One of the biggest tasks facing Congress during its very busy fall is to keep the lights on in the federal government by passing funding for the next fiscal year by the time this one ends on Sept. 30.

The Republican majority had some success moving the 12 bills that determine funding for each part of government earlier in the year but ran headlong into a wall of Democratic opposition over disagreements on whether to raise spending caps determined by the Budget Control Act in 2011. Implementation of those caps has been delayed, through continuing resolutions keeping federal funding level, and in 2013, through a deal struck by Sen. Patty Murphy, D-Wash., and Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., after lengthy negotiations.

That deal expires this year, and Democrats – backed by the promise of a presidential veto – have so far refused to allow Republicans to pass their spending bills, which feature deep cuts in domestic spending but use a workaround to raise funding for defense. Time is running out for a new deal, and another continuing resolution is now the most likely path forward to prevent a government shutdown.

Ed Lorenzen, a senior adviser with the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, worked on congressional budgets for three decades under former Rep. Charlie Stenholm, D-Texas, and House Minority Leader (then Majority Leader) Steny Hoyer, D-Md. U.S. News recently spoke with Lorenzen about how Congress got itself into this mess and how it might find a way out. Excerpts:

In a normal budget process, Congress would individually pass 12 appropriations bills, but that's been nearly impossible in recent Congresses. Can you explain what's gone so wrong?

Divided governments, with a Republican majority in Congress that has very different priorities than the president, means that we have Congress passing appropriations bills that are very much at odds with what the president is willing to sign, and that slows things up. But there's also divisions within the Republican Party itself; that's prevented them from passing all the appropriations bills on time as well, and the difficulty of getting a majority of Republicans to support appropriations bills means that they're not able to pass bills until there's, say, a compromise that can get Democratic votes.

But the other factor that has really affected it is what's known as sequestration, that in 2011, Congress and the president agreed that there was going to be a supercommittee that was going to achieve debts reduction, and if it failed, there would be deep cuts that primarily affected discretionary spending subject to appropriations. That was not supposed to take effect, that was supposed to be the penalty that everyone wanted to avoid, that would force a budget deal, but Congress and the president failed to reach an agreement on a budget deal and so now we have these deep reductions in discretionary spending taking place, and Congress and the president aren't able to agree on a bigger budget deal to replace those.

Democrats have repeatedly called for a budget deal like Ryan-Murray in 2013. Republicans have insisted Democrats pass their appropriations bills as-is. And now, as many predicted, we're looking at a continuing resolution, and have run out of time for a real budget deal before funding expires on Sept. 30. Why wasn't it possible for lawmakers to repeat their 2013 successes?


It's often that Congress first wants to show what its priorities were, and what its position was and force the president to veto it. Republicans also were able to use the Overseas Contingency Operation designation, which is intended to be for war spending, as a slush fund to essentially circumvent the spending limits on defense and undo the spending cuts from sequestration on defense.

The basic theory behind the sequester was that cuts would be evenly divided between defense and domestic spending so both Republicans, who are generally more concerned about defense, and Democrats, who are generally more concerned about domestic spending, would have an equal incentive to negotiate a deal. But in their budget, the Republicans essentially put an extra $38 billion into the OCO category, which allowed them to undo all of the cuts in defense spending under sequestration without undoing domestic spending [cuts].

From Republicans' perspective, they were able to get the increased spending they were concerned about without negotiating a new deal, and they bet the Democrats would not be willing to stand up and block increased spending in defense, but thus far they have. And that's part of what has brought us to where we are right now. They wanted to try to see if pressure would build on Democrats to go along with higher defense spending, and they still had some hope that that will change and Democrats will stop being against higher defense spending.

So Republicans are now comfortable with leaving sequestration in place?

Even though the sequester was not supposed to take effect and was supposed to be what forced a big deal, there's definitely a sizeable contingent of Republicans who have decided that having the sequester take effect is a good thing and they want to leave it in place. The ability to get the funding they want for defense took away a large part of their interest to negotiate a bigger deal.

In 2013, you still had Democratic control of the Senate. Now there's a greater expectation among the tea party that the cuts in domestic spending will stay in place because Republicans control the House and Senate.

Having said that, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell [R-Ky.,] has said that he does expect there to be a need to have negotiations on budget levels. The challenge is just that it will take time to work out a deal, and the longer we wait the harder it will be to put something together and the more likely it is that Congress will resort to gimmicks to meet the increased spending needs, as opposed to doing what they should do, which is replacing the cuts in discretionary spending with smarter, permanent savings.

We know the political price of a government shutdown are terrible. But what about spending in general? Do both sides have winning arguments?

There doesn't seem to be a great deal of appetite among congressional leaders for a shutdown fight. And in terms that there's been any talk of a shutdown, it hasn't been over the spending levels, it's been over policy riders, particularly the issue of defunding Planned Parenthood. That's not really about the spending levels.

And that's frankly one of the other things that has made it harder to pass appropriations bills. All of the policy fights with Congress using the appropriations fights to prevent the administration from implementing certain policies and adding other riders to them, that it's not about spending levels but about changing policy.

If you had to predict, what do you think will happen in the next few weeks?

I would think that it's possible to pass a short-term continuing resolution to buy a little bit of time without resolving the issues of the overall top line and without having to deal with a lot of the controversial policy riders like Planned Parenthood. But once you try to get something that's going to last for the full fiscal year, or even several months into the next fiscal year, then the disagreements about what the totals are, as well as all of the other policy riders, becomes a much bigger issue. And then it will get wrapped into the other issues with the debt limit needing to be raised in November or December, and you see a lot of things that will have to get done that Congress will be facing.

The challenge that the Republican leadership will have is striking the balance of something that can get enough Democratic support. There's going to be some contingent of Republicans who are unlikely to vote for any continuing resolution that doesn't defund Planned Parenthood, and so they have to find something that is acceptable to the bulk of the Republican conference but that is able to get enough Democratic support to offset defections.