What Happened To The Final Bush Budget?

If you need any additional indication that the Bush administration checked out several weeks...or months...before Inauguration Day 2009, just ask yourself what happened to the final Bush budget.

Some background: The president is required by law to submit a budget to Congress between the first Monday in January and the first Monday in February.  That one-month time frame works except in the year following a presidential election when there's a change at the White House.  Inauguration Day falls between the start and end of the period when the budget is supposed to be sent to Capital Hill, and the outgoing president typically says the legal requirement applies to the incoming president and vice versa.

But outgoing presidents usually submit something anyway, even in years like this when it is likely to be completely ignored.  The reason?  The outgoing president's final budget is that administration's last chance to say what it would do if it were still in office.  In cases where there is a change in the party that controls the White House, it's also a chance to make it more difficult for the incoming president by including spending and taxing proposals with which he or she can't or won't agree.

The best example of this may be Jimmy Carter.  Carter, who didn't just lose to Ronald Regan but was vanquished, sent Congress a final budget with a large proposed increase in military spending.  The Carter budget was never considered, of course, but congressional Democrats then used that proposed level to show that what Reagan was requesting was not that different from would have happened had Democrats stayed in power.

The word from the Office of Management and Budget earlier this year had been that the Bush administration was going to propose a current services budget to Congress before it left, that is, it was going to project what it would cost to maintain all spending and taxing proposals at their current levels but would propose no policy changes.  The only exception was the Pentagon; its numbers supposedly would be a regular budget request and would show a substantial increase (13.5 percent was the original number) over 2009.

But the Bush administration apparently decided that it didn't even want to do current services budget before it left town.

On the one hand, the fact that this happened, or didn't happen, is not that bad.  Although the Bush administration likely would have released this final budget online, it did a save a few trees.  And resources at the Office of Management and Budget, which by far is mostly career staff rather than political appointees, could be devoted to the incoming rather than the outgoing administration's needs.

Still, it's hard not to come to the conclusion that, as it did throughout it's eight years in office, the Bush administration again decided to downplay the budget so that it didn't have to deal with the issue.  This is especially likely because even a  current services budget would have projected a deficit of more than $1 trillion.  In fact, because of the scoring differences between OMB and CBO on TARP, the administration's deficit would likely have been much higher than the $1.2 trillion CBO projected in early January.  My back-of-the-envelope guess is that it could have been as high as $1.5 billion.

I'm a budget guy so one way or another I see everything in budget terms.  But it's hard not to look at the big picture and decide that the Bush administration's decision not to submit a final budget of any kind was just the last indication that it was no longer interested in governing.