The latest development in Congress’s ambition to achieve “regular order” is the push to reauthorize the water resources development programs last authorized in 2014. But one provision in the House’s bill would actually work against Congress’s ambition for order by moving a large portion of spending out of the regular appropriations process.
Both the House and Senate have moved on separate versions of a Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) for the upcoming fiscal year. These bills authorize federal spending on projects such as harbor dredging, lock and dam maintenance, and construction of other waterway infrastructure across the country.
Return to a 2-year reauthorization cycle is certainly a welcome development. As the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee points out in the summary of their bill, regular 2-year authorizations can help save on project costs by ensuring that projects aren’t stalled or delayed by legislative uncertainty.
However, another critical benefit of regular order is that it ensures that Congress is held fully accountable for its spending decisions by periodically forcing them to reevaluate programs and go on record by annually voting to fund those programs.
In this regard, a portion of the House WRDA bill deals a major blow to accountability by removing regular congressional oversight over a large portion of spending. The funding at hand is derived from the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund (HMTF), which sponsors a variety of water resources projects. It draws its resources from a 0.125 percent tax on the value of commercial cargo imports at federally maintained ports.
Current spending out of the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund is classified as discretionary and must be appropriated every year. This ensures effective oversight of resources and adheres to the regular order of the budget and appropriations process.
However, Section 108 of the House’s WRDA proposal does away with this practice. Instead, it takes Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund discretionary spending intended for commercial navigation of harbors and reclassifies it as mandatory spending, which removes the need for annual appropriations.
This creates a new, unappropriated entitlement program that could grow on autopilot every year and be spent without meaningful Congressional oversight.
In other words, Congress is shirking its duty by adding another program to the rapidly growing mandatory portion of the budget, which has grown to encompass more than two-thirds of federal spending.
Nor is this a trivial amount of spending: The Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund obligates $1.8 billion on commercial navigation projects annually, and the House WRDA bill authorizes nearly $650 million in total for new navigation projects. To defray the cost of these new projects, the bill simply relies on unspecified project cancellations to come sometime in the future.
To make matters worse, the bill uses a common budget gimmick to hide the cost of the change.
By delaying the transition to mandatory until 2027, the shift would occur outside the Congressional Budget Office’s 10 year budget window and would not show up in the legislation’s cost score. Thus, the bill completely hides the budgetary impact of the provision, which could serve to obfuscate future spending increases.
This creation of a new unappropriated mandatory program is troubling, especially done under the guise maintaining regular order. Instead of removing more spending from congressional approval, the WRDA bill should be an opportunity to overhaul the inefficient and unaccountable approach to spending on the nation’s harbors and ports.
This could be done by moving from an “ad valorem tax” on the value goods to a dedicated user fee model that would better reflect port needs. In contrast, shifting existing tax revenue to autopilot spending takes a step in the wrong direction and flies in the face of accountability.
