First, a joint committee under a single chairman will provide one directing head for staff activities as well as one focal point for the collection of all necessary information from all available sources. The Bureau of the Budget, the General Accounting Office, the Legislative Reference Service, the Joint Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation, the executive departments themselves, and other agencies can and should provide valuable sources of information. But such information can most effectively and economically be secured only if requests stem from one outside source to avoid competing and conflicting demands, duplication of effort, and confusion.

Moreover, the Joint Committee on the Budget would provide a direct, unified, and feasible means of bringing both appropriation proposals and their revenue implications to the attention of the Congress. A Joint Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation already exists and has been eminently successful in its field. The Joint Committee on the Budget, proposed in the bill under discussion, through providing a single point of contact for correlating total appropriation measures to the total revenue picture would bridge the hiatus which now exists and is generally deplored.

Secondly, such a joint committee should have its own staff, responsible solely to it. This staff should not duplicate the staff in the Bureau of the Budget, the General Accounting Office, or elsewhere, but should furnish technical assistance to the committee in collecting, analyzing, and presenting necessary information for legislative decisions. In such capacity, the staff must be divorced from any responsibilities or connections except to the committee of the Congress. It must be guided by the legislative viewpoint alone. This is vital if it is to serve as an instrument for effective legislative exercise of proper legislative prerogatives.

Consider for a moment the tasks which would be imposed upon the committee and its staff. It must provide full and objective information concerning, and evaluation of, budget requests, revenue estimates, and the impact of appropriations and expenditures upon Government operations and the national security. It must recommend such changes in existing laws as may effect greater efficiency and economy in Government.

It must report and recommend to any standing committee of either House on matters within the jursidiction of such committee relating to deviation from basic legislative authorization, or in relation to appropriations approved by Congress which are not consistent with such basic legislative authorization. Are these tasks to be performed with the aid of technical staff except such as is most directly and solely responsible to the committee?

Finally, this staff would be the instrumentality through which real legislative control would be exercised by means of what may be called a legislative audit. This must be distinguished from a post audit to determine whether the letter of the law has been adhered to, or a management audit to reveal ways and means for achieving greater economy or efficiency.

It is essentially an audit to determine how closely legislative intent in making an appropriation has been followed by the administration. Effectively to carry out this vital but not infrequently overlooked legislative responsibility requires continuing and intimate

knowledge of the legislative will. Such knowledge can be gained only through close connection with appropriation legislation from the time of its inception, through the course of its development, and up to the time of its enactment. This, I contend, is a task which will be performed only by a staff which participates in the legislative process itself.

In conclusion, I wish to state that while I favor the passage of S. 913, there are minor amendments which would, in my opinion, be desirable. Most of these were covered in the testimony presented by Messrs, Steve Stahl and Norman McDonald yesterday, but there is one further note I would like to add. In subsection (e) (1) (c), may I suggest that the phase "all available information" be amplified and made more specific by including reference also to the President's State of the Union and budget messages and the Economic Report. May I again thank the chairman and the members of this committee for extending an invitation to me to speak upon the bill now under consideration.

Senator HOEY. Mr. Schuckman, thank you very much for appearing before the committee. I believe the time is about up, unless there are some specific questions.

Senator MONRONEY. On page 2 of your statement, in considering total appropriations and expenditure authorizations and revenue to finance them, do you think the Congress has ever given an adequate trial to the legislative budget?

Mr. SCHUCKMAN. No; I do not believe it has.

Senator MONRONEY. That was the desire, aim, and ambition of the legislative budget which I think fits in rather closely with the desire of this bill.

Mr. SCHUCKMAN. Yes, sir.

Senator MONRONEY. In other words, the failure of the legislative budget was the lack of staff.

Mr. SCHUCKMAN. Precisely. You did not have the facilities to make the thing effective. It is my feeling that that is one of the main difficulties that confronted the Congress, and the main reason why the attempt at the legislative budget was not more successful. You cannot very well pull that sort of thing out of thin air.

Senator MONRONEY. If a proper staff were given, along the lines of your testimony, and the caliber of the staff sufficient, with the responsibility to make these studies, to coordinate and correlate the expenditures and revenues, wouldn't it be possible to get through the legislative budget?

I gather from your statement that that is the end result that Congress should seek.

Mr. SCHUCKMAN. I think it is. I frankly cannot see how you are going to exert adequate control, develop an adequate fiscal program, without having the proper framework within which to work.

Congress, of course, has to determine how much over all, it feels it is possible to appropriate or to spend, without having untoward effects upon the general economy and the general welfare. However, unless and until in its own consideration of the budget it has that benchmark to work against, no one can tell during the process what the cumulative effect of separate appropriations will be while action is being taken. Only afterward you can go back and more or less add up the pieces, and find out what you did."

Senator MONRONEY. Should we not know where we are going on total expenditures set a target that we are striving for, before we decide how we are going to spend these individual amounts?

Mr. SCHUCKMAN. Certainly. After all, there are quite a number of things which are essential and which have to be carried on. The degree to which they are carried on should depend upon their proper relationship to the predetermined over-all total.

