🚨🧵 1. It’s wrong that all spending bills go through just one committee in the Senate—the Committee on Appropriations…

🚨🧵 1. It’s wrong that all spending bills go through just one committee in the Senate—the Committee on Appropriations The House of Representatives does the same thing This thread attempts to explain why this is a problem and what can be done about it

Oilfield Rando@Oilfield_Rando · Jan 27, 2026

Today I learned that these are the two individuals who write the appropriations bills in the Senate and suddenly everything made a lot more sense

2. It’s unwise and even reckless to run all spending bills through a single committee for at least three independent reasons First, it makes no sense from a workload-distribution standpoint

3. The staggering size, cost, and complexity of the federal government are such that no sane person would assign all of the workload associated with all spending bills to one committee Responsibility for spending bills should be distributed broadly among all who have been elected to either chamber of Congress—not just to a select few who happen to serve on one committee

4. Giving the spending power to just one committee excludes most lawmakers from the process, many of whom are far more familiar (based on committee assignments or otherwise) with various federal entities—and their unique needs and challenges—than any member of the Appropriations Committee

5. While there are many competent, hardworking, and experienced people serving on the Senate Appropriations Committee—including the committee chair, my colleague from Maine, Senator Susan Collins—a single committee can’t reasonably be expected to make all spending decisions affecting every component of the federal government, at least not as well as they could if more lawmakers were allowed to perform a meaningful role in the process

6. Second, the extent to which spending priorities directly impact policy—as to literally everything the federal government does—make it fundamentally unfair to give the Appropriations Committee exclusive jurisdiction over all spending bills

7. Third, the unfairness of running all spending bills through a single committee becomes even more striking when viewed against the backdrop of Congress’s well-worn habit of rushing consideration of spending legislation—nearly always right before a self-imposed deadline and under the threat of a shutdown

8. The upshot of all of this is that most members of the House and Senate have no meaningful opportunity to amend spending bills, and are routinely asked to accept and vote for them without even a single, material modification

9. When lawmakers who are not on the Appropriations Committee ask for an adequate opportunity to read, debate, and amend a spending bill, those objectively reasonable requests tend to be denied with a lecture—often delivered in the most condescending tone imaginable—focusing on (1) a conclusory assertion that the Appropriations Committee has been eminently fair and thorough (“you should be grateful for what the Appropriations Committee has done, for all of you”), and (2) a threat that any effort to alter the spending bill under consideration will result in a government shutdown, for which individual members will be blamed if they oppose the bill, or even if they seek to amend it, delaying its immediate passage

10. On more occasions than I can count, members of Congress have been asked to pass spending bills they haven’t even had the chance to *read*—much less debate and amend This would be *far* less common if we didn’t assign all spending bills to a single committee

11. Just think about it for a minute: wouldn’t we be better served by a system that assigned every committee a piece of the federal budget—depending on each committee’s area of responsibility and expertise?

12. It’s not just that the expertise of other committees could prove useful in the spending process; it’s also that the so-called “authorizing committees” (e.g., Armed Services, Foreign Relations, Commerce, etc.) are rendered less effective in their oversight functions because they don’t control the funding of the departments and agencies they oversee (e.g., the Pentagon, State Department, FTC, etc.)

13. Without authority over a particular agency’s funding, a committee charged with overseeing that agency stands in the unenviable position of the unarmed English bobby As noted by the late Robin Williams, the English bobby—being unarmed—has the power to yell “stop, or I’ll yell ‘stop’ again,” but not much else

14 In one way or another, basically every other committee—including any committee with significant oversight responsibilities—steps into the shoes of the unarmed English bobby And the Appropriations Committee, while not “unarmed” in this way, is not well equipped to perform congressional oversight over all federal agencies

15. Consider this: why shouldn’t it be the Armed Services Committee that reviews bills funding the Pentagon—or the Homeland Security Committee that reviews bills funding the Department of Homeland Security?

16. What’s the solution? It’s pretty simple: both chambers of Congress should amend their rules to give each “authorizing committee” the authority to consider legislation funding each agency and department within that committee’s jurisdiction

17. Stripping the Appropriations Committee of exclusive jurisdiction over all spending bills may prompt the following question, perhaps raised as an objection by appropriators: “But who would then make sure we don’t spend too much?” That’s not the flex they might want it to be

18. With the status quo, in which the Appropriations Committee handles all spending bills, we’ve accumulated more than $38 trillion in debt and are adding to that at a rate of about $2 trillion a year The status quo isn’t controlling deficit spending Americans deserve better

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