreciate that very much. And again, thank you for your patience, thank you for cooperation. Gentleman's excused. Gentlelady from New Jersey, Ms. Watson Coleman, is recognized for any questions she may have. Oh, I apologize for that.
Bonnie Watson Coleman
So I'm going to ask, first of all, I'm going to say that I agree with the senator's... Oh.
Speaker 34
Gentlelady, just so you're advised, he is going to come back. You will be allowed to pose your question when he comes back.
Okay, then I'll... I can wait.
Tom Cole
That... it's up to you. You're certainly free to use time now if you've got other members you want to... but you will be recognized again when he returns so you can have an opportunity to address your question.
Speaker 29
All right, I just have a quick question for Shalanda. I want to thank you for being here, and Congressman, thank you for being here. Thank you for the thoughts and thank you for the fact that this is all about trying to get business done so that federal workers and the people who depend upon the programs that would be supported would not be hurt. So I love the premise of it. I just think we're not in normal times and we ought not be having this consideration right now.
But Shalanda, thank you for your thoughts. One thing has become clear to me during the discussion. Wouldn't the logical conclusion of a permanent automatic CR leave discretionary funding such as job training programs, food safety inspection, certain types of disease research, housing assistance, etc., and so much more chronically underfunded, already leaving these vital programs anemic and ultimately inoperable in the long term? Can you speak to the impacts that multiple years of an automatic CR would have on the operations and delivery of these very important programs?
Shalanda Young
You just have to look at a few programs. Pell Grants comes to mind, consistently shifting depending on how many Americans choose to go back to school. That typically happens when the economy starts to sour. So now we see a billions of dollars in shortfall in Pell Grant. Without this process, I don't know how we deal with a Pell shortfall other than an off-ramp of going to the reconciliation route.
So those, those are the kinds of things. Housing vouchers, again, not knowing when the government does not know what the uptake will be. So often we are behind and we see that the need outweighs the funding and we have to catch up. Well, I'd rather that we're always behind, but I'd rather the catch-up be six months behind than two years behind if we remain in the same stale funding scenario.
Speaker 29
So as not to use all my time up, Mr. Chairman Hyde, I just want to say this one thing. The one word I keep hearing over and over and over again is we could do a better job if we had the will to do it. And that will doesn't exist right now, and that's unfortunate. And one of the things I loved about being in appropriations is that we debated stuff. We didn't always disagree, we didn't always agree, but we didn't always disagree.
And now we disagree. So the will to do our work on behalf of this country, our constituents, and even taking into consideration those who work for us, that will doesn't exist. And so we need to find a way to get it back. And I temporarily, partially, whatever.
Steve Womack
All right, thank you, Mr. Acting Chairman. And let me begin by saying I have the utmost respect for the witnesses on this panel today. Senator Lankford and I served together on the Joint Select Committee on Budget Process Reform back in 2018, left at the altar because we had several Democrats that voted present instead of for the reforms. And Ms. Young, you know that process very well because you were there. I have a tremendous amount of respect for my friend Tom McClintock of California, who in my opinion, based on what we've seen here today, has the only true legitimate legislation that could actually fix the problem, or go a long way toward fixing the problem, by requiring expedited procedures in the Senate where a lot of this is held up because of filibuster rules.
And Ms. Young, your credentials speak well for themselves. Matter of fact, if this were a Fortune company and we were the board, we would probably just hire you to execute this budget process. But here's kind of the funny thing about it all. If you were an alien and you landed across the street this morning and then stumbled into this hearing room to see what was going on with the legislative body of the greatest country in the history of the world, and you found out that they were talking about fixing a budget process, you would have to come away scratching your head. And that's exactly what's going on right now.
It is a shame.
It is embarrassing that this country, that the legislative body of this country that was written into Article 1 of the United States Constitution in 2026 is having this conversation 250 years after we were founded. But here we are. So, Mr. McClintock, as you heard me say, I think that your proposal, based on the way the 1974 Budget Act is written, is the only legitimate proposal that could actually get us off the dime because of the concept that elections have consequences. And in the House, it's a simple majority. So if this is our basic function, one of our truly basic functions is to draft a budget, which is a reflection of what the winners of the election would want to do with the budget of the United States of America, then yours pretty much is the only thing that actually forces the hand of Congress because it would give you a simple majority.
Would you agree with that?
Tom McClintock
Thank you. Of course I do, and thank you for those comments. You know, just back to Mr. Hoyer's point, I think this makes the Congress more powerful, not less powerful, because it makes it more likely that the actual appropriations bills that express the will of the Congress will be presented to the president. Right now, it's this constant parade of continuing resolutions. But, you know, the basic problem, though, is these are hard decisions.
And they're going to be imperfectly, in any body, they're going to be imperfectly addressed. Benjamin Franklin has that wonderful line from the Constitutional Convention where he pointed out that when you draw a group of people together to benefit from their mutual wisdom, you also will inevitably get their mutual folly. You can't expect a perfect response. But the processes that we have are meant to guide us to the most perfect that we can make given our flaws as human beings.
Steve Womack
Well, I agree with the principle details of what your proposal is. I also happen to agree with others that have proposed that we do something to prevent the government or the country from going through the gymnastics of a potential government shutdown, à la what we did yesterday on the House floor by passing a CR that probably is not going to be lawful. But I also believe this, and Ms. Young, I'm going to give you the last 30 seconds on this. As you know, I have a bill that kind of mirrors some of the work we did back in 2018, moving Congress to a biennial budget, because I think the calendar is also a problem in this situation. Would you agree?
Shalanda Young
You were in my opening remarks as one of the proposals. I've always thought that was just common sense because at the time we worked on that joint select committee, that's how we were operating. We had 10-year budget caps from the days of the Obama presidency, and we'd come together every two years to actually enact real levels that the Appropriations Committee to operate under. And we did those in two-year cycles. So that's already how it was operating.
I will say, to Chairman Cole's point, the budget resolution isn't happening right now. So giving the budget resolution two years, like, it's not like anything's coming out of the Budget Committee. So yours is common sense. It's more common sense if the budget resolution process was actually happening. And I think that is a proposal that makes a lot of sense, and you have recounted kind of how that discussion in the joint committee came about.
I will say for the record, Mr. Acting Chairman, I need everyone to know I'm the co-chair of the Steve Womack Fan Club. There's almost no one who takes these issues as seriously as Steve Womack. And we all want a solution.
My problem is the same political will that we think we're going to magically come up with in these 14 days of auto-CR, where was that September 1st through 30th? Or where was that April 1st through 30th? I don't think it magically comes. And my worry is, because I have seen the inner workings of White Houses, even though I love you all most because I grew up here, is they will say, presidents will say, under this, can I do this, this, this, and this, and this, OMB director? Yes, sir, you can.
Then why would I do this that has these other three things I can't stand? And if we can create that political will in these 14-day cycles, let's figure out a way, if it's keeping people in town, to do that now and do the work. So that's my worry. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for your indulgence. I yield back.
Speaker 31
Well, and I am also on the Womack fan club, but that's not why he went over time. Ms. Underwood, you're recognized.
Speaker 33
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. First, I'd like to say welcome to my friend, Ms. Shalanda Young. As always, we are so lucky to have your expertise and your insight into the critical role of the appropriations process and exercising our Article One authority. Based on the comments that we've heard here today, it looks like my Republican colleagues have taken the exact wrong lesson from the unacceptable 43-day shutdown we experienced last year while they controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House. Instead of taking our constitutional responsibility seriously by fixing the appropriations process that they have broken, they are considering legislation that would do even more damage to our system of checks and balances.
For the last 18 months, President Trump has trampled on the separation of powers in the Constitution, illegally withholding and delaying funds that Congress appropriated. But instead of protecting our power of the purse, Republicans in Congress have sat on the sidelines, cheering him on. I want to be very clear that the proposals here today do not solve the problems Republicans created. They do not protect federal workers. They do not protect federal resources our communities rely on.
They do not protect the American people from the whims of an out-of-control president. Automatic continuing resolutions fail to address the changing needs of our districts. They fail to provide the community project funding so sorely needed by our constituents. They fail to incorporate expert insights from federal agencies, and they fail to impose the oversight and guardrails needed when agencies like ICE and CBP go rogue and murder people in our streets. Our constituents deserve a responsive and a deliberate Congress that can adapt to challenges in real time and fund essential services and programs with specificity, with stability, and with accountability.
