How to Un-Supplement a Tsunami of Fiscal Proportions: An Examination of the Supplemental Appropriations Process

Article I § 9 clause 7 of the United States Constitution makes it clear that “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” This single sentence provides Congress with the sole legislative authority to allocate money out of the federal treasury. Throughout the years, Congress has fleshed out this power through legislation governing how the appropriations and budgeting process should occur. Although Congress has been granted the constitutional authority to make appropriations, the President and the executive agencies that receive the funds appropriated by Congress have made themselves influential partners in this process, often through purely political means. Despite the processes that Congress has put in place, the United States is facing a fiscal tsunami should things continue at their current trajectory. One of these budgetary processes put in place by Congress, the supplemental appropriations process, has resulted in increased outlays that avoid the transparency provided through the normal budget process. This paper suggests that Congress should reform the supplemental appropriations process, and proposes a piece of legislation called the Transparency and Accountability in Supplemental Appropriations Act (TASA). TASA would provide increased transparency and political accountability to the supplemental appropriations process. It would do so by creating an Emergency Trust Fund to be included in the regular budget and by requiring that the President’s Budget and the Congressional Budget Resolution include Contingency Allowances representing the level of any supplemental appropriations used to pay for military conflicts during the prior fiscal year. These reforms would allow Congress to lower the impact of the upcoming fiscal tsunami by reducing overall budget costs

Legislative Alert: FY12 Agriculture Appropriations Bill

[Excerpt] The AFL-CIO urges conferees to the FY 12 Agriculture Appropriations Bill to retain a common-sense reporting requirement, one which was first included by House Republicans in the FY04 bill: Provided, That no funds made available by this appropriation may be obligated for FAIR Act or Circular A-76 activities until the Secretary has submitted to the Committees on Appropriations of both Houses of Congress and the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform of the House of Representatives a report on the Department\u27s contracting out policies, including agency budgets for contracting out

The Relationship Between Big-Time College Football and State Appropriations to Higher Education

I investigate the relationship between big-time college football programs and state appropriations to public institutions of higher education. Estimation of a linear reduced form model of the determination of state appropriations to higher education, using a panel of financial, athletic, and state-specific economic data from 570 public institutions of higher education at the Baccalaureate level or higher from 1976-1996 shows that schools with Division I-A football programs receive about 6% more in state appropriations than schools that do not field a Division I-A football team. Institutions with successful football teams receive 3% to 8% increases in state appropriations the following year. Defeating an in-state rival in a prominent football game is also associated with an increased level of appropriation in the following year. These results support the predictions of the model of competition for political influence among pressure groups developed by Becker (1983) and suggest that the total economic benefit associated with big-time athletic programs may be larger than previously thought.

Presidential Influence on Congressional Appropriations Decisions

We investigate the extent to which possession of the veto allows the president to influence congressional decisions regarding regular annual appropriations legislation. The most important implication of our analysis is that the influence the veto conveys is asymmetrical: it allows the president to restrain Congress when he prefers to appropriate less to an agency than Congress does; it does not provide him an effective means of extracting higher appropriations from Congress when he prefers to spend more than it does. This asymmetry derives from constitutional limitations on the veto, in combination with the presence of a de facto reversionary expenditure level contained inthe appropriations process (Fenno, 1966). We find strong support for this proposition in a regression of presidential requests upon congressional appropriations decisions

Legislative Alert: Grimm Amendment to the Military Construction Appropriations Bill

[Excerpt] On behalf of the AFL-CIO, I urge you to support Representative Grimm\u27s amendment to the Military Construction Appropriations bill to strike language prohibiting Project Labor Agreements (PLA\u27s) from being used on projects funded under the bill

World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance. [Review]

World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance. Edited by Sonia Massai. Abingdon, UK, and New York: Routledge, 2005. Pp. xiv + 199. $110 cloth,$34.95 paper. Reviewed by Douglas M. Lanie

The Item Veto and the Threat of Appropriations Bundling in Alaska

The item veto power forms an important check on the legislature in many states, including Alaska. The power allows the governor to veto individual items in an appropriations bill rather than vetoing or signing the bill as a whole. In 2011 the Alaska State Legislature contemplated challenging this crucial executive power. A proposed draft of the annual capital appropriations bill contained language that linked each energy appropriation to all the others, providing that if the governor struck one item then none of the items would go into effect. Further, the legislature inserted language providing that none of the proposed energy appropriations would go into effect if the section of the bill linking them together were successfully challenged in court. While neither provision was included in the final version of the bill signed into law, they prompted a controversy about whether such language would comport with the requirements of the state constitution. If they had been passed, the provisions would indeed have been unconstitutional and invalid, as they usurp the governor\u27s constitutional item veto power and violate the confinement clause\u27s requirement that the content of appropriations bills be limited to appropriations

Canonical Construction and Statutory Revisionism: The Strange Case of the Appropriations Canon

In this article, we consider the impact of positive political theory on legislative interpretation and, in particular, the debate over interpretive canons. Our vehicle for this consideration is the appropriations canon. By virtue of this canon, courts construe narrowly legislative changes to statutes made through the appropriations process. We consider the underlying logic and rationale of this canon -- essentially, that the appropriations process is unrepresentative and insufficiently deliberative -- and use this analysis to investigate, more broadly, the processes of canonical construction in the modern statutory interpretation jurisprudence. Canonical construction, we argue, must be attentive to the equilibrium effects of judicial approaches and, moreover, it must be based upon a normatively compelling theory of lawmaking and the legislative process. The appropriations canon fails both of these tests; and, in its structure, it reveals some of the weaknesses of the contemporary reliance on canons to illuminate statutory meaning

The Rockefeller Brothers Fund's Democratic Practice Global Governance Portfolio: Impact Assessment, 20102015

This report evaluates the progress of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) Democratic Practice–Global Governance (DP-GG) portfolio in the context of the program-specific goal, strategies, and the RBF mission. The overarching goal of the DP-GG program is to "strengthen the vitality of democracy in global governance." It is pursued through support for three strategies (transparency and accountability, access and participation, and innovation), and focused on three substantive areas (trade, climate, and development finance). Over the six-year period 2010 through 2015, the RBF invested $17.3 million in grants and appropriations in the Global Governance portfolio. This includes182 grants to 79 organizations, as well as support for 18 meetings at The Pocantico Center and 13 nongrant appropriations for consultancies and outside meetings. The average annual budget of the DP-GG portfolio is$2.95 million, a modest figure given the complexity and scale of issues these grants endeavor to tackle

Legislative Alert: FY2012 Financial Services

[Excerpt] On behalf of the AFL-CIO, I am writing to urge you to support the inclusion of five important sourcing reforms in the FY 2012 Financial Sendees appropriations bill when conferees convene on this important issue