Yakym, Arrington: How to Bring Back Accountability and Transparency to Washington’s Broken Budget Process

Washington, D.C. – Today, Congressman Rudy Yakym (IN-02) and House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington (TX-19) published an op-ed in the Washington Examiner on how the Budget Process Reform Task Force they launched last week will help fix Washington’s broken budget process. The Task Force will lead the House Budget Committee’s work on fixing Washington’s broken budget process by examining ways to increase transparency, accountability, and responsibility in fiscal decision-making within Congress.

“America’s long-term future — the strength of our economy, the health of our democracy, and our standing in the world itself — rests on our ability to tackle our fiscal challenges. This generational problem is made worse by the inability of Congress to abide by even the most basic budgetary disciplines. By establishing the Budget Process Reform Task Force, the House Budget Committee has a unique opportunity to tackle this problem head-on, fundamentally change how the government spends tax dollars, and transform a set of archaic guidelines that are no match for today’s polarized environment,” Reps. Yakym and Arrington wrote.

“Today, there are no consequences for missing deadlines to produce a budget framework. The process has been used by both parties in recent years to advance their respective partisan agendas and bypass supermajority requirements in the Senate. Our task force will look at ways to make the budget process more about setting actual budgets and achieving responsible budget outcomes rather than reducing it to just another procedural tool to jam through an unrelated partisan agenda,” Reps. Yakym and Arrington continued.

“Process reform is by no means a panacea for our broader fiscal problems, nor is it a guarantee of finding common ground. If anything, we hope to foster more debate about the size, scope, and spending of the federal government. Stripping away the unrelenting dysfunction will make it easier to resolve our differences, address our growing financial imbalance, and do the work the public elected us to do,” Reps. Yakym and Arrington concluded.

Read the full op-ed HERE.