Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett
A government funding deadline is approaching this Friday, December 20, and congressional leadership appears poised to punt the annual funding debate to March with a stopgap funding measure. Disaster aid is at the heart of the current impasse. President Biden requested nearly $100 billion in emergency funding in the wake of Hurricanes Helene and Milton earlier last month, plus $24 billion for Ukraine. A host of nondisaster-related issues might hitch a ride on this year’s continuing resolution, including several health policy and farm extenders. On top of this, certain Social Security beneficiaries may get boosted benefits (at everyone else’s expense), with the Senate planning to consider the Social Security Fairness Act later this week.
With federal deficits already in the trillions, lawmakers should approach this funding debate skeptically, avoiding unnecessary and expensive add-ons that are all too common in emergency funding packages. At a minimum, Congress should offset new emergency spending wherever possible and pair the package with commonsense budget reforms to promote future fiscal restraint.
While most of Biden’s budget request addresses Hurricanes Helene and Milton, the administration has included several items that are entirely unrelated to the most recent hurricanes and hardly qualify as emergencies (necessary, sudden, urgent, unforeseen, and temporary).
For instance, $216 million is earmarked to increase base pay for the Forest Service’s wildland firefighting force. Another $733 million is allocated to replace two National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration “hurricane hunter” aircraft not slated for decommissioning until 2030. Billions more would be distributed among various agencies for long-term infrastructure and modernization upgrades. These issues are foreseeable and non-urgent. Accordingly, they should be funded through the regular appropriations process, if at all, not through emergency supplemental funding, which receives less oversight and is more prone to waste, fraud, and abuse.
The current disaster funding debate offers Congress an opportunity to address systemic issues in federal disaster relief. Privatizing the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), for example, would align costs with actual risks, incentivize safer development, and minimize taxpayer exposure to repetitive losses. Additionally, Congress should adopt procedural reforms to strengthen fiscal responsibility, including:
offsetting emergency spending with equivalent budget cuts;
raising voting thresholds for emergency appropriations to reduce abuse; and
requiring justifications for how proposed funding qualifies as an emergency.
For more ideas, see our “Proposals to Reform the Emergency Spending Process.”
On top of the mostly hurricane-related disaster relief, several other funding plus-ups have been floated.
Ukraine funding: Biden has requested $24 billion in new foreign aid. It’s been nearly three years since Russia invaded Ukraine, and Congress has spent upwards of $174 billion on the conflict with mixed results. Congress should not funnel more money to Ukraine through the emergency loophole, especially since Biden made no effort to propose offsets.
Farm subsidies: GOP leadership is considering a one-year farm bill reauthorization and haggling with Democrats about direct economic aid to farmers. Congress should focus on cutting wasteful subsidies and reducing taxpayer costs rather than passing plus-ups to farm aid that benefits wealthy households.
Francis Scott Key Bridge funding: House Democrats are reportedly requesting the federal government to pay for 100 percent of the $2 billion cost of rebuilding Baltimore’s collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge. The federal government does not need to burden taxpayers with another costly infrastructure project. Instead, lawmakers might consider authorizing a private firm to build and operate the new bridge, reducing taxpayer liability.
Health policy: Congressional negotiators may reauthorize and extend several health programs as part of the stopgap package, including Medicare telehealth, the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act, and the SUPPORT Act. Few, if any, of these programs qualify as urgent emergencies requiring inclusion in a stopgap measure. For example, Medicare telehealth subsidies, initially justified under the COVID-19 emergency, have become a $2.4 billion recurring expense. Congress should reject last-minute rubber-stamped approvals that undermine accountability and drive up costs.
Legislators should reject funding proposals that could reasonably be addressed through the normal appropriations process. Any genuine emergency needs should be offset by eliminating wasteful, low-priority, or duplicative spending elsewhere in the budget.
As a separate issue, the Senate will likely consider voting on the Social Security Fairness Act, which would repeal the Windfall Elimination Provision and Government Pension Offset. Such a change would unfairly increase benefits for individuals with earnings not subject to Social Security taxation and cost taxpayers an additional $196 billion over 10 years. Additionally, it would accelerate Social Security deficits.
If you add everything together, Congress is considering adding more than $300 billion to 10-year deficits this week before including interest costs. With a new administration and the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, preparing to get underway, Congress should turn a new leaf on its overspending habit and embrace fiscal responsibility.
Rejecting a massive end-of-year emergency supplemental and embracing broader reforms would be a meaningful first step toward restoring budget discipline.