What constitutes an emergency? Second Congress is new shopping package, research equipment and facilities for the National Science Foundation is an emergency. The same goes for the 2024 Democratic National Committee convention and the Republican National Committee convention. The same goes for NASA’s space exploration.
By classifying all of these items as emergencies, Congress can obtain hundreds of millions in taxpayer funding with little oversight.
The latest expenditures of Congress package, released this week, is hardly the first time non-emergency projects have received this special funding designation. According to a Jan relationship From the Cato Institute, Congress has approved more than $12 trillion in emergency spending over the past three decades, equal to about 1 in 10 dollars spent in the federal budget, more than Medicaid and veterans programs combined.
How is it possible? Much of this comes down to lax rules that allow lawmakers to classify regular spending projects as “emergencies.”
“Congress has complete discretion in defining emergency spending because what qualifies as an emergency is subject to interpretation,” Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett wrote in the Cato report. Although the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has established several criteria that emergency spending should meet, Boccia and Lett note that “the current process lacks a mechanism for evaluating whether an emergency provision meets the OMB test , meaning anything can be considered an emergency expense.”
Once spending is deemed an emergency, it is not subject to typical limits on discretionary spending, allowing Congress to rack up costs with little accountability. “Unfortunately, over the last thirty years, Congress has taken what was designed to be a relief valve for breaking glass in an emergency and turned it into a major source of funding for business federal,” says David Ditch, senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation Reason“It’s just a way to [Congress] to avoid tax consequences. And that’s part of how we got to where we are.”
“Emergencies are, by definition, unexpected and urgent situations that require immediate action, except in Congress, where the term is increasingly used to justify spending decisions that should be part of the normal budget process,” Eric Boehm he underlined in the April 2024 issue of Reason magazine, “Because emergency spending bypasses some of the scrutiny applied to the normal budget process, it has become a convenient way for lawmakers and presidents to increase spending and raise the national debt.”
Cato’s report highlights some particularly egregious examples of this exact phenomenon, including $600 million set aside to replace aircraft used in weather forecasting, $347 million for prison construction and holding costs, and $278 million to speed up the process of building a single research center.
“To me, the original sin in all of this is that too many members of Congress don’t care at all about where the money comes from, all they care about is getting as much money out the door that they can take credit for,” Ditch says. “They are more concerned about their next reelection than the trajectory of the nation in 20 to 30 years.”