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What's the emergency?

Article Excerpt
Rarely does a fiscal year pass without some type of emergency requiring a response from the federal government. When a disaster strikes, lawmakers need prompt access to federal funds, which is provided by the supplemental spending process. In theory, supplemental bills fund programs that cannot wait until the next appropriations cycle or programs whose authorizations were just enacted or renewed.

Recently, however, serious concerns have emerged about the nature and size of supplemental appropriations bills. Once a small blip among federal outlays, emergency spending exploded after 2002 when the Republican Congress let a key legislative restriction on their use expire. In May 2007, for instance, President Bush signed into law the biggest supplemental bill in history, $120 billion, to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and pay for hurricane recovery and agriculture-disaster relief at home. As this goes to press in the late spring of 2008, there is talk that this year's supplemental could be as much as $193 billion. By contrast, the average annual amount of emergency supplemental spending in the 1990s--a decade that saw interventions in Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo--was just $13.8 billion.

The government's appetite has no limits. To that end, supplemental bills have become the tool of choice for Congress and the White House to avoid budget caps designed to promote fiscal responsibility, resulting in dramatically increased government spending.

BUDGET RULES While the regular appropriations process does include some emergency funding, the majority of emergency funding goes...

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