Continuing resolution an unnecessary evil.

• Author: McKinley, Craig R.
• Position: President's Perspective

* In my September column, I made a case for why Congress needs to get past all of the issues cluttering its table and finish the work on the annual budget for fiscal year 2016.

Many of you were kind enough to send me letters with favorable comments regarding my views on this topic--along with a couple of critical thoughts,

which I also appreciated and learned from. Regrettably, it does not seem that any of our efforts or pleas have been persuasive with the Congress itself.

Recently, a survey by The Washington Post of a group of highly respected and bipartisan budget experts placed the likelihood of getting all appropriations bills passed by Oct. 1 as low, and the possibility of a government shutdown as high --and probably increasing. Peter Orzag, President Obama's first director of the Office of Management and Budget, and currently a vice chairman at Citigroup, placed the odds of a federal shutdown at "over 50 percent" and growing.

Steve Bell, the senior director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, and a former Republican staff director of the Senate Budget Committee, was even more pessimistic, putting the odds at 60 percent. And Stan Collender, executive vice president of Qorvis Communications, a federal budget expert having experience with both the House and Senate Budget Committees, feels the odds are nearing 70 percent.

Each of these experts points to an extraordinarily large number of divisive issues that remain unresolved and stand as major obstacles to progress toward finalizing appropriations bills. These include the reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank, a charged issue that finds opponents and proponents on both sides of the aisle; the funding of the Highway Trust Fund, which must be resolved before the end of October or some important highway projects will have to be terminated; and a partisan squabble over funding for Planned Parenthood.

And looming in the background is the Iranian nuclear agreement. As Collender has written: "When combined with the expected efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, [the Iran deal] will add significant highly emotional fuel to the partisan fire and make a government shutdown far more politically palatable."

None of this is encouraging for securing approval of a defense appropriations bill by the beginning of fiscal 2016, and the likelihood grows that defense might be handicapped by another government shutdown, or sidetracked for weeks --if not months--as programs stumble along...