I will not vote to hand Congress's power over to a president who thinks that he's a king. Now, since Ms. Young is the expert on this topic, I'd like to offer my remaining time to her in case she had any additional comments.
Shalanda Young
Don't offer it up to any president. I think we're in a singular moment. Things feel worse and different. But there is no president who gives power back to Congress. And if you don't take it in a bipartisan way back, no one's going to give it back to you.
So everything I think about, I write about, I talk to students about, they go, I thought we got a former OMB director, why do you keep talking to us about Congress? I sat and listened to a constitutional law professor tell us all the things wrong with the judiciary and the presidency, and my only question to him was, but what about Congress? We just accept that it's broken and we find these workarounds, and a lot of times it comes from the body itself.
And I don't wax poetic about the past a lot because I think that's a waste of time. Times move on, we're in the political moment we're in. But we have got to figure out, and I think this committee is central to it, figure out a way to hold hands and do the hard work. This committee has always done it. You have the numbers to do it.
One of my reform ideas is maybe this committee has to be bigger since all the focus tends to be on the appropriations process because it gums up the works of the House. If more members were involved, maybe. That probably won't work. But it's the idea of thinking larger than when you get to shutdowns. Do you know how many things have failed before we got there?
Let's start further up the road than try to deal with the symptom of lots of problems that lots of people are responsible for.
Speaker 33
Well, thank you, Ms. Young. I do believe that we can get there in a positive resolution that continues to maintain the Congress's Article One responsibilities, to continue to protect our power of the purse, and to continue to assert the Congress's authority in directing federal spending. And so, you know, I hope that as a bipartisan Appropriations Committee here in the House, we can commit ourselves to finding that path forward. And I thank you for being here as a witness today. Mr. McClintock, it's nice to see you as well.
I yield back.
Thank the gentlelady. Dr. Harris, you're recognized, sir.
Andy Harris
Thank you very much, and I want to thank all of you for being here. But I'll tell you, we're just applying a tourniquet to a hemorrhaging wound that's hemorrhaging more every year. I've been here long enough now, look, we two years ago, did we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Budget Act? No, because it has failed. Let's just admit it.
Why don't we just admit to ourselves we actually need to redo the Budget Act? It doesn't work. Hasn't worked for decades. Hasn't worked since I've been here, 16 years. And no wonder, because the size of the federal government, the discretionary budget, has more than doubled since that Budget Act was passed.
More than doubled. It was 730 billion in today's dollars then, we're now at 1.6 trillion. The bottom line is, these budgets have become too complicated to get done given the limited bandwidth of both the executive branch and the legislative branch. So I will tell you, and Ms. Young, you're absolutely right, we have, we're just doing workarounds. The idea of a two-year budget cycle for the budget, why don't we do two-year appropriations?
There's some states that do two-year appropriations. We meet every year, if we have to adjust something we can adjust it, but at least half the government doesn't close on October 1st, with the exception of defense. You know, the idea that we somehow think that a one-year NDAA works and then a one-year budgetary cycle works is ridiculous. The Ukraine war has shown, if the Ukraine government had an NDAA that they passed a year ago that said what drone they had to buy and didn't give authority to the Ministry of Defense there for stop-starts, they would have lost the war in that year. When it comes to, and Ms. Young, you've said it absolutely right, the only real authorization bill that affects discretionary budget every year is NDAA.
Everything else, we don't really change the law that often, so why are we changing the appropriation every year on schedule when we could, in fact, change it every two years for everything but defense? And I will argue that in defense, we do have to give the executive branch more stop-start authority because we will otherwise freeze ourselves, we'll have a technology freeze that will serve us very poorly in defense and wars going forward.
I do think that that we should consider it. We should again, we should have, I mean look, '74 Act has failed. We should start talking about how to replace it, given the, given the current state of affairs and the size and scope of the federal government and the advancing technology in defense. I will tell you that there is another option we haven't talked about, the True Shutdown Fairness Act, which is kind of a compromise of, and Senator Lankford's not here, I was going to ask him about it, where you pay the workers, but you don't pay everything that's non-defense related contractual. And I know, and I'm going to ask you, Mr. McClintock, to comment on this because, you know, as we've grown the federal government, we have a lot of grants, we have a lot of things that go out that are not contractual.
And if we just pay, and because we don't, the workers should not get in the middle of this. We should figure out what actually has to be done to keep the government functioning safely and preserve those in a, if we go to a shutdown fairness or no shutdown act, whatever you want to call it. But that would leave some leverage over the government to actually do something. The workers would be paid, but grants wouldn't be going out. I mean, there would be plenty of, you know, pressure on us.
So, Mr. McClintock, if you can just mention within the scope of government why we, why don't we subdivide some of that out?
Tom McClintock
Well, the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings. The Budget Act hasn't failed, we've failed to apply the Budget Act. There's a story that Newt Gingrich tells, at a time when a Republican Congress and a Democrat president balanced four budgets in a row. During a leadership meeting, John Kasich, the budget chairman, slams his fist on the table and says, you show me where it's written in stone that we have to balance the budget. Well, at the next meeting, Gingrich brings in a stone tablet inscribed, thou shalt balance the budget, and they did.
So again, that's our responsibility. Now, we may have a lot, as Ms. Underwood says, of a lot of concerns over how that money's being spent. We don't get to spend the money, we get to appropriate, the president gets to spend it. We need to get back to our job of appropriations. And that means getting past that blockage in the Senate.
Marcy Kaptur
Thank you. Thank you so much, I had to find the button for the microphone. Let me thank the chair and ranking member DeLauro, Chairman Cole and ranking member DeLauro for this hearing and to each of our witnesses and guests today. Actually, continuing resolutions represent this legislative branch's major breach of its Article 1 constitutional responsibility. The executive branch aids, abets, and even coerces this broken process, even more pressuring lawmakers to acquiesce to its will.
It's very dangerous indeed what's going on. I also have served on the Budget Committee throughout my career, many, many times over my federal service, and at this moment there is no budget from the Budget Committee to guide the Appropriations Committee, and we're being sent home. In addition, for the record, I've counted the number of days the current House Speaker has sent House members back home since the beginning of the year without Congress's budget and appropriations work being done under regular order. It's close to 50 days, and that doesn't count what we're going to be sent home for now.
Meanwhile, federal workers and contractors from air controllers to employees at our Veterans Administration and veterans homes have faced uncertainty and literally chaos. They can't hire, they have to furlough. The executive branch takes full note and executes its power grab of spending across accounts. At this moment, as a nation at war, which has not been declared, can you imagine the musical chairs being employed by the executive branch shifting defense accounts from one spending category to another, to others? No one here can explain what the Department of Defense has been doing, including the Department of Defense.
I'm concerned that Congress is acquiescing the automatic CRs that kick the ball to the sideline, the big balls, while further empowering the executive branch. Let me focus on our defense planning preparedness and procurement. At this moment in history, our nation's defense requires replenishment, replenishment. Failing to give stable, predictive guidance and funding to industry makes it remarkably difficult to build ships, complex systems, or catch up to technological advancement where our country has lost edge. The Trump administration has come before this very committee in recent weeks asking for more long-term defense planning and procurement, so I'm pretty astounded that we might consider going in the opposite direction, making it less likely that the regular appropriations process can go forward.
So as a member of the Defense Subcommittee, I wanted to direct a question to Ms. Young and thank her for her service to our country. Can you explain to us what kind of an impact continuing resolutions have on our ability to plan for our nation's defense? Continuing resolutions also impede our ability to address new challenges that arise and require timely congressional input. When it comes to automatic CRs, are there any constitutional implications given that the clause that no appropriation of money to raise and support armies shall be longer than two years? I'm very concerned about what is happening at the US Department of Defense and I wonder if you could comment on this.
Shalanda Young
Sure, I think I gave some examples about what happens under long-term CRs, including the inability to do long-term procurement and fix problems that arise throughout the year, so I won't repeat those. The army clause in the Constitution obviously says that Congress is not supposed to appropriate army for more than two years at a time. At the time the Constitution was written, we can probably think back as to why the founders and the writers of the Constitution did not want an army that could rise up without the express approval and funding of the United States Congress. I think it's an interesting constitutional question that, you know, I would hope as this legislation is thought about, some constitutional scholars weigh in. The Solicitor General, I believe in 1904, we all live under his opinion, and I'm assuming it's a his because it was 1904, that the part of the Constitution or the defense appropriations that deals with that part of the Constitution is only military personnel, not procurement, not research.
