Congress Hasn't Reauthorized Education Law: Many Others Left Behind Too

Sometimes Congress has a hard time doing its job and it can have serious ramifications. Take the requirement that Congress is supposed to reauthorize programs periodically, once the programs are created.

Congress can't seem to do it; programs remain un-reauthorized for years. For example, consider the education law known as "No Child Left Behind." It was signed by President Bush in 2002 and expired in 2007. It has not been reauthorized since then.

In June, 2011, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan says that if Congress doesn't renew the law by the fall of 2011, the Obama administration will start granting waivers for states from the requirement that all students demonstrate math and reading proficiency by 2014.

Republican education analyst Chester E. Finn told the New York Times that a failure by Congress to reauthorize the law is nothing less than a constitutional crisis.  "If the Congress can't fix, after 10 years, something that is widely seen as in need of repair, and the executive takes the law into its own hands, then we are looking at a dysfunctional government and a disruption of our separation of powers," he said.

The education law is not the only one that has not been reauthorized. Many programs are late in being authorized - some of them decades late.

A little background is needed to understand what is happening here. There are two steps to the legislative process: authorization and appropriation. Congress creates and renews programs through the authorization process and funds them through the appropriations process. Programs that are supposed to be reauthorized, but aren't, don't necessarily go out of existence. The House and Senate simply continue to fund them through the appropriations process.

The Congressional Budget Office reported in January, 2010, that the previous year Congress had funded programs totaling $290 billion whose authorizations had expired.

The way the appropriations process works, it is very difficult to strike the funding for one program from an appropriations bill on the floor of the House or Senate.

Reauthorizing programs doesn't make headlines. But as Finn said, it is a necessary step to keep the government functioning well. It's just not happening.