Ahead of possible shutdown, Sen. John Curtis calls on Congress to innovate ‘broken’ budget process

The Senate faces a Friday night deadline to vote to fund the federal agencies — a scenario that’s become all too common in Washington with the regular looming threat of a government shutdown.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. That’s the belief of Utah Republican Sen. John Curtis, who said Thursday that the existing federal budget process is “broken,” antiquated and needs to be innovated.

“We put our budgeting laws into place in 1974,” Curtis said at the Workday-sponsored FedScoop Federal Forum. And since that time, Congress has passed a budget before the start of a fiscal year only four times, the senator pointed out. The last time was in 1996.

“This is a broken, broken process,” Curtis said.

Throwing additional bodies at the issue isn’t going to be what solves it, he said, referencing what he believes to be a losing strategy that the government takes when it encounters an issue.

“The way the government looks at this, if we would just put more people on it, if we would just work harder, we would get our job done,” Curtis said. “And I hear that every year we don’t get the budget done. Let’s work harder. Let’s stay here longer.”

But the senator stood firm that it’s not a people issue. “We have to change our paradigm,” he said, advocating for the addition of modern technology that can “make people so much better” at their jobs.

“Instead, someone needs to say, ‘We need to innovate here. This is not working.’” Curtis said. “You can double the number of senators and members of Congress. You can triple, quadruple them. And guess what? We’re not going to get it done because the system is broken. So instead, we need innovation. We need thoughtful people thinking: How do we do this differently? And that is not happening.”