Process. They spoke at an event hosted by the committee for a responsible federal budget. So, this sounds really loud to me. Does it sound okay to people . Yeah . Hello everybody. Im maya mcginnis. I run the committee for responsible budget. Im pleased you joined us for our forum. Many of you probably know this, but the committee for responsible federal budget is a Bipartisan Organization focused on fiscal responsibility. And if you look at the world right now where the debt is at near record levels, never been this high relative to the economy since world war ii and the deficit is the largest its ever been when the economy is this strong its a really important issue to focus on right now. Im smiling so i dont cry. I was thinking i look really happy. Its a troubling time for fiscal policy. Theres no question about that. Let me just tell you quickly about two projects that we are doing before i kick off our really great panels and speakers for this afternoon. The first project were doing right now is something we do every year on Election Year called u. S. Budget watch. And what we have started doing and we will continue to do is we look at all the promises that are put forth from the political candidates who are running for president and we both provide as many explainers as possible in our unbiased, nonpartisan way, kind of explaining what the policies are. And then we evaluate the details and put out the numbers in terms of how they would affect the National Debt. This, we believe, is critically important to try to push a discussion into the president ial campaign discussion that many candidates would prefer to ignore which is what are we going to do about this Huge National debt . What would the effect of these various policies be . And try to have a discussion that we all know is a real one also, budget constraints, how do these things fit into the overall budget picture. For anybody whos interested, we hope youll look at this. If you go to our website we have a very big analysis so far of the Health Care Proposals of the leading four candidates for the president ial candidates. We will soon be putting out more detalled policy scores of all of the proposals they have. And there are a lot of explainers on there. So, u. S. Budget watch for anybody who wants to see how the candidates are thinking about the National Debt. The second project i wanted to share with everybody here is something we launched about a month ago, and its called fix us. And fix us is a project thats run by my colleague mike murphy who we are looking at the question of how the country got so dysfunctional, so filled with distrust. How we got to this place and first we think we have to understand how we got here in order to figure out how to go forward. But many of you might be saying, i wake up and say also you are a budget group, why are you trying to fix the entire divide in the country and its a fair question. The answer is, after years and years of working on these fiscal issues and how much harder its become to address them, even while theres a lot of interest on both sides of the aisle for doing something. The real answer is, we have divisions running as deep they do in the nation is more difficult than ever to do all the things they need to fix the debt. What its going to take to fix the National Debt is a willingness to focus on the longer term issues instead of just the immediate political issues. Thinking about policy answers rather than political answers. Theres a real commitment to changing how our budget process works and bipartisan interest and leadership so i am optimistic and hopeful we can make some Real Progress in these topics. When i look at budget process and many people were share these concerns, you see a process where theres basically no accountability, there is the focus that misses long term and theres a tremendous amount of transparency and many dont understand budget speak and policy makers dont understand budget speak. But its written in another language to keep people feeling out of the entire process. The budget by crisis way too often these days will tell you the only way we get anything done and if you look at the fiscal outcome they are truly dreadful. The case that we need the budget process overall is not a difficult one to make and the notion that we run this Company Without a budget is something that should be shocking to everybody. The fact that when we cant get the work done our political leaders decide to shut the government down and its a punchline, its incredible that thats whats happening and i think the fact that we have a trillion dollar deficit at a time of Economic Growth there is no limiting factor of how you put a budget together and if you put it by the budget together what kind of fiscal goals you have and there is no requirement of something being included in that and thats incredibly troubling and all those things in the discussion that we have today which is considering how to move the process. So, again, i will acknowledge most people will have remarks that budget process only works with people who are doing the budget and it cannot force any lawmakers to do anything. It can really help them move along and build systems that allow if they care about the budget responsibly to do so. The good news here is that there are a lot of members who do care about this issue. Theres the select committee which came up with a lot of good ideas and had good interest in all four house senate, republican, democrats in a lot of ideas of come out of that. Theres leadership and you hear from them today in the process reforms and a whole lot of members of congress who say, i dont want to be a part of this non passing budget. My