The things we thought were law, now judges are deciding what is constitutional not in the budget and appropriation space in a way we just have not seen this level of litigation. So it probably will end up in litigation like lots of other things we've seen in the past year to see if it violates the the army clause of the Constitution.
Yield back?
Shalanda Young
I yield back for the moment. I hope we have a second round. Thank you. And I didn't get a chance, Mr. Chairman, to thank Senator Lankford and Congressman McClintock for whom I have very deep respect.
Speaker 40
Well, thank you for doing that. And and we thank again, Senator, I know that you've been you ran and came back, so we we are very grateful for that. Mr. Fleischmann, you're recognized, sir.
Charles Fleischmann
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. To the distinguished witnesses, Senator, you were my classmate in 2010 in the House and my neighbor. It was a privilege to serve with you there and in this capacity as well. And I thank you for your efforts. Of course, you know I'm a co-sponsor of this bill.
I did want to recognize the other two distinguished guests, Mr. McClintock, great, great friend. Thank you for your efforts in this regard and the accolades that you received are well-deserved for the way that you have conducted yourself in our body. And for Ms. Young, thank you, not only for your work on OMB, but for your work with this committee. I remember very well, ma'am, when you acceded to the position at OMB, the tremendous bipartisan feelings of of joy for you to get that. So thank you and thank you for continuing this process to all three of of you all.
Again, my my question will be for Senator Lankford. Again, a proud co-sponsor of the Prevent Government Shutdown Act. In my view, this bill solves many problems without letting Congress get off the hook. I firmly believe that we should never shut the federal government down. Rarely do I get animated, but I did on several national TV outlets, both progressive, conservative, and in the middle when we went through that government shutdown.
It's just wrong to the American people. It hurts it hurts the institution and it hurts families. So hopefully we get there. My question for you, Senator. You first introduced this legislation back in 2011.
Can you speak on how the shutdown landscape has changed since then and why you believe this moment represents the best opportunity for Congress to finally enact a permanent solution, sir?
James Lankford
Representative Fleischmann, thank you so much for your work on this as well. I have come a long way since 2011. When I first came in 2011 and sat in the House, I saw the government shutdowns happening and I jumped in and said there's got to be some way to be able to fix this. They've gotten longer, they've gotten more frequent since that time period. I've had multiple different iterations.
There was an iteration I had initially that was we we if we have a shutdown, then the budget gets cut by one percent until we keep doing it. Well, guess what? I'd never had a single Democratic colleague ever get on that bill on it. We had multiple different iterations on this. And then it was about seven years ago, I sat down with a Democratic colleague, Maggie Hassan, and said we've got to figure out a way that's a nonpartisan way to be able to solve this.
That's where it was born to be able to figure out how do we actually put pressure not on federal workers, which has been interesting to me in the dialogue even here today. It was if we change the current status quo of not paying federal workers while we go home, that's going to be bad. I'm like, no, that is bad. What we're currently doing, the status quo is what's bad is that we for months will get our pay, we will go home and see our families, we'll work on other bills and things while federal workers and their families can't pay their mortgage. We got to fix this.
So if this proposal's not the right proposal, let's work on one that is. That's why I'm so grateful this committee's got a full committee. This is the heart of the body to be able to solve this problem is right here. And it's got to be solved in a bipartisan way. That's the way we have to be able to solve big, hard, complicated things like this, and it has to be an agreement from Congress.
So this proposal has shifted over the years with multiple different iterations. What I mentioned before, Shalanda Young had this at OMB, she actually did the technical assistance for this bill when she was with the Biden administration. Now this OMB has done technical assistance for it as well. We've tried to work through several iterations because we're not trying to make a message, we're trying to solve a problem on this. And the problem is we stop paying federal workers, we go home and pretend things will get better at some point.
They don't for them, and it's bad for the country. And as I agree completely with you on that, we look terrible on the world stage on this as everyone tries to figure out what's wrong with the Americans while we have a government shutdown.
Charles Fleischmann
And thank you for your answer. And once again, my compliments to all three of you all for tackling this arduous issue. In my remaining seconds, very quickly, Senator, this goes beyond, this bill goes beyond simply avoiding a shutdown. It pairs the automatic continuing appropriation with real accountability measures, including restricted travel and a 23-hour limit on recess. Can you speak to why these provisions were important to include and how they ensure this bill doesn't just paper over the problem but actually pushes Congress to finish its appropriation work?
And by the way, I agree with this.
James Lankford
Yeah, thank you. By the way, the focus of this is not to have long-term CRs. And it's been interesting, some of the dialogue today has been, well, this is going to put us into a perpetual CR. If we are all here seven days a week, as required by law, we can't travel, we only can recess for 23 hours, we've got to get back together every single day, House and Senate. If we have to be here every day, we will get our work done because we will find a way to be able to solve a problem.
And this sense of we'll just never do appropriations again also means we never do another bill because this bill actually prevents us from moving to anything but appropriations. So the real focus is you can only do appropriations, you're here every single day until you solve the problem. So when you solve the problem, you can go home. And I can't even imagine this body not trying to say, we got to get on focus, let's solve this problem because I do need to get to a birthday party, I do need to get to my family, I do need to get to codels and responsibilities. So this is far from a perpetual CR that some are saying.
This is a focus of we're here till we solve the problem and we will get the problem solved.
Mario Diaz-Balart
Senator, thank you, and to the entire panel, my profound thanks. Yield back.
Speaker 29
Thank you. We're going to now go back to Ms. Watson Coleman because she was very efficient and kept two minutes of her time still. So you're recognized for two minutes.
Thank you, Senator. You were walking out the door and I was saying, I've got a question for him. First of all, let me just say that I appreciate the motivation behind this. I agree with you that we need to do better, we need to do our job, and we ought not be, we ought to be inconvenienced when we don't. I think, however, this issue of will is important, particularly in what I consider to be these non-normal moments of governance.
And so I'm not sure that people wouldn't stare us down for 10 days, 12 days, or whatever and still not come to any conclusion. But nonetheless, I don't want to give up any of our authority because I think that we've been giving up congressional authority to this president's second term in a way that's shameful.
So I wanted to just ask you, if we do take our jobs as appropriators seriously, I can't imagine why we would consider making permanent a tool that renders our committee's work unnecessary. How exactly would this automatic continuing resolution proposal encourage the kind of debate and consideration and respect for one another and each other's differences? How would we accomplish those necessary negotiations?
James Lankford
Thank you for the very honest question on that. I really appreciate that. The what happens under this proposal and what Senator Hassan and I have agreed to on this is the way to put pressure on members of Congress to actually get our work done is that we all have to be able to remain here to be able to get our work done. The focus of this, especially by saying we can't move to bills other than appropriations, puts the pressure on doing appropriations work. Literally the goal of this bill was not to have a CR.
Now we're about to have our 30th year in a row of having CRs. I don't like CRs either, but I hate shutdowns more. And so the goal of this is to have if we have a shutdown at all, it's short and everybody has to drop everything and finish appropriations. When appropriations is done, then we can go back to everything else: our families, other legislation, other committees. If we have not done our constitutional responsibility of appropriations, we have to stop everything until that's done, because that is the first priority in the Constitution for us to be able to accomplish that.
So I'm a former Appropriations Committee member. I want to make sure this committee is actually empowered to be able to do its task, and so I'm trying to draw a box around everything else to say nothing else gets done until this gets done.
Thank you, Senator.
So it's literally empowering this committee.
Thank you. I yield back.
Jennifer Wexton
Thank you. Ms. Wexton, you're recognized.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for holding this hearing today to our Chairman Cole, and thank you to our witnesses. It's a great discussion, a really important one, and I think the American people are certainly frustrated watching how this place does its business. So I'm encouraged by the fact that you are all here at the table joining with us to try to solve this very important problem. We did see last year the longest shutdown in government history.
It was incredibly destructive. Not only did it threaten our food assistance programs, disrupted a lot of travel, we all saw those TSA lines, and it put our national security at risk, which I think is unacceptable. And we saw people in both chambers really choosing political theater over American families through that process. I don't want to see that happen going forward, so I again appreciate the possible solutions here to avoid government shutdowns and all these proposals. And Senator, you mentioned, hey, maybe yours isn't the right one, maybe it is.
