Takeaways From This Year's Appropriations Bill
The government spends enormous amounts of money: influencing the appropriations process seems extremely high impact
A few weeks ago, Congress passed a $1.5 trillion dollar appropriations bill. Maybe you didn’t notice. The bill got less attention than it deserved – in fact, it might be the most important thing that Congress does this year. It also offers a useful lesson to would-be political influencers on how to really get things done in Washington.
What’s in the Appropriations bill, anyway?
When the appropriations bill made headlines, the coverage focused on the $13.6 billion dollars that Congress approved in aid to Ukraine. That aid included:
$6.5 billion to the Pentagon to cover the costs of deploying American troops to allies in Eastern Europe, to provide Ukrainian forces with intelligence, and to provide the Ukrainian army with additional weapons.
$7 billion to the State Department and USAID to provide humanitarian and diplomatic assistance
But while $13.6 billion dollars is a lot of money, it ultimately represents less than 1% of the total spending in the appropriations package – and less than 15% of the spending increase relative to last year's appropriations. The bipartisan deal tossed an additional $42 billion dollars toward the Pentagon, and boosted domestic discretionary spending by $46 billion dollars.
It’s worth taking a moment to think about how absurdly large those numbers are. Congress, with basically zero public debate, increased fiscal appropriations by roughly the combined annual GDP of Latvia and Lithuania – and did so on a broadly bipartisan basis!
Closed doors are good, actually
The argument against bills like this is that the way in which Congress appropriates money is opaque and thus cuts the public out of the debate. But I think that’s mostly a good thing. As Matt Yglesias and I discussed in our piece on “Secret Congress” last June, and as research by political scientists like Frances Lee has shown, Congress is often better able to cooperate when its workings are shielded from the public eye.
Imagine if every provision in each appropriations bill had to be brought up on the House and Senate floor individually, after weeks of debate in Congress and on cable television. It would be a disaster. Too much scrutiny makes it harder for lawmakers to horse trade effectively, and likely increases status quo bias, leading to fewer new programs and investments. If you are someone who – like me – generally thinks the government should spend more money, this is very bad.
What this says about influence
The 2022 appropriations bill was the result of more than five months of wrangling by top Democratic and Republican negotiators. Senate Appropriations chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and ranking member Richard Shelby (R-AL) played key roles. This Politico piece on the longstanding friendship between the two men, and how it affected their negotiations, is excellent – I highly recommend it for people who want to read more about this.
But other than that piece, it is really hard to find specific information online about who was involved in crafting the 2,700-page government funding package, what discussions they had during the drafting process, and when decisions on what to fund were made. I spent probably an hour and a half reading about the appropriations bill in all the major news sites I could think of, and basically didn’t find anything. I’m sure if I was a D.C. journalist I would’ve been able to find out more, but as simply an interested college student, I hit a wall.
From conversations I’ve had with people who work in politics though, my understanding is that appropriations bills are largely written by the leadership in Congress (which really means by their staff). Individual members can have significant influence over specific sections, especially with the return of earmarks.
The lesson I take from this is that one of the highest leverage career paths available to talented people interested in politics is influencing Congressional appropriations. I don’t have any hard data to support this, nor do I think it’s particularly feasible to get data that would back this up. But from the outside, it makes a lot of sense.
The lesson for Effective Altruists
Effective Altruists usually use three criteria when deciding whether to devote time and resources to a problem: importance (how big is the problem), tractability (how solvable is it), and neglectedness (how many people are already trying to solve it).
The scale of resources involved in appropriations is enormous, so it easily checks the importance box. Given how few major players are involved, and how much give and take seems to happen during the negotiation process, I think it’s probably pretty tractable as well. (The fact that corporations hire lobbyists to influence appropriations is strong evidence that those firms think it’s possible to exert influence here. Maybe Coke and Exxon are wrong, but given the profit incentive for them to get it right, I doubt it.)
So the remaining question is whether it’s neglected, which is a lot harder to answer. I think that relative to other areas Effective Altruists try to influence, there are a lot of non-EA people working in this space. Everyone wants a piece of appropriations, from industry groups to the AARP to labor unions. But right now, it doesn’t seem to be like there’s a meaningful presence of Effective Altruists trying to influence the budgeting process, so the marginal value of additional EAs might be very high.
So if you like politics and want to improve the world, I think you should consider a career in “appropriations influencing” – whether from inside or outside the government.
Makes sense. I feel like information from a congressional ex-staffer could make this much less speculative.