No contract or purchase on behalf of the United States shall be made unless the same is authorized by law or is under an appropriation adequate to its fulfillment, except in the War and Navy Departments, for clothing, subsistence, forage, fuel, quarters, or transportation, which, however, shall not exceed the necessities of the current year.
Section 3678, as follows:
All sums appropriated for the various branches of expenditure in the public service shall be applied solely to the objects for which they are respectively made, and for no others.
Section 3690, that—
All balances of appropriations contained in the annual appropriation bills, and made specifically for the service of any fiscal year, and remaining unexpended at the expiration of such fiscal year, shall only be applied to the payment of expenses properly incurred during that year or to the fulfillment of contracts properly made within that year; and balances not needed for such purposes shall be carried to the surplus fund. This section, however, shall not apply to appropriations known as permanent or indefinite appropriations.
The effect of the laws quoted, taken in connection with the constitutional provision referred to, is, as above stated, to prohibit any outlay of public money toward defraying even the current and necessary expenses of Government after the expiration of the year for which appropriated, excepting when those expenses are provided for by some permanent appropriation, and excepting in the War and Navy Departments, under section 3732.
The number of permanent appropriations are very limited, and cover but few of the necessary expenditures of the Government. They are nearly all, if not quite all, embraced in sections 3687, 3688, and 3689 of the Revised Statutes. That contained in section 3687 is applicable to expenses of collecting the revenue from customs, that in section 3688 to the payment of interest on the public debt, and that in section 3689 to various objects too numerous to detail here.
It will be observed that while section 3679, quoted above, provides that no Department shall in any one fiscal year involve the Government in any contract for the future payment of money in excess of the appropriation for that year, section 3732, also quoted above, confers, by clear implication, upon the heads of the War and Navy Departments full authority, even in the absence of any appropriation, to purchase or contract for clothing, subsistence, forage, fuel, quarters, or transportation not exceeding the necessities of the current year. The latter provision is special and exceptional in its character, and is to be regarded as excluded from the operation of the former more general one. But if any of the appropriation bills above enumerated should fail to be matured before the expiration of the current fiscal year, the Government would be greatly embarrassed for want of the necessary funds to carry on the service. Precluded from expending money not appropriated, the Departments would have to suspend the service so far as the appropriations for it should have failed to be made.
A careful examination of this subject will demonstrate the embarrassed condition all branches of the Government will be in, and especially the executive, if there should be a failure to pass the necessary appropriation bills before the 1st of July, or otherwise provide.
I commend this subject most earnestly to your consideration, and urge that some measure be speedily adopted to avert the evils which would result from nonaction by Congress. I will venture the suggestion, by way of remedy, that a joint resolution, properly guarded, might be passed through the two Houses of Congress, extending the provisions of all appropriations for the present fiscal year to the next in all cases where there is a failure on the 1st of July to supply such appropriation; each appropriation so extended to hold good until Congress shall have passed a corresponding appropriation applicable to the new fiscal year, when all moneys expended under laws enacted for this fiscal year shall be deducted from the corresponding appropriation for the next.