A glitch in Congressional budget rules could easily cost taxpayers $351 million. Thankfully, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Mike Enzi (R-WY) has introduced an amendment to a pending appropriations bill that would fix this problem and ensure that a spending increase is offset over the entirety of the budget window, not just for the first year. This would prevent appropriators from boosting the budgetary baseline with spending hikes that would be exempt from budget enforcement and preserve basic budgetary rules that prohibit including a mandatory spending hike in an appropriations bill. Mandatory spending already consumes a growing portion of our federal budget. Any increase without the accountability of offsets would only exacerbate this mounting crisis.
It’s a highly technical issue caused by provision in the FY 2019 Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education appropriations bill that increases the maximum Pell Grant award by $100 to $5,135 for 2019-2020. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that this would increase spending by $39 million for the 2019-2020 award year. The underlying measure provides an offset for the first year, but CBO is required under scoring rules to assume that the increase would be included in the baseline for the rest of the 10-year budget window, adding $351 million over Fiscal Years 2020 through 2028. This would lock higher mandatory spending levels into the baseline for future years, meaning that the increase will not be subject to budget enforcement and the higher levels would not have to be offset.
The Enzi amendment would prevent this from happening by requiring that the higher spending that would otherwise be built into the baseline from FY 2020-2028 would need to be offset in the future, just like current funding.
It is crucial to protect the integrity of the budget process – and the wallets of taxpayers – by ensuring that the spending baseline is not inflated and that increases are not exempt from fiscal discipline. As Senator Enzi said on the Senate floor, “Let’s not be spending into the future until we know where the money is coming from.”