JAMES CARTER And TIMOTHY MANEY: Washington’s Budget Process Is Broken. Fix It Now.

(Photo by Heather Diehl/Getty Images)

The federal government spent $7 trillion last year. That works out to roughly $222,000 per second — a pace that would have made even the most reckless Gilded Age railroad baron blush. And yet, in Washington, the response has largely been a shrug.

That shrug has a price tag. The federal debt now exceeds the size of the entire U.S. economy. Annual deficits are running at nearly $2 trillion and climbing. Interest payments alone, the tab for borrowing money just to pay for past borrowing, consumed $970 billion last year. That is more than triple what the Congressional Budget Office projected just four years earlier for fiscal year 2025.

CBO Director Phillip Swagel warns the country is caught in “a slow spiral … of rising debt and rising payments on the debt.” Slow, yes. But still a spiral.

None of this happened by accident. It happened because the federal budget process, the architecture that is supposed to impose order on Washington’s fiscal decisions, is, to use a technical term, a complete mess. (RELATED: Even $1.5 Trillion Might Not Be Enough To Fuel Trump’s Pentagon Dreams)

The framework currently governing how Congress spends your money was designed in 1974. That’s the era of ABBA, bell-bottoms, and rotary phones.

The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act was Congress’s........

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