Maryland Forward Party

Congress has passed a Continuing Resolution (CR) that goes into effect on Tuesday Oct 1.  While a CR is certainly preferable to a government shutdown, CRs are a significant failure by Congress that cost us taxpayers a great deal of money and force government agencies to operate inefficiently and waste money.  We have had CRs in 36 of the last 40 government fiscal years!  The last time we had a full government budget passed before the start of the fiscal year was in 1997. 

Many people might think that a CR is the way the government should operate because it has become the new norm. But a CR is in fact a failure to perform the most basic task that the people we have elected to Congress are entrusted with – give the government agencies that make up the Executive Branch of the Federal Government a reasonable budget for them to manage and operate under. 

The reason why we have a CR virtually every year is that the two political parties have making the other party look bad as their #1 priority.  Whatever budget proposal one party puts forward must be attacked by the other party and not allowed to pass.  This goes back and forth right up to the deadline when the government must shut down because all the money that Congress gave it to spend is gone.  The only thing both parties can agree on is to move that deadline back, in this case until December 20, 2024. 

This is not a problem that is caused by just the Republicans or just the Democrats.  Both parties are equally to blame for a process that is badly flawed, and neither of them have any interest in fixing it.  The leaders of both parties are locked into government of their party, by their party, and especially for their party. Most surveys show the approval rating for Congress at around 20%.  But 95% of those running for reelection win their seat back!  How does this make sense?

The Executive Branch of the Federal Government manages all the agencies that provide services to us as citizens.  Those agencies must operate in a way that is defined by many regulations passed by Congress.  Over the 235 years since the Constitution was signed in 1789, these regulations have become more numerous and complex.  Any time that Congress thinks there is a problem, they pass legislation they think will fix that problem.  That legislation adds significant overhead as agencies must complete paperwork that certifies that they are meeting each of those regulations.  And as agencies look to comply with that Congressional direction, they have found unintended side effects that they must deal with in many cases. 

The basic premise of a CR is that it allows an agency to continue for some additional period of time to do what it did the last fiscal year.  The CR that was just passed allows an agency to continue for 81 more days to do what it did in the FY 2024 fiscal year that ended on September 30.  The biggest problem is that it restricts them to only doing the same things.  For example, many government systems are using old technology.  Being under a CR forces that agency to continue to use what they have.  The systems that were used in 2024 are the ones they have to continue to use, so they have to keep the old systems going instead of replacing them with much more efficient current technology.  Like anything that gets old, more support is often required to keep old systems running, but no additional money is coming in, so that money must come from some place, which means fewer people and/or lesser services in another area. 

One of the most frequent complaints about the government is that it is very inefficient.  This is absolutely true, but it is true because Congress continues to pass laws that force them to be inefficient.   Agencies hate CRs.  They want to make improvements and do a better job for us.  But they are not allowed to do that because the CR strictly controls what money they can spend, when they can spend it, and what they can spend it on. 

In the last 40 years when we have had a CR, that CR was in force for at least one agency for the entire fiscal year in 2007, 2022, and 2013.  In the other 37 years the CR was only in effect for a portion of the year for some agencies.  To lift the CR Congress must pass 12 appropriation bills, each of which covers different agencies.  Why 12 different appropriation bills where each one is a separate battle?  Because the two political parties that have made up Congress decided that is how they wanted it to work.  For each of the 12 appropriation bills that is not passed, the agencies included in that bill are forces to continue to operate under the CR.

Having the CR lifted for an agency for part of the fiscal year does not solve the problem for those agencies, it just changes the problems that they must deal with.  When an appropriations bill is passed, it has pages of line-items for each agency and each line-item defines the money that can be spent on the function defined in that line item.  Our elected officials who have never worked in any of these agencies, much less tried to mange them, have determined that they are much more qualified than the Director of that agency is to define what that agency should do and how much money they need to have in order to accomplish each line-item. 

