The History Of Congressional Budgeting

The history of Congressional budgeting is a largely long and compounding series of passed laws and reforms like much of the rest of Congress. The early history of the Congressional budget was a story of decentralized requests from each consecutive administration. These requests were not coordinated or funneled through any specific agency. Budgetary requests were handled by Congress through its committee system meaning that committee chairs held supreme authority over any requests that came their way. This led to deficits in the late 19th and early 20th century that were the stimulus for the first budget reform acts by Congress. The Budget Accounting Act of 1921 was the first attempt at coordinating the budget process. It gave the president
Sequestration was aimed at discretionary spending a spared interest payments and entitlement programs. This process failed because once again Congress found a way to avoid the rules that they set in place for themselves; they exempted most of the budget from the sequester process. The 1990 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act and Budget Enforcement Act attempted to further centralize power within Congress and forced more automatic changes to the budget to get things passed. The Budget Enforcement Act set further ceilings for spending that if passed would force sequestration, though only when new legislation forced spending beyond the limits. This process generally was unsuccessful at producing lasting change and deficit reductions. There have for as long as Congress has attempted to address the budget problem limits to what they can do. Those limits have generally occurred because the decentralized nature of Congress makes it extremely difficult to rein in the beast. As we can see, as soon as one way of doing business was closed Congress or the President found another way to get around the restrictions in place and eventually forced the issue to be addressed, closing a further loophole. As soon as Congress runs into issues with their current set of rules for budgetary matters, they just go and change the rules