CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET PROCESS
The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 provides Congress with a procedure establishing appropriate spending and revenue levels for each year. The congressional budget process is designed to coordinate decisions on sources and levels of revenues and on objects and levels of expenditures. Its basic method is to prescribe the overall size of the fiscal pie and the particular sizes of its various pieces. Each year the Congress adopts a concurrent resolution imposing overall constraints on revenues and spending and distributing the overall constraint on spending among groups of programs and activities. Congress aims to complete action on a concurrent resolution on the budget for the next fiscal year by April 15. Congress may adopt a later budget resolution that revises the most recently adopted budget resolution.
One of the mechanisms Congress uses to implement the constraints on revenue and spending is called the reconciliation process. Reconciliation is a multiple-step process designed to bring existing law in conformity with the most recently adopted concurrent resolution on the budget. The first step in the reconciliation process is the language found in a concurrent resolution on the budget instructing House and Senate committees to determine and recommend changes in laws or bills that will achieve the constraints established in the concurrent resolution on the budget. The instructions to a committee specify the amount of spending reductions or revenue changes a committee must attain and leave to the discretion of the committee the specific changes to laws or bills that must be made. The subsequent steps involve the combination of the various instructed committees’ recommendations into an omnibus reconciliation bill or bills which are reported by the Committee on the Budget or by the one committee instructed, if only one committee has been instructed, and considered by the whole House.
In
the Senate, reconciliation bills reported from committee are entitled to
expedited consideration, permitting a majority of Senators, rather than sixty,
to assure consideration of the bill with limited time for amendments. The Budget
Act maintains that reconciliation provisions must be related to reconciling the
budget. This principle is codified in section 313 of the Budget Act, the
so-called Byrd Rule, named after Senator Robert C. Byrd of
Congress aims to complete action on a reconciliation bill or resolution by a
specified date of each year. After Congress has completed action on a concurrent
resolution on the budget for a fiscal year, it is generally not in order to
consider legislation that does not conform to the constraints on spending and
revenue set out in the resolution. The Unfunded Mandates Reform Act of 1995 established requirements
on committees with respect to measures containing unfunded intergovernmental
mandates. An unfunded intergovernmental mandate is the imposition of a
substantial financial requirement or obligation on a state, local, or tribal
government. The Act also established a unique point of order to enforce the
requirements of the Act with respect to intergovernmental mandates in excess of
fifty million dollars annually. In the House, an unfunded mandate point of order
is not disposed of by a ruling of the Chair but by the Chair putting the
question of consideration to the body. The House or the Committee of the Whole
then decides by vote whether or not to proceed with the measure with the alleged
mandate contained therein.