Mulvaney: The president’s budget is meaningless, the rules on spending need a re-write

You may have noticed the rollout of President Biden’s 2025 budget this week. I say “may” because, outside of the obligatory comments from financial media and think tanks, nobody seemed to care.

Even among those who might have cared at all about the budget, very few other than true budget geeks noticed that the document was more than a month late. I kept looking for the splashy headlines: “White House misses deadlines of Budget Control Act …Administration downplays violation of law.” Well, maybe next time.

One might expect Congress, especially in the opposition party, to clamor for all sorts of congressional investigations into how the White House is breaking the law. But that whole “let him who is without sin cast the first stone” proverb sort of gets in the way. Congress is required to pass its budget by April 15 each year, under the same Budget Act. The last time it met that deadline, Bill Clinton was president. Indeed, many years, Congress doesn’t pass a proper budget at all, simply “deeming” that it has, so that it can move on to spend money or use the budget reconciliation process to circumvent Senate filibuster rules.

To the extent that members of Congress even note the president’s budget in any given year, it is mostly so that the opposition party can get some earned media time decrying the document as “dead on arrival.” Indeed, even Republicans were quick to attack President Trump’s first budget as a complete waste of time, since it proposed to cut spending far, far more than many in his own party were willing to consider.

A president’s budget is a fairly worthless document when it comes to actually spending money. Students of the Constitution understand why, as it is Congress, not the president, who actually does the spending. As the Constitution puts it, “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.”  

Even if Congress were ever to pass a proper budget again, the president, by law, would have nothing to do with it. Budgets are resolutions that merely govern the practices of Congress, not laws. They don’t have to be signed by the president.

Any president’s role in spending money is basically limited to signing spending bills and managing the flow of cash from the Treasury as Congress directs.  

From a spending perspective, then, the president’s budget means nothing. Yes, it has all sorts of critical policy implications, and, yes, it says a great deal about the priorities of any administration. But when it comes to actually moving dollar one — when it comes to what most people considering “budgeting” — there really is no need for it. 

It’s time to acknowledge this and re-write the rules on how the government spends money.There have been efforts to do that in the recent past. House Republicans offered up the “No Budget, No Pay” act about a decade or so ago. This bill was doomed to failure, as it would have created perverse incentives for members to put out bad budgets in order to get paid. But it at least tried to shine some light on the topic. 

There are some current efforts as well: Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) has started looking at the topic, as have some House members of both parties. The simple fact that anyone at all seems to recognize the weaknesses in the current system is mildly encouraging.

The bottom line is this: Right now, the Budget Control Act of 1973 does nothing in terms of actually setting budgets or controlling government spending.

I suppose I could write at great length about all of the underlying economic messages in the Biden Budget. It would increase taxes by more than $5 trillion, then use most of that money to increase spending. It assumes lower rates of interest than any reputable entity, thus allowing it to project artificially low interest payments and smaller deficits. It claims it will fix Social Security in some unspecified way. It claims it will “pay for” extending some of the expiring Trump tax cuts, but it doesn’t say how.

Even so, those are merely political criticisms. They have nothing to do with real spending or taxation. Only Congress actually spends the money. 

If you care about spending at all, you can basically always ignore the president’s budget. The only things you need to pay attention to are the spending or “appropriations” bills that pass Congress and are signed by the president. Everything else — including essentially all of the Budget Act of 1973 — is just window dressing.

Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman from South Carolina, is a contributor to NewsNation. He served as director of the Office of Management and Budget, acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and White House chief of staff under President Donald Trump.