And for next year’s budget Congress will look at what each agency spent for each line-item they have this year.  If an agency had a line-item budget for $50M but only spends $46M on that item this year, then they clearly didn’t need $50M and the budget for that line item for the next year should be at most $46M.  But the CR controlled what they could spend money on for some period of they year.  Using the above example of modernizing inefficient old systems, they are legally not allowed to even issue a request for proposals for new technology while under the CR.  If their appropriations bill was passed at the end of March, they have just six months to go through the complex process they are required to use, with mountains of paperwork that are required, to award a contract for that modernization.  Sometimes the time they have after their appropriations bill is passed is just too short to do anything meaningful. 

The money allocated for each line item must be spent by the September 30 of each year.  If it is not spent, it just goes away.  This “Use it or lose it” requirement means that each agency must go through a process during the last months of the fiscal year to find ways to spend all the money for each line item, even if it is not the best use of that money.  If they don’t, their budget for next year will be cut.  This is a challenge when an agency has the full fiscal year to manage their budget.  But when they are limited by operating under a CR and have only a few months when they can fully use their budget, it is virtually impossible to do that efficiently.    

Who is not impacted by a CR?  The other two branches of the government: the Judicial Branch and the Legislative Branch.  The people who can’t pass a budget for the Executive Branch never have to operate their offices under a CR. 

How does this problem get solved?  The answer is we need to have more choices and better choices for who sits in Congress.  Both parties have evolved further to the extremes – Republicans to the Right and Democrats to the Left.  Bipartisan is now a four-letter word and moderates in each of the parties have increasing difficulty getting support to be reelected if they have not followed the party line religiously.  Independents are shut out of the political process in most states. 

The primary goals of the Forward Party are to get candidates elected who will support electoral reforms that will break the monopoly that the Democrats and Republicans have created. If you want more information on the three goals below, check out our website at https://www.marylandforwardparty.com/about_forward.

•   Open non-partisan primaries let every registered voter participate in determining who will be on the ballot in November.  Approximately 20% of registered voters are Independents, but surveys have shown that about 20-230% of those who are registered as Republicans or Democrats would happily change their registration to Independent if they were allowed to vote in an open non-partisan primary.  Moderates from both parties and Independent candidates would give us more choices and better choices. With more candidates to choose from, the process to determine which ones are on the November ballot needs to be more than who gets the most votes.  One of the most frequent arguments made against open non-partisan primaries is that it will allow one party to vote for the opponent they think they can most easily beat, not for who they think is best qualified. 

•   Approaches like Rank Choice Voting or Star Voting are much better ways to let voters select the slate of the best candidates to be on the ballot and avoid the issue of voting to get the least qualified candidate on the ballot so they lose to your preferred candidate. To learn more about Rank Choice Voting the link below will take you to a post that is a very good introduction - https://www.marylandforwardparty.com/beer_edition_the_two-party_system_open_primaries_and_rcv.

•   Gerrymandering election districts to give one party the best chance to win the most seats is another problem that has gone on for too long.  Independent commissions are needed to define sensible election districts that do not wander all over the map to get certain blocks of target voters.  Having the majority party redefine districts to what they want needs to end.

These three changes would be the foundation to return this country to what our Founding Fathers said they wanted – government of the people, by the people, and for the people.  Our two major political parties see all three of these changes as major threats to the monopoly they have created and are doing everything they can to keep them from happening.  If they do not happen, you will continue to see CRs for a major portion of each fiscal year.  You and I are paying for that.  If you want that to change, consider helping the Forward Party achieve these three goals. 

Understanding why CRs cause many problems that end up costing us more in taxes and getting less services for that money not an easy thing to explain, especially for anyone who has not worked with or for the Federal Government.  This post is intended as a high level answer, but it could raise more questions than it answers.  Please share your questions in the Comment box below and we will try our best to give you an answer that is not as long as a textbook.