The Purse-String Surrender: How Congress Traded Its Most Fundamental Power for the Convenience of Never Having to Vote

The federal government has not operated under a complete, on-time appropriations budget since 1997. Read that again. For nearly three decades, the United States Congress — the institution the Constitution designates as the exclusive keeper of the federal checkbook — has failed to perform its most basic fiscal duty in any given year. Instead, the country lurches forward on a rolling series of continuing resolutions and last-minute omnibus spending packages, thousand-page documents assembled in the dark and passed under threat of government shutdown, which no member of Congress has meaningfully read and which no individual legislator can meaningfully amend.

This is not a procedural inconvenience. It is a constitutional crisis that has been normalized through sheer repetition.

What the Constitution Actually Says

Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution is explicit: "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law." The Founders did not assign this power to the President. They did not assign it to the Treasury Department or the Office of Management and Budget. They assigned it to the branch of government most directly accountable to the electorate — the House of Representatives, whose members must face voters every two years — precisely because they understood that control over public spending was the democratic fulcrum. A legislature that cannot control spending cannot govern. A legislature that voluntarily surrenders that control has effectively voted itself into irrelevance.

The regular order appropriations process — twelve separate spending bills, each covering a distinct area of government, each debated and amended through committee — was designed to force exactly this kind of accountability. Members of Congress would have to go on record, line by line, on how they proposed to spend your money. Constituents could examine those votes. Journalists could scrutinize them. Opponents could campaign against them. The process was supposed to be transparent, deliberate, and politically costly in all the right ways.

The Continuing Resolution as Constitutional Evasion

Continuing resolutions — stopgap measures that simply extend prior-year spending levels while Congress fails to agree on a budget — have transformed from emergency instruments into the default operating mode of the federal government. The Congressional Budget Office and the Government Accountability Office have repeatedly documented the concrete costs of this dysfunction: agencies cannot plan multi-year contracts, military procurement is disrupted, and program administrators make conservative spending decisions early in the fiscal year that create artificial backlogs later. A 2023 GAO report estimated that operating under continuing resolutions costs the Defense Department alone billions of dollars annually in inefficiency and delayed procurement.

But the deeper damage is constitutional, not fiscal. When Congress funds the government through a continuing resolution, it is not actually appropriating money in any meaningful sense — it is delegating spending authority to the executive branch, which then decides how to allocate funds within the broad parameters of prior-year baselines. This is precisely the inversion of constitutional order the Founders feared. The President becomes, in effect, the de facto appropriator, and Congress becomes a spectator to spending decisions that the Constitution reserves exclusively for the legislature.

Omnibus spending bills are worse. These are typically assembled by a small group of congressional leaders and White House staff, presented to the full Congress with little or no time for review, and passed under the coercive pressure of an imminent shutdown deadline. The $1.7 trillion omnibus signed by President Biden in December 2022 ran to over 4,000 pages and was released approximately forty-eight hours before the vote. No member of Congress read it. No member could have. The vote was not a legislative act in any serious sense — it was a ratification of a document negotiated by a handful of people behind closed doors.

The Partisan Incentives That Make Dysfunction Profitable

The conventional explanation for chronic budget failure is partisan gridlock — Republicans and Democrats simply cannot agree on spending priorities. This is true as far as it goes, but it obscures the more uncomfortable reality: both parties have structural incentives to prefer the current dysfunction to genuine budget discipline.

For Democrats, continuing resolutions preserve existing spending baselines — which tend to reflect the accumulated priorities of decades of liberal program expansion — without requiring any new votes that might draw scrutiny. For Republicans, the omnibus process provides political cover: members can claim to oppose specific spending provisions while voting for the overall package under the justification that "the alternative was a shutdown." Both parties can campaign against wasteful spending while jointly ensuring that the process never produces the kind of transparent, line-item accountability that would make such campaigns politically costly.

The shutdown threat is the mechanism that makes this arrangement self-perpetuating. By allowing the fiscal calendar to compress spending negotiations into a single, crisis-driven moment, congressional leadership on both sides acquires enormous leverage over rank-and-file members who fear being blamed for a shutdown. Individual members lose the ability to hold out for specific appropriations reforms because the alternative — government closure — is presented as catastrophic. The leadership class has, in effect, engineered a process that strips ordinary members of the very appropriations authority the Constitution vests in them collectively.

What Reclaiming the Power of the Purse Would Require

Restoring genuine congressional control over spending is politically straightforward to describe and institutionally difficult to execute. It would require, at minimum: a statutory or rules-based prohibition on omnibus spending bills exceeding a defined page limit or covering more than a single fiscal year; a mandatory sequestration trigger that imposes automatic, across-the-board spending cuts if regular-order appropriations are not passed by October 1 — a consequence severe enough to make the status quo more painful than the discipline of doing the work; and a rule stripping congressional leadership of the ability to bring a continuing resolution to the floor without a supermajority vote.

Some conservatives have proposed a constitutional balanced-budget amendment as the solution. This is well-intentioned but insufficient. A balanced-budget requirement does not restore transparency or democratic accountability to the spending process — it merely caps the total while leaving the omnibus dysfunction fully intact. The problem is not only the quantity of spending but the opacity and executive discretion that the current process enables.

Conservatives who genuinely believe in limited government and constitutional order should be leading this fight. The power of the purse is not a procedural technicality — it is the mechanism by which republican self-governance translates into actual policy. A Congress that cannot control spending cannot limit government, regardless of what its members say on the campaign trail.

When the people's representatives surrender the power to decide how the people's money is spent, they have not merely failed at their jobs — they have betrayed the constitutional compact that gives their jobs any legitimacy at all.