If you find the Congressional budget process as confusing as an IRS tax form, you are not alone! This quick tutorial on the Congressional budget should help demystify it for you:
The Budget Resolution
Since the mid-1970s, the first legislative step in approving a federal budget is the development of a budget resolution. A budget resolution is a statutorily non-binding blueprint or framework of the broad spending categories for the upcoming fiscal year. The budget resolution is prepared, debated and voted on by the Budget Committee in both the House and the Senate. Once a budget resolution is approved by the committees, it reaches the floor of each chamber where it is debated, amended and then hopefully approved.
Once the resolution is approved, the committees issue official “allocations” to the various Appropriations subcommittees (10 in the House; 12 in the Senate). These allocations represent the overall amount of money that the subcommittee is allowed to spend for the programs under its jurisdiction.
Appropriations Committees
Although the Appropriations Committee cannot actually begin carving up their slices of the federal spending pie until they receive their allocations from the Budget Committee, appropriators are hard at work long before that transpires. In the winter and early spring Appropriations subcommittees hold dozens of hearings on the funding requests for programs under their jurisdiction—hearing testimony from top Administration officials to ordinary citizens. It is during this period that the appropriators also accept requests from individual Members of Congress to fund projects that benefit their congressional district.
As hearings are winding down, appropriations staffers begin drafting the actual spending bills. Each appropriations subcommittee works on one bill: the Senate is organized into 12 subcommittees, while the House recently reorganized its Appropriations Committee into just 10 subcommittees.
The first legislative action takes place in a subcommittee markup, in which Members take up the draft bill, offer amendments and vote on those amendments as well as the overall measure. Following a subcommittee markup is a full committee markup. After the bill clears the full Appropriations Committee, it is ready for consideration by the full House or Senate.
Final Consideration
Once the House and Senate complete work on a spending bill, a conference committee is convened to iron out differences between the two versions, and once that final bill is approved in each chamber, it is sent to the President for signature.
Many years, however, work is not completed on all of the spending bills by the end of the current fiscal year, September 30. In that case, a few things happen. First, to ensure that the government continues to operate, Congress will usually pass a Continuing Resolution (CR) that extends current budget authority for a set period of time (usually a matter of weeks or days.) As each CR is set to expire, a new CR is considered and voted on.
Meanwhile, Congress has frequently chosen to complete work on pending appropriations bills by combining them into a single broad measure, known as an omnibus appropriations bill. H.R. 4818, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2004, which was the final spending bill passed in the 108th Congress, is an example of such a measure.
