Letter
Support Legislation to Apply Unobligated Funds to Deficit Reduction
April 11, 2011
Dear Member of Congress:
On behalf of the 362,000 members of
the National Taxpayers Union (NTU), I urge you to support legislative efforts
that would require the Director of the Office of Management and Budget to
rescind money from certain unobligated balances of discretionary
appropriations. The “Decrease Spending Now Act,” introduced as H.R. 1111 by
Representative Price (R-GA) and as S. 726 by Senator Rubio (R-FL), is
commonsense legislation that allows us to apply unused taxpayer dollars to pay
down our deficit.
Nearly every federal department
ends each year with billions of dollars in unobligated funding. This is money
that Congress has appropriated to agencies but has gone unspent, often for
years at a time. A recent report by the OMB found $703 billion in unobligated
federal money gathering dust in department coffers waiting to be spent.
Research conducted by Senator Tom Coburn’s office estimates that more than $82
billion of these funds are between six and 20 years old.
Needless to say, at a time of
record deficits, the very existence of a glorified “slush fund” amounting to $703
billion is simply unacceptable. Despite the enormous unspent balances,
year-after-year Congress has borrowed billions more dollars to increase funding
levels for programs. It is a sad indictment of Washington’s budgeting habits
that Congress has been appropriating money far faster than even our voracious
bureaucracy can spend it. At a time when many families are watching every penny
of their own finances, such gross mismanagement of taxpayer dollars must stop.
Both parties are now locked in
heated debate over the size and substance of reductions in government
expenditures. Even the modest cuts being proposed, which make a nearly
imperceptible dent in the budget deficit, are being unjustly impugned as
harmful to core government functions. Even at this decisive moment in politics,
Washington should be able to agree that using unspent federal funds for deficit
reduction is far wiser than forcing taxpayers to pay for unneeded departmental
funding increases or continuing to add to our $14 trillion debt. It is
therefore encouraging that 81 Senators, including 34 Democrats, are already on
record as having supported a similar proposal as part of S. 223, the Federal
Aviation Administration Reauthorization bill. Accordingly, we hope your
colleagues maintain their backing of this commonsense legislation and make
passage of these proposals a priority.
Sincerely,
Brandon Greife
Federal Government Affairs
Manager
