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The congressional appropriations committees have the reputation of being exclusive clubs where members scratch each other's backs and outsiders are viewed with some suspicion. There's little reason to believe that's about to change, even though both the House and Senate panels have new chairmen and new staff directors this year. Nor is it likely that the committees' new leadership can succeed in repairing the badly broken appropriations process.

Term limits forced House Appropriations Committee Chairman Bill Young, R-Fla., and Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, to step aside at the beginning of the year. After a tense and competitive selection process, House Republican leaders chose Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., over two rivals as the new chairman in their chamber. In the Senate, GOP leaders relied strictly on seniority in putting Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., in the post.

Congressional conservatives have long blasted appropriators for running a secretive process that results in budget-busting spending bills laden with special-interest provisions for favored members. Conservatives have sought new leadership at the committees, and both Lewis and Cochran are slightly more conservative than their predecessors, according to National Journal's 2004 vote ratings.

But the new chairmen and their staffs are seasoned committee veterans who are steeped in the old-fashioned ways of appropriators, and they may not be comfortable bucking tradition.

Lewis is "an institutional guy. He respects the committee," said James Dyer, the former Republican staff director of the House Appropriations Committee who recently joined Clark & Weinstock, a lobbying firm. Another former House GOP committee aide said that Lewis will protect the panel from attempted encroachments. "I think he will stand up for the committee," the former aide said. "He wants to be a team player [within the House Republican Conference], but he's a longtime appropriator."

Early in his 26-year House tenure, Lewis showed his distaste for big government spending by distributing a poster featuring a fat Uncle Sam and the slogan, "Uncle Needs a Diet." But for fiscal 2004, Lewis obtained some $13.6 billion in "pork" projects for his district, according to the watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste, although many lawmakers dispute the group's definition of "pork." Asked whether Lewis would bring increased fiscal conservatism to the appropriations process, Tom Schatz, the group's president, responded, "We'll see."

Cochran also likes to take care of his state. In December, he told a group of Mississippi business leaders, "I might not be able to get as much money for all those local projects as you would like, but I'll get as much as I can," according to The Commercial Appeal in Memphis. Citizens Against Government Waste gave Cochran a "Narcissist Award" in 2001 for steering funds to the "Thad Cochran National Warmwater Aquaculture Center," which Mississippi State University named for the senator when the center opened in 1997.

Dyer noted that Cochran "has been around this committee for a long, long time," and that he "has a very formidable reputation."

The two chairmen have hired staff directors who are also longtime appropriations hands. In the House, Frank Cushing served as staff director of the Veterans' Affairs, Housing and Urban Development Subcommittee when Lewis chaired that panel. Cushing, who has also worked for the Senate Appropriations Committee, is "cut out of the old appropriations mold," said the former GOP committee aide.

Keith Kennedy, the new staff director in the Senate, worked for former Sen. Mark Hatfield, R-Ore., a moderate, when he chaired the Appropriations Committee. The two staff directors get along well, said one senior Senate Republican aide. "There's a lot of cross-pollination," the aide said.

During a March 1 interview with CongressDaily and National Journal, Lewis defended some traditional Appropriations Committee practices, but he also vowed to be more responsive to his House Republican colleagues' concerns about excessive spending.

Lewis, for instance, said he sees some value in earmarking funds for lawmakers' pet projects in spending bills. "We've had very successful experiences with some earmarks that I've personally been involved in," he said. "I do believe strongly that member input [on their projects] should and must be listened to" when appropriators write their bills.

But Lewis also said that the Appropriations Committee must shed its big-spending image. "I feel very strongly that the Appropriations Committee does need to revisit a historical responsibility that it has had to preserve dollars, not just automatically spend them," he said. "And if we're serious about a balanced budget, the way to get there is by reducing the pattern of growth in those areas where we have some control."

The new chairman said he is well aware of accusations that appropriators work too independently, and added: "I think what we really are about on the Appropriations Committee is attempting to make sure our staff understands that it works for the entire Congress."

In his brief tenure at the helm, Lewis has already made waves by pushing through a plan that consolidated the 13 House Appropriations subcommittees into 10 panels. Lewis said the change made "organizational sense" and insisted it was his idea. But Democrats said that House Republican leaders, who have increasingly seized control of the appropriations process, were behind the move. In particular, Appropriations ranking member David Obey, D-Wis., said that Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, whose Houston district includes the Johnson Space Center, was unhappy with the initial funding of NASA last year.

Senate appropriators have criticized the realignment in the House, and they considered a plan this week for 12 subcommittees on their panel. Any differences in the structure of the House and Senate panels could cause complications later in the year, when the two chambers reconcile their competing versions of spending bills.

But Lewis and Cochran have deeper problems to contend with. Congress rarely completes the annual appropriations bills on time, and the stalemates have followed a familiar pattern in recent years of GOP control. In the House, Republican leaders insist that appropriators write relatively conservative spending bills. But in the more-moderate Senate, members demand additional money for key federal programs. President Bush has yet to veto any appropriations bill, therefore giving, at least tacitly, both sides the green light. Ultimately, Congress passes continuing resolutions to keep the government fully operating until lawmakers can finish their business by cobbling together a larded-up 11th-hour omnibus spending measure.

This year, appropriators face an early challenge in shepherding two fiscal 2005 supplemental spending bills sought by the White House. The $950 million aid package for tsunami victims, and an additional $82 billion request for ongoing U.S. military efforts in Iraq, have both generated controversy. Conservatives have questioned some portions of the war supplemental, and they want to at least partly pay for both bills by pushing through "offsets," or cuts, in other government programs. Lawmakers also are considering attaching unrelated items, including contentious immigration proposals.

Prolonged debate over the supplementals could eat into the appropriators' work on the fiscal 2006 appropriations bills later this spring. And those measures could prove especially nettlesome, given the tight budget caps that Bush and GOP leaders are insisting on. Bush has proposed boosting overall discretionary spending by just 2.1 percent, lower than the projected inflation rate, including cutting nondefense and non-homeland-security funding by almost 0.6 percent. His budget would eliminate or sharply curtail some 150 federal programs.

Although conservatives cheer such cuts, moderate Republicans and Democrats are vowing opposition. Moderate Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the chairman of the Senate Labor, Health and Human Services, Education Appropriations Subcommittee, has publicly announced that he intends to fight for additional spending. "Congressional budgeteers and appropriators have not sufficiently recognized that education and health care are capital investments," Specter wrote in a February 8 Washington Post op-ed piece. "Fiscal 2006 looks like an especially tough year."

Schatz of Citizens Against Government Waste said that congressional Republican leaders will have to finally hold the line on spending. "House and Senate [leaders] have not pushed hard enough ... to restrain the growth of the federal government," Schatz said. "Unless leadership pushes for reform or restraint, nothing will happen."

But the former House appropriations aide suggested that Congress will simply reach into its bag of budget gimmicks and "round up the usual suspects" to make it appear that money is being saved, even if it isn't.

At the end of the day, it may be that, even with new Appropriations chairmen and staff, and a new subcommittee structure, little will have changed. Congress probably will pass a huge omnibus spending bill that nobody reads, and everybody once again will be complaining about the Appropriations committees.

Lewis said that result would be disastrous. Although he clearly faces an uphill battle, he is pledging to try to fix the broken appropriations process. "I feel that the very survival of the Appropriations Committee is at stake," Lewis said, "and I take that very seriously."

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