The good news is that astronautical engineering and orbital mechanics are not required. The bad news is that, besides politics, there are two big challenges that hinder Congress from solving our fiscal problems: First, a focus on short-form media and rapid news cycles has distracted from long-term thinking about budget issues. Second, rapid staff turnover means that Congress struggles with the institutional knowledge needed for a functioning budget process. (Only a handful of staff remain who remember our last budget surplus at the turn of the millennium.)
What is needed, and what the newly launched Fiscal Lab on Capitol Hill exists to provide, are the staff educational resources and laboratory tools that will foster intelligent discussion and analytical exploration of the fiscal possibilities and different options within the legislative proposals for staff to make better informed decisions and choices when drafting legislation for federal lawmakers.
The good news is that Congress continues to attract bright and intelligent young staff on both sides of the aisle. Just because they do not agree on the downstream policies does not mean that certain core considerations, like 2+2=4, cannot form a rudimentary basis for conversation and discussion of the obvious problems that are our national debt and our weakened ability to handle future crises owing to our fiscal situation. We should all be able to rally around the common goals of fiscal responsibility and soundness.
The Fiscal Lab aims to meet staff where they are, recognizing that their educational training and background are often misaligned with the tools needed for rigorously testing policy proposals. Yes, a policy may solve one immediate problem, but what if it creates two other unintended problems? Or what if there is a better way to solve the problem? Members of Congress typically do not hire staff for their mathematical prowess; they hire them because they are philosophically aligned and can offer credible recommendations for the Member to follow.
No exact record exists on the college majors of staff, but anyone who has spent time in Congress will confirm that degrees in the humanities and law far exceed STEM degrees. For Members, it is less than 10 percent who have STEM degrees. We are great at making rhetorical points, but for doing the work of budgeting and fiscal reform, Congress is weak. That’s where the Fiscal Lab can help, with both education and analytical analysis.
I once had a Senate chief who had the staff read from a book of stories by the late, legendary basketball coach John Wooden. We laughed at these because some were quite corny, but some offered real wisdom. One story spoke of the coach beginning every first practice, every season with reviewing how to put on socks. The point was that if those skilled players were drilled and redrilled and got this right, it would reduce blisters and help the players perform better during the season. (Wooden’s UCLA teams won an astounding 10 NCAA championships.)
No question is too small or too big for the Fiscal Lab. What is a budget? What is GDP? What is the difference between budget authority and budget outlays, and how do they interplay? What are the fiscal, economic, and budgetary effects of a piece of legislation in light of demographic and regulatory changes and the interplay of conflicting laws? We want to help staff answer these questions, either confidentially or publicly.
At the Fiscal Lab, we believe in a free and fair market where opportunity and enterprise abound. We have all read economic texts and studied economic history (most more than me, as the Fiscal Lab team is stacked with economics PhD’s). Our conclusion is that more opportunity for far more people is achieved with pro-market, pro-growth policies. Yet we also recognize that good ideas come from both sides of the political spectrum. To that end, we are nonpartisan and want to help all staff in crafting measures for their members that are good for our nation’s fiscal health and consistent with the ideals of opportunity and liberty. We want to have conversations with everyone and do whatever good we can.
Returning to the moonshot analogy, the jobs of policymakers may in fact be harder than that of engineers studying orbital mechanics. The engineer and physicist operate within a static environment that is complex, but predictable once you know the rules. The policymaker, on the other hand, operates within a fluid environment governed by the uncertain choices and behaviors of man, society’s governing institutions, and unpredictable events like war, recession, and natural disasters. Attempting to tame an historically high level of federal debt is no small task, and the seemingly obvious straight-line solution may not always be the quickest way to get there.
The Fiscal Lab is now open and available to help policymakers navigate this treacherous environment.
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.
