Government Executive - Authors - David Baumann

Guarding the Purse Strings

David Baumann — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Anyone who thought that the absence of earmarks in the fiscal 2007 joint resolution that Congress passed last month signaled a new trend was mistaken. Lawmakers jealously guard their many powers of the purse. Just ask Senate Appropriations Chairman Robert Byrd, D-W.Va. He'll gladly spend a few hours describing the authority that the Constitution grants Congress.

But the revamped Earmark Store is advertising less, not more, this year. Shopkeeper David Obey, the Wisconsin Democrat who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, has announced that his panel intends to allow only half as much earmark spending as Congress approved in fiscal 2006. Exempt from the clampdown, however, are programs that by their nature are "project-based," such as the Army Corps of Engineers' levees, appropriators said.

In the House, earmark season is well under way. Appropriators notified members by letter that they must submit all earmark requests for the fiscal 2008 budget to the relevant subcommittee by March 16. The requests, with all sorts of justifications attached, are sent electronically. If members still want earmarks that were axed out of the fiscal 2007 joint resolution, they must resubmit them.

And this year, under a new House rule, members must also verify in writing that they have no personal financial interest in their requested earmarks. At the subcommittee level, all requests will remain confidential. (Last year, some Republican appropriators threatened to go public with earmark requests submitted by outspoken critics of earmarking.) Sponsors of earmarks will be identified only when subcommittee-approved requests advance to the full Appropriations Committee.

Gee, having to accept responsibility for seeking a new bridge for your district -- that's a heavy burden? "People are happy to claim credit for many of those [projects]," noted Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., one of the harshest opponents of the earmarking process. "They're happy to take a victory lap."

The House changed its earmarking process by amending its rules. The Senate has not yet changed its process, because leaders in that body want to do it by statute, said Senate Rules Chairman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. "It remains unresolved because the House has not passed a bill," she told National Journal. Of course, the Senate hasn't passed one either.

Meanwhile, a few other wrinkles have popped up this year. Flake, for instance, praised Office of Management and Budget Director Rob Portman for directing executive branch departments and agencies to ignore fiscal 2006 earmarks contained in committee reports. Flake said he worries that rather than resubmitting axed earmarks, powerful lawmakers will call federal agencies directly to lobby for their projects.

Portman addressed that concern in a February memo: "While the administration welcomes input to help make informed decisions, no oral or written communication concerning earmarks shall supersede statutory criteria, competitive awards, or merit-based decision-making."

Portman's instructions notwithstanding, Flake expects that lawmakers will pressure agencies to fund their pet projects. "If we do hear evidence that they are, I will go to the floor with a privileged resolution requesting an investigation," he vowed.

But Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, who defends earmarks as a fair way to ensure that needed public projects get funded, said, "I am concerned about the letter Portman put out." He contended that Portman should warn executive branch heads that appropriators are very serious about the funding directions that they include in committee reports.

In shopper Simpson's view, Portman should tell agency chiefs that they ignore that guidance "at their own risk."

In other words, even during remodeling, the Earmark Store never really stopped doing business.

]]>

Reliance on supplemental funding draws bipartisan attack

David Baumann — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0400

"It needs to be in the budget," said Coburn, a conservative budget hawk, in an interview about the cost of the Iraq war. Likewise, Obey, the senior Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said that supplemental bills are "a good idea if you want to hide the cost of the war. It's a bad idea if you want to be able to offer an accounting of what our war costs are."

The Bush administration, with Congress's cooperation, has insisted on paying for the Iraq war through supplemental spending bills. The funding is not included in the president's annual budgets or, in most cases, in the congressional budget resolutions, and it is considered separately from the regular appropriations bills. The money is not counted in the budget deficit estimates that the administration routinely releases. Nor is it counted against any budget caps that Congress has set for itself to abide by throughout the year.

Since U.S. forces invaded Iraq in March 2003, Congress has approved about $250 billion in supplemental spending for the mission. Now, with another big wartime supplemental pending -- the House signed off on a $91.9 billion bill in March, while a $106.5 billion package awaits Senate approval -- the talk is increasing on Capitol Hill about ending the shell game.

