eSignature Legitimacy for Operational Budget in United States

How to eSign a document: eSignature legitimacy for Operational Budget in United States

The US budget process is incredibly complicated. But I'm here to try and help break it down for you. The first thing to know is that the US Congress controls how much money the federal government has to spend in any given year. And that's why I'm here in front of the Capitol building in Washington DC. While Congress has the ultimate power of the purse, so to speak, the budget process actually starts across town at the White House and its Office of Management and Budget. In late spring or summer of the prior year, the White House will give guidance to the agencies in the case of foreign aid to the State Department, to USAID, to the Millennium Challenge Corporation about how much money it thinks the agency should spend in the coming year. The agencies then write up a budget detailing how they'll spend that allocated money and send it back to the White House. Some back and forth ensues, and then what ends up coming out of that is the President's budget request. The President then submits that budget request to Congress generally around February or March, and that's supposed to be sort of the starting point for discussions around the budget here on Capitol Hill. And assuming things go ing to schedule, the House Appropriations Subcommittee will write their bill, they'll do what they call a mark up where they discuss the bill and then they would pass the bill out of the Subcommittee to the Full Committee which would then vote on it, and then send it to the House Floor for a vote. The Senate would be running a parallel process. The Senate would take some allocation for the budget. It would give a subsection of that money to the State and Foreign Operations Subcommittee. That Subcommittee would then write their own bill and get it passed through the process, and then the House and the Senate would have to come together and find a middle ground on their two bills. However, that's not how the process always plays out. In recent years, at least we've rarely seen bills get voted all the way through committee and individually voted on the House or the Senate Floor. Instead, what we've often gotten is what you call an omnibus bill. That's when a group of these appropriations bills are all grouped together and eventually passed in one block. Now to complicate matters even further, because of all the delays in the process if there aren't specific allocations, if there's other politics that get involved, these budget packages often aren't actually passed before the end of the current fiscal year. That means that Congress passes what you would call a continuing resolution, which essentially would just sort of buy some extra time for them to actually pass the budget bill. In those intervening months, because this often happens in the beginning of a new fiscal year, agencies have to spend based on the prior year appropriations. The problem with this is that it's not only that it creates unpredictability, but the last minute negotiations that typically go into passing these budget resolutions that are coming up against a tight deadline after previous delays is that foreign aid actually often misses out. Fiscal year 2022 is a good example of this. In that year, the House and the Senate bills both actually proposed an increase to the US foreign aid budget. But when push came to shove in those 11th hour negotiations, the result was that actually the foreign aid budget basically stayed flat. At the end of this whole process, agencies finally get an allocation, the amount of money that they can spend in that year on the various programs, often with a lot of specifics from Congress about how they should spend it. The various agencies involved in foreign aid will then take that money they've been allocated and create specific plans for how they'll use it. Now keep in mind they've often only been given that allocation three months into a fiscal year. So they're planning for a year that's already underway. Once those plans are complete, they share them with Congress, and only once they're approved again, often a process of several more months, can the agencies actually begin allocating and spending funds. That then often creates a time crunch for these agencies to spend money quickly before the end of the fiscal year. And at this point, they're probably already in the process of determining their budget priorities for the following year. So it's really this never ending cycle in part because of a significant amount of dysfunction, in part because of the complexity that many people tell me, actually makes it quite difficult to deliver foreign aid as effectively as possible. For more details about how the current budget process is playing out and how much money is going to be allocated this year for priorities from global health, to humanitarian aid, to development finance, stay tuned to devex.com.