As America approaches its 250th birthday, Senior Fellow Doug Branch, Director of Outreach at the Fiscal Lab, takes a whirlwind tour through the history of federal budgeting and asks a simple question: have things always been done the way they are now? This Fiscal Lab update explores: How Congress controlled the budget before 1920, from dispersed appropriations to project-specific bonds The Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 and the rise of executive branch control over spending The 1974 Budget Act, which created the CBO and the House and Senate Budget Committees but failed to curb annual deficits How reconciliation evolved into a tool for bypassing the Senate filibuster rather than reducing deficits The striking shift from 83 surpluses in the nation’s first 125 fiscal years to persistent deficits ever since Two and a half centuries in, budgeting reform is a topic ripe for reconsideration, and there may be lessons worth reclaiming from how we did things before.
Doug has a quarter-century of service on Capitol Hill where he gained extensive federal legislative, policy, communications, political, and administrative experience serving on the staffs of senators, representatives, and congressional committees, including the Joint Economic Committee (JEC) the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, and as DC Chief of Staff to a House Financial Services Subcommittee Chairman. Branch has a master’s in governing from Hillsdale College.
