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Even the most detailed federal budget strategy can be thwarted by relatively simple logistical problems. That is what happened last week when two pages from the fiscal 2002 budget resolution conference report somehow got lost on the bill's way to the House floor and the numbers in the bill supposedly did not work.

The plan had been to have the House adopt the conference report on Thursday, then have the Senate approve the measure on Friday. But after hours of trying to figure out what to do to fix the problem (and keeping members around in the hope that a solution could be found), the House leadership finally gave up at about 3 a.m. Friday. GOP leaders either decided that more time was needed or concluded that too many likely supporters had gone home for them to risk a vote.

As a result, the final vote in the House on the budget resolution conference report now is not expected until Wednesday.

The Senate will wait until the House votes before taking up the reconciliation conference report, so final passage is not expected there until Wednesday or Thursday. If for any reason the House has to delay its action for an extra day or so, the Senate vote could spill over into next week.

Problems like this are hardly new when it comes to the federal budget. Ever since the White House and Congress began using the budget process as the major way to impose policy changes each year, the rush to do things at the last minute typically has created substantial logistical nightmares and huge drafting errors.

Until this year, the most infamous of these was the Gramm-Latta reconciliation bill considered by the House in 1981. That legislation was drafted so quickly and by so many people that in the era before personal computers and spell-check programs, the version brought to the House floor for debate included misnumbered sections, misspellings and hard-to-read handwritten changes in the margin that in many (but not all) cases were part of the legislative language.

One of the more memorable aspects of this incident was when the name and telephone number of a Congressional Budget Office analyst who had been helping with a particular section of Gramm-Latta not only was included in the margin--it also became the subject of the floor debate between Speaker Tip O'Neill, D-Mass., and Republican Minority Leader Bob Michel, R-Ill.

The current lost pages problem can be corrected in at least three different ways. The House could decide to adopt the conference report with the missing pages and then adopt a resolution making "technical corrections" to what it just passed. It could also adopt the conference report with the missing pages and then have the House and Senate pass a second budget resolution with the corrections. Finally, the House and Senate could go back to conference and file a completely new, and presumably error-free, conference report.

The problem with all of these options is that they will take time.

The White House and Republican congressional leadership would like to get the budget resolution out of the way so that the reconciliation process can be completed and a tax bill sent to the President as soon as possible. Before the two pages disappeared, the hope was that Bush would have the bill by Memorial Day; now the hope is that he will have it by July 4. There is concern, however, that it might not happen until the start of the summer recess in early August.

The leadership's fear is that support for the budget deal, which was relatively weak to begin with, is likely to diminish as the spending and tax specifics are considered. The longer it takes to get final passage of the budget resolution, the more the political pain associated with the changes will become obvious, and the greater the chance the backing for the individual pieces of the agreement will dip substantially.

In fact, support for some of the general provisions in the budget resolution conference report were already under attack on a number of fronts last week. For example, the House Appropriations Committee was fighting with the Budget Committee over how tight the spending restrictions would actually be.

In addition, some Republicans were insisting that they would cut taxes by more than was assumed in the budget resolution because the tax cuts would be done outside of reconciliation. And the Senate Finance Committee was giving strong signals that the tax cuts it is planning to approve would be different, perhaps even very different, from those proposed by the White House (which was what many representatives and senators thought were included in the budget deal).

With majorities as narrow as they are in both houses, partisanship again on the rise and other issues starting to intrude into the policy world that the budget has had more or less to itself the past few months, any one of these changes could make this year's debate much more difficult.

All of which leads one to wonder whether House Budget Committee Chairman Jim Nussle, R-Iowa, who took the blame on behalf of his committee for losing the two pages, might have acted too quickly. After all, this is the type of situation that each political party typically blames on the other.

Question of the Week

Last Week's Question. Had the vote in the House on the fiscal 2002 budget resolution conference report not been delayed until this week, you would have all been able to watch the debate in the Senate to figure out the answer to last week's question before the deadline. The question was how many votes will it take this year for the Senate to adopt the conference report. The answer: The same as every year--a simple majority. If only 1 person votes, then only 1 vote is needed. If, as is likely, all 100 senators vote, then 50 votes plus the Vice President's tiebreaker will be needed.

The winner of the "I Won A 2001 Budget Battle" T-shirt is Alberto Craff, who works for the U.S. Army in Davenport, Iowa, and was selected at random from all of the correct responses. Honorable mention to former U.S. Mint Director Philip Diehl, who now lives in Dallas and--in addition to getting the answer right--also knew that a budget resolution conference report is privileged.

This Week's Question. Memorial Day is almost here, Independence Day is coming shortly, and Labor Day isn't that far away. The question: If there were a national holiday in honor of the federal budget, when during the year should it occur and why? (Note: "never" is not an acceptable response for this question).

Send your answer to scollender@nationaljournal.com by 5 p.m. EDT on Saturday, May 12. You must include your mailing address so we can send you the shirt if you win. If there is more than one correct response, then the winner will be selected at random from all of the correct responses.

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