Maybe we need just more conversation around these things. And Congressman McClintock as well, I just I'm encouraged by this discussion across the board. So I wanted to ask you a question, Director Young. Thank you for coming. It's nice to see you again.
And my question for you, because I know that we've talked about the cost of government shutdowns, they do cost a significant amount of money, they're fiscally irresponsible and they're inefficient, as are even the threat of a shutdown happening. You talked about that day, September 30th, a couple of years ago when you were headed into the office to go through the process. Can you tell us a little bit more about what even the threat of a process of shutting down looks like? What motions do you have to go through at OMB to make that happen?
Shalanda Young
So I said we didn't shut down, but I didn't tell you we didn't spend a lot of time preparing, right, because all the deals came through on the last day and hours possible, on the phone, you sure you got a time agreement in the Senate, like we are putting ourselves out here not to do an orderly shutdown. It requires each and every agency not only to develop the plans, but they have to start communicating with the staff. How traumatic, like you don't know if the next day you leave your tools at the because you're not supposed to answer any government phone. So you have to tell grantees, you have to tell federal employees, you have to tell contractors, and they're all waiting for this, you know, do we have a new smoke to see if a deal is not. So it is not without consequence to get to the threshold.
So we we've talked today about how bad shutdowns are.
Secondary to that are CRs, because I don't want to leave this room either thinking CRs are the panacea either. The regular appropriations bills are the goal and always have been the goal of this committee and should be the gold standard of Congress, and preferably on time, which we haven't gotten all of that done since long before my time.
Jennifer Wexton
Well, at least I'm proud of the committee's work in the past two appropriations cycles. We have gotten all 12 bills through committee and we're working on getting them over the floor for the second year in a row. But of course, with the fiscal year being only two months away from ending, it's certainly challenging with the timetable. But when you think about, you talked a little bit about kind of the planning that has to happen, do you feel like culture across the board in many of our departments, many of these people are, you know, really experts in their field, lifelong employees who are valuable contributors to government service. Do you feel like shutdown culture is pervasive?
They know this is coming and they just kind of shrug, or is the frustration palpable?
Shalanda Young
I mean, their hope is you can prevent it, right? I mean, during the four years I was at OMB, we didn't shutdown, so they had some hope like we would come out on the other side and they would come to work the next day. So it isn't a surety that you end up in the worst case scenario. But it's quite destabilizing. And look, you have it in your own office to tell somebody they're essential or not essential, especially at a agency level, it also presents a morale problem.
I've managed it from the congressional side and I've managed it from agency side, my own agency, not just the federal government and the orderly operations. So it presents a morale problem even preparing for it, because I have to tell somebody your job is important. Well, all jobs are important. We just try to take the narrowest viewpoint possible to try to stay on the right side of the law. But it is a morale bust when you have to go through this process for many reasons.
Jennifer Wexton
Well, and I've visited many of my FSA offices in the district where they talk about the struggles they already have with hiring personnel and how long it takes to get that process done. All of that is hit paused and delayed further. Um, so our farmers aren't getting the services they need. TSA has trouble recruiting and retaining employees if they're not getting paid and they're having to show up to work every day. So I thank our witnesses for coming today and I look forward to engaging and working on this problem so we can find a solution that doesn't play politics with government shutdowns.
Thank you, I yield back.
Great, thank you for yielding. Ms. Meng, you're recognized.
Grace Meng
Thank you so much and thank you to all of our witnesses for being here too and for your work and this dialogue. I wanted to ask, and any of you are welcome to answer, under this current administration, how has OMB Director Vought approached the legal requirements of our budget process and how is it different from maybe previous administrations, even under the first Trump administration?
Tom McClintock
Well, obviously they've been late in submitting budgets to the Congress. But again, as I said earlier, they are not the central player in the appropriations process. The chief executive is there to tell us how much he thinks he's going to need to faithfully execute the laws, to run the government. It's up to us to tell him how much we are willing to appropriate to him. The Congress appropriates but cannot spend, the president spends but cannot appropriate.
That separation of powers is central to concept of good governance going back to Magna Carta.
Speaker 43
We need to focus on our responsibility to appropriate, and that's where we have an impediment that I think we can remove.
James Lankford
Yeah, I would just say obviously Russ Vought was also in the first Trump administration as well as the second. It's hard for me to be able to say day-to-day operations there because I'm not in day-to-day operations, but clearly the first year, very late in getting the budget over, which is typical for a president when they actually come in the first year. I think President Biden was as well on that, just because you're just getting your staff hired and trying to be able to get going. Also late years already been mentioned by Chairman Cole. It is important to be able to get those numbers, but as Representative McClintock mentioned as well, those numbers are the requests from the President and the President's budget.
In the 1974 Budget Act, they're supposed to be in on time, but this body actually determines, House and Senate determine what's going to actually come out legislatively. It has to originate in the House. So literally this committee is the one who actually kicks it off first.
Shalanda Young
I don't know if Director Young if you want to offer any input, even in differences. Is it proper to, you know, to comment on your own operations? Look, I mentioned this earlier and I think it's true. I'm an OMB director, you've had members of Congress like Leon Panetta who was the budget chair, so saw it from a member perspective, very different. I think having a staff director of the Appropriations Committee, even from a member who had been a chair of budget, go, I think what that gave me was a perspective of I knew what you needed, I knew your districts.
Every government program I go, whose district is that? So I had 15 years of that baked in. There was no way as OMB director I wouldn't consider how that impacted your constituents. I'm from South Louisiana. I don't do red and blue and certainly not in a job like OMB.
While I work for a Democratic president, I work for Democratic members, I have an I believed I approached that job responsibility to make sure we are answering the mail for our constituents. I think a disaster response, it does not matter who represents them in the Senate and who represents them in the House. If there is a need, and thankfully I worked for a president who spent a long time in the Senate and I did not have to convince him that was the right way to approach the job. So you got someone who was predisposed I think to not bypass the system. Yeah, thank you so much, sorry to rush you all.
I just wanted to ask one more question, speaking about local districts. There's always a concern that these automatic types of procedures or process would freeze out benefits to local districts. For example, under an automatic CR, no new community project funding, including local infrastructure and public safety projects, would be able to be enacted into law. Is that correct?
James Lankford
That is correct, if I can just make one comment on that. We're hopefully going to get a continuing resolution. That's not our best case scenario, but that's better than the worst case scenario of a shutdown coming up. So that will start September the 1st, that kicks it all the way into November, let's say, before we actually get appropriations done. What what I'm recommending is instead of having a two-month CR, it be two-week and we have to get all the work done at that point and we're all have to be here.
At this point, we're punting all this and we're saying we'll deal with this in November. That's very different than you don't leave until it's done. So I totally agree that's how a CR works, but the goal of this is to not have a shutdown, second best to having appropriations is having at least the government still operating, but we're all still here while we have to get this resolved. So hopefully CRs would be much shorter in the days ahead.
Speaker 42
Yeah, just concerned that that two weeks could keep getting extended under the bill.
James Lankford
It could if you want to stay here forever with Chairman Cole and be able to be here week after week after week with all of our colleagues here. By the way, Chairman Cole's a great guy to hang out with, but it's just we all want to be able to get home and see our families and do other responsibilities. If we're in a position where we have to legally stay here and you can't move to any other bill but appropriations, that's the incentive built in to get appropriations worked out.
Okay, thank you, I yield back.
Stephanie Bice
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank the witnesses for being here this morning slash now afternoon. Shutdowns are bad for the American people, and more frequently members will take votes to close government from a political standpoint. I have thousands of dedicated civilian employees in my district, and I'm glad that we at least passed a CR last night to hopefully avoid another government shutdown. During the last shutdown, I had a constituent stop me in the airport, and he said his son had taken a job a few months earlier with the TSA. And he was wondering why his son would do a job where a paycheck isn't guaranteed.
This is a twenty-something-year-old young man, single, trying to get out on his own. And yes, those government employees are made whole, but in the back end, when you have rent and utilities and bills to pay, it can become incredibly difficult. So I'm incredibly thankful for the work that my senator, Senator Lankford, has done to try to address this issue, and I am incredibly thankful for the work that Representative McClintock has done on the Budget Control Act. Let me start with you, if I can. You know, the Budget Control Act was passed in 1974.
Things have changed just a little bit since those days. Are there other things that we should be considering as we look to try to make sure that the budget process and our appropriations work is done in a timely fashion?