"At the outset [of the war], a justification could be made that it was an emergency," said William Hoagland, budget adviser to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn. These days, Hoagland added, "it does seem that this is not something that is unexpected."

But if Congress and the White House actually put the Iraq war properly on the federal books, other budget priorities -- not to mention local pork projects -- would feel the squeeze. That explains why, particularly in an election year, the game is likely to continue.

The status quo is fine with the Bush administration. Although the Congressional Research Service recently estimated that Iraq war costs would come in at $9.8 billion a month beginning in fiscal 2006, administration officials continue to insist on paying for the war in small chunks. They say that war is unpredictable and can't be budgeted a year in advance.

"The traditional annual federal budget takes up to 12 months to formulate, it takes another eight or 12 months to pass Congress, and then it takes another 12 months to execute -- a total of something like two and a half to three years," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told the Senate Appropriations Committee in March. "Needless to say, in war, circumstances on the ground change quickly. The enemy has a brain -- is continuously changing and adapting their tactics."

Despite Rumsfeld's entreaties, a growing number of lawmakers -- Republicans as well as Democrats -- are raising objections to war-by-supplemental. "Last year, we were pretty clear, on both sides of the aisle, in this and the other body, that we think supplemental funding needs to stop," said Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., the ranking member on the House Armed Services Committee, at a February hearing on the defense budget. "Congress and the American people must be able to see the full cost of the war, and it must be done through the regular process, not through supplementals."

For his part, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg, R-N.H., fumed in a March interview with National Journal: "The administration is running two sets of books here.... There are two sets of books, and one is not subject to the budget controls."

Appropriators, however, have used supplemental spending bills to their advantage, and they defend the current practice of separating the war money. "It gives people a picture of what the war actually costs," House Appropriations Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., told NJ.

Experts have found that the Bush administration's supplemental spending requests have been designating an increasing number of Pentagon programs as "emergencies" -- thus freeing them from budget restraints -- when in reality the programs are needed for day-to-day defense activities.

According to the CRS, the Pentagon requested $782 million for research and development in the supplemental now pending before Congress. "It is unusual for [R&D] funds to be provided in emergency supplementals, because of the long-term nature of the work," the CRS said, adding that the administration failed to provide sufficient background details to justify calling the funds "emergency" spending.

On the Hill, appropriators have gone along -- and then some -- with the scheme of attaching routine defense spending to supplemental spending bills in recent years. The tactic takes some of the pressure off appropriators, allowing them to dish out more money to nondefense programs while appearing to stay within tight budget caps.

"The open purse on the defense side does provide more flexibility on the nondefense side," Hoagland said. "When you're spending $92 billion for the war on terrorism and [Hurricane] Katrina, what's another $3 or $4 billion?"

In other words, supplementals have become something of a safety valve for appropriators. "There literally isn't a month that the appropriators aren't moving defense money," said James Dyer, a former Republican staff director of the House Appropriations Committee who is now a lobbyist at Clark and Weinstock. "It's an opportunity for creative people, and nobody's more creative than an appropriator."

Numerous camps on the Hill are putting their feet down over the practice and are vowing to examine supplemental bills more carefully. Members of the conservative House Republican Study Committee have asked the Office of Management and Budget to provide detailed justification for all projects and programs contained in the White House's supplemental spending requests.

Nor do members of authorizing committees like the idea that funding for Pentagon projects gets sneaked past them in supplemental bills. "It goes around the authorizing process," said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Meanwhile, budgeteers -- led by Gregg and House Budget Committee Chairman Jim Nussle, R-Iowa -- are struggling with ways to restrain both the size of supplementals and their ability to carry nonemergency spending. The Senate-passed budget resolution limits the use of emergency spending designations to $90 billion for fiscal 2007. And the budget resolution pending in the House establishes a $50 billion placeholder for war costs, while also essentially capping nondefense emergency spending at $4.3 billion.

