Brookings Mountain West presents The Partisan Politics of the Congressional Budget Process a talk by Molly Reynolds, Ph.D., fellow, governance studies, Brookings Institution, as part of the Fall 2016 Brookings Scholar Lecture Series.

Observers of Congress often cite the budget process as evidence of the institution’s contemporary dysfunction. Indeed, in the past ten years, the House and Senate have failed to agree on a budget resolution six times and Congress has failed to pass nearly all of its appropriations bills before the October 1 deadline. This inability to fulfill one of its basic responsibilities is often blamed on increasingly polarized congressional parties attempting to leverage the process to their advantages. Is this claim accurate? How have partisan dynamics in the budget process changed over time? How can we make the process work better in light of current levels of partisanship and polarization? Will the 2016 elections have consequences for the budget process? In this lecture, I will address these and other related questions, relying in part of new data on the use (and possible abuse) of various procedural aspects of the budget process, especially in the U.S. Senate.