Are restrictions in pay for members of Congress and senators really going to happen? Reports this week have it that the House will agree to an increase in the debt limit, but they’re going to condition it on requiring the House and Senate to pass a budget. Paychecks would stop if Congress hasn’t done its budget work.

There’s been a long-running dispute about budgeting, with Republicans claiming that the Senate isn’t passing a budget plan while Senate Democrats claim there’s a budget plan in place.

Should House members’ and senators’ pay be docked if they don’t do their jobs? Should their automatic pay raise be withdrawn? (Believe it or not, current law gives Members of Congress and senators an automatic pay raise if they don’t pass a law rejecting more pay each year.)

Our petition on the subject is called: “No Automatic Pay Raise for Congress!” We’ll be adding some new bills to the petition’s list of related bills. A large number of bills to limit congressional pay have been introduced already in the new, 113th Congress.

Let’s take a look at the bills and what they do. You can vote and comment on each one, tell your friends about the good and bad ones—whatever you want to do! So long as you do something…

Stopping that Automatic Pay Increase, Once of for All Time

H.R. 54 prevents any pay increase happening for representatives in the 113th Congress, but the automatic pay increase would still exist in the law.

H.R. 134 would repeal the law that provides for that automatic pay increase.

H.R. 196 would also eliminate automatic pay adjustments for Members of Congress, full stop.

That’s Enough of Those Retirement Bennies

H.R. 52 would terminate further retirement coverage for Members of Congress, except for the right to participate in the Thrift Savings Plan, which is their version of a 401(k).

H.R. 151 is called the “Termination of Lifelong Pensions for Members of Congress Act.” It’s a sibling of H.R. 52.

H.R. 296 would allow Members of Congress to decline certain retirement benefits and contributions by the Federal Government. Might save a couple bucks that way.

Do Your Job or Don’t Get Paid

Then there are the bills that create incentives for good behavior. (The incentive of getting reelected seems not to be very strong—most everyone gets reelected anyway.)

H.R. 167 does a thing that might be clever. It denies Members of Congress their automatic pay increase “in the year following any fiscal year in which outlays of the United States exceeded receipts of the United States.” That means that their pay stays flat if they let the debt increase.

H.R. 308 would require the salaries of Members of Congress to be held in escrow if all regular appropriation bills for a fiscal year have not been enacted by the beginning of the fiscal year. (It can’t be cut straight away because of the 27th Amendment.

H.R. 310 would deny Members of Congress their pay after October 1 of any fiscal year in which Congress they have not approved a budget and passed the regular appropriations bills.

Added 1/24: S. 30 would prevent the 2013 automatic pay increase for “persons holding senior positions in the Federal Government” and it would prevent pay adjustments for Members of Congress in any year there is a budget deficit.

So, there you have it. If it’s your bag to cut Congress’ pay, more is happening on that front than ever.

Last week, the 112th Congress ended and the new, 113th Congress set to work straight away. It passed a bill that responds to flooding caused by “Superstorm” Sandy.

The bill, H.R. 41, is to “temporarily increase the borrowing authority of the Federal Emergency Management Agency for carrying out the National Flood Insurance Program.” It increases that authority by $9.7 billion.

It turns out that FEMA runs an insurance business. It hasn’t collected premiums to cover claims, though, and it has had to borrow from the Treasury to make payments. Here’s a story from the New York Times called “Flood Insurance, Already Fragile, Faces New Stress.”

So what does that mean to you and me?

We went looking to see how the Congressional Budget Office scored any other bills like this. And in 2006, Congress increased the borrowing authority of this program after Hurricane Katrina. The bill to do that was S. 2275, which became Public Law 106-208 when President Bush signed it. Here’s how CBO dealt with that increase in borrowing authority.

Current law requires FEMA to repay any borrowed funds (with interest) as it collects premiums, provided that the program’s other costs are fully covered. However, CBO expects that the agency is unlikely to repay funds borrowed under S. 2275 within the next 10 years because premium collections over that period will probably be used to pay any remaining claims resulting from Katrina and future flood insurance claims and expenses.

FEMA evidently hasn’t increased its premium collections since then to meet outlays. Can we expect it to increase premiums enough to cover Superstorm Sandy expenses and pay back the Treasury? We have our doubts.

Our bets are on this being $9.7 billion spent, not a $9.7 billion loan. That’s a little over $90 in spending per U.S. family, a little under $30 per person.

The House passed the bill by a vote of 354 to 67. The Senate passed it by voice vote, sending it to the president for his signature.

Quite a start for the new 113th Congress!

(Update: The House passed H.R. 8 by a vote of 257-167 late on January 1.)