That emergency spending cap drew the ire of Lewis and his 66-member Appropriations Committee because, they complained, it would tie their hands. The appropriators' opposition -- combined with potential defections by other unhappy GOP moderates and conservatives -- forced House Republican leaders to postpone a floor vote on the budget resolution before the Easter recess.

]]>

Legislator takes stand in support of earmarks

David Baumann — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500

His goal is to convince folks who want to put the kibosh on earmarks that the projects are good for America, that they will help balance the budget and curtail the growth of the federal government. "I just want an honest debate," Simpson said in a recent interview. "I get a little tired of the rhetoric in this place," he added, referring to critics who knock members who ask for millions -- if not billions -- of dollars for their districts.

Simpson said he is particularly disturbed because no project that the president requests is ever identified as an earmark. The House Appropriations Committee recently tried to make that point by identifying administration requests in the $91 billion defense and disaster relief supplemental spending bill as earmarks.

Simpson also goes to great lengths to remind people that the "Bridge to Nowhere" in Alaska that caused so much indigestion last year was tucked into the massive highway reauthorization bill; it was not part of the transportation appropriations spending bill.

Simpson has a special interest in trying to keep pork on the menu. He is a member of the House Appropriations Committee and its Energy and Water Development Subcommittee -- the panel that doles out money for such agencies as the Army Corps of Engineers. A former speaker of the Idaho House of Representatives, he's a veteran of political infighting. And as a practicing dentist, he's used to causing people to squirm.

Some fiscal conservatives say that earmarking goes against their principles. Simpson disagrees. And he's circulated a "Dear Colleague" letter that states his case in great detail. First, he makes the timeworn argument that the Constitution gives the power of the purse to Congress.

But he goes further -- actually implying that outlawing earmarking would be unconstitutional. "Ending the practice of earmarking would transfer massive funding authority to the president, and federal agencies, in defiance of the Constitution," Simpson contends.

He goes on to say that earmarking does not increase the federal budget, because each pork project comes under the discretionary spending cap imposed by the budget resolution that Congress passes each year. In addition, earmarking shifts federal money away from the discretion of federal agencies and into the hands of local officials.

"Earmarked dollars generally go to projects that are short-term in nature and small in scope," he wrote. If the money did not go to those projects, it would wind up in Washington-operated programs that would never end, Simpson argued.

Finally, he said, earmarking keeps spending decisions in the hands of members of Congress, rather than giving them to bureaucrats. In other words, earmarks are so conservative that Ronald Reagan would have loved them.

Simpson said he favors "transparency" that would require every member to identify the earmarks he or she requests. He said he already posts his earmarks on his Web site. (Of course, taking credit for money brought back home is not a bad idea.) "I told people if they were wasteful, we'd talk about it," Simpson said.

Some conservatives don't buy Simpson's argument. "Maybe we shouldn't be spending that money at all," said Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., the most outspoken earmark critic in the House. Flake said the constitutional argument falls apart when politics enter the picture.

In recent years, Republican subcommittee chairmen have been known to refuse earmarks for Democrats who don't support appropriations bills. "Your constitutional right to earmarks only applies if you're a Republican and you support the underlying bill," Flake said.

Flake says that appropriators are only trying to maintain a system that they have benefited from for years. Simpson counters that they are simply trying to respond to the needs of lawmakers and the nation. Time will tell whether Simpson wins or whether Flake can convince members that appropriators are just trying to cover their own assets.

]]>

Spending proposals leave moderates in tough position

David Baumann — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Simmons, a moderate who faces a fierce re-election battle in a Democratic-leaning district, knew that his decision on the budget reconciliation bill could have a huge effect on his political future. He had voted against the House version of the measure in November, but had supported the conference report in December. Because of parliamentary maneuvering in the Senate, the conference report faced a February 1 revote in the House. The outcome was going to be close, and President Bush and House GOP leaders wanted his support.

But on January 25, Simmons announced that he would vote no. "I wasn't sent here to be a cheerleader for the executive branch," he said in a recent interview, adding that he disagrees with budget cuts that Republican leaders continue to propose. "It puts [moderate Republicans] under pressure."

