This piece originally appeared at Prototyping Politics.
We are in the middle of a budget pileup: a reconciliation fight, spiking debt and debt payments, the beginnings of a debt ceiling standoff, rescissions, and even impoundment. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the budget process isn’t up to the task right now.
But here’s the twist: it never really was. The budget process used to be much worse. And at moments of major national transformation the budget process itself was transformed. After the Civil War we created the Appropriations Committees to centralize spending decisions. During World War I and the Progressive movement, we centralized power in the executive branch because it had more information. During and after World War II and the New Deal, the budget process was revamped. And after Vietnam and the Great Society, the budget process was transformed in response to those challenges.
What we’re experiencing now isn’t unprecedented. It’s cyclical. And that means we’re not just at a moment of breakdown — we’re at a moment of potential redesign. If we understand how we got here, we might glimpse what has to come next.
