Aaron Wildavsky’s Anti–Government Shutdown Plan

Worries about Congress’s capacity to carry out its constitutional duties are not new. In 1965, leaders of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) commissioned a series of papers focused on strengthening the legislative branch’s institutional standing. Among the submissions was Aaron Wildavsky’s on reforming how Congress participates in the federal budget process. His analysis is interesting for providing insights that are still relevant alongside observations that were quickly overtaken by events. 

Wildavsky was a respected political scientist who built his reputation through a close study of federal spending decisions. From his research and interviews with scores of direct participants (including key staff members at the then-Bureau of the Budget and the House and Senate appropriations committees), he viewed grand theories calling for systematic assessment and ranking of the numerous competing claims on public funding as hopelessly impractical and therefore unrealistic. His conviction was that writing a budget is by necessity a political project, and the demands of politics do not always conform to tidy cost-benefit considerations. For elected leaders, intention and stability matter, even if sticking with the status quo means suboptimal results.

With this context, sharp breaks from the status quo are seen as risky, especially when initiated by officials who do much of the work but only because they have been deputized by officials who are accountable to voters. Wildavsky’s 1964 book, The Politics of the Budgetary Process, described in detail how key spending decisions are often based on the rational calculation that, absent compelling evidence otherwise, what was spent last year is as good a starting point for setting current budgets as anything else. 

This emphasis on realistic expectations and practicality were again featured themes in Wildavsky’s AEI symposium submission, which he entitled “Toward a Radical Incrementalism: A Proposal to Aid Congress in Reform of the Budgetary Process.” In today’s context, his recommendations can be seen as providing a plausible reform for today’s dysfunctional appropriations process while being overly dismissive of the importance of attending to the macro fiscal outlook. 

Wildavsky stressed two themes in his analysis. First, despite the superficial appearance of the preparation and approval of a full budget every year, both the executive branch and Congress proceeded on an incremental basis by building on previous budgets. In other words, most appropriation decisions can be seen as marginal adjustments to the choices made in prior years, and most of those adjustments are relatively minor. 

Second, he was supportive rather than distrustful of the informal system of information used by Congress to make budget decisions. If something is not working well, his expectation was that Congress would hear about it, one way or another. And it is this informal and fragmented information system that he believed provided a rational basis for deciding which agencies and programs demand closer scrutiny at any given point in time and which ones could be safely ignored (with funding kept essentially at the current level). He did not view it as unreasonable to assume the most intense petitions for changes in appropriations are fairly reliable indicators of matters deserving of Congress’s attention. 

Based on these convictions, he recommended abandoning the broadly held assumption that the president and Congress should work through a “comprehensive” budget every year. Instead,  he supported something like a permanent automatic continuing resolution, or CR, that would provide all agencies and programs with annual funding without the need for further congressional action (a modified version would put agencies and programs that are operating satisfactorily on five-year cycles of review). Congress could focus its limited time on targeted cuts or increases as warranted by the circumstances of specific accounts. Government shutdowns would not occur because funding for agencies would continue indefinitely based on a standard formula tied to appropriations provided by Congress in prior years. 

Though his plan was admittedly “radical,” Wildavsky’s penetrating assessment of the practical realities of the appropriations process still resonates. Indeed, his reasoning is detectable in reforms that others have advocated in recent years. 

Wildavsky’s views on the value of a comprehensive budget have not worn as well. He was dismissive of the need to carefully monitor macro fiscal trends because he believed informal information systems would warn key congressional leaders when the gap between taxes and spending carried increased economic risks, and Congress could be counted on to corrective action. If only it were so. 

Still, Wildavsky’s paper offered a perspective that is valuable given the many ways today’s budget process falls short. As he observed, Congress spends far too much time processing decisions of little consequence, which then leaves it with less capacity to go in depth on the questions that really matter. 

There would be a side benefit from his suggestions too. With more appropriations spending renewed automatically each year, the disruptions from government shutdowns would become things of the past.

James C. Capretta is a senior fellow and holds the Milton Friedman Chair at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he studies health care, entitlement programs, and fiscal trends in advanced economies. This essay was first published on AEI Ideas.