House GOP leaders, appropriators at impasse on spending allocations

As the Memorial Day recess draws nearer, the House Appropriations Committee and GOP leadership remain at an impasse over how to divide among the panel's 13 subcommittees the $785 billion discretionary spending allocation it was given for fiscal 2004.

Appropriations Committee Chairman Bill Young, R-Fla., has presented Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., three primary scenarios for crafting the so-called 302(b) subcommittee spending allocations, but they have yet to reach an agreement.

Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and the White House also have participated in meetings held in recent weeks. Expanding on an earlier proposal to divert money from defense to domestic programs, appropriators now propose to shift $7 billion to $10 billion from both the defense and international relations accounts to domestic subcommittees that are pressed for money.

The second option is an across-the-board cut in every committee's allocation to make up for the more than $3 billion difference between the Bush budget and Congress' plan. A third option is some combination of the first two.

Appropriators say $785 billion is insufficient to cover the $7.6 billion in spending increases contained, but not funded, in the budget resolution. And while the top line number of the congressional budget is $2.2 billion less than the Bush budget, appropriators say Bush's budget contains roughly $1.5 billion in fee hikes and other offsets Congress has spurned in the past, making the true difference around $3 billion.

Stevens Tuesday suggested the House wanted to exceed the budget resolution to gain more funding, but Young replied, "Everything I've presented to the speaker has been within the budget resolution."