While America’s Representatives and Senators are on break until after the Midterm Elections, National Taxpayers Union Foundation researchers are still hard at work on the BillTally project. The program is the nation’s only comprehensive study that scores nearly every introduced bill in Congress for changes in spending. As we score each bill (as a “no cost,” increase, or decrease in budgetary outlays), we tack the possible fiscal impact to the proposal’s sponsor and cosponsors. Then, after NTUF experts score the thousands of bills in each chamber, taxpayers can see what kind of spending their elected officials support.
Though BillTally is complex and at times daunting, it is vital to taxpayers to hold Congress accountable. In an age where the news cycle is getting shorter and shorter, the media will mention a bill only once or twice and offer few details on how a measure’s enactment would affect the federal budget. That’s where NTUF comes in and provides you with the cost or savings of a bill, where we got the information from (often times from third party sources like the Congressional Budget Office and budget documents), and whether or not your Representative or Senators have signed onto it. Sometimes, we include bills, both ripped from the headlines or receiving little attention, in our weekly newsletter, The Taxpayer’s Tab, and broadcast our findings on our special @NTUF Twitter account.
The latest BillTally report, The Tea is Cooling: The First Session of the 113th Congress, found that Congress might be headed back to its historical spending-increase patterns. House Members have, on average, proposed 4.4 spending-increase bills for every one decrease bill while Senators introduced almost six spending bills for every one cut measure. Compared to the so-called “Tea Party Congress” from 2011 to 2012, legislators are either sponsoring more increase proposals or fewer savings bills. In either Congress, legislators have yet to reach savings levels comparable to the 104th Congress, which was when Republicans retook the House en masse.
All told, NTUF found that if every non-overlapping introduced measure was signed into law, taxpayers would face an almost $1.1 trillion spending increase for each of the next five years. By party, the average Democrat in either chamber has a spending-increase agenda whereas House and Senate Republicans supported net cuts to the federal government. Search for your officials’ line-by-line agendas here!
The bottom line from the latest BillTally report is that the average spending-growth agenda is getting smaller and budget-cutting agendas are also getting smaller (i.e. both averages are getting closer to zero change in current spending).
As taxpayers, reporters, and those on Capitol Hill consider the findings of the report, NTUF offers you a breakdown of how we conduct our BillTally research and some more, easily digestible facts in a new video, featuring NTUF Director of Research Demian Brady (author of the study), NTUF President Pete Sepp (an encyclopedia of budget information), and myself (cruncher of data, much of which can be found in the BillTally Resources page).
Share the video with your network so we can get the information to taxpayers that they need! Also, consider supporting NTUF with a tax-deductible contribution so we can score more bills, make more videos, and shine the light of transparency on more government spending.
Special thanks to NTUF Communications Manager Doug Kellogg for pulling the levers behind the camera and getting the video online.