In the October 2021 Washington Report, we reported that the House had passed nine of twelve appropriations bills, while the Senate had to that point failed to pass a single appropriations bill. In the sixteen weeks since that report, no visible progress towards passing a budget for FY2022 has been made. The Senate has still failed to pass a single bill. The House still has three bills that have not been passed. Not a single bill has made it to President Biden’s desk for final signature.

Thus far, the government has avoided a shutdown only through repeated Continuing Resolutions (CRs). The only arguable sign of progress is that the length of CRs is becoming shorter, with the most recent one, passed by the House of Representatives on February 12, 2022, lasting only three weeks. However, as there has been no other sign of breakthroughs in negotiations, one could also argue that shortening the CRs to three weeks will simply result in Congress spending more time arguing about CRs and less actually attempting to fund the government through regular order.

CRs are better than a shutdown in the same way that getting run over by a golf cart is preferable to being hit by a truck. The amount of damage Congress has done to the government and to American taxpayers through their grotesque negligence on this fundamental issue is appalling. Officials at the Pentagon have warned that a full year CR would reduce available funding for the Department of Defense (DOD) by more than $20 billion. A CR keeps funding for all programs at last year’s levels, meaning that large amounts of money could not be spent productively. For example, three billion dollars are earmarked for the Afghan National Security Force, which no longer exists, and cannot be spent on anything else.

Pay is also an issue. President Biden signed into law a 2.7 percent raise for uniformed military and federal employees. This was important and could not wait. However, the funding to pay for it would be included in the 2022 budget, if it were to pass, and is not reflected in the 2021-level funding of a CR. This further strains the budget.

Additionally, CRs impose costs in efficiency, as long-term planning or bulk purchases are difficult or impossible. Whether a program will remain funded or not is often in doubt, freezing progress in place and making it impossible to plan. About 11 percent of total government expenditure is military expenditure, which means that if the wastage ratios for the DOD hold true across the government, the total amount of taxpayer money wasted would be approximately $182 billion – equivalent to more than a year of funding for the Build Back Better plan that appears to have been shelved for being too expensive.

At a time when the military needs to modernize and re-gear for conflict with near-peer adversaries, throwing a massive, expensive wrench into the gears of these efforts is the worst thing that Congress could do. CRs are not “no decision” as they are often portrayed – they are, in fact, a decision to keep wait times for aircraft carrier maintenance at more than a thousand days instead of the 100 days it was six years ago. A CR is better than a shutdown, but the costs of it are incredibly high.