The Republican-led House of Representatives finally passed their annual spending bill to fund Congress. While I’m the last to complain about lower spending levels, the ratio of budgets between the executive and legislative branches are oddly disproportional. As in, “907:1” kinds of disproportional.
Conservative Review’s Daniel Horowitz reports:
The [House] bill would appropriate $3.3 billion for the House of Representatives and all of the legislative agencies. When coupled with the Senate’s own budget bill expected to pass later this year, the House bill will bring the total budget for the entire legislative branch of government to roughly $4.3 billion.
Accordingly, the entire cost of the legislative branch of government represents just .001% of total federal spending, projected to top $3.9 trillion next year, according to the Congressional Budget Office….It’s important to note this budget is not only paying for the members of Congress and their staff; it includes all of the investigative and research agencies as well as other positions, such as the Capitol Police.
… The Executive Branch dwarfs the legislative branch in spending by a ratio of 907:1. Even the Judiciary Branch has a bigger budget than Congress, at $6.9 billion.
Now, for the trillion dollar question- where is all our money going?
Consider this: the budget for the Department of Agriculture was $141 billion in 2014, which is 33 times the size of the entire legislative branch; the budget for the Department of Education was $59.6 billion, which is 14 times the size of Congress. And remember, the entirety of Article I in the Constitution is dedicated to the legislative branch, while some of these executive departments and agencies are, shall we say, post-constitutional. The Department of Commerce is slated to receive $8.1 billion for the next fiscal year. The DOC was without a cabinet-level secretary at its helm for an entire year (June 2012- June2013) and nobody even noticed. The EPA, which is just an independent agency (not a full department), costs twice as much as the entire legislative branch of government.
