July 15, 1975
Page 22800
BUDGET SCOREKEEPING REPORTS
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, my colleagues have on their desks this morning for the first time two new tools for fiscal responsibility.
One is a scorekeeping report which will be published monthly by the Congressional Budget Office. It will review our legislative actions to date and compare them with the budget figures in the first concurrent resolution..
The second report — the Senate Budget Scorekeeping Report — will be produced weekly by the CBO specifically for the use of the Senate.
The Senate report is complementary to the monthly CBO report, but expands upon it in three very important ways:
First, it not only catalogs past spending action, but tries to anticipate spending bills that are coming down the road, so that each Senator can know, as he votes today, what other competing expenditures he may face tomorrow. This is a totally new concept in scorekeeping — one which I am extremely proud to make available to my colleagues and one which I believe will dramatically increase the chances for fiscal self-discipline which Congress sought when the new budget procedures were established.
Second, the weekly Senate report will cover authorizing legislation as well as spending until a subsequent appropriations bill has been passed. Nevertheless, it is my firm belief that we must apply the same standard of discipline to authorizing bills as we wish to apply to spending bills if we expect to achieve fiscal responsibility and a rational pattern of national priorities. Both restraint and hard priority choices must begin at the beginning, with authorizing bills.
Third, the Senate report will tell the Senate how each bill compares to each priority in the budget and how these separate priorities compare to the total Federal spending authorized in the congressional budget. These comparisons will be essential as we proceed with the long and difficult process we have begun through budget reform to redirect our national spending priorities.
Now, let me illustrate just how important this weekly report will be by calling the attention of my colleagues to a summary table on page 9.
First comes the concurrent resolution target — $367 billion in outlays.
Next, spending legislation on which action has been completed — either as a result of enactments in prior years or enactments this session — $210.5 billion.
Next, under section II-B, legislation which has passed the Senate or has been reported to the Senate but has not yet been enacted by both houses and signed into law — $5.7 billion.
Then, in addition to these amounts which will almost certainly be on the books, we must add a figure for other spending bills which we know will be before us. For this purpose, we have shown the President's spending request not yet reported in the Senate — $153.4 billion.
What do these figures show? They show that if all the legislation now on the books and on the horizon is enacted, we will be $2.6 billion over the concurrent resolution target adopted in May.
That is a key figure. That is the figure that reminds us as we consider the President's requests and legislation now reported in the Senate that we will be over our target unless we exercise real restraint. That is the figure that keeps our feet to the fire.
But we cannot stop there. The truth is that there is still other spending legislation and authorizing legislation pending in our committees — legislation many of us now unaware of — which can drive that $2.6 billion figure much higher. We have attempted to identify such legislation. This is not an exact science to be sure, but throughout this report there are tables by functional category which list bills we know are pending and which taken together, we now believe, could drive us as much as $12.6 billion over our overall targets.
This figure appears at the bottom of table I.
So, Mr. President, we do not have money to spend. We have money to save, and I am convinced that this scorekeeping report will help us do it.
Let me call the attention of my colleagues to some other features of this report.
On page 7, there is a list of legislative highlights covering specific bills expected to be on the floor or reported in the weeks ahead.
Each of these bills then appears again in its appropriate function, tables for which begin on page 15. The first of these tables — table A — matches the one I have already described for the budget as a whole, but on a function-by-function basis. Subsequent tables enumerate additional legislation within that function which we must keep in mind as we vote.
It will take all of us time to learn to use this report. It undoubtedly can be improved, but for us, for the press, for the public, I believe it represents a major step toward a more orderly and responsible fiscal policy.