December 19, 1975
Page 42136
SENATOR MUSKIE'S BUDGET WORK: PROGRESS TOWARD FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY
Mr. HATHAWAY. Mr. President, as we complete our first year under the new budget process, I would like to commend the distinguished Senior Senator from Maine, ED MUSKIE for his hard work and accomplishments in his first year as chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.
As we have learned in recent years, the economic well-being of the average citizen can be hurt when the Federal Government does too little and in some cases when it does too much.
At least 60 times this year, ED MUSKIE has taken to the Senate floor to insure that a wide variety of legislation meets the standard of both economic and fiscal responsibility. Time and time again he has opposed measures which he believed would cause excessive Federal spending.
While we had different views in some cases, I support his cause: that every program enacted by Congress squares with the people's overall economic interest. One of the most valuable aspects of budget reform is that it allows all of us to debate and reach a consensus on those interests.
ED MUSKIE'S role as budget chairman is not always a popular one. Telling Members that their favorite legislative proposals are too expensive, that the money is needed elsewhere, is a difficult job, but Senator MUSKIE has done it effectively.
In recent weeks many voices have been raised against the uncontrolled growth of Federal spending. The people of Maine benefitted by having a representative who has spoken steadily on this issue but, more importantly, has gone about the work of doing something about it. In the long run, that is what will really make the difference.
In the past session, due largely to the efforts of Senator MUSKIE's Budget Committee, the Congress has spent more money where the people wish it to be spent and less money where the people wish to see reductions. We have enlarged programs such as health, education, and aid to the elderly. We have cut programs devoted to the military and to foreign aid. We have added considerably to programs aimed at job creation.
Perhaps more important than any single accomplishment, Senator MUSKIE has been able to open the budgetary process to public view. From the outset, the committee has held its hearings and conducted its business in public session. That fact has increased the accountability of the Federal Government.
Budget control is not a glamour issue. It will never arouse the interest, or the television coverage, of a CIA investigation. But there are no more important issues than those addressed by the budget process.
To help focus attention on Senator MUSKIE'S work, I ask unanimous consent that several news articles and editorials be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
[From the Portland (Maine) Evening Express, Sept. 9, 1975]
SENATOR MUSKIE'S SUCCESS
How well the 94th Congress succeeds in holding down the size of the federal deficit this year depends in large measure on the ability of senators and House members to earnestly abide by self-imposed spending limits. So far, thanks in large measure to the efforts of Sen. Edmund S. Muskie, chairman of the Senate's new Budget Committee, the Congress is acting with considerable self-restraint.
Two indications of Muskie's success in forging a workable coalition in the Senate occurred in the past month. First, the Senate rejected a $31.1 billion military procurement package on the grounds it exceeded stated spending limits.
More recently, the Senate voted to send a $2.8 billion child nutrition measure back to a conference committee for the same reason.
In both instances Senator Muskie managed to muster an unlikely coalition of conservatives and liberals to prevent passage of the spending bills. In the first instance he won conservative opposition to the military spending bill by promising to oppose excessive spending for domestic programs. Last week he lived up to his word when he opposed the child nutrition bill, saying that "What we are doing is to insist that the fiscal discipline which led to the disapproval of the military bill be applied equally to other programs." The Senate turned back the bill by a surprising 76–0 vote.
Overall, Muskie is successfully arguing that Congress must take the bitter with the sweet if it is to succeed in holding the deficit to the $68.8 billion it approved in May. Although it may be argued that a federal deficit of that magnitude is too much, it is not far from the $60 billion deficit initially sought by President Ford and since subjected to upward revisions totaling $2 billion more. In terms of deficit spending limits, the President and Congress are not poles apart.
While it is still too early to accurately gauge the long range impact of congressional creation of the new Budget Committee, the success achieved so far is promising. For the first time in decades the Congress has the machinery needed to become a full-fledged partner in the federal budgetary process, a position it has all but ceded to the executive branch in recent years.
Moreover, Senator Muskie's success in convincing his colleagues that they must make the hard decisions as well as the easy — to vote for warranted spending reductions as well as popular spending bills — promises a restoration of congressional fiscal responsibility.
[From the Maine Sunday Telegram, Sept. 21, 1975]
MUSKIE TAKES SENATE FLOOR DAILY TO CONTROL SPENDING
(By Donald R. Larrabee)
WASHINGTON.— On three successive days this week, Sen. Edmund S. Muskie, D-Me., waded into the briar patch of budget reform. The Senate floor was no bed of roses for the budget committee chairman but, as Muskie said, "nobody promised us a rose garden."
