Why We Must Reform the Federal Budget Process

On the Dysfunction That Produces Shutdowns, Omnibus Bills, and Fiscal Theater

Campaign Briefing: Fiscal Discipline and Structural Oversight

2028 Presidential Campaign of Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

August 6, 2026

I. A Process That Has Stopped Working

The federal budget process was designed to produce an annual budget. Congress was to pass twelve appropriations bills, covering twelve categories of government spending, before the start of the fiscal year on October 1. The President would sign them. The government would be funded. This was the design.

In recent decades, the design and the reality have diverged almost completely. The twelve appropriations bills are rarely passed before October 1. Often they are not passed at all — replaced instead by a continuing resolution that funds the government at the previous year's levels while Congress avoids the difficult decisions that an actual budget requires. When the continuing resolutions expire without agreement, the government shuts down — sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks, once for 35 days, at enormous cost and zero governing benefit. When an agreement is eventually reached, it typically takes the form of an omnibus — a single massive bill, often thousands of pages long, passed in the hours before a deadline, with minimal deliberation and maximum opacity.

II. What the Dysfunction Costs

It costs money — directly, in the inefficiency of operating on continuing resolutions that prevent agencies from starting new programs, entering into long-term contracts, or planning beyond the current quarter. The Department of Defense, for example, cannot sign multi-year procurement contracts when it does not know whether it will be funded past the next continuing resolution. That uncertainty costs real dollars.

It costs governance — the decisions that should be made through the budget process, about national priorities and how to fund them, are deferred or avoided. The budget process is supposed to be the mechanism through which Congress exercises its constitutional power of the purse. When that process is broken, so is the most fundamental check Congress holds over executive power.

And it costs public trust — the spectacle of shutdown brinksmanship, of midnight votes on thousand-page omnibus bills that no member has read, of a process that produces neither fiscal discipline nor genuine deliberation, is visible evidence that the institution is not functioning.

III. The Reforms This Campaign Advocates

Automatic continuing resolutions at reduced funding levels — creating a fiscal cost to delay that incentivizes timely completion of appropriations. A constitutional budget amendment requiring balanced budgets over the economic cycle, with a supermajority requirement for emergency exceptions. Biennial budgeting for certain categories that would benefit from longer planning horizons. And transparency requirements — no omnibus bills, no combined legislation that obscures individual spending decisions, no votes on bills that members have not had 72 hours to read.

The budget process is where congressional authority over the executive is most fundamentally exercised. Fixing it is not an inside-baseball governance question. It is a constitutional imperative.

Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

2028 Presidential Campaign of Martin A. Ginsburg, RN