Tom McClintock
Well, as I said earlier, whatever process we use is not going to make the decisions any easier. And every year that goes by and we go deeper in debt, those decisions become more and more difficult. I continue to believe that the budget process outlined in the 1974 Budget Act is methodical, it is logical. The problem is we just don't follow it because it requires hard decisions. That's on us.
But we can't, there is that one impediment, though, that we keep running into. Even without fulfilling the budget process as envisioned by the Budget Act, the Appropriations Committee, this committee, has still established or received 302 budget instructions, marked to those instructions, sent those bills on. We've spent endless hours debating and amending them on the floor. We send them over to the Senate and nothing happens because a minority is able to block that for lack of cloture. Again, this is not a cure-all.
The two houses are still going to disagree. You know, there will still be other impediments. But at least that one impediment is removed, and perhaps we can get back to the process as was envisioned. We've evolved this legislative process over two and a half centuries, and it's very good at resolving differences between the two houses when we use it. We have to use it.
Speaker 47
Thank you for that, and I'm proud to be a co-sponsor of your legislation as well. I want to pivot to you, Ms. Young. You briefly touched on this earlier. Excluding the chicken and the egg problem, during your time at OMB, what was the biggest pain point in getting the president's budget submitted in a timely fashion?
Shalanda Young
Look, besides the chicken and the egg, which I think I could do the same thing Congress could do. I could ignore Congress's numbers, I can go there late, and we're just going to go ahead. What happens is we're then told that's incredibly unhelpful because you get a president's budget that's not compared to what reality is. I've literally had budgets go out as you all are finishing approps. I'm then required to send supplemental tables from every agency because the appropriators, you guys, need to see real comparisons.
And I appreciate that. But putting that aside, seeing OMB and the White House and agencies in the 50,000 million priorities that happen, oftentimes you have to remind them that it is the law and a priority to put this together. And just like the budget resolution process faded because it was tough, my fear in president's budgets is we're headed that direction. I fought very hard to have full budgets: mandatory, revenue, discretionary. What have you gotten the last cycle?
A discretionary budget. No one screamed, and I bet you you're going to get just discretionary. Every time an easier path and no one really squills, that is what the system is going to do. And Shalanda at OMB in the future, will I win an argument that says our responsibility is to put a full budget that shows all spending, all revenues? I'm going to lose that argument because they're going to say the last president didn't have to do that, why do we have to take those bullet and arrows?
Speaker 47
So it sort of speaks to Representative McClintock, we're taking the easy path to be able to try to address this, and sometimes the easiest path is either punting or not adhering to the Budget Control Act provisions. So with that, thank you for being here today. Special shout-out to my senator, thrilled that you're working on this important legislation, and appreciate your time. With that, I yield.
Thank you so much. Mr. Espaillat.
Adriano Espaillat
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Senator, Member, and Shalanda, thank you, good to see you again. Shutdowns are horrible, right? The general public, the rest of the world see us as dysfunctional, people get hurt. Continuing resolutions are not necessarily either the best solution to this budget issue, right?
But I tell you what I feel is just as bad. The winner-take-all attitude and the extreme budget decisions that either side makes present a scenario where it's difficult to build consensus and get this done. So imagine how the world looks at us when we cut food stamps, for example. That could very well be that it is something around seven dollars and change per person per day. Imagine when a mom is hurt because in one of our 12 separate appropriations process, we present a scenario where they will be hurt that way, or other meritorious programs for the American people.
So I think that the extreme positions that we take make it impossible for us to reach consensus, and the winner-take-all attitude present a major obstacle for us to get this done. And then we have to resort to either a shutdown or a continuing resolution, which is both are not the best scenario.
But I think that unless we decide to be more flexible and understand that there is a middle road somewhere where we can all live and protect our points of view, we're going to continue in this direction. But my question is to Ms. Young. As a ranking member of the legislative branch subcommittee, I have met and heard concerns from Capitol Police officers. It has been growing concern that the US Capitol Police continues to lose staff to other law enforcement agencies that can offer higher pay and benefits as violence and the threat of violence continues to hover above us, members, staff, and visitors in this campus. So this is a real issue that could have a devastating impact on the campus.
Having served as director of the Office of Management and Budget, you understand how continuing resolutions affect agencies' abilities to plan and manage their operation. What risk would Congress create if the department were required to operate under an automatic CR for an extended period of time while staffing shortages and security demands continue to evolve? This is something right here on campus. We've seen it play out on different scenarios and theaters. So what do you see?
Shalanda Young
Long before I was OMB director, I was the clerk of the legislative branch subcommittee. So it is near and dear, and the Capitol Police are near and dear, and it was always hard to recruit, and it's gotten harder. And obviously there are morale problems. Look, you've heard what I believe happens in an automatic CR scenario where a few people who see the year-long bills as something they would rather not have happen for whatever reason, whether it be a president or a few senators or a few House members, that we have no way out of that doom loop. Fourteen days becomes twenty-eight.
Think about before election season if there's something hard to deal with, like immigration, has always been difficult. What happens? You take tough votes, you put the House and Senate in that position, or do you say I have this thing that allows me not to do that? That's my fear. And Senator Lankford is right, he has quorum call every day for the Senate.
I don't see that for the House. So my fear again is I see a provision that says that it is an order to have a bed check basically for the House, but it does not dictate for the House in the same way it dictates for the Senate in the bill. So my worry is that especially in election years, we end up just the automatic CR becomes something we have to live with for a very long time.
Speaker 51
Thank you. And again, Senator and Congressmember, unless we deal with the culture of this place and our inability to talk to each other and reach consensus, this is a difficult endeavor. I yield back.
Speaker 49
I thank the gentleman. Mr. Soskumani, you're recognized, sir.
I think it's been a fascinating discussion on the solutions and also reiterating the problem. Thank you, Chairman. I want to first of all thank all three of you for being here and for giving us so much of your time.
I think if we have gone down the line in terms of explaining what the issue is, the problem that we're all trying to fix, and I think everybody agrees on what the problem is. The difference, of course, is going to come in the solution that we're proposing here. I've been here for three and a half years, came in in January of '23, and so I've lived through a few of these moments. And both from, as it was explained, Speaker McCarthy coming to an agreement and that potentially costing him the speakership to actually the longest shutdown in US history, followed by a partial shutdown. So we see the problems.
I can read stats of how this has impacted my district, 1.3 billion per month in lost gross state product, disruption in SNAP benefits, WIC benefits, not to mention TSA as has been mentioned before, and so on. So I think we get that. Now, what's one of the most frustrating parts for me after being here for the period of time that I have been is the blaming on both sides. It happened under other leadership when I was here, before I was here, now this. So there is a problem.
There's a problem that hasn't been fixed. And we could argue on who's the main responsible person depending on the year, but this is the reality that I think we're trying to get to. The, and that I strongly believe that this is the case, the pain of a shutdown should be felt primarily by this body and not by the people at home, because they're not the ones that have failed. It's the people that work in this building, specifically the members that have been elected, that's where the pain should be felt for any shutdown. I withheld my pay as long as people in my district and my office were not getting paid, I was not getting paid either.
That's just a small part of what needs to happen in terms of everyone in the building making the decisions to get us into a shutdown to participate in that pain and to actually be the ones feeling the pain, not the people at home. So my question is to, and I hope I can get to them real quick here, Ms. Young, you know, the way that we've explained this, and I really appreciate your perspective because you've been in the practical sense of this thing working on it, and I think you've given a very thoughtful response to all this. You know, the guardrails that have kept the shutdowns from happening in the past, as it was described, they still exist today. But as it was mentioned before, the culture in this place is not the same that was back then when the shutdowns were not acceptable and either side wanted them and the work was to go to a solution. What we have here today is a different culture, a different mood in this building that it seems that for some, that's where they want to go.
So the current guardrails that we have today are not working. They're not enough to prevent it because those in power of them and making the decisions are not constraining themselves to those guardrails anymore. So if not this solution that is being proposed, what can we do to fix this and prevent this from happening?
Shalanda Young
And I wouldn't say it's guardrails, it's people, right? The people in leadership, the people who occupy the House, the office of the presidency, but more congressional leadership giving this committee the space in which to do its job and to promote this process and stand on an equal footing with any presidency. I will say, listening to Senator Lankford, like, I am a big fan of people staying and working. If there is a way to ensure that that happens and people are as engaged as this committee is all summer long, I remember my summers only being appropriations, do it earlier. So I don't have, like, that is an honorable goal.
