§015s. Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010 (Pub. L. 111-139)

Cyclopedia of Congressional Budget Law

Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010

Summary

The Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010 (S-Paygo) is a law enacted by Congress as Public Law 111-139 that brought backed the expired “pay-as-you-go” provisions contained in the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985 (BBEDCA), which had expired after fiscal year 2002.

Though the formal name for the public law is “Increasing the Statutory Limit on the Public Debt Limit, S-Paygo may be found in the Codex on the BCR under the short title of that law, which is the “Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010“.

Structure of the Law

From a budget law standpoint, the law is an oddity insofar as it uses many of the sections of BBEDCA as its working apparatus, but then grafts new provisions largely replicating other functions of that prior law. Section 252 (BBEDCA) was in force from 1990 through 2002, and operated in a very similar manner as S-Paygo. Instead of reviving that section, with amendments to implement the desired changes, its technicians, primarily at the Office of Management and Budget chose to create new sections to do so.

Legislative History

Unfortunately, S-Paygo was not considered in the usual route toward enactment, with House consideration, Senate consideration, a Conference Report and accompanying explanatory material for each step. It was instead grafted on to a public debt limit increase (H.J. Res. 45 (111th Congress) , which is not an oddity since both BBEDCA and Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Reaffirmation Act of 1987 had that same feature. Those two bills, though, did have a Joint Explanatory Statement of Managers accompanying the conference text which became law.