Darlene Hooley: “while I understand the frustrations sometimes we have with the budget process, I come from a State that had biennial…”

“while I understand the frustrations sometimes we have with the budget process, I come from a State that had biennial budgets. They did not work very well. Let me tell my colleagues why they did not work very well. In that off year, we talk about having review and oversight. Well, when we do it in the off year, what I found is that it does not work very well, it has no teeth. It was a time when that oversight is less systematic, it is less intense and, again, it really does not have any teeth. In fact, most of the time it did not happen. So it does not work very well. This is only chance we have to sit down every year and go over those budgets item by item and agency by agency. And again, by my experience, biennial budgets do not work very well. If we want to experiment, let us experiment with it. But this is a time that we should not change the process because there is not the oversight that happens in those opposite years.”