You can’t say Rep. Dennis Ross of Lakeland isn’t trying in his first few weeks on the job in D.C.

Ross introduced his first piece of legislation this week, a bill he calls the Zero Based Budget Act. He laid out the arguments for the bill in an editorial in The Ledger over the weekend.

In his editorial, he defined what the bill will require:

“Investopedia defines zero-based budgeting as, ‘A method of budgeting in which all expenses must be justified for each new period. Zero-based budgeting starts from a ‘zero base’ and every function within an organization is analyzed for its needs and costs. Budgets are then built around what is needed for the upcoming period, regardless of whether the budget is higher or lower than the previous one.'”

It’s obvious that there is wasteful spending in government, everyone knows that. And this bill would try to nip all that spending in the bud, not only analyzing every expense much more closely, but also by requiring each agency that is requesting funding to present alternative funding sources from which they can draw.

It’s hard to imagine a budgeting plan like this not resulting in a decrease in wasteful spending. If nothing else, it holds government agencies more accountable and gets them to really look closely at where all the money is going.

No plan is perfect, and I’m sure there will be some kind of opposition to this bill, but I applaud Congressman Ross for at least continuing to move forward and presenting ideas that will help fix this deficit mess that we are in.

He’s off to a good start.