“It’s clearly time for a new approach,” Ryan said. “I would even say, calling this organized chaos is too generous of a description.” | Getty 'Organized chaos is too generous': Lawmakers clash over fix to budget dysfunction

Top lawmakers from both parties are proposing major reforms to Congress' funding process, slamming Band-Aid spending bills, toothless budget resolutions and the near-constant threat of shutdown that has festered during their reign.

But the consensus ends there.


In five-minute rounds, several of Congress' most powerful members — including Speaker Paul Ryan and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — showed up Wednesday to air long-simmering grievances before the bicameral special committee created this year to fix Congress’ broken funding cycle.

“It’s clearly time for a new approach,” Ryan said. “I would even say, calling this organized chaos is too generous of a description.”

Members of both parties pitched more than a dozen radical ideas during a nearly four-hour hearing. Those proposed reforms include the idea of moving to an every-other-year spending cycle, repealing the debt limit, restoring earmarks, setting an autopilot function for government funding, keeping controversial policy language out of spending bills and scrapping the Budget Committee altogether.

Hardly any of those suggestions have attracted cross-party support, however, and stand little chance at gaining favor among a majority of the House's 435 members.

The only ideas that have gone uncontested are policies that Congress has effectively already accepted — a biennial budget process and a shift in the fiscal calendar.

Several GOP lawmakers are throwing their support behind a controversial plan from Senate Budget chief Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) that would cut in half the annual workload for Congress’ appropriations committees.

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Instead of the usual 12 bills, the House and Senate funding panels would focus on just six spending measures per year. Ryan, a former GOP budget chairman, called it one of the “sweet spots” for the special committee to pursue and "one of the best ideas I’ve seen."

That plan has been met with fierce resistance from Democrats, though, as well as an influential GOP appropriator, Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.).

“In the dynamic world we live in today, federal agencies need to be nimble and responsive,” the 35-year appropriations veterans said. “That means a constant contact with appropriators — not just every other year, not just every year, but every day.”

Members are largely in agreement that Congress should codify a plan to set spending levels every two years. Both parties’ leaders have been functionally doing that since 2012, in the wake of the strict budget caps created as part of a Republican deal with then-President Barack Obama.

“We have biennial budgeting,” said House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), a former appropriator, noting that it functions simply as a “two-year rule to suspend the sequester.”

Hoyer warns that formalizing that process wouldn’t, by itself, “fix the root cause to our unpredictable government timelines.”

“Pretending that process will solve this problem is a delusion,” Hoyer said. “Congress has to want to follow whatever process it creates for itself.”

Some Republicans are even calling for the outright elimination of Congress’ budget panel.

Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who serves on the Senate Budget Committee, called it “the biggest waste of time you can possibly imagine.”

“We ought to actually do away with the Budget Committee because it performs no useful function,” said Corker, the only senator to testify.

Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who sits on both the Senate Budget Committee and Congress’ select panel on reforming the budget process, said he largely agrees but thinks the committee should have one more chance to serve its purpose.

“I do think there’s a step between getting rid of the damn thing before its current parlous state,” Whitehouse said.

Even Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.), one of the most conservative members of the House Budget Committee, scoffed at some of the most extreme ideas for overhauling the budget process, blaming the political climate for the process itself.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves,” McClintock said, quoting Shakespeare. “The principle problem with the budget process is that it requires very hard decisions. Changing the process isn’t going to make these decisions any easier."