Kosar is vice president of policy at the R Street Institute, a nonpartisan and pro-free-market public policy research organization. He's also a co-director of the nonpartisan Legislative Branch Capacity Working Group.

It is difficult to overstate how wrecked the federal budget process is. Late last month, President Trump signed a 30-day stopgap funding measure to dodge a government shutdown. This was the second time this autumn that Congress and the president had to resort to such a continuing resolution. Governing through short-term spending bills has become the rule in recent years, and not passing a congressional budget resolution (or spending plan) has become the new normal.

The wrecked process has produced alarming results. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has predicted that our country will have a trillion dollar deficit this year. Payments on the $22 trillion federal debt are more than $325 billion a year — which, to put it in context, is more than quintuple the budget of the Department of Education. Entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, federal workers' retirement benefits and so-called food stamps) account for about 60 percent of all spending. These mandatory outlays have swallowed nearly 90 percent of federal spending. "Fiscal democracy," as scholar Eugene Steurle terms it, is clearly eroding.