‘We’re going to need a bigger boat’ — our budget process is causing our fiscal problems

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“Jaws,” the summer movie classic, serves as an allegory for our congressional budget process. I don’t say this because of the obvious parallel between the great white shark and debt eating us alive, but because of the similarity between Amity Island’s problem and our broken congressional budget process.

Fictional Amity Island is a lovely Cape Cod seaside town with a tourism-dependent economy. It also has a big problem: An aggressive man-eating shark arrives on the cusp of its summer season.

The problem is obvious with the first discovery of human remains. Both the police and the coroner recognize the wounds of a shark attack. Police Chief Brody swiftly comprehends the problem and prepares to close the beach, but Mayor Vaughn refuses to see the shark as the problem. He sees the reaction — the loss of tourism revenue — as the problem. He thus successfully pressures the coroner to say the death was a boating accident, ultimately causing further carnage.

In Washington, our shark is not the $41 trillion debt limit or $32 trillion of publicly held debt, as bad as those things are. Those are just consequences of our real problem. The real problem is the congressional budget process itself, which places little restraint on lawmakers’ spending and makes spending reform and reductions more difficult than they should be.

Before World War I, the U.S. ran annual deficits in 34 percent of all fiscal years. Since then, we have run deficits in 79 percent of fiscal years. Since adopting the modern budget process in 1974, we have run a deficit 92 percent of the time. The only respite came between 1998 and 2001, in the four years of surpluses under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

Truly, we have long operated mostly free from a robust budget process. Concurrent budget resolutions have been adopted in only six of the last 16 years. For fiscal 2027, a budget resolution seems unlikely, and it appears that senior appropriators from both parties are huddling in a back room with leadership to decide how much they want to spend, or how much they must spend to secure the votes to fund the government’s discretionary spending portfolio.

Today’s motivating force for adopting any budget is to pursue the opaque process known as reconciliation, which lets Congress bypass normal Senate rules. In theory, reconciliation reconciles (hence the name) federal spending and revenue with the budget, in order to reduce the deficit. However, it is never actually used for this. Instead, reconciliation is primarily used to bypass Senate filibuster rules and pass policies with a simple majority.

This was true for the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, the 2010 Obama Affordable Care Act, the 2017 and 2025 Trump tax cuts, the Democrats’ green-energy driven 2021 Inflation Reduction Act, and, most recently, funding for the Department of Homeland Security. There is no longer any pretense of a connection between reconciliation and deficit reduction or spending restraint.

Fatefully, on Amity Island, the beach remains open, and the next attack occurs in public. With another attack, the problem — if not its scale — is recognized. Local business owners pressure the mayor and town council to adopt half-measures to keep the beach open. Victory is proclaimed with the catch of a large tiger shark, and the politicians refuse to further investigate whether the right shark has been caught, despite the pleading of shark scientist Matt Hooper.

So too, in our current budget process, significant concern regarding spending has inspired a few fleeting attempts at reform. The 1985 Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act, with its spending sequesters, and the 2011 Budget Control Act with its defense and non-defense spending caps, were mere tiger sharks. Lawmakers could claim they made progress, and things were temporarily better, but the problem — the great white — still roams free.

In “Jaws,” the salty Captain Bartholomew Quint finally eliminates the great white, becoming its last victim in the process. Since the 2008 Financial Crisis, lawmakers abandoned the Hamiltonian norm, of restraining spending after large outlays. We then really piled on with COVID spending.

We have gotten so used to the madness of operating under the 1974 Budget Act framework that we fail to recognize its carnage: higher interest rates on mortgages and consumer loans, our reduced ability to finance infrastructure and defense, and our inability to enact reforms to sustain vital safety-net programs like Social Security and Medicare. We know things aren’t right, but we keep going after the wrong sharks.

What we need is to revisit the 1974 Budget Act, a silent but deadly contributor to our real fiscal problem. In “Jaws,” Chief Brody memorably said that “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” In Washington, we are going to need a new congressional budget process.

Doug Branch spent a quarter century working in Congress and is a senior fellow at the nonprofit, non-partisan Fiscal Lab on Capitol Hill.