The Continuing Resolution Habit Is Congress Abdicating the Power of the Purse

The most dangerous phrase in Washington is not "shutdown." It is "current levels." A continuing resolution sounds like a harmless bridge between budgets. What it actually does is put the federal government on autopilot: last year's spending, last year's priorities, last year's mistakes. The public is told that Congress has avoided a crisis. In reality, Congress has simply declined to exercise its judgment in public.

The power of the purse is not a formality

Every September the same ritual plays out. A deadline approaches. The press fills with talk of a government shutdown. Leaders huddle behind closed doors. Then, at the last possible moment, Congress passes a continuing resolution. Federal money keeps flowing. The public breathes a sigh of relief. But the real crisis never makes the evening news.

Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution is blunt. No money may be drawn from the Treasury except in consequence of appropriations made by law. The power of the purse is not a clerical function. It is the chief check that the people's House holds against the executive. James Madison, writing in Federalist No. 58, called it the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people. A continuing resolution is Congress looking at that weapon and deciding to leave it unused.

What a continuing resolution actually does

When Congress funds the government by resolution rather than by deliberate appropriations, it makes no new decision. Last year's priorities continue. Programs that could never survive a stand-alone vote continue. Every member who wanted to avoid a hard vote gets exactly what he or she wanted: no vote at all.

That is not neutral. It is budgeting by inertia. Suppose Congress wanted to move money from a failed green-energy slush fund to border enforcement. Under a full-year continuing resolution, that reallocation becomes almost impossible for an entire fiscal year. The old program keeps its funding. The new priority waits. Both are frozen at last year's levels, regardless of changing circumstances.

Henry Hazlitt taught the lesson well in Economics in One Lesson. The bad economist sees only the immediate effect of a policy. The good economist sees the longer-run costs. A continuing resolution's visible benefit is that the government stays open and federal workers keep getting paid. The hidden costs are far larger. The visible good of avoiding a shutdown blinds people to the unseen harm of hollowing out the budget process.

The word "clean" hides the real deal

You will often hear a continuing resolution described as "clean." The word is meant to reassure you that nothing controversial has been tucked inside. Do not believe it.

Even a so-called clean continuing resolution carries dozens or even hundreds of exceptions known as anomalies. These are quiet adjustments that boost or cut specific accounts. An anomaly might raise the ceiling on a military construction account so a new project can proceed. It might extend an expiring visa program. It might allow a federal agency to initiate a contract it was not previously authorized to begin. Some of those ideas may be perfectly defensible. The problem is that none of them are debated on the floor, none of them are subject to amendment, and none of them receive a separate recorded vote.

The public is told Congress passed a clean stopgap. Well-connected interests know it passed a mini-budget behind closed doors. Every anomaly is an appropriations decision by another name. It simply lacks the transparency the rule of law demands.

The bureaucracy ends up with the power

Here is the least understood part of the continuing resolution racket. A continuing resolution does not simply hold spending at a fixed number. It often gives the Office of Management and Budget and federal agencies broad power to apportion funds and move money within accounts. Agencies receive a lump sum at last year's level and then decide how to spread it across programs. They decide which employees to hire, which contracts to sign, which grants to award, and which deadlines to slow-walk.

That is not a budget. It is a delegation.

The Constitution vests the legislative power in Congress, not in the executive branch. The late Justice Antonin Scalia often reminded us that the separation of powers is not a technicality. It is the structure that protects individual liberty. Every full-year continuing resolution shifts real decisions from elected lawmakers to unelected administrators. Friedrich Hayek warned that central planners cannot master the dispersed knowledge of millions of free people. A continuing resolution does not solve that problem. It hands the planning to the least accountable part of the government, the permanent bureaucracy, while pretending to be a harmless bridge.

The result is predictable. The administrative state grows more powerful precisely because Congress refuses to make hard choices. The people's representatives become spectators. The people's servants become managers.

Baseline bias makes the machine grow

There is a second hidden cost, and it may be the most corrosive. Continuing resolutions reinforce baseline budgeting, the Washington convention that treats automatic spending increases as the starting point and labels any slower growth a cut.

Under baseline budgeting, a program that was supposed to grow by seven percent automatically receives that seven percent as its baseline. If Congress funds it at only three percent growth, the press and the interest groups mourn a four percent cut. No actual reduction in spending has occurred. The program still has more money than it had last year. Yet the entire political debate is framed around the imaginary cut. A continuing resolution locks in that baseline. The status quo becomes the floor, and anyone who wants to eliminate a failing program is framed as a radical.

Thomas Sowell's warning about incentives applies perfectly. The intention of a continuing resolution is to prevent disruption. The result is to reward delay, penalize diligence, and guarantee that the hardest choices are never made by the people elected to make them. Members of Congress learn that they can avoid the political pain of voting on specific spending by simply kicking the can down the road. The incentive structure punishes courage and rewards cowardice.

Regular order is the only exit

The remedy is not another budget commission, a new set of parliamentary rules, or a bipartisan gang that promises to solve everything after the next election. The remedy is regular order.

Congress is supposed to pass twelve individual appropriations bills, covering defense, homeland security, agriculture, transportation, and the rest, in public, with debate and amendments, before the October 1 start of the fiscal year. That is not an impossible demand. It was the normal practice for much of American history. Today it is treated as a fantasy, and that tells you how far the institution has fallen.

The House and Senate should be required to complete those twelve bills on time. No full-year continuing resolutions. No hidden anomalies. No delegating the people's authority to the executive. And if Congress cannot do its most basic job, it should not be paid until it does. Members who fail to pass individual appropriations bills should feel the same consequence any private-sector manager would feel for failing to produce a budget: accountability.

I would rather have Congress make ten bad decisions in the open than one bad decision in the dark. A bad decision can be debated, exposed, and reversed. A hidden decision simply accumulates power.

A republic does not run on autopilot

The Constitution has no continuing resolution. The very concept is an extra-constitutional convenience invented to spare politicians from their duty. It should be treated as a last resort for a genuine national emergency, not as the default setting of American government.

A continuing resolution is not a compromise. It is a confession. It says the people's representatives cannot decide how much to spend, or on what, so they will let last year's political class keep governing from the grave.

The Founders gave us a republic of laws, not a government on autopilot. They gave Congress the power of the purse precisely because they understood that the power to spend is the power to control, and that the people's liberty depends on that power being exercised in the open, by the branch closest to the people.

Every continuing resolution quietly transfers that power to the executive branch and the permanent bureaucracy. It replaces deliberation with delegation. It replaces accountability with inertia. It teaches Americans that the federal government cannot govern itself.

That is not the constitutional republic Madison and the other framers designed. It is managed decline dressed up as fiscal responsibility. The cure is not complicated. Pass the appropriations bills. Debate them in public. Vote on them. And when someone offers you a clean continuing resolution, ask one simple question: What are you afraid to vote on?

The power of the purse was never meant to be deferred. It was meant to be exercised, by the people's representatives, in the light of day, for the good of the republic.