Kevin D. Williamson at The Dispatch:
Appropriations, which is the nitty-gritty business of putting money into agency coffers where it may be spent, theoretically happens in 12 parts, with 12 subcommittees writing appropriations bills and these then going to the House and Senate appropriations committees. The subcommittees are for the most part relatively capacious slop buckets: Agriculture, Rural Development, and Food and Drug Administration; Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies; Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies; Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies; etc. Some are more focused, such as Defense—not to be confused with Homeland Security or Military Construction, Veterans’ Affairs, and Related Agencies.
When things are working the way they are supposed to, the appropriations subcommittees spend a lot of time listening to testimony and holding hearings about this or that program and its financial needs, with members of each party negotiating with their own fellow partisans and with those of the other party, doing all the usual horse-trading and favor-swapping and such that constitutes ordinary politics. It is a long, complicated, exasperating, labor-intensive process that, for the average congressional specimen, is not nearly as much fun as getting a hit on Fox News or MSNBC. And so we end up with what Jonah Goldberg calls our “Parliament of Pundits,” where relatively little work is done in the way of the ordinary business of politics (much less the ordinary business of governing!) and, while our lawmakers and bureaucrats angle for television time and hone their own-the-opposition social-media strategies, the actual fiscal process lapses into chaos. Holding off that chaos is what such stop-gap measures as “continuing resolutions” and “omnibus appropriations” and such are all about.
It matters how much money Washington spends. It also matters—a great deal!—what it spends that money on. And here I do not mean big broad vague categorical buckets such as “defense” or “education” or whatever, but actual programs. There is some education spending that is excellent and worthwhile and worth expanding, and some education spending that ought to be eliminated entirely, the programs ended, the records burned, the bureaucratic fields sown with salt by libertarian centurions under the command of Nick Gillespie (if only because I think he is likely to own a toga in addition to his 41 black leather jackets). (Rough estimate.) Talking about “how much we spend on education” doesn’t get to the important details.
You know what probably could get into those details? Congressional subcommittees doing their g—mned jobs.
“Getting spending under control” is only in part about debt and deficits—as important as those factors are. It also is about making sure that the money we do spend, we spend on things that are useful and productive. And that is why it is important to understand that continuing resolutions and budget ad-hocracy isn’t just about avoiding the hard work of intelligent appropriations and oversight—it is about avoiding accountability. If you lump everything together into one big mess and then pass it at the last minute under the shadow of a budget crisis, then you can pretend that you have an excuse for not watching where the money is actually going. And then you can go back to your career as a half-assed cable-news pundit who also happens to serve in Congress.
