... Section 13301(a) of the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990 unambiguously states:
“Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the receipts and disbursements of the Federal Old Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund and the Federal Disability Insurance Trust Fund shall not be counted as new budget authority, outlays, receipts, or deficit or surplus for purposes of (1) the Budget of the United States Government, (2) the Congressional budget, or (3) the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985.”Social Security’s cash benefits, which are paid from the program’s trust funds, are, appropriately, not subject to annual appropriations or spending caps imposed by recent budget agreements. That is wise: Social Security has its own dedicated revenue. It cannot pay monies in excess of its income and assets, and it has no borrowing authority. Consequently, it does not add even a penny to the federal debt. Without any logic whatsoever, however, the associated administrative costs, which are also paid from trust fund monies, are subject to the annual appropriations process and the spending caps imposed by recent budget agreements. There is no legal authority for the different treatment of administrative costs. That different treatment results from an Office of Management and Budget (OMB) interpretation of ambiguous language, in the report accompanying the conference agreement, of the enactment of the above legislative language. That OMB decision, made during President George H.W. Bush’s administration in the early 1990s, was deeply flawed.
Under well-established, uncontroversial principles of statutory interpretation, the clear statement in the actual law governs, and should not be overridden by ambiguities or even contradictions in the legislative history. Consistent with those principles, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) disagreed with OMB. (Indeed, CBO offered a different interpretation of the ambiguous report language.) So did the then-Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, in a letter he wrote to the OMB director. Nevertheless, OMB did not change its position, and that decision continues to affect the way that Social Security’s administrative costs are treated to this very day.We urge President Biden to instruct OMB to revoke the erroneous interpretation, and present his budgets in accordance with the clear, unambiguous language quoted above. Social Security’s administrative budget should not have to compete with other agencies for its administrative funding in the annual appropriations process. ...
3 comments:
If approved that would seem to make shutdown quite unlikely if not impossible.
2:42, Social Security has not been the reason for shutdowns in recent memory. Even when there has been a shutdown the benefits kept getting paid, hearings were held, and field offices were open for limited workloads. It doesn't make a lot of sense for SSA's administrative funds to be considered as part of the same pool of money as Labor, HHS, and Ed when most of SSA's LAE comes from the trust funds and the other agencies can't draw any money from those. At the very least, exclude the trust fund money and just have appropriators consider the other money that does come from general revenue (like SSI).
On the other hand, I could imagine a situation where SSA were more stingy with LAE than Congress would be, and we'd be glad appropriators had a role.
Before that OMB ruling, Congress easily had input into SSA budget matters. In the 90s, HHS had to approve SSA's budget, and they were not fun to play with. This ruling took place before independence, so it's been SOP for independent SSA. But if changed, Congress still would have input and influence, just not directly via appropriations staff. OMB did this in order to "keep costs down" in the federal budget (and support the GOP long term goal to kill SSA by death of a thousand cuts). The key here is LAE funds being in the appropriations process is not just expenditures but captured on budget deficit/surplus reports. This change takes SSA "off book" in all of that. It makes it harder to make doomsday predictions about SSA if they are outside the process.
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