Jim Nussle: “Mr. Chairman, to me, the reason that the budget functions were removed from the budget process as part of the base bill…”

“Mr. Chairman, to me, the reason that the budget functions were removed from the budget process as part of the base bill probably makes the most sense, to me, of just about any of the provisions. And the reason is because, as a new Member of the Committee on the Budget, one of the things that I did and one of the things that my staff did as an exercise is we actually tried to make sense of the budget functions and how there was a correlation between those 20 budget functions and the 13 appropriation bills. So my colleagues understand what I am saying, let me show this chart. This is what the budget currently looks like, and what the gentlewoman is suggesting is that these budget functions need to remain in the budget that we pass. The problem is, there is not one number within these 20 budget functions that correlates to anything in reality later on in the year. In other words, let me just take an example. Income security is the budget function called budget function 600. As an example, for this last budget there was $252 billion, with a B, billion dollars, set aside for income security.”