Pete Domenici: “I rise to introduce the Budget Enforcement Act of 1999. The time has come to conform our budget laws and procedures to a…”

“I rise to introduce the Budget Enforcement Act of 1999. The time has come to conform our budget laws and procedures to a new fiscal environment. The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act was enacted 25 years ago. Amendments to the Act, including the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings legislation in 1985, established new enforcement procedures that were further expanded and modified in the 1990 budget agreement. Those laws and procedures have served us well. In combination with a strong economy and robust revenue growth, not only have we balanced the Federal budget, we will shortly produce a surplus even excluding the current balances generated by Social Security program. Laws and procedures developed over the last 25 years for a fiscal environment of deficits, cannot be appropriate for a fiscal environment of surpluses. As an example, while the President a year ago in his State of the Union Address pledged to reserve "every penny" of the Social Security surpluses for the reform of that program, he and the Congress did not live up to that pledge last year. In one piece of legislation last fall, we spent $21.4 billion of these surpluses for so-called "emergencies".”