Journal: Basic Info on the US Congress's Budget Procedure

There are a fair number of stories posted on Slashdot about the introduction of bills in the U.S. Congress promising to create some new agency or fund some new project of great nerdly interest. I hope this little journal entry will help sort the wheat from the chaff for readers who want to know how seriously to take such bills. I don't expect that this article will help anyone analyze the actual policy content of such legislation; on the other hand, it's worth asking whether such an analysis is worthy of one's time, which hopefully this article will help you determine.

In case you're wondering, my credentials on this are that I am a former Congressional staffer (3 years!) and a current PhD student in political science at a university you've probably heard of.

Now down to business: there are 2 major questions you should ask when you see a bill number and some hype. First, what chance does this bill have of actually becoming law? As you may remember from Schoolhouse Rock (if you grew up in the US), there are a lot of steps between a bill's introduction and its passage into statute, some purely technical, others political. I'll very briefly touch on these below.

Second, if the bill does become law, will anything actually happen? Most of the bills that come to the attention of Slashdot editors seem to be what are known as "authorization" bills. These are important first steps in establishing federal programs, but don't actually mean that any money gets spent. I very briefly explain this below.

In attempting to answer the first question listed above, there are some subsidiary questions you should ask. First, who introduced the bill? If it's a House bill (usually an H.R., H.Res. or H.J.Res bill), then it is spectacularly unlikely to ever come to a vote unless it is sponsored (not just cosponsored) by a senior member of the committee to which it is referred. If it's sponsored by a junior member of the minority party (currently the Democratic party) the only possible way it will ever see consideration is as an amendment to some bigger bill