It is quite probable that in most cases you will not have 100 percent of what might be deemed by many people to be desirable. But certainly if the level has to be less than that it would appear desirable to keep the various functions and services in some balance.

In other words, if you cannot on the over-all basis reach Utopia, you do not want one function or service up perhaps to 90 percent of what the idealist would like, and have other equally important things held down to 20 or 30 percent simply because by the time you got to them previous appropriation commitments had called for almost all available funds.

Senator MONRONEY. On your joint hearings I wonder if you would not lose some of the things that they find necessary now that the House may go on a cutting spree and reduce perhaps below the level of efficiency or ability of the department to absorb and still carry out its functions. Without any further hearings in the Senate as to the effect of these cuts that were made I am afraid you would lose some of the valuable information that the Senate might need on that matter.

Mr. SCHUCKMAN. That perhaps is true. Of course, it would be hoped that with adequate staff to begin with, and better information at the disposal of both Houses before the hearings began, that there should be a little less likelihood of purely arbitrary or capricious action on the part of either one of them. I do recognize, however, the point that you make-that further hearings sometimes are highly desirable.

Senator HOEY. The upper House always ups the appropriations. Mr. SCHUCKMAN. Each House, of course, would be free to act in its own way. If there were a difference of opinion, obviously, the thing would have to go back to conference, anyway, where it would be thrashed out.

Senator MONRONEY. I am a new Member. My impression of the Appropriations Committee's hearings-those that I have attendedis more or less based on the action that the House has taken.

The hearings center around the differences of opinion between the House-reported totals and that which they are hoping to either get restored or further reduced in the Senate. I do not believe that the hearings are as de novo as they are in the House.

Senator HOEY. I think that is true.

Mr. SCHUCKMAN. No; they are not. That, of course, raises a rather interesting question. It seems by tradition to have more or less gone that way, although constitutionally I do not see any reason why it should. Under the Constitution, it is true, revenue measures must originate on the House side.

The attitude seems to have grown up that appropriation measures ought also to originate there and that the Senate just takes a second look at appropriations after the House has acted. That appears to

be the modus operandi that has grown up and has apparently been fairly widely accepted for reasons which I do not think there would be any point in trying to discuss here.

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I do not think that necessarily should be the case, however.

Senator HOEY. The committee will stand in recess, subject to the call of the chairman.

(Thereupon, at 12: 10 p. m., the committee adjourned, subject to the call of the chairman.)

See Background of Controversy Over Power To Originate Appropriation Bills, appendix C on p. 169.

APPENDIXES

APPENDIX A

OMNIBUS APPROPRIATION BILL

The omnibus appropriation bill approach was tried out for the fiscal year 1951 by the House Appropriations Committee without any statutory change, but was recently discarded by the members of that committee for the fiscal year 1952. As a result, Senator Byrd and 47 other Senators introduced Senate Concurrent Resolution 27 on April 17, 1951, requiring use of an omnibus appropriation. The proposal was referred to the Committee on Rules and Administration, which last year favorably reported a similar bill which passed the Senate but made no progress in the House (S. Rept. No. 1487, dated April 14, 1950, on S. Con Res. 38). Senate Concurrent Resolution 27 would add the following subsections to the joint rule of the Senate and of the House of Representatives contained in section 138 of the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946, to take effect on the first day of the second regular session of the Eighty-second Congress:

"(c) (1) All appropriations for each fiscal year shall be consolidated in one general appropriation bill to be known as the 'Consolidated General Appropriation Act of (the blank to be filled in with the appropriate fiscal year). The consolidated general appropriation bill may be divided into separate titles, each title corresponding so far as practicable to the respective regular general appropriation bills heretofore enacted. As used in this paragraph the term 'appropriations' shall not include deficiency or supplemental appropriations, appropriations under private Acts of Congress, or rescissions of appropriations.

"(2) The consolidated general appropriation bill for each fiscal year and each deficiency and supplemental general appropriation bill containing appropriations available for obligation during such fiscal year, shall contain provisions limiting the net amount to be obligated during such fiscal year in the case of each appropriation made therein which is available for obligation beyond the close of such fiscal year. Such consolidated general appropriation bill shall also contain provisions limiting the net amounts to be obligated during such fiscal year from all other prior appropriations which are available for obligation beyond the close of such fiscal year. Each such general appropriation bill shall also contain a provision that the limitations required by this paragraph shall not be construed to prohibit the incurring of an obligation in the form of a contract within the respective amounts appropriated or otherwise authorized by law, if such contract does not provide for the delivery of property or the rendition of services during such fiscal year in excess of the applicable limitations on obligations. The foregoing provisions of this paragraph shall not be applicable to appropriations made specifically for the payment of claims certified by the Comptroller General of the United States and of judgments, to amounts appropriated under private Acts of Congress, to appropriations for the payment of interest on the public debt, or to revolving funds or appropriations thereto.

"(3) The committee reports accompanying each consolidated general appropriation bill, and any conference report thereon, shall show in tabular form, for information purposes, by items and totals

"(A) the amount of each appropriation, including estimates of amounts becoming available in the fiscal year under permanent appropriations;

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