Simmons, however, hasn't gotten much of a break from that pressure. On February 6, President Bush sent Congress a $2.77 trillion budget for fiscal 2007 that, while boosting defense and homeland-security funding, would cut other discretionary spending by 0.5 percent and eliminate or sharply reduce 141 programs. Bush also proposed another round of budget reconciliation to find $65 billion in savings over five years in mandatory entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

As Congress began to move on the president's proposal in early March, Simmons and other like-minded moderates knew it was important to make themselves heard. After all, moderate Republicans had been unusually bold -- and unusually successful -- in shaping last fall's budget reconciliation debate. They forced House and Senate GOP leaders to scale back some of their entitlement and tax cuts, and to abandon a plan to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

So Simmons on March 8 joined 62 other House Republicans in signing a letter urging House Budget Committee Chairman Jim Nussle, R-Iowa, to reject Bush's proposal to cut Medicare spending by $36 billion over five years. "The budget's steep Medicare reductions could hurt the people who depend on the program for care," wrote the mostly moderate GOP group.

But the same day that the moderates' letter was publicly released, congressional conservatives laid down their own bold marker for this year's budget debate. For months, many conservatives have argued that the way to overcome all of the problems -- and the abysmal poll numbers -- that have had Bush and their party reeling during the past year is to return to bedrock principles of smaller government and deficit reduction.

At a March 8 rally on the Cannon House Office Building terrace, members of the conservative House Republican Study Committee released an austere, balanced-budget proposal based on the Contract With America, which they credit with vaulting their party to power. "House conservatives believe that this Republican Congress should return to our 1994 roots of fiscal discipline and reform," declared Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., the RSC chairman.

The RSC plan proposes reducing the deficit by $392 billion over five years, while achieving entitlement savings of $358 billion through reconciliation. It would significantly restructure three Cabinet departments (Commerce, Energy, and Education); block-grant Medicaid and most federal education programs; cap Medicare growth; rescind highway bill earmarks; and end federal subsidies for Amtrak, public broadcasting, and the arts and humanities endowments, among other longtime conservative targets.

The early skirmishing between moderates and conservatives signals that congressional Republicans have an extremely difficult budget year ahead of them, given the political woes and the fiscal constraints that they face.

The approaching midterm elections appear to pose the greatest threat to the House and Senate GOP majorities since 1994, yet the party is arguably more riven by internal divisions than at any time in the past dozen years, a predicament that is likely to make agreement on contentious budget issues all the more elusive. And easy budget answers aren't exactly handy in any event: Deficits continue to mount, with the Iraq war and the Gulf Coast hurricane relief and reconstruction effort soaking up huge amounts of money. Budget writers looking for cuts are finding that many of the relatively painless ones are gone.

In recent days, congressional Republicans have begun to craft their fiscal 2007 budget resolutions, which will set their game plan for the rest of the year. Through the debate over the budget resolution, they are deciding whether to undertake another round of reconciliation to curb entitlement spending or pursue further tax cuts, and how much discretionary spending to allow in the appropriations bills. Early on, Republicans also must shepherd a $90 billion-plus fiscal 2006 "emergency" supplemental spending bill for the Iraq war and Gulf Coast aid, which the House was debating at press time.

These budget decisions -- and the ones that follow -- will be amplified by the fact that Congress's other legislative output is expected to be paltry this year. Fiscal matters will become a focal point and could reverberate along the campaign trail. Whether that is to the detriment or the good of the GOP majority remains to be seen.

Roiled Over Reconciliation

In the House, the chaos caused by the early moderate-conservative clashes contributed to the Republican leadership's decision to delay a Budget Committee markup of the fiscal 2007 budget resolution until after the weeklong St. Patrick's Day recess. The more moderate Senate, meanwhile, was debating a fiscal 2007 budget resolution at press time that surely had many conservatives seeing red.

As crafted by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg, R-N.H., and approved by his panel on March 9, the Senate's budget resolution heeds Bush's call to set overall fiscal 2007 discretionary spending at $873 billion. But the Senate plan assumes that appropriators will shift some $5 billion from defense and foreign-aid accounts to domestic programs like education and health care.