The Maine senator, by his recent actions, seems dead serious about putting the Congress and the country on the long, hard road back toward fiscal responsibility. The press gallery is beginning to pay attention because Muskie is beginning to upset the powerful lobbies, the powerful executive agencies and the power blocs in Congress.
Whatever his personal feelings about a particular expenditure, Muskie feels he must take the floor on every major spending bill before the Senate to remind his colleagues of their decision last May to keep within a ceiling of $367. billion. This puts him in almost daily combat.
Last week, Muskie spoke out on the Health-Labor-Education-Welfare Bill and on the Federal Pay Bill, warning of budget-busting implications in both measures. In the midst of this, House-Senate conferees agreed on a defense procurement bill which had been pared down by $250 million as a result of an earlier Muskie appeal.
These actions have stepped on some ancient toes in the Appropriations Committee which once ruled supreme on spending bills. Muskie found himself tangling with two of the committee giants — Chairman McClellan of Arkansas and Sen. Magnuson of Washington State. They said his committee was not coordinating its activities with theirs. "Mr. Budget" was creating chaos and confusion, they charged.
Muskie was alternately frustrated, angered, flushed with victory and torn by his own spending priorities and his responsibilities as chairman. What ticked him off most, however, was a story by syndicated columnists Evans and Novak charging that the budget reform process was "really a Senate shell game to fleece the pentagon."
The article was prompted by Muskie's unprecedented victory over the powerful military bloc when the Senate sent the procurement bill back to conference August 1. The story implied that the senator from Maine, one month earlier, had engineered a cutback in the nutrition-school lunch bill in order to win conservative support for reducing military spending. Evans and Novak said the real Muskie target is defense.
The columnists also accused Muskie's budget staff of juggling figures to give a misleading picture of how defense spending is shaping up compared with spending for social welfare.
The senator produced figures of his own in an attempt to show that Evans and Novak were dealing in "political gossip" rather than facts. The nub of his rebuttal was that his committee's opposition to the school lunch bill shows that it is just as concerned with overspending in the domestic area as in the defense-international area.
But, as Muskie himself conceded, his stand on these two bills has already shaken up the liberals on welfare spending who are now trumpeting word that the defeat of the defense bill carries "grave implications for domestic programs."
The Council on National Priorities and Resources issued a statement warning that "Muskie and the liberals on the Budget Committee seem to have been seduced by the conservatives ... This action will most likely exact a heavier toll on programs oriented to human needs."
Americans for Democratic Action, in a separate report applauded the use of the new budget process to control military spending but warned that if Muskie can defeat "Stennis and the Pentagon,"any major increases in social programs will be hard to come by. How, for example, the ADA asked, can we look for action on national health insurance?
In the face of attacks from right and left, Muskie was philosophical. "We haven't looked for thanks for our efforts. Any reward for this work will come slowly. It will come in the form of a return to the sound fiscal management Congress owes the taxpayers."
It is early in the game and Muskie's dilemma is not likely to diminish. There will always be a pressure group to argue that the national interest is being damaged by a specific cut. There will always be those who complain that social progress can only be achieved by greater spending.
But Muskie still feels that unless the integrity of the new budget process can be established in its first year of trial, Congress will have embarked on an exercise in fiscal fantasy and futility.
[From the Kennebec Journal, Aug. 7, 1975]
MUSKIE SCORES A COUP
Sen. Muskie scored a bona fide coup last week when the Senate, by a narrow margin, rejected a compromise military procurement a bill. It was an important test of the concepts of budgetary responsibility approved last year to take federal financing out of the helter-skelter, pork barrel groove.
As chairman of the Senate's new Budget Committee Muskie knew well his colleagues' propensity for 11th hour programs and back-stairs juggling. He came down hard on military spending in excess of ballpark figures adopted by Congress in May. And he won. It was the first time the new budget committee had decided to challenge a spending authorization or appropriation bill worked out by the standing committees. If the conference committee report were adopted, Muskie said in a floor speech, "we will inevitably bust the budget target for national defense." He didn't add that, in so doing, Congress would be undercutting the reforms it had approved and federal fiscal matters would return to their comfortable and expensive chaos.
The new Budget Act, fully operational next year when the fiscal year is changed, means Congress sets overall targets for revenue, appropriations, spending, deficits. Within this framework — already accomplished last May, you'll remember — are the guidelines as to how much Congress should appropriate in specific areas.
The rejected legislation refers to major weapons, among other things, and Muskie landed on a $60,000,000 item that would have committed Congress to building a Navy strike cruiser at a cost of more than one billion dollars next year.
