John Spratt: “This would be making a distinction between defense and nondefense spending. This gives you one big aggregate for all…”

“This would be making a distinction between defense and nondefense spending. This gives you one big aggregate for all discretionary spending. That is how far back it takes us and how little definition it leaves to what we end up doing. We come up with three or four big numbers and that is the end of the budget. The gentleman is suggesting we could do something much more elaborate, but this would be the only statutory prerogative we would have which would mean that pretty soon we would probably not be doing any function allocations at all. It would not have any statutory basis. I am not saying they get great deference from the Committee on Appropriations today, but once we reduce the budget process to this, I doubt the Committee on the Budget would get any deference from the appropriators.”