Moreover, Gregg rejected calls by Bush and congressional conservatives for another round of budget reconciliation to pass further tax cuts and curb entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Instead, Gregg permitted reconciliation only so that a plan to allow ANWR drilling can reach the Senate floor with a protection against filibusters.

"I'm willing to do [reconciliation]. I don't think the votes are there to do anything substantial," Gregg said in an interview before his committee's markup. "I would like this budget to be stronger in the entitlement area. But this year, the reality is ... it is not going to be."

To be sure, the "reality" of last year's reconciliation effort was that it became a nightmare for GOP leaders and key committee chairmen. In both chambers last fall, they had to engage in arduous 11th-hour negotiations with moderate holdouts over contentious provisions. Then it took numerous cliff-hanger floor votes -- including a Senate tie broken by Vice President Cheney -- before Bush was finally able to sign the fiscal 2006 reconciliation bill into law on February 8.

By historical standards, though, that bill was minuscule, saving $39 billion over five years compared with reconciliation bills of the 1990s that saved between $118 billion and $482 billion. And pending tax cuts will probably eat up that $39 billion. "They huffed and they puffed, and they didn't produce a great deal when it came to the bottom line," said Urban Institute President Robert Reischauer, who served as director of the Congressional Budget Office during the Clinton administration.

Nevertheless, Nussle is intent on finding some reconciliation savings when the House Budget Committee marks up its fiscal 2007 budget resolution, presumably during the last week of March. "It's my view that we should do reconciliation every year," Nussle said in an interview. Still, he acknowledged that the $65 billion in entitlement savings called for in the president's budget is "not reasonable."

Looking over Nussle's shoulder is the Republican Study Committee, more than 100 members strong, which is insisting on reconciliation. "You don't lose weight until you get on the scale every day," Pence, the RSC chairman, said in an interview. "We're adamant."

Conservatives say that their party must appeal to its base, and they contend that moderates haven't been hurt by fiscal conservatism in the past and wouldn't be hurt by it this November. "There were moderates in the Congress when we passed the Contract With America in 1994," said Rep. John Shadegg, R-Ariz., a former RSC chairman.

House conservatives expect their chamber to agree on another round of reconciliation -- and the Senate, too, once the budget resolution goes to conference. "Sooner or later, we expect the Senate to get this," said Rep. Gil Gutknecht, R-Minn.

For their part, Republican moderates believe that any large reconciliation measure will doom them on Election Day. "Their constituents are watching how much is being cut," said Sarah Chamberlain Resnick, executive director of the Republican Main Street Partnership, a moderate organization with members on and off Capitol Hill. "The real key is that the base in a swing district is very different than the base in a Republican Study Committee district."

If congressional Republicans go ahead on reconciliation, the going surely won't be easy. Budget analysts say that lawmakers are realizing that they have already achieved many of the easier savings in entitlement programs. Finding additional savings would mean fundamentally overhauling these programs -- something that has proven politically impossible (witness the Social Security and Medicare reform efforts of late).

"A lot of the low-hanging fruit has been picked," said G. William Hoagland, the budget and appropriations adviser to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn. "We've known all along this was coming. You're looking at the hard cookies."

Tom Kahn, Democratic staff director of the House Budget Committee, agreed, saying that after last year's round, "reconciliation fatigue" has set in. "It's hard to imagine how they would want to move another bill that cuts Medicare, Medicaid, and education," he said. "Last year's 'low-hanging fruit' wasn't hanging very low."

Even some of the Republican chairmen of authorizing committees -- who would be responsible for coming up with savings proposals for entitlement programs under their jurisdictions -- aren't very keen on another round of reconciliation.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said his panel, which oversees Medicare and Medicaid, is deeply divided over reconciliation, and he cautioned that moderate Sens. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and Gordon Smith, R-Ore., hold all the cards. Reconciliation will be decided by "the extent to which I get Snowe and Smith to agree to it," Grassley said.

Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee Chairman Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., said that from his perspective, reconciliation isn't do-able. "We told [the Budget Committee] we just can't find any more money," he said. "Here we are, a year away from writing another farm bill. That's not the time to address additional savings. I don't think we'll have the votes in committee to do anything." House Agriculture Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., and ranking member Collin Peterson, D-Minn., have echoed those sentiments.

If anyone should be sympathetic on reconciliation, it is Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., who put together numerous reconciliation bills as the Senate Budget Committee's chairman or ranking member during the 1980s and '90s. But this year, as chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Domenici is objecting to more than $800 million in entitlement savings that the Bush administration proposed in programs under his jurisdiction. Domenici asked Gregg not to assume savings for them in his fiscal 2007 budget resolution.

A Matter of Discretion

When Congress turns to the discretionary side of the budget -- writing the annual appropriations bills -- conservatives contend that the president didn't go far enough in proposing to cut nondefense, non-homeland-security spending by 0.5 percent. They believe that their "Contract With America Renewed" budget, calling for far steeper cuts, would help most Republicans at the ballot box this fall.

"Fiscal discipline is a tough sell in a few marginal districts," Pence said in an interview. "But runaway federal spending is a liability in every Republican's district. If we don't renew the confidence of the American people to our commitment to fiscal discipline, Congress could be a very different place in 2007."

But Democrats, moderate Republicans, and some veteran pragmatists in both parties think that even Bush's plan will be a tough sell in Congress, particularly in an election year.

Democrats on the House Budget Committee estimate that the president's budget would cut domestic discretionary spending $16.8 billion below the level needed to continue current services. "Over the next five years, the proposed cuts in domestic discretionary funding will have a significant effect on a wide array of programs that provide services many Americans regard as important," the liberal Center on Budget Policy and Priorities said in a February analysis of the Bush plan.

Moderate Republicans have responded to the president's budget by appealing for funding for programs, such as Amtrak or Community Development Block Grants, that directly affect their constituents. "We have an obligation to promote the general welfare," Simmons said. "I'm not sure that we're promoting the general welfare when we're cutting many of these programs."

Several seasoned appropriators contended that the funding levels in the Bush budget are so low that they could not win passage, particularly in the Senate. Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, a former Senate Appropriations Committee chairman, told reporters, "The budget looks pretty lean to me. It's going to be pretty tough to live with."

Moderate Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., who chairs the Appropriations Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies Subcommittee, has called the Bush budget "scandalous" and "unrealistic." And Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa., the ranking member on Specter's subcommittee, added: "If the Budget Committee adopts the president's numbers and the Senate adopts the president's numbers, there's no way we'll pass any appropriations bills."

Gregg, himself an appropriator, also believes that Bush's domestic discretionary spending proposal was too low. In crafting the Senate's budget resolution, he called for spending $1.5 billion more than the president did on education programs and $1.5 billion more on health programs.

Frist adviser Hoagland predicted that Republicans may press throughout the budget process to hold to the president's $873 billion ceiling in fiscal 2007 discretionary spending, but with a different mix, as Gregg did in his budget resolution. "Politically, I don't think the will is there to do the president's nondefense discretionary number," Hoagland said.

Gregg is incensed at the administration's decision to put defense funding ahead of domestic spending. "The administration is running two sets of books here," he said. "It doesn't seem realistic that defense is so high and nondefense is so low. There will be some adjustment. There are two sets of books, and one is not subject to the budget controls."

The Bush administration and Congress have paid for much of the cost of the Iraq war through supplemental spending bills that designate the funding as "emergency" and therefore not subject to budget constraints. From 2003 to 2005, Congress approved four Iraq supplementals totaling $250 billion, and an additional $90 billion Iraq supplemental bill is pending.

In this tight budget year, analysts -- including Hoagland -- predict that Congress will shuffle additional, non-Iraq-related defense costs into supplemental spending bills, to free up more money for domestic discretionary accounts. Congress has used this tactic in other recent years.

