The budget season tips off in advance of March madness when the president delivers his 2007 budget to Congress on the first Monday in February.
As a senior member of the Senate Budget Committee, I will help set the federal spending allowance that Congress uses to fund the federal government. Lawmakers will hammer out the nitty gritty details in the months ahead.
As a fiscal conservative, I’d like to see the federal government erase the federal deficit by reining in unnecessary spending, rooting out waste, fraud and abuse and maintaining pro-growth tax policies that will keep the U.S. economy on the right track.
A lion’s share of the federal budget is tied to mandatory spending – entitlement costs for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid consume $1.0 trillion-and-escalating each year. And that’s even before 79 million baby boomers tap into the social safety net once they reach retirement.
This leaves scant wiggle room for budget-conscious lawmakers to finagle savings from essential government services and politically popular programs.
Unlike a basketball game, there are few opportunities for a slam-dunk when it comes to terminating or even trimming federal dollars from an existing program. That’s because lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and from both houses of Congress ultimately must reach an agreement despite strongly held philosophical and political differences of opinion.
Some of my colleagues want to tax our way out of the deficit. To me, that’s a non-starter. To the contrary, I expect to lead a full court press in support of our current tax policy that promotes job creation and economic growth.
And I also believe every line item of discretionary spending deserves rigorous scrutiny under the budget committee’s microscope.
That includes the farm budget. As a farmer-lawmaker who represents a state anchored by an ag-based economy, it may seem puzzling to some that I strongly support attaching payment limits to the nation’s farm programs. Today the payment system unfairly benefits large-scale farming operations to the detriment of small and mid-sized farms. Something just isn’t adding up when the top 10 percent of farm payment recipients across the country between 1995 and 2002 received 72 percent of the total payments. Not only does this run counter to the intent of the farm safety net created during the Great Depression, it also could harm the rural-urban coalition in Congress that for years has forged a consensus in support of federal farm programs to maintain and protect America’s food security.
I’ll also work to tighten Uncle Sam’s belt in other areas of government, especially those where I’ve uncovered misuse of hard-earned tax dollars. Forced to deficit-spend the last four years to respond to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, pay for the war in Iraq and now reconstruct America’s Gulf Coast, Congress has an obligation to ensure the money appropriated for securing the homeland, outfitting the military and rebuilding areas devastated by Hurricanes Rita and Katrina is spent as intended.
In December I won an effort to restore fiscal accountability amid the massive disaster relief effort underway in the aftermath of last year’s hurricanes. By year’s end, federal employees had charged more than $39 million on government credit cards in response to the natural disaster. Those bills are payable by Uncle Sam. So when the payment limits went from $15,000 to $250,000, it seemed to me a bit like the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. That’s why I sought to weed out any bad apples by making sure reasonable strings were attached to those pre-holiday shopping sprees. After investigating hundreds of millions of tax dollars lost to the misuse of government-issued credit cards in other federal agencies, I successfully pushed to restore the credit limit back to $15,000.
Rooting out waste, fraud and abuse within the federal bureaucracy won’t wipe out the national debt by itself. That will take political courage by policymakers willing to make the tough choices necessary to score entitlement reform.
Although I’d also like to restore fiscal fitness to all of our major entitlement programs sooner rather than later, the opportunity seems out of bounds for now. Nonetheless, I’ll work in Washington this budget season to tighten Uncle Sam’s belt by at least a notch or two. And that’s still a well-deserved victory for taxpayers in my book.