I would like to see that same will or forced participation happen much earlier in the process, because even before we got to, like, the longest shutdown, CRs, like, you know, we all know you get to September, that's not the time, you're never going to finish in time. So what can we do, and some members are off this, to bring, if it's Senator Lankford's idea, don't have it start October 1st, this idea to keep members around. What can we do earlier in the process?
Speaker 49
I like that. So I want to talk offline because I want us to acknowledge that what we have today is not enough to prevent shutdowns from happening.
The only thing worse than a short-term CR is a long-term CR, and the only thing worse than a long-term CR is a shutdown. So we don't want any of those, we want to do our job and pass it. So I, I do, I'm happy that we can acknowledge that. Senator, with the seconds I have left, on Ms. Young's perspective here, the practical experience of this, if something like this goes through, the decision really at the end of how to pass this or not to pass it comes down to just a few handful of people, and many of us in this room are not in those conversations. So just the decision-making of two, three, four, maybe ten people have an impact on the other 435 that are not at the table in the room in all these decisions that are being made.
So how will a legislation like this one or a rule like this one address that?
James Lankford
So for the five or ten people that are in the room at that point, they're at least known by the other 400 people that are around them. At this point, we're just saying we're not going to pay TSA workers that have no idea where to point. We at least know who they are, we can pick up and call them, we can interact with those folks. When the final negotiations are done, they'll be done here in this building, not out somewhere else. Right now I've got TSA agents that tell me they feel like their paycheck is bipolar and they don't know who to be able to call to be able to fix it.
The responsibility and the consequences should be on this body, not on federal workers, and the idea that the best-case scenario for us is to continue to not pay federal workers, I just completely disagree with.
Unacceptable. Absolutely unacceptable, and we got to be able to solve this. And if somebody has a better solution than this, bring it, but currently no one else is, so we're bringing one.
Norma Torres
Thank you, Chairman and Ranking Member, and to our witnesses, thank you for being here today. Special shout-out, of course, to Director Young, who many of us have had the pleasure of working with you in this committee and beyond. The appropriations process requires the discipline to work across the aisle, find common ground, to cut off, especially to cut off extremes on both sides of the aisle and the extremes of a president. I know that a few Republican colleagues were relieved when some of the cuts proposed by the president and House majority were not signed into law for fiscal year 2026, and some of us were disappointed to see cuts in critical areas that help support our communities and the next generation of leaders. I support a transparent process that includes compromise, checks and balances, and Senator Lankford, I really appreciate your approach.
What I do not agree on is the triggering of an automatic continuing resolution because I agree with Director Young that we should start this process earlier and we should be committed and disciplined. Simply put, it is our job to compromise. The American people needs Congress to step up when our country is divided. They need the Appropriations Committee to uphold our common American values and help all communities, especially on disaster aid. The January 2025 LA wildfires were devastating to communities across Southern California, and the White House has not taken a single step to submit a disaster aid supplemental request.
Not for California and not for the 39 states, tribes, and territories that have had major disaster declared since 2025. Where is the outrage in that? And instead of lending a helping hand to hardworking taxpayers, the Trump administration and the Republican majority are prioritizing funding the Iran Forever War. To add insult to injury, California is also the biggest donor state in America, with 40 million of our hardworking taxpayers paying 275 billion more in federal taxes than we get back in funding.
Disaster aid should not be a partisan issue. Doubling down on this short-sighted decision, President Trump announced this week he is freezing federal Medicaid dollars for California. The Appropriations Committee should be spending time on standing up for appropriations law instead of letting President Trump decide that Americans in blue states shouldn't get the funding Congress provided in law. Instead of considering legislation to avoid hard choices and let automatic process take over, we should be working together, compromising and finding a path forward. The proposals before us would do the opposite and weaken not just this committee, but Congress itself.
Except for my agreement with you, Senator, on the issue of ensuring that we come together. We are already witnessing what happens when a party refuses to check its worst impulses. We need not only to stand up for the appropriations law, but we need to stand up for laws in general. Federal immigration agents need to follow the same law they impose on American citizens. You cannot say that we are pro-law enforcement or party of law and order when you don't care when ICE agents break the law.
It is still against the law to murder an American citizen for no reason on American soil, even if you wear a mask and a badge. And when agencies don't follow the law, that is when Congress and this committee must step in and hold them accountable, not give them a free pass and unlimited funding. Instead of proposals like this to get out of tough choices, this committee must work together across the aisle to hold this administration accountable, support our constituents and uphold the law. There's really no excuse not to do that. Senator, how would you suggest we move forward?
I think there's so much more agreement than disagreement, and how can we cancel, you know, the two super extremes on both sides and find the middle to move forward?
James Lankford
So I think the best thing we can do is keep the conversation going. What typically happens in a moment like this is someone will say, "I like everything in this proposal but this one thing, so let's not do it, and then let's not do anything." It's a different issue when we actually look at it and say, "Okay, I agree with these issues, I don't agree with these issues, let's figure out how to be able to solve this." If we have agreement that we should end government shutdowns, then let's actually figure out a bipartisan option. That's what we've been working on in the Senate, to figure out a bipartisan, nonpartisan option to try to figure out how do we end government shutdowns.
That's what Maggie and I continue to be able to work on. The worst-case scenario for us is to finish this hearing and go, "We had a hearing on it, check," and then a couple years from now we're in a long government shutdown again and say nothing's changed. Nothing changes until we actually keep the conversation going until we figure out what does work and then do that.
Norma Torres
I'm committed to doing that with you or anyone else. I can tell you that I got myself to Congress, elected to Congress, campaigning in my district. The party did not get me here, and my commitment and when I took that oath was to my constituents, not the Democratic Party or any president. And with that I yield back.
James Lankford
Thank you. I do appreciate the time to be able to be in the part of the conversation. I do encourage folks to glance through these. This letter from the American Federation of Government Employees, they really want a solution to this. And Senator, I almost called you Senator Hoyer there for just a second.
Sorry, that's just a default on that. Congressman Hoyer knows this extremely well from having so many federal employees that live in his district. This is a big issue that they are crying out, that they support this piece of legislation, but they are crying out for us to actually solve this.
Mario Diaz-Balart
Thank you. Thank you. The Senator has to be excused and then we will.
May I just take.
Of course we'll give you a few seconds.
Steny Hoyer
I thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Kelly is A, a good friend of mine, B, lives in my district, and we've talked about this. Everybody on this committee has said shutdowns are terrible. I cited three people who didn't believe that necessarily, and that was Mr. Gingrich, who said that, Mr. Vought has said that, and President Trump has said that, a shutdown under certain circumstances is good. I want to thank you for this thoughtful proposal.
I will tell you I am very much supportive of your proposal. You cannot consider other legislation until must-pass legislation, and the only must-pass legislation is the appropriation bills. None of the authorizing bills are must-pass. Consequences will occur, but they will not shut down government if they don't pass. And I want to thank you for thoughtful presentation and the way that you always present yourself and your issues in a constructive, positive way.
And I look forward to working with you as we go forward because as majority leader, I indicated to the Appropriations Committee and Shalanda Young, I want the bills ready to go to the floor by June 1. I want all the bills considered in June. I want July by then, June go to the Senate. The Senate, I want them to consider it. I think Mr. McClintock's idea is an interesting idea.
I don't think we can affect it. I am frankly not for the filibuster. I know we Democrats are for it now, we weren't for it when we were trying to get gun legislation through. So I thank the gentleman for his work and look forward to working with him.
Mario Diaz-Balart
I thank the gentleman. And again, Senator, you're excused, but again, gratitude for your willingness to do the work that you do, for your service, and also for spending this I think very valuable time. Thank you, sir. You're excused. Mr. Edwards, you're recognized, sir.
Chuck Edwards
Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank all of you for being here on our panel today. Ms. Young, I represent Western North Carolina, NC-11. We were hit on September 27, 2024, by Hurricane Helene, the worst natural disaster in my district's history.
And I got to witness firsthand how difficult that it became for us to continue our recovery from such a storm under two significant government shutdowns.
Can you tell me from your experience from the inside of the White House what difficulties that you have seen because I'm not sure that every member of this committee and I certainly know that not every member of Congress understands the difficulties of folks that have lost everything when we choose to play political games with a budget up here.