personal belief these days is that there shouldnt be a Single Member of congress who doesnt have an idea of where they think the budget should be in a reasonable amount of time and ten years from now and how they think we should get there. They are certainly not going to agree agree, thats not the problem at all but its any political leader in this country that will have a plan to what they think the budget should be. Looking at the one right now thats unsustainable with that growing faster and going to the fastest part of the budget no member of congress should say im okay with that by not doing anything im okay in that process. That is just my thought of getting to a place where every member feel its on them to have some thoughts for how we should be budgeting. Thats what you hear for me i will turn it over to two tremendous panels and will be hearing from three senators and theres different ideas of the real work working on this issue. I will invite the first panel to come on up. The moderator jennifer shut will take us through the wealth of experience on this panel so thank you all for joining us and thank you all for joining us. applause hello everyone im Jennifer Shutt at sea queue roll call and i spend a lot of my time talking with lawmakers and staff and not just about the process but about the annual spending bills and we are here today to talk a little bit about some of the efforts in the past few years to overhaul the annual budget and appropriations process as well as the personalities of the politicians that are paying those forward and the real life politics that impact the process every year. So, one thing id like to point out is that everyone on our tables should have cards that you can submit questions on so if you want to write down a question at any point during the Panel Members from the committee with responsibility of the federal budget will collect those from you. Joining me today is laura blessing at Georgetown University and phil joyce from the university of maryland, rory myers from Baltimore County and Steve Redburn from George Washington university. They are going to give Opening Statements and will start off with laura who will talk about what the budget and process is supposed to look like. Suppose already hello everyone, and the federal budget process is broken and there are few things that we can agree on that makes the list in hamilton of course. Beyond the process itself there are related problems and everyone thinks that this is merely a issue of hitting deadlines. We are in trillion dollar deficits where coordinates fall and resolutions to make it more difficult for federal agencies to do their jobs under certain conditions and the most account of this was the secretary mattis is 2017 long term see ours are negatively affective in readiness in their significant threats and hamstrung budget process makes it difficult to set National Priorities or problems with many kinds with all Government Shutdowns are costly and harmful. Ill kick us off by expanding with the budget is supposed to look like. I reviewed a review of the former procedure created by the 1974 budget act, wheels of complex multi stage process and the 1974 act contained a number of improvements and previously added process of appropriation bills and comprehensive process for Discretionary Spending along with new resources with congressional but Budget Office and committees. It imposed a timeline and created a new procedural tools, according to the 1974 law, they police a budget in february, congressional budget outlook report to the Budget Committee and they create a budget reggie lieu xin with low amounts of Discretionary Spending. Possibly reconciliation instructions that Congress Passes in april with the House Appropriations committees deciding how much of that discretionary total the 12 Appropriations Committees each get. The house gets to work on their bills in may, finishing in june followed by the senates work on the same individual bills, followed by conference committees and final congressional passage and president s signature by october 1st, the start of a new fiscal year. So, to simplify, youve got the president s proposal, the Budget Committees budget resolution, house action, senate, action bills go to conference committee. They pass and get the president to sign them. This is the process in theory. When congress does not keep the schedule, they can use a continued resolution or see our to continue spending at current levels with occasional exceptions called anomalies to avoid a Government Shutdown and in practice we have seen a lot of scars as well as combining individual appropriations fills into must pass omnibus legislation. We have seen this complicated process progressively breakdown as congress is polarized and you procedural problems have been created. Earlier on, the hurdle was the senate as Appropriations Bills reach filibusters so, failing later in the process that i just described, but after the 20 tenure mark span there has not been a single appropriations bill individually passed into law. The start process starts failing earlier in the house and more recently, the Budget Committees are failing to pass budget resolutions, so thats even earlier. All of this makes the entire process more leadership driven but also more volatile. Budget resolutions in the president s budget are increasingly seen as messaging documents and more worrisome procedural elements have been added in addition to the iraq span of 2010. Constitutional amendments can derail the process as members of Congress Take advantage of the reticence of openness to make their mark interpreter . A sequestration regime was created significantly complicated