Senate pair set to unveil multi-year spending caps

With no fiscal 2003 Senate budget resolution in place, the debate over the $31 billion fiscal 2002 supplemental bill is increasingly becoming as much about Congress' need to police itself on various budget fronts as it is about homeland security and defense needs.

While budget and appropriations leaders are working on a one-year extension of such mechanisms and an agreement on 2003 spending, Sens. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., and Judd Gregg, R-N.H., plan to offer an amendment this week to institute multi-year spending caps and add various enforcement procedures to keep spending and pork barreling in check.

The Feingold-Gregg amendment would extend budget caps using the five-year spending figures contained in the 2003 budget resolution reported out of the Senate Budget Committee. It would also extend current budget enforcement procedures, such as pay/go and sequestration.

But it contains two major changes to current law. The first would allow Congress to forgo sequestration if there was a budget surplus excluding Social Security funds. The second, more controversial change would allow a senator to raise a point of order against any provision in a spending bill that pushes that bill over the cap for that fiscal year.

A Feingold aide said the provision would normally apply to the last one or two spending bills enacted and theoretically would serve to restrain pork barrel spending.

"It makes it more likely that we can police the final bill," said the aide. "You would look for the most porky thing you could find and pick at that . pull one of the threads out of the sweater."

But appropriators and other opponents say it would give other senators and the president too much say in the appropriations process and would likely lead toward partisan paybacks.

"It gives the president extraordinary power to rifle shot appropriations," said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D.

While even backers of the Feingold-Gregg amendment say it will be difficult to gather the 60 votes needed to pass it, opponents are taking it seriously and see the debate as an impetus to drive an agreement on the overall 2003 spending number. Without at least the one-year cap, they say the Feingold-Gregg amendment becomes more attractive to those worried about future deficit spending.