GovernmentExecutive.com

Nearly four months into fiscal 2003, Senate appropriators congratulated themselves last week for passing their omnibus bill incorporating the remaining 11 of their 13 regular spending bills. But their accomplishment, such as it was, marked yet another peculiar moment in a year that has gone beyond the usual 12 months and has featured one breakdown after another in the usually regimented process.

Indeed, referring to the handling of this year's spending bills as a "process" is generous, given the apparent lack of anything close to standard procedure. Strikingly, because that collapse has been across the board, lawmakers have been reluctant to cast blame. And, while most of the government operates on the autopilot of a continuing resolution, the end mercilessly may still not be in sight.

Fiscal 2003 began with a budget resolution in which House Republican leaders struggled to rally their troops behind a plan consistent with the budget proposed a year ago by President Bush; House Democrats, unlike in recent years, offered no alternatives of their own.

In the Senate, the Democratic-controlled Budget Committee belatedly reported its own plan, but that consensus was so jury-rigged that Democrats failed to bring it to the floor for debate.

Lacking bicameral agreement on the size of the overall pie for domestic spending, neither House nor Senate appropriators were able to make real progress on their bills and each chamber eventually threw in the towel, although they took credit internally for having prepared their bills. The exceptions were the Defense and Military Construction appropriations bills, which were a high priority for President Bush's war on terrorism.

Appropriators, and their respective party leaders, kept promising that action was around the corner: first, last July; then, September; then, after the election in November, and now, with the new 108th Congress this month. But yet another deadline passed Tuesday with President Bush's State of the Union message and another looms with his scheduled early February submission of the fiscal 2004 budget.

The Senate-passed omnibus bill illustrated many of the problems that have become endemic for appropriators. The details and explanation of the measure, which fill nearly 500 pages of the Congressional Record in small type, is replete with listings of what appear to be thousands of mundane local projects to accommodate senators and their local interests, from a theater restoration in Biddeford, Maine, to various museums and ubiquitous projects in Alaska, the home state of Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska. Senate debate on the bill focused less on determining spending priorities than in seeking to raise other policies, such as clean air enforcement or pension rules that members wanted to discuss.

The resulting gridlock, of course, is symptomatic of far larger problems: appropriators who prefer to keep secret many of their details; leaders who fear the consequences of wide-open debate; and members who are unhappy with the specific results. With an unwieldy House-Senate conference committee expected to convene shortly on the spending bill, there may be plenty more moments to document the legislative failures.