Democrats Plan to Restore Budget Discipline

House, Senate Consider How To Reduce Deficit

Over the past decade, budget discipline on Capitol Hill collapsed under the desire for tax cuts and the pressure of war spending, analysts say. Now, the new Democratic majority says it is ready to put congressional budget-making back on track and, in the process, reduce the budget deficit.

The Senate is debating a plan to balance the budget by 2012, allow modest increases in some programs and require, for the first time in years, that revenue lost to tax cuts be made up elsewhere. House leaders announced a similar plan yesterday.

The Democratic proposals, like President Bush's latest budget request, would rely on accounting gimmicks. But supporters say that even with their flaws, the plans would force Congress to do a better job of living within its means.

Passing a credible budget would also enhance the Democrats' stature for next year's elections, strategists from both parties said.

"If they can at least tout that they've got a balanced budget put together, then I think they undermine the Republicans and set themselves up well to claim the mantle of fiscal responsibility going into 2008," said G. William Hoagland, a former top Republican aide on Capitol Hill.

Congress is supposed to be subject to an elaborate budget procedure that imposes discipline. Created in 1974 to settle a power struggle with President Richard M. Nixon, the procedure requires lawmakers to write a broad framework for federal spending known as a budget resolution, setting limits on spending and targets for revenue.

Before each budget year begins Oct. 1, Congress is supposed to consult that broad plan and pass 11 specific bills to appropriate money.

The procedure has never worked exactly as planned. For example, Congress has met the deadline for approving spending bills only four times in three decades. But for more than 20 straight years, it approved budget resolutions, often with the aim of limiting the deficit.

That discipline essentially collapsed late in the Clinton administration, budget analysts said, when a booming economy produced a budget surplus in 1998.

"We had finally gotten to the point where we could see surpluses and everybody said, 'Let's party,' " said John R. Kasich, the Ohio Republican who was House Budget Committee chairman at the time.

Arguments broke out over whether to spend the surplus or return it to taxpayers. Paralyzed by a fight between the House and Senate, both under Republican control, Congress failed for the first time to agree on a spending plan.

After that, "all those disciplining rules went by the wayside," said Rudolph G. Penner, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office and a senior fellow at the Urban Institute.