What if a federal agency automatically ended unless Congress voted to save it?
Context
Politicians of both parties have issued grandiose calls to abolish federal agencies, from President Trump’s call to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to some Democrats’ calls to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Yet while some federal agencies have seen budgets cuts or staff reductions, virtually none ever actually seem to get abolished.
Some have proposed flipping the equation around. Instead of every federal agency automatically continuing unless Congress voted to abolish it, what if every federal agency were scheduled for demise unless Congress voted to rescue it?
What the bill does
The Federal Sunset Act would create a bipartisan commission to set an expiration date for every federal agency, which would take effect unless Congress voted to maintain the agency. While some agencies would be unanimous or near-unanimous guarantees for resuscitation, such as the Department of Defense, others would not be such sure things.
The commission would have 12 members: six appointed by the Speaker of the House, the other six appointed by the Senate Majority Leader. For each of those six, respectively, two would be from the congressional chamber’s majority party, two from the chamber’s minority party, and the remaining two would be non-politician experts.
It was introduced in the House on January 3 as bill number H.R. 39, by Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC8).
What supporters say
Supporters argue the legislation greases the wheels to make cost-cutting decisions that would otherwise be too politically perilous for many members of Congress to support.
As a comparison, Congress found it too politically perilous to vote to close a military base, even when it was necessary. So they created the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process, where a bipartisan commission makes the decisions while insulated from electoral pressure.
“This commonsense measure gives teeth to much-needed reforms in the federal budget process,” Rep. Hudson said in a 2014 press release upon introduction of a prior version of the bill.
“By setting an expiration date for each Federal agency, we force Congress to question the need for each program and consider ways to cut wasteful spending to help government operate more efficiently,” Rep. Hudson continued. “Hardworking individuals and families don’t just spend their money carelessly without evaluating the costs first. It is time we demand the same level of responsibility from the federal government.”
What opponents say
Opponents counter that despite the commission’s surface-level bipartisan appearances, their recommendations could actually potentially be enacted with zero minority votes.
“The other four [non-politician] members of the commission could be appointed without any input from the House and Senate Minority Leaders and could all be affiliated with the majority party,” James R. Horney wrote for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “This would produce a likely 8–4 partisan majority on the commission, as long as one party controlled both houses of Congress.”
“These partisan majorities on the commissions would be extremely significant, because only a simple majority of the commission would be needed for the commission to approve its recommendations and submit legislation to write them into law,” Horney continued. “The commission’s recommendations thus could be developed and adopted on a strictly partisan basis.”
(This analysis was about a prior 2006 version of the bill, but applies to the 2019 version as well.)
Opponents also note that many states which implemented similar laws on a state level had subsequently repealed them.
Between 1976 and 1982, 36 states had enacted so-called sunset laws. Yet by 1990, 12 of those 36 states had repealed them, “because of high monetary and temporal costs of sunset review, intensive lobbying by vested interests, unfulfilled expectations of agency termination, low levels of citizen participation, and other perceived problems.”
Odds of passage
Previous versions introduced in 2014, 2015, and 2017 attracted zero, 13 Republican, and three Republican cosponsors, respectively. None of those versions received a vote, although the House was then under Republican control.
The current version has so far attracted no cosponsors, although it’s unclear why the dropoff to zero. Odds of passage are extremely low in the Democratic-controlled chamber.
