Congressional Budget Resolutions
Background on Budget Resolutions
The Senate and House Budget Committees – using the President’s Budget request, information from their own hearings, views and estimates from other committees of Congress, and projections from the Congressional Budget Office – draft their respective versions of a “Congressional Budget Resolution” in a series of working meetings known as committee “mark-ups.”
The Budget Resolution does not become a law and therefore is not presented to the President for signature. Rather, it is a congressional blueprint to guide subsequent action on specific spending and revenue measures.
The budget resolution, as a blueprint to guide subsequent action on spending and revenue measures, includes the following:
Enforceable spending aggregates (new budget authority and outlays) and revenue floors for the upcoming budget year, and planning levels for at least the ensuing four fiscal years;
A nonbinding distribution of new budget authority and outlays for all covered years among the 20 spending categories known as budget functions;
On-budget deficit (or surplus) levels projected to result from the spending and revenue aggregates;
Outlays and revenues for the Social Security insurance trust funds, displayed separately because the trust funds are off-budget;
Administrative expenses for the U.S Postal Service (which is also off-budget);
Total public debt and debt-held-by-the-public levels estimated to result from the budget resolution’s spending, revenue, and deficit levels;
(In the Conference Report accompanying the budget resolution): Enforceable allocations of spending to each committee of the House and Senate, including a lump-sum to the House and Senate Appropriations Committees for all “discretionary” spending, and direct (mandatory) spending allocations to authorizing committees;
Optional: “budget reconciliation instructions” directing revenue-raising and authorizing committees to report legislation making programmatic changes that achieve specified dollar amounts of revenue, direct spending, or deficit changes to programs within their jurisdictions, for inclusion in a combined reconciliation bill;
Optional: “budget reconciliation instructions” to the House Ways & Means and Senate Finance Committees to report changes to the debt limit;
Optional: special procedures to enforce the budget resolution;
Optional: budget resolution “reserve funds”—sometimes called contingency funds—to permit the Budget Committees to make adjustments in budget resolution aggregates and committee allocations to accommodate legislation on a specified subject that meets certain conditions (usually deficit-neutrality);
Optional: non-binding declaratory statements usually in the form of “sense of the House,” “sense of the Senate,” or “sense of the Congress,” and
Optional: displays of Federal retirement trust fund balances.