This One Thing Shows How Deeply Washington Is Broken

Already largely ignored, the 50-year-old law meant to guide the government's budget process faces new risks from Donald Trump.

Late Friday, the White House said it would run up an additional $1.1 trillion in new debt if all its plans were carried out over the next 10 years. That would be on top of the $16.3 trillion in debt it had already planned to incur and would bring government debt to $54.5 trillion.

Official Washington’s reaction to the news, unveiled in the administration’s mid-year budget update: crickets.

Fifty years after an embattled Richard Nixon, only weeks from resigning, signed into law the bill creating the federal budget process, it has become a bipartisan pariah, the fiscal crazy uncle no one wants to talk about.

And while Congress has effectively abdicated much of its responsibility, the picture could get worse if former President Donald Trump and Republicans take aim at the few parts of the law that are still working as intended.

“The days when the [Congressional] Budget Act had some impact on actually setting fiscal policy or actually setting priorities, that no longer exists,” said Bill Hoagland, senior vice president of the Bipartisan Policy Center and a veteran of many budget debates as a former GOP Capitol Hill budget staffer.