The Senate passed “fiscal cliff” legislation today (New Year’s Day – January 1, 2013), sending it to the House. Will the House approve or disapprove H.R. 8, the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012?

There are stirrings against the bill among Republicans, who don’t like that it does not cut spending. What does it do, anyway? In brief, here’s what:

The bill increases federal spending by a little over $330 billion over the next ten years, and it lowers revenues by about $3.6 trillion. That means a higher national debt.

Boiled down to numbers that relate to you and your family, the bill “saves” about $26,300 per U.S. family (through tax reductions). The tax cuts and spending increases result in an increase to the national debt of almost $32,000 per U.S. family, pushing the national debt to nearly $200,000 per family.

It’s up to the House, which really means it’s up to you.

No matter what the outcome, Congress is going to get it wrong with the fiscal cliff (which, as we already pointed out, is not actually a cliff). Creating “cliffs” is a bad way to manage an economy.

Here’s what that means.

An economy is a social system. It’s all about people. The value of things is based on people’s willingness to pay for them. People will pay a lot for mittens in winter and nothing at all for mittens in summer. During the summer, mittens have some value because everyone knows people will pay for them again in winter.

That idea—knowing that mittens will have value again in winter—allows the owners of mittens to plan. The companies that make and wholesale mittens plan to sell them to stores, and stores to put them on shelves, because they know there will be demand for mittens. There’s no weather “cliff,” no uncertainty (give or take small variations in weather and temperature) that there will be demand for mittens.

If the weather couldn’t be known in advance, it would be much harder to plan. How much productive capability should mitten-makers have on hand? Given the other things that might be sold, should supplies of mittens be warehoused or trashed?

Of course, these are the simplest of decisions. Most businesses are making tougher calls, like, Should we hire new employees? Should we invest in new equipment? These questions depend on how much it will cost to employ a worker, how much it will cost to buy or finance new equipment, and other difficult calculations. There are thousands of different calculations that millions of different businesses might make.

Congress has lately been in the habit of writing economic legislation (tax rates and such) that has expiration dates. When those expiration dates arrive, nobody knows what Congress will do next. Will the research and development tax credit continue or cease? At what rate? What will interest rates be like? What will tax rates on capital gains be? On income? And so on and so forth.

I’ll these expiring laws are “cliffs” of different kinds. And they’re created by Congress. They systematically make it hard for businesses to plan. This makes businesses act more conservatively, doing less, and reducing economic activity compared to what it should be.

So nevermind what is happening with the “fiscal cliff.” We don’t know what Congress to do and accordingly can’t do anything about it. The fiscal cliff and all the other cliffs Congress lays before economic actors are slowing economic growth.

You’ve seen us harp again and again in our appropriations/budget posts about Congress following the annual spending schedule. We’ve included a copy of it here again.

Nevermind the fiscal cliff. Congress should do its job year in and year out without setting traps for the economy. The president is supposed to present his budget on the first Monday in February. Congress will begin work on its budget resolutions shortly thereafter. Get ready to howl if they fall behind. Payback for putting our economy through the fiscal cliff.

In early November, a bill to spend money on “Superstorm” Sandy recovery was introduced in the House. We pushed discussion of it on Twitter, thinking it would be interesting to know what people think of federal spending on the storm in these tight budgetary times.

Well, presently a small margin oppose the $115 per U.S. family in spending found in that House bill. It’s H.R. 6581, the Hurricane Sandy Recovery and Rebuilding Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2013. We loosely detailed the spending in an earlier post.

Well, there’s a larger Superstorm Sandy bill brewing. Last week, the Senate Appropriations Committee released the text of a bill—not introduced, but it’s expected to be an amendment to H.R. 1. Its total spending amounts to about $520 per U.S. family. (Added to the national debt, which is at $162,687 per U.S. family…)

The Disaster Assistance Supplemental, which has not been introduced yet, is posted on the Committee’s web page. It proposes to spend $60.4 billion.

Here’s how the money is divvied up. (We’ve copied this information from the summary found here.)

Looking over it, some is obviously repair and response to Sandy. (At least one comment on H.R. 6581 suggests that the government should have reserve funds rather than spend as if that emergencies that occur year over year are a surprise.) But some of it doesn’t look so much like Sandy spending. It looks like spending spending. Sure enough, there are news stories arguing that the bill is a Christmas tree full of presents for the federal government.

