Hi, I'm Ron Elving and welcome to my office
hours.
So, to put it the way Jerry Seinfeld might
ask it: What's the deal with the number 12?
We've got 12 days of Christmas; we've got
the Twelve Apostles.
Go back further, you've got the 12 tribes
of Israel.
And when Congress wants to spend money, they
deal with the number 12, too.
Let me give you a little explanation.
The most important thing the Constitution
gives Congress to do every single year
is spend money.
And when they do that, they use the number 12.
Here, let me tell you what the Constitution
says exactly; it says, "No money shall be
drawn from the Treasury but by consequence
of appropriations made by law."
So, literally it takes an act of Congress
for someone to tap into the Treasury for all
that money the government spends.
Now, some of it is done pretty much automatically,
it's not redone every year.
You've got the debt service; you've got Social
Security and things of that nature.
But about half the money the federal government
lays out every year,
whether it's for paper clips or nuclear
weapons or salaries or jet fighters; all of
that has to be appropriated by Congress, and
it does it through a process called
the appropriations process.
It's built around 12 bills.
Now it all gets done in some of the fanciest
digs in the entire Capitol,
the appropriations committee rooms.
And in these ornate chambers, the appropriations
committees are pretty much sacrosanct.
They take some guidance from here and there,
but their chairmen are very powerful people.
That power is broken down into subcommittees.
Each one with its own powerful chairman.
Each one with its own specific responsibilities:
national defense, homeland security, other
things sometimes combined together.
And each one of those subcommittees produces
a bill each year, in the House and in the
Senate, and then those become 12 spending
bills passed by both the House and the Senate.
Ideally, Congress likes to pass each of those
12 big spending bills individually.
But sometimes that doesn't work or they don't
have the votes for them or time is short before
the end of the fiscal year.
And then we get these enormous combination
plates of many of the bills, all the ones
that haven't been passed at a given moment,
and those are called omnibus appropriations.
And if they've got just two or three that
they're ready to put through but they aren't
ready for the rest, they might send those
through on what's been called a minibus.
Now minibus is a cute name, but there's nothing
cute about what happens if these bills do
not get passed by the end of the fiscal year,
that's Sept. 30.
Without these bills, the federal government
shuts down, in whole or in part.
We saw that as recently as 2013; we saw it
for longer periods in 1995 and in 1996.
And even when they all do get done and the
government doesn't shut down, there's a great
deal of pressure to get this done so it won't
shut down, and that drives all the other business
off the floor of the House and the Senate.
That happens more often than not in the month
of September, and 2017 looks like the latest
year to give us an example.
I'm Ron Elving at NPR.
Thank you for coming to my office hours.
