Rep. Jake Auchincloss

Love the question.

And in fact, I just wrote a sub stack on this question on my sub stack, simple but not easy, where I call for multi-year agency specific appropriations.

So David, if you'd be willing to let me like wonk out for one minute.

Yeah, please.

For our listeners.

The way it works now is

There are every year on September 30th, funding runs out and every single year Congress basically has to agree on every single element to the federal government, its budget.

And that's been the way basically for the last 40 years, 50 years, roughly since about the 1970s is the way we've done it since it started in the 1970s.

Only four times has Congress successfully funded the entire federal government on time.

Four times.

It's like 10% or fewer of the years and never in the 21st century.

So this system is broken.

The single year appropriations of across the board funding for the federal government is broken.

My approach

is simple and I think more tightly scoped, which is to say Congress should take its time on an agency by agency basis to do multi-year authorizations and appropriations.

So for example, the Federal Aviation Administration, those are air traffic controllers and airport inspections, we come together, the authorizing committee, which would be transportation infrastructure, they agree on new policy for the FAA, which by the way we did two years ago, it was a good bipartisan process.

Then based on that new authorization, you give them five years worth of funding and basically a ticket that says every year they go back to the treasury and they draw funding based on that five year authorization.

For maybe the Environmental Protection Agency, we do it for 10 years.

Maybe for the National Institutes of Health, which we want to really insulate from politics, we do it for 15 years.

Maybe for the Department of Defense, based on the Constitution's prohibition on a standing army, we do it every single year to keep it as close as possible to the will of the people.