process and the most worrisome change is the perennial inclusion of the debt ceiling in all of this budget handling as well as coming to the razors edge of default in 2011 and too close for comfort in 2013. This is an important topic and im delighted to be here today with wonderful copanels to discuss it. And now we will walk everyone through the principles of process reform and the anti deficiency act. I was asked to talk about what a better budget process might look like and its actually a pretty low bar, isnt, it based on what laura has said. But i want to set a high bar by referring to something published in the journal policy sizes two decades ago and it was drawn upon by a convergence project. Those of you were at this summit two years ago would be familiar with that work. And it set out ten principles that i thought would be useful to how one could design a better budget process. I will not mention all ten because we dont have time but i do want to think, and what i mentioned most important ones particularly as they relate to the White House Bill the senators will be talking about later. To start with two principles that have been emphasized, one is that the budget should be constrained, that, is limiting the amount of money that need to be acquired by the government and second, that it be perceptive. That is, looking into the long term as well as the short term and right now of course macro by terry policies is arguably not meeting those criteria. Now, i dont particularly want to advocate for any path for a federal budget deficit or debt but i do think its worthwhile to think about the provision in the White House Bill that would have the congress by anybody set debt to gdp targets. That is one thing i hope they will discuss. We also probably should spend a little more time thinking about the long term risk of climate change, both medication and adaptation, in our long term budget outlooks. In my opinion, though the even more important principle is that the budget process we judgmental, and by that i mean seeking ways to obtain the most benefits for the least costs and to do that, we probably have to at the same time satisfied to other criteria. One is the budget being comprehensive, that is including all uses of the governments Financial Resources and second, honest, based on unbiased projections. And frankly i think much of the current budget process meets those latter two and that we have a reasonably comprehensive budget and if you look at the excellent work done by cbo and by many budget professionals in the executive branch and our committee staff, they work hard and they try to come up with good estimates and informal elected officials about those. And that is particularly important, i have to say, given that we have a president now who is not really wellknown for his honesty. The process, however is not designed to truly identify priorities to meet that judgmental criterion and in part, because the budget is not fully comprehensive in its treatment of tax expenditures. One thing that dnc White House Bill does is that it would increase the integration of tax expenditures into the Spending Review process. It also would create a very minimal but First Step Towards a portfolio budgeting process that the late poll poster has written about and this particular bill, which is a little bit weaker than what senator enzi proposed earlier, we provide information to the Budget Committee about portfolios that would be groups of professional, mandatory tax expenditure programs which then could be used to formulate a budget resolution that would be more judgmental. There are some other principles that i could talk about and we wont have time, perhaps in the questions but i want to briefly mention the impoundment issue. Certainly one of the makers of the stimuli that congress and acted in the congressional budget control act was president actions challenge of the Congress Congressional law, the power of the person arguably we are going through a similar situation now with the controversy over reprogramming and transfers for the wall. We are seeing of course the Ukrainian Security assistance being the basis for the house impeachment of the president. There also were some arguably questionable decisions made by the omb council and others regarding who could work during the shutdown that might be a violation of the anti deficiency act so my hope is that given these kind of situations, it might provide more dissimilar members of congress, not just democrats but also republicans, to consider that the institutional power of congress is being challenged now by this president and over the long run, that would weaken the individual influence of each member of congress. And steve is going to talk to us now about some Lessons Learned from International Examples in terms of how to get to a functioning, on time budget appropriations process. For 20 years i worked at omb, so i was part of the problem but as you said, more recently ive been doing some International Work and i think its been giving me a new perspective on the way we budget and perhaps useful new insights. European countries, a number of whom i have visited in the last few months, since the financial crisis, have individually and collectively made major changes in their budget procedures. Individually, most have established independent Budget Offices or parliamentary Budget Offices, in many cases modeled consciously after our Congressional Budget Office. Most have adopted a multi year medium term framework for in the budget, they are by lengthening their budget horizons, thinking not just about next year with three to five years out at least. Many have conducted periodic indepth