In the United States Congress, a budget resolution is part of the United States budget process. It is in the form of a concurrent resolution passed by both the House of Representatives and the Senate but is not presented to the President and does not have the force of law. It sets out the congressional budget.
The United States House Committee on the Budget and the United States Senate Committee on the Budget draft a budget resolution. Following the traditional calendar, both committees finalize their draft resolution by early April and submit it to their respective floors for consideration and adoption.
Once both houses pass the resolution, selected Representatives and Senators negotiate a conference report to reconcile differences between the House and the Senate versions. The conference report, in order to become binding, must be approved by both the House and Senate.
The budget resolution establishes various budget totals, allocations, entitlements, and may include reconciliation instructions to designated House or Senate committees.
The budget resolution serves as a blueprint for the actual appropriation process, and provides Congress with some control over the appropriations process. No new spending authority, however, is provided until appropriation bills are enacted. A budget resolution binds Congress, but is not a law. It does allow for certain points of order to be made if the President does not follow the resolution. There may not be a resolution every year; if none is established, the previous year's resolution stays in force.
Read more about Budget Resolution: Structure of The Budget, History
Famous quotes containing the words budget and/or resolution:
“You can fool all the people all the time if the advertising is right and the budget is big enough.”
—Joseph E. Levine (b. 1905)
“Unfortunately, many things have been omitted which should have been recorded in our journal; for though we made it a rule to set down all our experiences therein, yet such a resolution is very hard to keep, for the important experience rarely allows us to remember such obligations, and so indifferent things get recorded, while that is frequently neglected. It is not easy to write in a journal what interests us at any time, because to write it is not what interests us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)