The March issue of National Review is out, and that means there’s a new Stat for your reading pleasure:

4 — the number of times since 1977 that Congress has passed all twelve of its annually required appropriations bills on time.

That’s according to Matthew Dickerson, in “The Budget Process Must Confront the Challenges of Today and Tomorrow,” his paper for the Economic Policy Innovation Center. Dickerson describes the failure of the appropriations process as set out in the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.

Congress, by that law, is supposed to pass twelve appropriations bills each year to set spending levels for most federal departments. It’s well known that this process is disregarded now, but as Dickerson notes, “there was never some mythical time” when Congress did enact the appropriations bills on time. The only four years in which it did were 1977, 1989, 1995, and 1997.

Other aspects of the law have been successful, such as its creation of the Congressional Budget Office and the House and Senate budget committees. The CBO was one of the first independent fiscal institutions and has served as a model for other countries looking to improve their legislatures’ access to reliable information.

But Congress should not feel wedded to the budget process the law created, which has never worked well and is now a hindrance to understanding America’s budgetary woes.

Check out the whole issue here.