WASHINGTON, DC – Congressman Crenshaw introduced H.R. 4559, the End-of-Year Fiscal Responsibility Act, to end the tendency of federal agencies to spend leftover money at the end of the fiscal year rather than returning it to the Treasury.
“As a conservative millennial, I’m painfully aware of the potential consequences my generation faces if we fail to confront our over $22 trillion debt,” said Crenshaw. “We must address spending at all levels, and one simple way to do that is by getting control of unnecessary year-end government spending. Wasteful spending often happens at the end of the year when agencies have leftover cash. We want to stop that incentive to spend wastefully and encourage them to spend on only things they truly need.”
Currently, it is normal practice in Washington for a federal agency to spend more at the end of the fiscal year in order to max out the budget and ensure their funding for the next year does not decrease. This flawed system incentivizes our government to frivolously spend billions of taxpayer dollars.
The End-of-Year Fiscal Responsibility Act, which only applies to discretionary spending, seeks to correct this by prohibiting executive branch federal agencies from spending more money in each of the last two months of the fiscal year than the agency’s monthly average during the first ten months of that year.
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