Congress Had Already Eliminated (on January 7, 2024) Hopes of the Federal Agencies for Increases in their FY 2024 Budgets by Agreeing to Hold Those Budgets to Approximately the Prior Fiscal Year 2023 Levels
The Federal agency heads on January 7, 2024, had already let out a collective “groan” good for the rest of this Fiscal Year 2024 (ending September 30, 2024). In a major “win” for the Republican Freedom Caucus, which has aggressively sought to reduce the federal government’s rising debt, Congress agreed to cap the 12 budgets which collectively comprise the federal government’s “discretionary” spending budget at the prior year’s spending levels. (This was the agreement on the $1.6 trillion dollar so-called “top line” federal spending agreement discussed above and codified as H.R. 2872 that President Biden signed into law on January 19, 2024.) Here is the best explanation we could find for the complex agreements underlying the passage of the second C.R. pertaining to FY 2024’s federal discretionary spending budget.
Capping federal agency budgets (the discretionary budgets) at the prior year’s level is the first step for Congress to eventually reduce the budget and then eventually “balance the budget,” if it can, with tax increases and increased tax collections from more IRS agents and from a hopefully expanding and vigorous economy as the GAO has recently recommended. See our story last week on that blunt and worrisome GAO Report.
The issue to watch is which program initiatives and how many employee FTEs (Full Time Equivalent) positions each federal government agency gives up without new and higher budget spending authorizations now that FY 2024 spending has been “locked” at the prior year’s level.
OFCCP: The agency’s credibility-challenged “pie-in-the-sky” March 2023 Budget Request for FY 2024 to increase its approximately $105 Million budget by over $40M (+ 36%+) and to increase employee headcount by 125 (from 495 to 620) (+25%), was naïve and at best ill-conceived at the time. In the rear-view mirror, that request now shows OFCCP to be badly out-of-step with the direction of Congress and its adoption of a “hold-the-line” approach to federal agency spending. OFCCP’s ever-bigger budget requests will find themselves even further out-of-step in coming years as Congress now hunkers down to determine how to actually reduce federal agency spending going forward. We discussed OFCCP’s Budget Justification for FY 2024 here.
Here is what OFCCP did not obtain that its hoped-for FY 2024 Budget would have purchased, in its own words (from pages 10 to 11 of its FY 2024 Budget Justification to Congress):
“Additional resources will build OFCCP’s capacity to effectively oversee the growing number of contractors, projects, and workers under its purview. In order to meet these demands, in FY 2024, OFCCP will build its workforce and modernize its technology to strengthen enforcement and launch robust hiring initiatives to help workers access good jobs and employers to fully utilize the talent across their communities. As a result, the requested funding will enable OFCCP to grow its presence in communities across America, to serve workers and contractors most in need of assistance. In the area of technology, these investments will fund specialized expertise and technology upgrades to help OFCCP respond and adapt to the increasingly sophisticated systems that employers use to track, analyze, and produce data on hiring, pay, promotion, termination, and other key equal opportunity issues. OFCCP will also leverage technology and data analytics to more expeditiously and effectively evaluate contractors’ employment practices across multiple establishments to remove barriers to opportunity and improve its risk-based methodology to schedule contractors for review.”