The Public Policy/Line-Item Imaginings
Moe, Ronald & Fisher, Louis
THE PUBLIC POLICY LINE-ITEM IMAGININGS by Ronald Moe and Louis Fisher O ne of the dramatic highlights of President Reagan's final State of the Union Address last January was yet another plea to...
...The table says nothing, incidentally, about crawfish...
...The list totalled $1.5 billion...
...If he vetoed only ten percent, Congress would confront a thousand override decisions...
...Or say a Medicaid bill were passed, after much congressional give-and-take, containing language prohibiting the use of such funds for abortions...
...under attack would have had to be mentioned in the law...
...Giving the President item veto authority would profoundly alter these conditions...
...But there's an interesting catch to the President's indignation about these spending excesses...
...Maybe, maybe not...
...No one in either branch wants this kind of inflexibility...
...At present, Presidents do not invoke the veto power frivolously, and Congress treats vetoes with respect...
...He would nullify the compromise that allowed Congress to pass the appropriation in the first place...
...Thomas Jefferson, always a man to take seriously, advised that in seeking reforms one should be sure the patch is commensurate with the hole...
...His solution, however, is faulty and serves to divert our attention from plausible solutions to our chronic budget deficit problems...
...In his accompanying message, Reagan told Congress that "these are the projects that, if I were able to exercise line veto authority, I would delete...
...In both instances the President would be converting a conditional appropriation into an unconditional grant of funds...
...If Congress, for instance, provided $50 million for the resistance in Nicaragua, but included a proviso that the aid 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1988 could be used only for "non-lethal" purposes, the President could delete the restrictive language and keep the funds...
...The continuing resolution, however, said nothing about cranberries, blueberries, crawfish, or wildflowers...
...To find them we have to look deeper...
...A thunderous ovation rose from both sides of the aisle...
...In December 1987 Congress passed, and the President signed into law, the continuing resolution appropriating funds for fiscal 1988...
...Instead of a single item of $303 million for Cooperative State Research Service, you would first earmark this to the sub-items, such as the $31 million for special research grants, and then into sub-sub-items, such as the sixty specific programs...
...The President also promised to send to Congress, in thirty days, a formal request to rescind billions of dollars in wasteful spending...
...With item-veto authority, he might easily have 10,000 candidates to veto...
...A President with item-veto authority could have deleted the entire $303 million, abolishing good programs and bad...
...In states where governors possess the item veto, courts have handed down conflicting opinions on the authority of governors to delete parts of an item...
...rri his proposal to delete legislative 1 language, and not just dollar amounts, raises a serious issue about the President's authority to rewrite legislation...
...Since those items were not identified in the bill sent to the President, an item veto could not have touched them...
...The item veto is a poor fit...
...A table in the conference report subdivides the $31 million among sixty programs, including $92,000 for research on the blueberry shoestring virus to be conducted in Michigan, $260,000 for cranberry/blueberry disease and breeding in New Jersey, and $50,000 for native wildflowers in New Mexico...
...OMB estimated that the federal government would be $643 million dollars richer if the prohibition could be "item vetoed...
...And what of the celebrated "pork list" Reagan had vowed to send to Congress within thirty days of the State of the Union address, the "multi-billion dollar package" of items he wanted to veto but couldn't...
...Let's approve the line-item veto...
...THE PUBLIC POLICY LINE-ITEM IMAGININGS by Ronald Moe and Louis Fisher O ne of the dramatic highlights of President Reagan's final State of the Union Address last January was yet another plea to Congress to approve a constitutional amendment granting the President a line-item veto...
...In a theatrical gesture to illustrate his frustration, the President brought to the podium three "behemoths": a conference report, a reconciliation bill, and the continuing resolution, the total weight coming to some forty-three pounds...
...The President is currently presented with approximately 300 bills a year...
...This solution would produce a bill not of fourteen pounds, which President Reagan ridiculed, but double or triple that...
...President Reagan was correct when he said that the budget process has broken down...
...In these documents, he asserted, are to be found those egregious "pork" provisions that would have been eliminated had he a line-item veto...
...But even if Reagan could have made such a deletion, we are still a long way from pinpointing the four programs he objected to...
...The CSRS account earmarks, as one part of the larger item, $31,185,000 for contracts and grants for agricultural research...
...The projected deficit is about $150 billion...
...Give the President the same authority that forty-three governors use in their states," Reagan said, "the right to reach into massive appropriations bills, pare away the waste, and enforce budget discipline...
...To be vulnerable to a line-item veto, the four programs Ronald Moe and Louis Fisher are political analysts in Washington, D.C...
...The ban on selling SBA loans is a policy provision and does not directly involve an appropriation...
...The reasons why illustrate the confusion that currently dominates the debate about budgeting...
...If circumstances and public needs change, what then...
...Of this amount, fully $643 million was accounted for in one purported "item" contained in the Small Business Administration appropriation...
...The sheerimpracticality of this system overload should give its supporters pause...
...That level of detail is included in the conference report, a supporting document that explains how Congress expects the money to be spent...
...Congress goes to some length to avoid presidential vetoes, often by deleting items that are offensive to the executive branch...
...This account provides $303,654,000 for various categories of spending...
...The continuing resolution prohibited the SBA from selling its loans to the private sector...
...Only after checking with the Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture did we confirm that the money was for the fabled crawfish...
...A President could simply strike the proviso and use Medicaid funds for abortions...
...Exercising the item veto in this fashion would give the President the power to "edit" bills to his taste by deleting words and phrases he finds, for whatever reason, unacceptable...
...As examples of the type of waste to be trimmed, he referred to "millions for items such as cranberry research, blueberry research, the study of crawfish, and the commercialization of wild flowers...
...Could the President have vetoed this "item within an item...
...Itemizing appropriations bills would lock every project and program into public law, leaving executive departments with a detailed statutory menu of how funds are to be spent...
...Even more serious, however, itemization would deprive agency officials—members of the executive branch—of the latitude and discretion they now have, and want to retain, with lump-sum amounts...
...71 here is a way, of course, to empower the President to veto small grant programs like the blueberries: take all the detail in the conference report and put it in the bill presented to the President for his signature...
...Running the federal government with itemized appropriations—a prerequisite of the line-item veto—is neither desirable nor feasible...
...Consider the effect of this power...
...Notwithstanding the publicity awarded the four research grants he identified, he could not have eliminated them even with the item veto...
...Instead, the four programs were funded under the agriculture section of the continuing resolution, within an account called Cooperative State Research Service (CSRS...
...With itemized appropriation bills, a typical bill would offer hundreds of opportunities for an item veto...
...The package was finally submitted in March...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1988 39...
...In the case of "aquaculture research," you would have to descend to sub-sub-subitems in order to find the crawfish study...
...What is now unusual will become routine...
...To override a presidential veto generally requires considerable political leadership and effort and also precious legislative time...
...who specialize in executive-legislative relations...
...It does mention $660,000 for aquaculture, and an industrious reader will discover that this amount includes $200,000 for "research in Louisiana...
...Even the smallest change would force the officials to return to Congress and re-do the legislation...
...But he could not have singled out the cranberries and crawfish because they were not specifically mentioned...
...The item veto would mean, if nothing else, many more vetoes...
...The targeted programs and projects would be those which he would have "item vetoed" had he the authority...
Vol. 21 • August 1988 • No. 8
