Congress has just 15 days left in September to reach a budget agreement and the stakes are high: Without a deal, the government will shut down for the second time in three years. The flashpoint this time could be Planned Parenthood: Republicans want to use the budget negotiations to defund the group after videos released this summer allegedly showed the organization illegally profiting from the sale of fetal tissue. Democrats have said they will not accept any budget that defunds Planned Parenthood.
Last week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called the Planned Parenthood funding protest an “exercise in futility” in an interview with POLITICO, a sign he will not let the issue cause a shutdown. Whether House GOP leaders will take the same position as McConnell is unclear. The Senate and House have just 11 and 6 work days respectively before the end of September—little time to reach a budget deal and barely enough time to hash out a continuing resolution that lets the government limp along for another few weeks or months.
How do these last-minute negotiations affect government agencies? And is there a better way for lawmakers to reach a budget deal? To answer these questions, The Agenda’s Danny Vinik sat down with renowned budget expert Stan Collender, who formerly worked for both the House and Senate Budget Committees, writes frequently on budget issues for Forbes and is on Twitter as @TheBudgetGuy. He’s currently executive vice president and national director for financial communications at Qorvis MSLGROUP.
Collender isn’t optimistic: he’s not sure how Congress avoids yet another shutdown, and says it’s hard for agencies to function effectively when facing a potential shutdown: “It's just not a good way to run a railroad, let alone a country.” And he pointed out a pretty big irony: The minute Congress shuts the government down, it actually hands vast power to President Obama, who gets to decide what keeps working and what doesn’t.
Danny Vinik: What’s the current state of the budget showdown?
Stan Collender: Technically, it's a big mess. Congress and the president are supposed to agree on 12 appropriations bills for every year. The new fiscal year starts in October 1, and none have been agreed to. In fact, none are even close to being agreed to. What Congress has got to do in the next three weeks or so is come up with an agreement on total federal spending—that's defense and domestic—that they haven't been able to do for the last nine months.
DV: What about a three-month extension via continuing resolution?
SC: The extra three months doesn't help at all. Everyone's hoping that something will happen in the meantime, a foreign policy issue, an economic situation, something that will change the calculus so that it becomes easier for people to move from their established positions. But in an election year, especially when you've got 17 Republican candidates running around the country trying very hard to appeal to the same group of very conservative voters, it's hard to see how the situation is going to get anything better. It's more likely to get much, much worse as time goes along.
DV: What are you looking for as signals for how this plays out?
SC: What I'm looking for is something that would indicate somebody is moving from an established position, someone who is influential. If John Boehner, for example, did what he's done once in the past where he basically said, "Look, I don't care what you guys want, we're going forward with this particular activity, extending Social Security, doing a variety of things like that." That would be significant.
DV: Take us behind the scenes. How do these negotiations play out in a more granular sense?
SC: This is a very political as opposed to a substantive debate. The staff won't get involved until the members of Congress they represent, and senators, actually sit down and figure out what they want to do from a political standpoint. Once that's decided, the other decisions are relatively easy. There will be a couple of final negotiations on really in-the-weeds numbers and those types of things, but this is really a question where the Republican leadership in both houses has to figure out what its members want to do, and before that nothing else matters… in an institution like Congress that is so staff-driven, this is a process that's not staff-driven at all. This is member-to-member, this is high-level politics, this is as closes to arm wrestling as you can possibly get.
DV: How much do these last-minute negotiations hurt the actual agencies?
SC: The operations of the agencies are the least important consideration for most members of Congress. They're looking at the overall politics of the big decision because the average person at home doesn't know about how an agency runs or what it does or how it affects them, and for some members, an agency that isn't running well is an excuse to cut it next time, so they don't really care. But yeah, it's this indecision that we force on agencies makes it very difficult for them to do good jobs.
I heard today—I'm not going to tell you who from—but I heard today from a budget officer of a major agency who said they've already been preparing for a shutdown for three weeks, all right, going through what the motions are, which functions would stay, which ones wouldn't stay, which employees would have to go home.
DV: Let’s talk about a potential shutdown. So, each person has to go home and do whatever that’s not work related.
SC: Let me stop you for a second. The president has enormous discretion in a shutdown to determine who is, quote, essential and not essential. Now, someone essential may be a security guard. That you can see. But think about this: For the National Zoo, you need somebody there to receive the feed—the food, the meat, for the lions. And then, you need someone to feed the lions. So, they get to find this essential. In the last shutdown, the president took enormous liberties and defined the Department of Defense as almost as whole as essential, but the president could, if he wanted, go in the opposite direction. The air traffic control system gets funded by an appropriation. So, the president could say, "Sorry, no appropriation, no air traffic control system. Shut down the air traffic control. Shut down all flight." Which would probably put the economy into a tailspin within seconds. It would mean no one could go to honeymoons. Packages wouldn’t get delivered on Federal Express or UPS or anything else like that. It would be really bad. Now, that would be an extreme example. But the shutdown, there is no manual to how to do it. It's really up to the president to decide who works and who doesn't.
DV: That gives the president a lot of power.
SC: It does, and what happened with the shutdown during Clinton's years is that the definition of who is essential kept changing over days as, one, for technical reasons, they found out that zookeepers were needed, but other reasons because, for political reasons, some programs they wanted to start back up again, like veterans' benefits.
DV: Does giving the president such power worry Republicans?
SC: I don't think it actually worries Republicans…From what I can tell, for a lot of Republicans, particularly Tea Party Republicans, a government shutdown is the equivalent of a campaign event. It helps them get reelected.
DV: What are ways we can change the system so that we don't get into this repetitive process of last-minute deadline deals?
SC: There are thousands of ways we could fix this, all right? The truth is they don't want to. There's always talk, for example, about making a continuing resolution automatic. That is, if Congress and the president don't agree to a new continuing resolution or existing appropriations, then it's last year's level plus or minus something, 5 percent, 2 percent, minus 3. It sounds like a great idea. The problem is you can't agree on whether it's always last year or last year plus inflation or last year minus inflation. In other words, whatever rule you come up with favors somebody.
The real solution here is to get members of Congress, Republicans and Democrats, House and Senate, Congress and White House, to get everybody together and just agree that they're going to compromise. When I first got to Washington, which is now almost 40 years ago, that's what you did. You came to Washington to do something. Now, you come to Washington to get reelected.
So, again, I can come up with 30, 50, 100 ways of fixing the budget process, but none of them are ever going to get adopted. There's got to be a change in culture, here. It's become so poisonous, and [since] compromise is now considered collaborating with the enemy, most members of Congress won't do it for fear that they will be called a collaborator.
DV: That sounds pretty depressing.
SC: Oh, yeah. There's nothing positive about this. It's why you see so many retirements from Congress these days.
DV: Who are the key players you're watching?
SC: John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and Barack Obama, just three. … And ultimately, it's not going to be congressional Democrats. It's going to be the White House, Barack Obama, who decides whether to compromise with Republicans.
DV: I you were to bet on what's going to happen, where would you put your money?
SC: The answer is I don't know. I mean, I really don't know. For one of the few times in my career, I can see a shutdown. I just don't see how they can avoid it, and I don't see how they stop it once it starts. Once it starts, I suspect that the political pressure will get intense after about two weeks, that members of Congress who thought it was a good idea will say, "Okay, we've won what we're going to win and now we better stop the shutdown." But given that compromise is a four-letter word in Washington these days, I'm not even sure how long it's going to take before that pain starts to be felt.
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