Shalanda Young
Mr. Edwards, as someone who has pulled out drywall from my parents' house and grew up with a storm tracker under my arm in South Louisiana, there is nothing almost that energizes me than meeting people after they've experienced some of the worst loss after hurricane, tornado, or fire. It should be nonpartisan, not even bipartisan, it should be nonpartisan. So we were proud to work together to get a supplemental up. We did not have a shutdown during my time at OMB, but I can tell you I have seen shutdowns over my time, especially when I was staff director. People have to, we have to determine whether people can continue to service in the disaster area or if we have to pull them back.
So you have to take two weeks to decide who can even stay versus leave. It is extremely, even if they can stay, you've gone through this process which slows down their ability to do their day-to-day work. So it is detrimental in a regular time for people, for people who are wondering if the SBA is going to continue to staff the disaster recovery center. Can you imagine like going through the muck, literally after Helene, the muck, showing up to not have full support be there to take your application. So while we didn't have the scenario of a shutdown, I know how hard it is to manage a disaster response and shutdowns in general just put a strain on the system as you're even determining.
And by the way, can the people in the disaster recovery center get paid? So you have them trying to help people, the FEMA people probably are getting paid because they have the disaster relief fund, the SBA people maybe not. So you have two class of federal citizens. It's not a way to operate.
Chuck Edwards
Well, I can tell you that there are positions in FEMA that might continue to operate during a government shutdown, but from firsthand experience for me and for my constituents, a large part of FEMA absolutely shuts down. They won't even answer our phone. What would a shutdown, for example, what would a government shutdown do to replenishing the disaster relief fund?
Shalanda Young
So again, we didn't have a shutdown, but we talked about this a little where during shutdowns OMB and the White House have a lot of flexibility on what they determine to be essential or not. So this idea, this general theme where we seem to have agreement is Congress wants to keep more of that authority. So shutdowns just by their very nature hand that authority over to White Houses and OMB to decide who can still answer phones. Now, the longer these go on, even people who are told they have to work may have to go find other jobs and you start seeing people call out and not being able to sustain their own families in long shutdowns.
Chuck Edwards
Thank you. I'm going to run out of time, but I need to reiterate to this committee, I've seen what happens in a government shutdown. The North Carolina governor came to my office as the only appropriator from North Carolina asking for additional relief funds and two days later his very delegation chose to shut the government down in the North Carolina delegation chose to shut the government down. That brought things to a screeching halt. Money that was due to folks looking to recover was brought to a halt.
Debris removal was brought to a halt. The help that people in Western North Carolina needed was brought to a halt. All while there were folks up here saying, "We need more money, we need more research resources." And I thought it was rich and hypocritical of folks to then turn right around and vote to shut the government down. Just, just my perspective for, for those folks that are making decisions to shut us down for political reasons.
Thank you. I yield back.
Glenn Ivey
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate it. And let me say I appreciate the structure of this hearing as well. I, you know, I think while I've been on appropriations, we've done a lot of hearings where frankly they're kind of very quick opportunities to chat, to have some questions with the heads of some of the departments and agencies. Don't always get a chance to have this level of information that's shared with people who are knowledgeable on this topic, especially Ms. Young here.
For, so I want to thank the committee for that. And I appreciate the fact too that this is such a critical issue for us. I mean, we've had a couple of shutdowns while I've been here in the Congress, only for three years. I represent the other half of Prince George's County that Mr. Hoyer doesn't represent. I have thousands of federal government employees in my district.
I used to be a federal government employee along these lines as well before I was elected to Congress. So I have a lot of concern and sympathy with respect to them and the impact that these shutdowns can have on them. My parents, my father in particular, was a federal employee as well. I also want to make sure too, and Ms. Young, I think your, your testimony addressed some of this from a standpoint of institutional impact that this piece of legislation might have from the standpoint of transferring authority and power to the White House from Congress. And I was kind of curious if you would elaborate on that and give me some of your additional thoughts on it.
Shalanda Young
I think, I'll give you an answer I gave someone earlier. Like, having been at OMB and how decisions typically get made where there are lots of balls in the air. You know, I certainly see a scenario where if you come together in a bipartisan way and you have some oversight that a occupant of the White House is not a fan of. What happens if they have this fail-safe and automatic? If they go to the OMB director and said, "Look, the government's still open.
Can I still do these five things?" And the OMB director says, "Yes you can, Mr. or Ms. President." Then why should I sign these bills if the government stays open? That's my worry. That you have ten people, they could be a combination of the Senate, there could be bad actors in any administration, even in the House itself, who don't want this process to work for whatever reason.
And you give them a fail-safe and then we never, or it will take a very long time to get regular appropriations done. That's my concern.
Speaker 67
Mr. MacGuineas, do you have thoughts on that? And by the way, it's good to see you again. We miss you at Judiciary. But what's your thought on that?
Tom McClintock
Well, um, the, uh, I think Mr. Lankford's main point, can't speak for him, but I think what it comes down to is this. If we're not here talking to one another, we're not resolving the issues. The whole, the name Congress comes from the root of the word to mean coming together. It is a process, it's a human process, and it's a very messy process. The founders wanted it to be very difficult to make these decisions.
They wanted every voice in the country to be heard. They wanted these questions to be held up to every conceivable light. Once that, and that's, that's this process.
I think Senator Lankford's principal point is it can't work if we're not actually in Congress.
Glenn Ivey
I appreciate that. And I appreciate the fact I guess we've got two versions of the legislation here that we're going to take a look at. I share Mr., Senator Lankford's view that we do need to try and find a solution here because it's an ongoing challenge. I do think it's critical for this to be the right solution though. And I, I'm not sure that we've sort of figured that out.
We've got two competing bills here that I think are honest and fair-minded efforts to try and address the problems, but I think we've got some more work cut out before we get there. And I, you know, running out of time, the SNAP benefits piece would be one that I would ask that popped up in the last shutdown. I think there was an assertion by the administration that they couldn't continue to pay SNAP benefits and there was a... I mean, it's just another example of how much leeway an OMB, a White House has in a shutdown. So I think we've all agreed shutdowns are awful, CRs slightly better than awful, whether they be automatic or our regular way of doing CRs.
What, what can we do to get this process to produce 12 appropriations bills? And there was just a lot more agreement in this room than there was opposition. The solutions, there is disagreement, but the overall aims and goals to stop shutdowns and CRs not being much better, I think provides a basis to not end the conversation here, but keep it going. I thank you for that, Mr. Chairman. I apologize for running over and I yield back.
Celeste Maloy
Thank you, Mr. Chair. This has been a really interesting hearing, unlike any I've ever been in. Sitting here as a still fairly newish member of Congress listening to three insiders with knowledge of how things work about here talking about how broken we are has been informative and a little bit heartbreaking. And thank you, I know you're not used to being on that side for these hearings, but thank you for sitting here and patiently answering questions for more than three hours now. I will be brief.
I don't think I'll even use my whole five minutes. But Mr. McClintock, I think you and I are in agreement on part of what's broken here based on other conversations we've had. I think the reason that the annual appropriations bills are so important is that when we have to pass spending bills every year, it keeps Congress accountable to the taxpayers every year. And when we're talking about spending government dollars, they're taxpayer dollars. We're taking money from American citizens, we're deciding how it needs to be spent.
And if we have to vote on that every single year, it keeps us accountable, it keeps that at the front of our minds. And the process of how we do that is only supposed to be a means to an end. And what I'm hearing here, and I'm doing the thing I hate, which is giving a speech just to ask a question, but what I'm hearing is that the means has become the end. We get so caught up in the means, we're not getting there.
Any proposal that includes automatic funding for anything seems like it defeats that purpose of making us vote on it every year so that we go back to our taxpayers and say what we're doing. And so I really like your bill. I like the idea that we need to change the process to make it work. But we can't make the Senate change. They're going to have to vote on that in the Senate.
How optimistic are you that we can get senators to actually vote for a bill that changes their procedure? I know there are changes on our side too. But I know how our side works better. Do you think we can actually get the Senate to agree to process changes to get us back on track?
Tom McClintock
Well, that ultimately be a question for the Senate to decide. Again, we are amending statutes, so both houses have a say in that. But obviously this directly affects the Senate's procedures. I have been in contact with one of the leading members of the Senate who's very interested in introducing a similar measure on their side. I don't think he's made a decision yet, so I won't mention his name.
