Cord Byrd: “I am increasingly alarmed about the congressional budget process as it now operates. I helped to write the Budget Act of…”

“I am increasingly alarmed about the congressional budget process as it now operates. I helped to write the Budget Act of 1974. At the time, I served as chairman of the Subcommittee on the Standing Rules of the Senate. The subcommittee was tasked with studying the budget process reforms reported by the then-Senate Government Operations Committee as they affected the Senate rules. I met with a working group of staff that was comprised of 10 standing committees of the Senate, and which included 90 hours of meetings during 25 sessions over a 16-day period. After the staff had completed its work, I spent many hours with the Senate Parliamentarian and met in all day sessions and over holiday weekends with the staff from the Congressional Research Service and the Senate legal counsel. I helped to manage the Senate's floor deliberations of the Budget Act as majority whip, and, when the Senate completed its many weeks of debate and amendment, I served on the conference committee that finalized the Budget Act. I studied the Budget Act. I championed it. I supported it. And so I can say, without equivocation, that the process the Senate utilizes today hardly resembles the process envisioned in 1974. The budget process used today obscures more than it clarifies the tax and spending decisions of the Congress.…”