Department of Agriculture: $224 million

• Emergency Conservation: $25.090 million
  The Emergency Conservation Program provides emergency funding and technical assistance for farmers and ranchers to rehabilitate farmland damaged by natural disasters and for carrying out emergency water conservation measures.
• Emergency Forest Restoration: $58.855 million
  The Emergency Forest Restoration Program provides funding to carry out emergency measures to restore nonindustrial private forest land damaged by a natural disaster.
• Emergency Watershed Protection: $125.055 million
  The Emergency Watershed Protection (EWP) program provides financial and technical assistance to undertake emergency measures to safeguard lives and property from floods, drought, and the products of erosion on any watershed whenever fire, flood or any other natural occurrence is causing or has caused a sudden impairment of the watershed.
• Emergency Food Assistance: $15 million
  The Emergency Food Assistance Program provides USDA commodities to food banks throughout the country in order to provide nutrition assistance to low-income individuals and communities in need.

(more…)

Why has the Treasury Department changed the date of a forthcoming economic report so that it will come out after Congress has debated the fiscal cliff? Will Congress be debating about the fiscal cliff in the dark?

The fiscal cliff isn’t a cliff, but many people believe the impending improvement in the government’s fiscal situation will harm the economy. It’s a “looming fiscal crisis that could send the entire US economy plunging into recession again,” according to typically over-dramatic language from AFP. Belief drives economies, so talk like that can be self-fulfilling prophecy.

But just how is the economy doing? One way to find out would be to look at the Financial Report of the United States Government. It’s a comprehensive overview of the federal government’s finances, and it comes out every year on December 15th. (See where it says “Next Report” on these archived pages? 2011, 2010)

But recently the Treasury Department’s Financial Management Service quietly changed the date of publication for this information to January 17, 2013. That’ll be after the “fiscal cliff” debate is over. It’ll be around the time that a new Congress comes in.

What is in the report? Why did they delay its publication? In a special alert to subscribers earlier this month, watchdog Shadow Government Statistics asks:

Might someone have had a concern here of inflaming what already are likely to be highly contentious, and down-to-the-wire, year-end negotiations, with meaningfully new negative information?

It’s certainly possible that Treasury is just behind on producing the report, but even if they’re not hiding information, it’s not OK to be late with an important report at such a crucial time.

Interesting problem, here: The government is the best source of information about the government. The government can shade or shut down information flows at key times. It’s concerning if they’re doing so now.

What do you do about a confounding situation like this? Raise an outcry!

That means letting your friends and neighbors know. Email this blog post to interested people. Post it on Facebook. (You can “like” our page if you’re inclined.) Tweet it, too, with your comments.

Nobody’s going to do it for you. If you push this story, the Treasury Department will figure out that they’ve made a mistake in delaying this report, and they’ll be less likely to keep a debate in the dark again.

Ignore the talk of a “fiscal cliff.” It’s not true.

That phrase—fiscal cliff—suggests that the fiscal status of the government will go off a cliff, debt increasing dramatically, which would be bad. What’s actually going on is a combination of revenue increases and spending cuts kicking in January 1st that would improve the fiscal situation by lowering debt.

But it would withdraw money from the economy at a time when many people believe that money is needed for economic recovery.

We’re really talking about a sharp, but insufficient, improvement in the fiscal situation, not a “fiscal cliff.” But don’t hold your breath waiting for any politicians to start fretting about the coming “sharp, but insufficient improvement in the fiscal situation”…

Here’s what’s actually going on.

First, there’s the expiration of tax cuts. They’ve been called the “Bush tax cuts,” but President Obama signed the most recent extension of them. The expiration of these temporary tax cuts would increase income taxes (and government revenues) by about $221 billion.

Then there’s “sequestration.” That’s automatic spending cuts of about $65 billion that kick in because Congress did not come up with its own deficit control deal as it planned to do when it passed the Budget Control Act of 2011. No deal means that automatic spending control goes into effect. But everyone’s worried that “sequestration”—reduction in government spending—will undercut the wobbly economic growth that everyone talks about happening. (Is it?)

A couple more policies from another law, the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012, change with the new year. One is the temporary, 2% reduction in the payroll tax—about $95 billion in revenues would result from its expiration. Spending on unemployment benefits would stop, producing a $26 billion improvement in the fiscal situation.

The Alternative Minimum Tax would return to 2000 tax-year thresholds, increasing revenue and improving the fiscal situation. Some 26 million households might become subject to the AMT which could raise taxes by as much as $3,700 for some people.

There are other policies triggered by the coming turn of the year—new health care taxes and the expiration of an increase in Medicare payments, for example. They all point in the same direction: lowering U.S. debt.

But they’re calling it a “fiscal cliff.” It’s a phrase Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke used in congressional testimony back in February. Now his dramatization of tax increases and spending reduction that would put the government into better fiscal order has taken on a life of its own.