But I do think there's enormous frustration in the Senate over that same problem of the system seizing up and not being able to deliver. And that's going to be true whoever has a majority. The minority can block the system, can block the process of coming together to compromise and to make a decision. That's a serious problem because then the system can't operate as it was designed. It can't operate at all.
Celeste Maloy
Yeah, and as an appropriator, I've seen that it is a lot of work for us to get 12 bills written, marked up, out of committee, ready to go to the floor. And when we know it's not going to go anywhere, that's a lot of wasted effort. But I've also seen that when we do that work, sometimes we're our own worst enemies. And the public thinks these are enormous bills that were written at midnight and presented the next morning and nobody's seen them. Do you see any solution to that where we have some control on our side that we can make sure the public understands this process and why it's so important and how many people are involved and how many steps are involved?
Agreed.
Celeste Maloy
That's a yes. Okay. With that, I have some other questions, but I'm almost out of time and you've been here for a long time and it's been a long day. I appreciate both of you and the senator answering these questions. And again, this has been one of the most interesting hearings I've ever sat through.
And I yield.
Pete Aguilar
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate it. And I know our guests have been here for a long time and I appreciate their patience. Shalanda, it's always good to see you and always good to see you back here in this space. We think that we're your home here on the Appropriations team.
I wanted to know, and I know you've answered a ton of questions from members, can you talk to me specifically, you know I'm from Southern California, the home state for Mr. McClintock and I, often ravaged by wildfires in our region. The current administration has neglected our recovery needs in my opinion because we're a blue state. I'm also working to ensure that our region is prepared for national security when it comes to the 2028 Olympics. Can you touch on how policies of automatic CRs would impact Congress's ability to respond to unforeseen needs like natural disasters and other unforeseen events?
Shalanda Young
Again, if you believe my scenario and how automatic CRs play out, obviously I believe it quite well that if there is a fail-safe and there are hard decisions to be made, like immigration, like a whole host of things that we have fought hard in the appropriations process to do. Then it may not be this committee, but it could be a president, it could be a group of senators, it could be some combination of leadership who just say, why would we take this tough vote if we have an out not to shut down the government?
If you believe that and you believe that leads to a longer CR, then you can't be responsive in a CR. This committee has always been against CRs because all the work that Ms. Shalala has talked about over the summer where you're responding to things you've heard about from home, where frankly you're marking up a president's budget that's probably out of date before it even gets to you because agencies have started this late, then we have never believed a CR and putting the third of government that depends on appropriations that two or three years operating at the same levels was a responsive way to govern. When I started on this committee as a staffer, I would sit through senior members just rail like all this stuff comes to us, yet we at least do our work every year. Go talk to the authorizers who have mandatory and they don't deal with that every year. And I just am will always be shaped by that and can't imagine a world where we'd put this now 28% of discretionary, even the possibility that turns into yet another chunk of federal spending that Congress does not deal with in an annual way.
The complaint I grew up with for members was all of it needed to be reviewed in a more, you know, in a clip that was more regular.
That was members on both sides of the aisle.
Shalanda Young
That was members on both sides of the aisle and a unique perspective from the members who served on the annual process committee.
Speaker 63
Yeah. Mr. McClintock, your thoughts on how automatic CRs would respond under unforeseen circumstances or natural disasters?
Tom McClintock
Well, again, this is Senator Lankford's bill, but I think his point is that we need a default safety net when we can't come to an agreement. But I can't disagree with Ms. Young's analysis that that, you know, that can then provide a perverse incentive not to come to an agreement.
Pete Aguilar
Yeah. Yeah, the theory of your case is that we all need to, you know, kind of be in the same space to work that out. I think that's also the same ethos of the members on this committee. We want to, even in difficult times, even in even in shutdowns.
Tom McClintock
That's the whole purpose of that building with the big dome on top. It's to talk these things through, and sometimes that takes a lot of talking.
Pete Aguilar
Yeah. Sometimes that takes a lot of talking, and I've I've been here when we have had shutdowns in a number of ways and a number of circumstances. Ms. Young was working here previously when we had shutdowns over the border wall that was unnecessary. We've had shutdowns over the Affordable Care Act tax credits. You know, I say that just and I know we're here to talk about the proposals, but it's not lost on me to kind of step back and think why we get into the situation we're in are also big and complex and sometimes, you know, are out of the purview of just this committee.
But that doesn't minimize the importance of of the debates that we're that we're having. I think what we want out of these proposals is to just ensure that we have the ability to shape what is what is in front of us. That's why we're here and and that's the job that we've that we've agreed to. So I thank you both for your time and I appreciate your patience with the committee. Yield back.
Mario Diaz-Balart
I thank the gentleman. Ms. Letlow. Okay, I think you're going to wind us up, wind us down, I should say.
On the other side over here.
Ms. Letlow you're recognized.
Julia Letlow
Thank you so much Mr. Chairman. And thank you for holding this important meeting. And Ms. Young, it's good to see you, a fellow Louisianan here today. Last fall the nation experienced the longest government shutdown in history, lasting 43 days. The shutdown disrupted businesses across the country and placed a significant burden on American workers and their families.
For weeks dedicated federal government employees were required to report to work without pay, while members of Congress still received a paycheck. This is simply unacceptable. During every government shutdown I have asked the House to withhold my pay until the government reopened because members of Congress should share in the consequences of a funding lapse. Earlier this year my fellow Louisianan Senator John Kennedy led a successful effort to withhold Senators' pay during government shutdowns. I think this is a common sense measure ensuring that members are held accountable and are not treated differently from the federal employees and American families they serve.
While I hope our nation avoids another shutdown, I believe the House should seriously consider adopting a similar policy to hold all our feet to the fire. For our witnesses today, as Congress considers ways to restore public trust in the appropriations process, should additional accountability measures including whether members of Congress should continue receiving pay during a funding lapse be part of that conversation?
Shalanda Young
One, I cannot let pass a fellow Louisianan without, she's the only person in here who knows where Clinton, Louisiana is and that's my hometown. I promise you she's the only one. Look, I think that this conversation today there has been more agreement that this is unacceptable. In my remarks I reminded not as a pat on the back because it's low hanging to say I didn't preside over a shutdown. I don't take great pride in that.
That like should be basic. But nothing trumps political will. And I have asked and think through these these reforms that Congressman Kilmer has, that Senator Lankford has. Let's, I don't really, I don't, we like to start with the symptom. But there has been a lot to fail before we get to shutdowns.
And that could be a combination of administrations who, and it doesn't matter the party, if it presents an opportunity they're not going to really offer you your Article One power back. So I'd like to see a lot of effort and thought in what does it take to get the room to really work on the appropriations process and have leadership give you all the room to do the hard work, to have an administration who is fearful if they get in the way of your hard work. The soft power of the Appropriations Committee was often more strong than the hard power of the bills. A pick up of the phone call. Like, hey, that's not what we meant.
And that was always listened to. So I think, I get it after the longest shutdown and we saw the harm in federal workers, the want to do these things on the tail end like pay, I'll leave that to you all to discuss and I know there has been some constitutionality questions but you all will have to answer that for yourself. But I would just hope we leave this and it's been a very good discussion trying to figure out what we can do to give this process the space it needs and the hard work you all sit here and do all summer, right?
I finally took my first June vacation last year because appropriations is all the summer. What can we do to focus the House and the Senate's full body on this work and not leave it to September when we know we're set up for failure? You can't finish in two weeks.
Speaker 59
Thank you for your comments. I know the American people expect us to do our job. And when we shut this place down, I just believe that we should not receive a paycheck just like they would not receive if they didn't show up to work.
Tom McClintock
The ideal outcome of course is for the appropriations process to culminate with appropriations sent to the President for signature. We have a blockage in that system where a minority, Republican or Democrat, can stop that process in the Senate. And that seizes up the legislative progression that will ultimately arrive at agreement between the two houses and produce an appropriations bill to the Senate. So that's my principal concern. Again, not a cure-all, but it will make it more likely that those bills can make their way to the President's desk.
And that's the ideal situation is for the Congress to work its will through the appropriations that it adopts. That's what the founders envisioned.
Speaker 56
Amen to that. Thank you both so much for your time. Appreciate it. I yield back.
Mario Diaz-Balart
Thanks the gentlelady. Let me thank our remarkable witnesses for being here today, for your time, for your insight. As a reminder, members will have five legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks and to insert extraneous material into the record. With that, the committee stands adjourned.