By Veronique de Rugy, includes “Funding the federal government’s operations outside of the regular budget process—and thus outside of limits intended to restrain spending—is a practice that has been abused in recent years. In addition to bypassing budget caps, supplemental bills can become a vehicle for excessive and haphazard appropriations because Congress often passes them in a rush. This week’s chart displays the annual amount of real (2014 $) federal supplemental funding since 1980.
As the chart shows, supplemental spending exploded in 2000s during the administration of George W. Bush and a largely Republican-controlled Congress. The increases were driven by the GOP’s preference for skirting budget limits by funding the wars in the Middle East outside of the regular budget process. While this might have been justifiable at the outset of hostilities, the practice of treating war spending as if it were “unforeseen” quickly became dubious. …”
Read the full article on: Mercatus Center, George Mason University