Washington Has No Budget, and You Are Paying for It

What the issue is

Every household in this district lives inside a budget. You know what comes in, you know what has to go out, and when those two numbers don't work you make a decision.

The federal government does not do this. It spends, borrows to cover the difference, and passes the bill forward.

Kevin has spent thirty years as a controller — the person who goes through the books line by line and asks why a number moved. When he looks at federal spending, he sees an operation with no budget, no discipline, and nobody asking the question.

"We cannot continue with an open pocketbook policy and continuing to stroke checks for special programs that are not needed in the long run." — Kevin Martin

"We are for selling the livelihoods of not the next generation or the following generations, but selling the livelihood of five generations from now." — Kevin Martin

What Congress actually controls

All of it. This is the one issue with no state or local component whatsoever.

Congress holds the power of the purse. Every dollar the federal government spends was appropriated by a vote in the House and the Senate. Every dollar it borrows was authorized the same way. The debt exists because members of Congress voted for it, year after year, in both parties.

There is no one else to point at. This is the job.

What needs to change

Pass an actual budget and hold to it. Not a continuing resolution, not a last-minute omnibus nobody read, not another vote at midnight to avoid a shutdown. A budget, passed through regular order, with the same expectation any business or family operates under.

Fund the core obligations first. National defense. Emergency response when a tornado or a hurricane hits and people need help immediately. Protecting the constitutional rights the country is built on. These come first, and they are not where the waste is.

Audit everything else. Every program should have to answer one question before it gets another appropriation: does this benefit the general population, or does it exist because somebody with access asked for it? Programs that can't answer that shouldn't be funded by default just because they were funded last year.

End earmarks and pork-barrel spending. Special interests have learned the federal government's pocket is the easiest one to reach into, and the mechanism for that is written into the appropriations process itself. Congress can close it.

Stop assuming Washington has to be the one to do it. Private industry has repeatedly done things the federal government called too expensive — space launch being the obvious recent example — faster and cheaper.

Why it matters

Every dollar borrowed is a dollar of somebody's future income already committed. Right now we are committing income from people who haven't been born yet, for spending nobody can fully account for.

It costs you today, too. Federal borrowing at this scale competes with you for credit, and that shows up in the interest rate on your mortgage, your car loan, and your credit card.

Nobody currently in that building is going through this line by line and asking why. That is the job Kevin has done for thirty years.