Opinion: Lawmakers five decades ago passed a big budget fix. It made a difference (for them)
LA TimesFifty years ago, Congress tried to rein in deficits and fix the budget process — or, perhaps, lawmakers were mostly just trying to wrest back some spending power from the White House. The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, signed by President Nixon while he was at risk of impeachment, established the House and Senate Budget Committees and the Congressional Budget Office to guide lawmakers in establishing and enforcing spending plans. Congress set annual deficit targets, imposed pay-as-you-go procedures for tax cuts and entitlement increases so that any law with a price tag had to also have a plan to pay for it, established caps on annually appropriated spending, directed across-the-board spending cuts if those targets or caps were breached, and created other rules and processes to help balance the nation’s revenues and spending. To control impoundments, the 1974 law established an orderly process by which the president could withhold funds either by temporarily deferring or by asking Congress for a rescission, which is a permanent reduction in spending.
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