The Appropriations Cardinals: How a Dozen Lawmakers Secretly Control Your Tax Dollars

Most Americans can name a few Supreme Court justices, maybe a couple of senators. Ask them who chairs the subcommittee that funds the Pentagon and they will stare at you blankly. That is exactly the way Washington wants it. The power to spend your money has been quietly moved into the hands of a small group known on Capitol Hill as the appropriations cardinals. The less you know about them, the easier it is for them to keep doing it.

In both the House and the Senate, the Appropriations Committee divides its work into twelve subcommittees. Each one writes a single annual spending bill: Defense, Labor-Health and Human Services, Transportation-Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture, and the rest. The chair of each subcommittee is called a cardinal. The full committee chair, who negotiates with party leadership and the White House, gets called the pope. It sounds like a joke. It is not a joke. Together these cardinals control well over a trillion dollars in annual discretionary spending. They decide which weapons systems survive, which agencies grow, which districts get new federal buildings, which grant programs live, and which quietly die.

The cardinals are not elected by the American people. They are chosen by party leaders and seniority. A cardinal answers to the voters of only one district or state, yet the decisions he makes affect all fifty states. If a cardinal represents a district with a major shipyard, do not be surprised when that shipyard's funding survives every budget fight. If a cardinal comes from a farm state, the agriculture bill will reflect his priorities. This is not representation. It is concentration of power.

What the Constitution actually says

Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution states the rule plainly: "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law." Notice what the text does not say. It does not say appropriations made by twelve cardinals in a back room. It does not say funding levels set by a small committee that no one outside the Beltway can hold responsible. It says appropriations made by law, meaning public, deliberative, and subject to the consent of the governed through their elected representatives.

James Madison understood the stakes. In Federalist No. 58, he wrote that the power of the purse "may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people." The key word is immediate. The power was supposed to rest with representatives who face their neighbors, their communities, and the consequences of their votes. It was never meant to be delegated to a permanent internal body that operates outside public view.

Madison warned in Federalist No. 10 that faction would always threaten republican government. But he assumed the cure would be a large republic with many competing interests checking one another. He did not anticipate a system in which a handful of members from safe districts would control the entire flow of federal money. The modern appropriations process turns Madison's warning upside down. A small faction dominates every spending decision. The rest of the House is reduced to a ratifying body.

The knowledge problem in twelve chairs

Friedrich Hayek spent much of his career explaining what he called the knowledge problem. No central planner, no matter how intelligent or well-intentioned, can gather the dispersed knowledge necessary to make wise decisions for millions of free people. The appropriations cardinals are central planners par excellence. They attempt to allocate hundreds of billions of dollars across every sector of American life without the discipline of market prices, profit and loss, or local knowledge.

A cardinal deciding how much to spend on rural development does not know the needs of every county in America. He knows the needs of his own district, the lobbyists who visit his office, and the interest groups that fund his campaigns. The result is not rational planning. It is concentrated benefits and dispersed costs, the classic Washington formula.

Henry Hazlitt built Economics in One Lesson around a simple principle: judge a policy by what is seen and what is unseen. For every visible project the cardinal funds, there is an unseen cost. The tax dollar taken from a family that would have spent it better. The small business that could not expand. The local community that lost control of its own priorities. The cardinal sees the ribbon-cutting. He never sees the unseen. Milton Friedman liked to remind us that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Someone always pays. The appropriations cardinals decide who pays and who eats.

The death of regular order

The appropriations process is supposed to follow regular order. Twelve separate spending bills, each debated in subcommittee, then in the full committee, then on the floor, then in conference with the Senate. Members are supposed to have time to read each bill, offer amendments, and vote on the record. That has not happened in years. Instead, the cardinals draft the bills behind closed doors. Leadership merges them into a single omnibus or minibus. Rank-and-file members are then given hours, sometimes only minutes, to vote on thousands of pages they have not read. In some years, members have been asked to approve a package that no human being could fully digest before the vote. That is not deliberation. That is decree.

The return of earmarks made it worse. Earmarks did not return power to rank-and-file members. They returned discretion to the cardinals and leadership, now under the friendlier label of community project funding. A handful of members decide which districts get the goodies. That is why so many incumbents protect the system. They know that crossing a cardinal can mean losing a project in their district and facing a well-funded primary challenger.

The problem is structural, not personal

The cardinals are not evil people. They are rational actors responding to a broken system. Thomas Sowell's constrained vision reminds us that human beings respond to incentives. If you give a member a gavel that controls billions of dollars, he will use it to reward allies, protect his district, and punish enemies. That is not an indictment of his character. It is an indictment of a structure that invites that behavior.

We do not need better cardinals. We need to break the college.

Breaking the college without amending the Constitution

If we want limited government, we must first break the spending cartel. The fixes are not mysterious. Restore regular order by passing twelve separate appropriations bills through open committee and floor debate. Stop allowing thousand-page omnibus packages that no one reads. Adopt and enforce a single-subject rule so a member has to vote on the actual policy in front of him. Reopen the amendment process so the public can see who is fighting for what, because that is how a republic functions. Rotate subcommittee chairs on a fixed schedule to break the iron triangle of appropriators, lobbyists, and agency bureaucrats. Move toward zero-based budgeting, forcing every program to justify its existence each year instead of treating last year's number as a sacred baseline. And most importantly, send much of this money and authority back to the states and localities where it belongs.

None of these reforms requires a constitutional amendment. They require only that Congress change its own rules. That is the frustrating part. The solution is not complicated. The resistance is political.

The real choice in front of us

The appropriations cardinals are the closest thing to an unelected fourth branch of government. They are not in the Constitution. They are not accountable to the people of the United States. Yet they decide how much of your money is spent, where it goes, and who benefits. The Founders gave the power of the purse to the people's representatives precisely so that spending would remain close to the governed. When that power is concentrated in a small, secretive college, the republic begins to look less like a republic and more like a court.

The next time you hear a member of Congress complain about the deficit, ask him whether he supports restoring regular order and ending the omnibus. If he will not answer, you know whose side he is on. We don't need a new conclave. We need the old Constitution.