Appropriations Bills Are Central Planning in Disguise

Every fall, Washington performs a ritual that looks like republican deliberation and functions like Gosplan. Congress takes up the appropriations process, twelve bills that are supposed to fund the federal government, and then, with almost mechanical regularity, abandons them for a thousand-page omnibus released at midnight and voted on before anyone can read it. The usual complaints write themselves: dysfunction, corruption, waste. But they miss the deeper point.

The appropriations process is not failing because Congress is unusually incompetent. It is failing because we have asked a political body to do something no central planner can do: allocate resources for an entire continental nation without the information that only free markets and real prices can provide. That is not a scheduling problem. That is an impossibility.

The Founders Gave Congress a Ledger, Not a Plan

The Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse. Article I, Section 9 says plainly: "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law." That sounds sweeping until you remember what else the Constitution does: it enumerates the powers for which Congress may spend at all.

James Madison answered the claim that the General Welfare Clause gives Congress unlimited spending power in Federalist No. 41. He asked, "For what purpose could the enumeration of particular powers be inserted, if these and all others were meant to be included in the preceding general power?" In other words, the spending power was never a blank check for central planners. It was a tool for funding a limited government, defense, courts, post roads, and the few objects the Constitution actually assigns to the federal government.

That matters because a ledger is manageable. A plan is not. The Founders designed an appropriations process for a government with a dozen departments and a defined jurisdiction. They did not design it to allocate trillions of dollars across every corner of American life.

From Ledger to Five-Year Plan

Today, the federal government does not just fund the enumerated powers. It funds education, health care, energy, housing, agriculture, transportation, scientific research, foreign aid, and thousands of grants and subsidies that have no constitutional home. The appropriations process is expected to make rational decisions about all of it.

Look at the numbers. Federal spending now runs over six trillion dollars a year, with roughly one point seven trillion of that in discretionary appropriations. The twelve appropriations bills cover everything from the Department of Defense to the National Endowment for the Arts, from the Centers for Disease Control to the Appalachian Regional Commission. Many of those agencies and programs did not exist a century ago, and they certainly were not part of the original constitutional design. The Department of Education, for example, was created in 1979 to administer a function the Constitution leaves to the states and local communities. Yet the appropriations process now funds it to the tune of tens of billions of dollars every year.

That is the same impossible task the Soviet central planners faced. They had five-year plans. We have twelve appropriations bills, and when those fail, a continuing resolution or an omnibus that functions as a five-year plan compressed into a week. The label is different. The logic is the same: a central committee tries to do what no committee can do.

The Knowledge Problem on Capitol Hill

A committee of five hundred thirty-five people, assisted by thousands of staffers and lobbyists, cannot know the marginal value of every program in a six-trillion-dollar budget. It cannot know which highway project adds more value, which medical research grant will fail, which green-energy subsidy is pure waste, or which local museum deserves a million dollars. No one can know those things, because the knowledge is not collected in any one place.

Friedrich Hayek explained this in his 1945 essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society." The knowledge that matters for rational economic decisions, he wrote, never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. A free market processes that knowledge through prices, which emerge from millions of voluntary exchanges. An appropriations committee processes it through seniority, lobbying, and political pressure.

The difference is not slight. It is the difference between a decentralized information system and a centralized guess. When you see an earmark for a local bridge or a subsidy for a preferred industry, you are not seeing the result of rational planning. You are seeing the result of a political contest in which the best-connected interest wins, not the most productive use of resources.

The Seen and the Unseen in a Thousand Pages

Henry Hazlitt taught us to judge policy by what is unseen. The appropriations process is the ultimate broken-window exercise. Every line item has a visible beneficiary: a contractor, a grant recipient, a university, a defense plant. The unseen costs are the higher taxes, the bigger debt, the inflation, and the private projects that never happen because the capital was seized and spent by Congress.

The structure of the process guarantees that the seen wins. The benefits of any particular appropriation are concentrated and easily photographed. The costs are dispersed across three hundred forty million people and arrive later. So every member fights for their district's earmark and ignores the aggregate damage. The appropriations process does not just fail to restrain spending. It actively manufactures a bias toward more of it.

This is why every clean continuing resolution eventually balloons into an omnibus. The incentives point that way. If you are a member of Congress, you do not get reelected for saying no to a thousand programs. You get reelected for bringing home the money. The process is not a safeguard. It is a machine for turning diffuse costs into concentrated benefits.

The Constitutional Abdication

There is a second problem, and it is just as serious. The Founders understood the power of the purse as a legislative weapon. Madison wrote in Federalist No. 58 that it is "the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure." That weapon only works if representatives actually debate and vote on what they spend.

The modern appropriations process has abandoned that. Omnibus bills are negotiated in secret by leadership and voted on before anyone can read them. Members are given hours, sometimes minutes, to review thousands of pages. In recent years, omnibus bills have run over twenty-two hundred pages, released in the dead of night and passed within twenty-four hours. Committee hearings become theater. Regular order is invoked every year and ignored every year.

This is not just inefficiency. It is a quiet transfer of power from the people's representatives to a small group of appropriators, staffers, and lobbyists. The Constitution's appropriation power was meant to be exercised in the open, line by line, by people accountable to their constituents. The modern process turns it into a central committee's decree, with all the accountability problems that follow.

Why Regular Order Is Not Enough

The standard conservative answer is to demand regular order: pass twelve separate bills, allow amendments, read the text, and stop governing by omnibus. I am all for it. But let us be clear-eyed about what regular order can and cannot do.

Regular order would make the process more transparent and more accountable. It would not solve the knowledge problem. If Congress still tries to allocate six trillion dollars across the entire economy, twelve bills are still twelve central plans. They will still be written by people who cannot know what every dollar should buy. They will still be shaped by lobbying and politics. The only difference is that we will watch the failure happen in slightly better lighting.

The real fix is not process reform. It is jurisdiction reform. The federal government should not be spending on most of what it spends on. If the appropriations process were limited to the enumerated powers, defense, federal courts, foreign affairs, and the genuinely national functions, then twelve bills would be readable. Members could actually deliberate. The power of the purse would mean something again. The problem is not that Congress is bad at central planning. The problem is that central planning is impossible, and we keep asking Congress to do it.

The Human Stakes

Every year, the ordinary American taxpayer watches Congress stumble from continuing resolution to omnibus, from shutdown threat to debt ceiling crisis. He sees the debt grow, the inflation eat his paycheck, and the government spend money on projects he never consented to. He senses something is wrong. The standard explanations, partisanship, gridlock, incompetence, are true enough, but they miss the root.

The root is that we have drifted far from the constitutional design. The Founders gave us a government of limited, enumerated powers, and an appropriations process meant to fund that government with deliberation and consent. We have turned it into a sprawling central plan that no one can understand, no one can control, and no one can afford.

The remedy is not a better budget process. It is a smaller government. Restore the enumerated powers, shrink the spending jurisdiction, and the appropriations process will become what it was meant to be: a deliberate, legible, constitutional act, not a five-year plan with extra steps. Until then, every fall we will watch the same spectacle, and every year the debt will grow heavier on the backs of Americans who never asked for any of it.