 Hey, brah. Yeah. You, brah. Yeah, brah. You interested in the federal budget process? It's going to be tizzite. Like a word? No, wait. Come back, yo. This is going to be super awesome. Uh, brah. Budgeting in the his house? All right, fine. This is a little boring. Okay, it's a lot boring, but it's kind of important. Yeah, exactly. What indeed? How do they even decide how much money to spend on the government? Yeah, boy. Sorry, sorry. To get a budget for the federal government, the first step is for the president to submit a budget request to Congress. The president starts with the budget requests which come in from the various agencies like FIBI, SIA, IPA, and DOE. I think I'm saying those right. The president has the final say on what the agencies get. Even so, you often have situations where the president, the heads of the agencies, and Congress have different ideas about how much money should be spent on each thing. The president's budget request is due by law to Congress on the first Monday in February, so everyone needs to be in line by then. The request needs to explain how much money the president wants to spend, how much money the government will take in, and what deficits that will leave over if the money in isn't more than the money out. If there's a deficit, the government needs to borrow money to cover the difference, which has been going on 38 of the last 42 years. Right now, the deficit is over $1 trillion, and the total federal government debt is over $16 trillion. The budget is for the fiscal year, not the calendar year, so it runs from October 1st to September 30th. Planning goes out for several years though, so agencies need to try to spend money for this year, try to get funding in Congress for next year, and try to get a budget request to the president for the year all around the same time. This means a lot of guesswork about the future and how things will be changed by the timing of the inevitable robot apocalypse. Once the president turns in a budget request, Congress gets to work like a smoothly-oiled machine. Just kidding, it's a disaster. In theory, Congress is supposed to have a budget passed by April 15th, but that never happens. It's funny that the deadline is tax day, almost like they want one day they can enjoy the giant piles of money before they all get sent out again to pay the bills. In an attempt to keep themselves on deadline, Congress isn't allowed to consider any laws about spending or taxes until they either pass a budget resolution, or it gets to be April 16th. They also aren't allowed to take more than a three-day break unless the bills authorizing spending have passed the House of Representatives. As we will see later, this makes almost no difference. The bills authorizing the spending of money are called appropriations bills. The federal government cannot spend money without appropriations, which is why Congress is supposedly the most powerful branch of the government. Despite all these rules, Congress didn't actually pass a budget resolution in 1998, 2002, 2004, 2006, or from 2009 to now. The law they passed, which ended the debt ceiling fight, did have caps on spending for 2011 and 2012, but otherwise they just passed individual appropriations bills to keep the government funded. Everything in Congress is done by committees. There are three types of committees. Oversight committees look after the agency or subject area and offer comments on the President's budget proposal. Budget committees formulate the budget resolution, and appropriations committees pass the spending bills. Politicians fight to get on the appropriations committees because a lot of detail is left out of the budget resolution, which means they have a lot of sway over how the money is spent and can pass lots of little items to spend a little here and there. In order to set spending in taxes, a budget may have to change existing laws which have been passed, so budgeting is very closely connected to lawmaking. Just like with the President's request, the budget Congress passes needs to say how much will be spent, how much will be collected to pay for it, and what the deficit will be. A lot of spending may take longer than a year to happen or may happen later than the year of the budget. The government has the authority to spend money when it's in the budget, but the actual spending happens when the Treasury writes the checks. The budget has to be based on some estimate of how the economy will perform, so that politicians will know how much money they can expect to bring in and how much they should expect to spend on things like welfare, which will vary depending on the poverty rate. These estimates can come from Congress, via the Congressional Budget Office, or they can come from the President via the Office of Management and Budget. The two do not always agree. The Congressional estimates are updated later in the year in case some major event changes things. Once the Budget Committee's created a resolution, then everyone in the House or Senate can vote on it and try to get amendments, meaning changes, like getting funding for some project that they want. There are procedures in place to limit the number of amendments that can be considered, so they don't debate everything until the end of time. One rule that has been set up to try and cut down on spending is pay as you go. This means that every increase to an entitlement program, where the government gives money to someone, and every tax cut should be offset by some spending cut somewhere else. Of course, they can also override that requirement with a vote. Try to guess how often that happens. And there you have it.