Representative · R-AZ
The bill tightens baseline scoring and increases congressional pay accountability and oversight to promote fiscal discipline and transparency, but risks eroding real program funding over time, creating incentives to reclassify spending as emergencies, and imposing cash-flow and administrative burdens on federal employees and officials.
Taxpayers and the federal budget process: baseline calculations will exclude emergency and supplemental resources and ban automatic inflation adjustments, producing more conservative projected spending baselines and clearer scoring rules.
Members of Congress and Congress overall: preventing automatic payment of congressional salaries during a funding lapse increases pressure to reach budget agreements and may speed negotiations.
Taxpayers and oversight committees: requiring the OPM Inspector General to verify OMB compliance with budget submission law and notify committee chairs within 3 days increases transparency and executive-branch accountability in budgeting.
Federal programs, beneficiaries, and taxpayers: freezing baseline values (no inflation adjustment) will erode real funding over time, reducing program capacity and likely forcing cuts or shifting costs to maintain services.
Congress and budget planners: excluding emergency and supplemental funding from baselines creates incentives to reclassify ordinary or recurring spending as 'emergency' to bypass budget constraints, complicating long-term planning and accountability.
Members of Congress, staff, and some OMB officials: escrow and suspension of pay delays access to earned wages and could bar retroactive pay for affected periods, creating cash-flow hardship for those who rely on regular pay.
Based on analysis of 3 sections of legislative text.
Narrows baseline exclusions under deficit-control law, requires escrow of Members' pay if no FY2026 concurrent budget is agreed by April 15, 2025, and authorizes IG review with pay penalties for OMB noncompliance.
Official title: To remove the discretionary inflater from the baseline and to provide that the salaries of Members of a House of Congress will be held in escrow if that House has not agreed to a concurrent resolution on the budget for fiscal year 2026, and for other purposes.
Introduced January 3, 2025 by Andrew S. Biggs · Last progress January 3, 2025
Narrows how certain baseline resources are excluded from budget treatment, removes several existing baseline adjustment paragraphs, and bars inflation or other automatic adjustments to those baseline exclusions. It also creates a temporary escrow rule that withholds Members of Congress' pay if both Houses have not agreed to a FY2026 concurrent budget resolution by April 15, 2025, requires an OPM Inspector General review of OMB budget submission compliance, and withholds pay for certain OMB officials during periods of noncompliance. The bill changes budget baseline rules under the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act and imposes payroll and oversight consequences tied to timely budget action and required presidential/OMB budget submissions. Some provisions take effect on enactment and others trigger if the concurrent budget resolution is not agreed by the April 15, 2025 deadline.
