The Congress that cried wolf: it's time for lawmakers to stop abusing the emergency-spending loophole.

• Author: de Rugy, Veronique
• Position: Column

THE NEWLY DOMINANT GOP swept into Washington after November muttering promises about fiscal discipline. But the last time Republicans controlled Congress, they utterly failed to rein in their profligate ways. Their favorite trick: passing large supplemental spending bills and labeling routine funding as "emergency."

In theory, supplemental appropriations-and emergency-designated funds in particular--are intended to provide necessary infusions of cash on matters so unforeseen that they couldn't have been expected to make it into this year's budget and so urgent that they cannot wait for next year's. The Budget Enforcement Act, passed in 1990 to facilitate deficit reduction, gave emergency-designated funding special exemptions from budget restraints.

Although there is no limit on the spending that can be designated "emergency," historically there was an understanding that emergencies are sudden, unanticipated, and temporary conditions that pose a threat to life, property, or national security. And emergency spending was traditionally offset, at least in part, by cuts in other areas of the budget or cuts in future years.

Not lately. Over the past couple of decades, Congress has abused these powers, using supplemental bills to fund predictable, non-emergency activities and refusing to find offsets for legitimate emergency spending. The result has been a significant increase in spending across the board. What's worse, this spending is conducted with little adult supervision, since emergency-designated funding does not have to be justified with the same level of detail as the federal bureaucracy's annual budget requests.

This is big money we're talking about. In Fiscal Year 2009, supplemental appropriations--the main vehicle for emergency spending and hence abuse--reached an all-time high of $207 billion (in 2014 dollars), up from $7 billion in 1998. And whereas supplemental discretionary funding accounted for 1.5 percent of total discretionary budget authority in the 1990s, the figure for the 2000s was 10.3 percent--with a high of more than 16 percent in Fiscal Year 2005.

With the federal budget running surpluses after 1998, policy makers gave up all pretense of fiscal prudence. As members of Congress became more amenable to increased spending, supplemental and "emergency" appropriations took off.

When Republicans took control of Congress in 2003--they already held the White House--the Budget Enforcement Act was conveniently allowed to expire...