Mulvaney: The president’s budget is meaningless, the rules on spending need a re-write

You may have noticed that President Biden’s 2025 budget was released this week. I say “may” because apart from the obligatory comments from the financial media and think tanks, no one seems to care.

Even among people who may not have cared about the budget at all, few other than true budget fanatics noticed that the document was more than a month late. I kept looking for flashy headlines like, “White House misses Budget Control Act deadline… Executive downplays law violations.” Well, maybe next time.

One might expect that Congress, especially the opposition, would call for any kind of parliamentary investigation into how the White House is violating the law. But the whole saying, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,” is in a way a hindrance. Congress must pass a budget by April 15 each year under the same budget law. The last time I met that deadline, bill clinton was president. In fact, for years, Congress has failed to pass a proper budget at all, simply “deeming” it passed, then moving on to spending or adjusting the budget to get around the Senate’s filibuster rules. You can use the process.

To the extent that members of Congress even pay attention to the president’s budget for the year, they do so primarily to buy media time, where opposition parties decry the document as “dead on arrival.” In fact, even Republicans were quick to attack President Trump’s first budget proposal as a complete waste of time. That’s because the budget proposed far more spending cuts than many in his party were willing to consider.

The president’s budget is a completely worthless document when it comes to actually spending money. Students of the Constitution can understand why, since Congress, not the president, actually spends the money.as The constitution stipulates that“No money is withdrawn from the Treasury as a result of expenditures made by law.”

Even if Congress were to pass another proper budget, by law the president would have nothing to do with it. A budget is simply a resolution regulating parliamentary practice, not a law. It does not need to be signed by the president.

The president’s role in fiscal spending is essentially limited to signing spending bills and controlling the flow of funds from the Treasury at the direction of Congress.

So from a spending perspective, the president’s budget means nothing. Yes, it has all sorts of important policy implications, and certainly, it says a lot about any administration’s priorities. But when it comes to actually moving a dollar, which is what most people would consider “budgeting,” he doesn’t really need to.

It’s time to recognize this and rewrite the rules for how government money is spent. Recently, efforts have been made to do so. House Republicans proposed the “No Budget, No Payroll” law nearly a decade ago. The bill was doomed to fail because it would create perverse incentives for lawmakers to create bad budgets in order to get paid. But at least I tried to shed some light on this subject.

There are also some current initiatives. Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) has begun considering the topic, as have some members of Congress from both parties. The simple fact that everyone seems to recognize the weaknesses of the current system is somewhat encouraging.

The bottom line is that, at this point, the Budget Control Act of 1973 does nothing in terms of actually setting budgets or controlling government spending.

I could write at length about all of the economic messages underlying the Biden budget. It would raise taxes by more than $5 trillion, with most of the money going to increased spending. Because we assume lower interest rates than any reputable company, we can expect artificially lower interest payments and smaller deficits. It claims to fix Social Security in unspecified ways. He claims he will “pay for” extending some of the expiring Trump tax cuts, but hasn’t said how.

Even so, they are merely political criticisms. These have nothing to do with actual spending or taxes. Only Congress actually spends the money.

If you care about spending at all, you can basically ignore the president’s budget at any time. The only things you need to watch out for are spending or “appropriations” bills that are passed by Congress and signed by the president. Everything else, including essentially everything in the Budget Act of 1973, is just window dressing.

mick mulvaney He is a former member of the South Carolina House of Representatives and a NewsNation contributor. Under President Donald Trump, he served as Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Acting Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and White House Chief of Staff.