The debate apparently uncovered a power struggle between the new Budget Committee and the senior members of the standing committee who see an invasion of their traditional turf. The Budget Committee won, thanks largely to the zeal Muskie threw into the fight. In so doing he saved the Budget Control Act since a key feature is the process by which Congress establishes spending priorities for itself before any fiscal legislation is enacted. It was a good day for the country.
[From the New York Times, Sept. 21, 19751
BUDGET REFORM: THE QUIET REVOLUTION ON CAPITOL HILL
(By James Reston)
WASHINGTON, September 19.— Sometimes it is the quiet things, slipping by almost unnoticed at the start, that change the power structure of this noisy city more than anything else. The new Senate and House Budget Committees are the latest evidence of the point.
These committees were formed just a year ago on the reasonable but unprecedented notion that the Congress itself should try tc keep its appropriations in line with the nation's revenues. It was even suggested that if the President or the committees of the Congress asked to put out more money than was likely to come in, the Budget Committees could challenge the deficit, and propose budget cuts and spending priorities.
Well, of course, the deficits are now running higher than ever before, and these Budget Committees of the Congress haven't had time to get their staffs or their procedures in order, but Muskie's liberal colleagues are scolding him for his cuts and priorities.
"Muskie and the liberals on the (Senate) Budget Committee," says the liberal Council of National Priorities and Resources, "seem to have been seduced by the conservatives." Likewise, the liberal Americans for Democratic Action concluded that "if Muskie can defeat Stennis and the Pentagon, he almost surely can defeat the Child Nutrition Act amendments ... and any major increase in social programs, such as expanded food stamp benefits, or any social initiatives."
But something new is happening here. Mr Muskie, Mr. Bellmon and their colleagues in the Senate Budget Committee are reaching beyond ideological and partisan assumptions and insisting that fiscal responsibility in the Congress is more important than the principle of guiding it not controlling appropriations has already been established.
For example, on last Aug. 1, the Senate, on the urging of both Republican and Democratic members of the Senate Budget Committee, rejected the fiscal 1976 military procurement conference report (H.R. 6674). On Capitol Hill, where committee decisions an usually regarded as commands, especially when the committees of the House and Senate agree in conference on the money to be voted, this was a startling surprise. Never before had a military budget conference report been defeated, especially when recommended by the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Stennis of Mississippi.
In the fight over money in this town, which most of the big fights are all about, there has been no more formidable coalition than the Pentagon and the Armed Services Committees. When they have agreed in the past, nobody could stand against them, not the rest of the Congress or even the President. But the Senate Budget Committee, led by Senator Edmund Muskie, Democrat of Maine and Senator Henry L. Bellmon, Republican of Oklahoma, prevailed.
What has happened in this intervention of the Senate Budget Committee may be more important than any other event in this Congress. The new Budget Committees have taken the problem of Congressional fiscal responsibility seriously. They have limited powers, but they have avoided party ideology and have dared to question the most powerful committee chairmen of the House and Senate.
Also, Mr. Muskie has made clear that his fight against what he regards as excessive spending by the Pentagon also applies to excessive spending on domestic social programs in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. He is leading the fight with Mr. Bellmon against what they regard as extravagance at HEW as well as across the river at the Pentagon, and the prerogatives of their parties or the committee chairmen.
Senator Muskie has been very careful to respect the prior responsibilities of the chairmen of the Appropriations Committees and the Ways and Means Committee, provided they stay within reasonable guidelines, pay attention to overall priorities, and work together to avoid "busting the budget."
"Nobody promised us a rose garden when we undertook budget reform," Mr. Muskie told the Senate the other day. "We knew the task of addressing our national fiscal priorities and beginning the long road back toward a balanced budget would be a thankless one.
"We knew those whose favorite programs would be cut would complain we were damaging the national interest, and those whose programs were allowed to grow might complain that the growth was not fast enough. We did so because of our conviction that failure to put the Congress and the country on the course toward fiscal responsibility and a balanced budget was to abandon our responsibility to our people.
"I think it's fair to say, at the end of our first year, that the Budget Committees of the House and Senate, with the help and support of the membership and committees of both bodies, have gained a toe-hold in the struggle toward fiscal responsibility."
And of course, it's no more than a toe-hold bitterly opposed by many of the most powerful Democratic chairmen and liberal members of the Democratic party, but these Budget Committees, created almost by accident after President Nixon's impounding of funds voted often recklessly by the Congress, and aided mightily by the financial nightmare of New York City's financial crisis, are gradually having an important effect on Capitol Hill. Almost unnoticed, they may have started a quiet revolution in the Congress, and imposed a little common sense upon the ideological and party struggles on Capitol Hill.
