The United States fiscal constitution since the congressional budget impoundment and control act

Jonathan W. Plante ()

Constitutional Political Economy, 2025, vol. 36, issue 2, No 4, 200-223

Abstract: Abstract Despite both chambers of the United States Congress passing budgetary rules to limit deficits and public debts, the deficit and, as a result, public debt, have increased dramatically. Most political economy literature has attributed these phenomena to the tragedy of the fiscal commons or political budget cycles. In contrast, this paper attributes these phenomena to a change in the fiscal constitution—specifically, the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act (CBICA) of 1974. Prior to the passage of the CBIA, the fiscal constitution was such that the Executive Branch led the federal budgeting process. The Executive Branch leading the budgetary process effectively established a constraint on Congress’ propensity to use deficit and public debt finance. The passage of CBICA, however, established a new fiscal constitution that removed this constraint. The CBICA provided Congress with the lead over the budgeting process. This new fiscal constitution established by the CBICA caused an increase in deficits and public debt—despite budgetary rules aiming to stop such increases. Budgetary historical narratives are provided to support the theory.

Keywords: Budgetary legislation; Deficit financing; Public debt; Constitutional enforcement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H69 H77 I38 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10602-024-09439-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:copoec:v:36:y:2025:i:2:d:10.1007_s10602-024-09439-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/10602/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10602-024-09439-y

Access Statistics for this article

Constitutional Political Economy is currently edited by Roger Congleton and Stefan Voigt

More articles in Constitutional Political Economy from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().