At more than 100 pages, last summer's debt ceiling deal was a fairly large bill. And it was passed in a hurry, as the federal government was literally hours away from hitting the debt ceiling and facing a shutdown and economic turmoil. The manufactured crisis resulted in legislation that would automatically cut $1.2 trillion in federal spending through an arcane mechanism known as “sequestration” that few lawmakers fully understood. As those automatic cuts draw nearer, lawmakers are expressing confusion over how sequestration works, providing yet another example of how crisis budgeting can lead to unexpected and unintended results.

Schoolhouse Rock was only partly correct: getting a bill through Congress is just one way to turn proposals into law. Another way to write your policy demands into law is to hide them in the funding bills Congress passes every year to keep the government running. These “policy riders” in appropriations bills are temporary, but they establish new policies just like normal laws. Their use effectively shuts the public out of important policy discussions, and they undermine the openness of the legislative process. To remedy this practice, Congress can take some lessons learned from its reforms of the earmarking process.

On May 3, the Associated Press reported that the governor of Wyoming pressured the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to delay the release of a draft study linking a controversial natural gas extraction process, commonly referred to as fracking, to the contamination of drinking water. Wyoming officials apparently used the delay to coordinate efforts with the oil and gas industries to attack the report’s findings.