YOUNG AND CREWS: Season for relief from big government - Washington Times

YOUNG AND CREWS: Season for relief from big government - Washington Times

The good news is that this year’s budget deficit will be half a trillion less than last year’s. The bad news is that it still will top $1 trillion.

The worse news is that politicians, those clever creatures, are constantly looking for ways to keep enacting expensive new regulations and dispensing goodies without adding to the budget or the deficit. It’s a way to curry favor with voters, who tend to like freebies but dislike paying the costs. One such trick is the unfunded mandate, and it needs to be reined in.

Here’s how an unfunded mandate works: In the face of today’s still-high unemployment, suppose Congress wants to enact, say, a new job-training program. It could pay for the program itself by increasing federal spending, or it could require businesses or states to foot the bill, escaping any cost scrutiny.

The first approach shows up in the federal budget and increases the deficit. The second does not; hence the unfunded mandate’s political appeal.

Unfunded mandates are ways to grow government without making the government’s balance sheet look worse than it already is.

Unfunded mandates have been abused for a long time. Back in 1995, governors were furious at Washington, and Congress even passed an Unfunded Mandate Reform Act (UMRA). It handily passed the House with a 394-28 vote and sailed through the Senate, 91-9. One reason for such overwhelming margins, though, was that the legislation doesn’t have much in the way of teeth. Members of Congress were able to hold back-patting press conferences, but they didn’t have to change their behavior very much.

One loophole is that an unfunded mandate has to be very expensive before it triggers any UMRA actions. It would have to cost more than $73 million to state and local governments or more than $146 million to the private sector.

If an unfunded mandate reaches those thresholds, the Congressional Budget Office is supposed to take a closer look and disclose its findings to Congress. Congress then has the option of striking the spending, though it almost never does. Congress explicitly is not allowed to strike down disaster aid, national security-related spending and a few other kinds of mandates. The UMRA is a good transparency measure, but it isn’t much more than that.

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