When Congress comes up with a deal later this year to address the “fiscal cliff,” it probably won’t actually improve the fiscal situation. It will make the fiscal situation worse, giving higher priority to maintaining high spending and low taxes due to the belief that this does more good for the economy than maintaining high levels of debt does harm.

Watch this space as events unfold…

The bill may soon come due for “Superstorm” Sandy.

H.R. 6581 is a supplemental spending bill for the current fiscal year 2013 that was introduced last week. It spends $12 billion on recovery from damage caused by the big storm.

By agency, the money divides up this way:

• Army Corps of Engineers: $45 million
• Small Business Administration: $225 million
• Federal Emergency Management Agency: $11 billion

By U.S. family—that is how much money the average family is paying out—it divides up this way:

• about $115.00 per U.S. family

So is that the right amount of federal spending on storm recovery? Have your say in the comments or by voting on the bill’s page.

Representatives from New York and New Jersey have been encouraging their constituents to apply for FEMA aid. “‘[N]o matter where you live, it is critical that you document your losses and any expenses incurred in your recovery — including, for instance, the costs to pump water out of your basement, to replace your water heater, or to stay in temporary housing,” Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) said in a note on his website Wednesday,’ reports The Hill‘s Floor Action blog.

The next question is whether the money will be effectively used. It’s very hard to oversee the movement of money in the federal government.

Below is the current vote on the bill. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article about the bill.

We’ve been pushing attention to what is now Public Law 112-175, the Continuing Appropriations Resolution, 2013. President Obama recently signed this continuing resolution into law. It funds the government (the parts of it not automatically funded) for six months at a cost of about $12,000 per U.S. family.

But there are other new laws, worth keeping our eyes on.

• There’s Public Law 112-176, which reauthorized—that means “extended the life of”—the EB-5 Regional Center Program, the E-Verify Program, the Special Immigrant Nonminister Religious Worker Program, and the Conrad State 30 J-1 Visa Waiver Program.
• Then there’s Public Law 112-177, the Pesticide Registration Improvement Extension Act of 2012, which, as you might guess, reauthorized the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, also known as “FIFRA.” Hate pests? This one’s for you!
• And finally there’s Public Law 112-178, which changed the date on which certain officials would have to publish their financial disclosures (to December 8, 2012) and exempted other officials from these disclosures. This requirement of the STOCK Act turned out to be controversial when people in the government got a look at what it required.

Here are the current votes on all these laws. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki articles on them. (It’s still worth doing that. You’ll contribute to the national conversation, which is ongoing, and laws get far more attention here than the thousands of bills that go nowhere…)

It’s a very special time of year in one area of governing you don’t hear about much.

It’s the end of the fiscal year.

What’s so special about the end of the fiscal year?

It’s when the grant programs in the federal government have to move money out the door. If the funds aren’t spent by September 30th, next year’s funds might go away.

And there’s something else special happening right now. Members of Congress and senators are home campaigning, making their pitches for re-election.

Now, let’s do a little political math.

If agencies are spending a lot of grant money, and politicians are campaigning, that makes this a perfect time to link up grant-making and politics!

Just as happened during Republican administrations, bureaucrats in the Obama administration are making sure that Democratic politicians are getting a little “heads-up” about the money coming their way, so those politicians can take some credit for bringing home the bacon.

Now, this whole process of using grants for political gain is one of Washington’s open secrets. You won’t find proof of it, because grant-makers are very careful to keep these practices under the radar. But sometimes the radar beams catch on to things. Earlier this year, for example, the Heritage Foundation put out a report on the relationship between grant-making and votes in Congress.

“An examination of ‘administrative earmarks,’” the report said, “suggests the White House used its power to fund local projects as a means to ‘buy’ votes for major legislative efforts.” (Heritage is generally allied with Republicans. It’s very likely a Democrat-oriented group would find the same during Republican administrations.)

Outraged? Well, you should be. Or maybe you shouldn’t be, instead channeling your energy toward productive change.

For example, you could contact your legislators expressing support for the DATA Act. It’s a bill that would standardize government spending data, so that sites like ours could report better information to you. That means that it would be harder to play politics with grants—harder to play politics in general! (Have you signed our transparency petition yet? That would help, too.)

There are several versions of the DATA Act. It doesn’t really matter which one you ask your representatives to support. The most recent is S. 3600, introduced last week by Senators Mark Warner (D-VA) and Rob Portman (R-OH). H.R. 2146 (Darrel Issa (R-CA)) was the original—it has passed the House and gone to the Senate. Another version of the bill, also introduced Senator Warner, is S. 1222.

We’ve written about the DATA Act before. Here, and here’s a little primer on who it’s most important to contact.

So what are you waiting for? If you’re not getting one of those grants, you should be working to make sure you know who does.