[From the Tampa Tribune, Sept. 14, 1975]
CONGRESS IS HOLDING THE LINE
(By Donald Smith)
WASHINGTON.— At a time when success stories about Congress are hard to find, here is one to watch.
Last spring, Congress set for itself a $367 billion target for the amount of Federal spending it intended to approve during the summer for the fiscal 1976 budget. So far Congress has stuck to the target.
The toughest test of Congress budgeting procedures, operating for the first time this year, is still two months off. But the fact that things have gone so well to date has lifted a few eyebrows on Capitol Hill, particularly among conservatives. Many of them are crediting the system with helping to keep Congress from overreacting to the recession by adopting expensive new spending programs.
"Considering the process is still in its infancy, I'm pleased with our results so far," said Henry Bellmon of Oklahoma, the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee. Bellmon's counterpart in the House committee, Ohio's Delbert L. Latta, agreed, "I've seen some of these people who have been labeled as big spenders saying we ought to cut back, or at least give some thought to cutting spending," he says.
Some liberals, on the other hand, feel the system is working too well. They contend that it has cowed Congress into essentially accepting President Ford's conservative fiscal policy.
"The whole thing is an absolute failure so far," contends AFL-CIO economist Arnold Cantor. "What they have done is not at all responsive to the needs of the economy. If they continue along this vein, I'd just as soon see the system go down the drain, because it isn't doing anybody any good."
The purpose of the new procedures is to consolidate the scattered pieces of legislative activity pertaining to the Federal budget into a coordinated Congressional spending strategy.
To do this, Congress last year set up the House and Senate Budget Committees to formulate overall spending and tax goals, and a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to provide Congress with technical information about the economy and the budget.
The law also created a set of deadlines for Congressional action on the budget. One key date each year is April 15, when Congress is supposed to have completed action on a resolution containing budget targets to guide the various committees as they process fiscal legislation during the summer.
The other important date is Sept. 15, when Congress is obliged to enact a second resolution, replacing the targets with binding limits on such items as total Federal spending and the amount of the deficit. This year the deadline for the second resolution has been pushed back to Nov. 20.
If the limits adopted in the second resolution differ from those adopted during the summer through the individual pieces of spending legislation, Congress must reconcile the amounts before it can adjourn.
The most concrete evidence that the system is working is the fact that Congressional action on appropriations bills to date generally has been consistent with the targets Congress adopted in the first resolution last May.
As Congress returned from its latest recess, the House — where all spending bills originate — had approved $77.4 billion in outlays contained in 11 appropriations bills, according to a House Budget Committee status report. That amount was $6 billion below the corresponding spending targets envisioned in the first resolution.
At the same time, the Senate had completed action on seven appropriations bills. The Senate Budget Committee, which does not have the same scorekeeping system as the House, could not provide an exact comparison between the targets and the amounts actually passed. But, according to a spokesman, "So far they (the bills) have all been consistent with or inside the targets."
Part of the success Congress has had in adhering to the targets is due to Ford's threat of vetoing any new spending measures. The President's vetoes of a $5.3 billion emergency jobs bill and an emergency farm bill, which he said would add $1.8 billion to the fiscal 1976 deficit, helped Congress stay well below its targets. The House sustained both vetoes.
With that kind of pressure from Ford, most observers doubt that Congress will overshoot its total $367 billion spending target by more than $3 billion to $5 billion by November, when the time comes to replace the targets with binding limits. Ford's requests for the two major appropriations bills remaining to be taken up in Congress — defense and foreign aid — both exceed the Congressional targets.
However, if action on the remaining bills does greatly exceed the targets, the stage could be set for a battle that could wreck the process.
The scenario that the Budget Committees fear the most goes as follows: if, after a number of reconciliation rounds, spending and the spending ceiling still do not agree, it may become apparent that a majority cannot be formed around any further cutting of spending or further raising of the ceiling.
For example, liberal members might refuse to cut social programs they already have approved, and conservatives might oppose cutting defense. And various factions could coalesce to hold down the spending ceiling because of dissatisfaction with cuts already voted or with the size of the deficit.
In that case, the system "can destroy itself," House Budget Committee Chairman Brock Adams, D-Wash., acknowledged. "If people don't want to be rational and make it work, it can be destroyed."
Adams puts the importance of holding the system together in terms of Congressional versus executive power.
"People are seeing for the first time where all the money is going, and I'm not sure they like it," he said. "But I keep telling them, if you want to be in on governing through the revenue and spending policy of the United States, you've got to use this act. That's what the House and Senate have got to decide. Otherwise it's the President's game completely, and you're out."