Conservatives object to such shell games. RSC leaders have written to House Appropriations Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., urging him to keep supplemental spending bills as "clean" as possible, free of items not requested by the president and not truly emergencies. "It's simply time we restore fiscal discipline to this process and pay for these expenditures by making choices among competing spending priorities," Pence and Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, chairman of the RSC's Budget and Spending Task Force, wrote to Lewis.

When asked about the House conservatives' objections, Hoagland replied, "We have enough problems in the United States Senate without worrying about the House of Representatives right now."

Indeed. Besides all the political problems and fiscal constraints threatening the budget process this year, Republicans also have the calendar working against them. The House is scheduled to be in session just 79 days between now and October 6, when Congress hopes to adjourn for the elections, according to the House Appropriations Committee. The fiscal year ends on September 30, but Congress seldom finishes the funding measures by then.

For appearance's sake, GOP leaders want to avoid having to finish the appropriations bills in a lame-duck session after the election, as happened in 2004. "If they can't pass a budget, it calls into question a fitness to govern," said Rep. John Spratt, D-S.C., the House Budget Committee's ranking member.

In the end, Republicans will probably use smoke and mirrors, Reischauer predicted, and the successful completion of the budget and appropriations year will rely on the "ingenuity and creativity with which expenses are shifted into other accounts." In other words, he said, someone will be put in charge of "packing 300 pounds of spending into a 200-pound sack."

]]>

Growth in earmarks limits agencies’ flexibility

David Baumann — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 00:00:00 -0500

"For our situation, I can't say that [earmarks] took away from anything" in last year's appropriations bill, Luisa said. President Bush requested $4.3 billion for the Corps. The House upped the ante to $4.7 billion, the Senate raised it to $5.3 billion, and the two chambers "compromised" on $5.83 billion, adding almost 500 projects to those the administration proposed.

So the Corps, which builds and maintains dams, flood-control projects, and ports, got enough money to fund its own priorities and those of lawmakers as well. "We feel comfortable that we can satisfy an awful lot," Luisa said.

The Army Corps of Engineers has been benefiting from that type of additive earmarking for decades, and it drives anti-deficit groups nuts. But the recent growth of earmarks -- from 4,126 specific designations in 1994 appropriations bills to 15,268 such requests in 2005, according to the Congressional Research Service -- has been largely driven by a more budget-neutral practice: telling agencies where to spend their money, without increasing their funds.

This practice, say officials in executive departments and agencies, is beginning to have a huge effect on their ability to set national priorities. And complaints from these officials are adding to the pressure to reform earmarks, especially in the wake of the criminal convictions of former Rep. Randy (Duke) Cunningham, R-Calif., and lobbyist Jack Abramoff for steering congressional favors to clients.

Take the Economic Development Administration, for example. Its mission is to spur growth in areas "experiencing high unemployment, low income, or other severe economic distress," in the words of one EDA brochure.

In fiscal 1998, the agency got $340 million and had two broad earmarks: for trade adjustment assistance and for timber and coal states. In 2002, the budget was $335 million, with Congress emphasizing timber, coal, New England fisheries, and industries affected by the North American Free Trade Agreement, particularly trade with Canada.

For the current year, the EDA's funding fell to $251 million but came with many more congressional directions on how to spend it. The conference report included at least 20 specific earmarks, including funding for the Gateway Economic Development District's business creation and expansion program in the Montana counties of Broadwater, Meagher, and Lewis and Clark; for the Mississippi Delta; and for Development Projects Inc. in Dayton, Ohio.

These are considered "soft" earmarks because they include no specific dollar amounts. But the agency has learned not to ignore them.

"The more that we are constrained by specific report language or legislative needs, the more difficult it is for us to address the sudden and severe and ongoing needs across the country," said Sandy Baruah, the Commerce Department's assistant secretary for economic development and the head of the EDA. "We would like as much flexibility as possible."

The agency attempts to respond to major problems, such as plant and military base closings, Baruah said. An earmark "usually means that a project that might have provided a greater economic impact did not get funded." He added, "We don't apply political pressure in Washington, and we would appreciate if Congress wouldn't either."

In the past, Baruah said, his agency was not a big target for earmarks. But the EDA has increasingly suffered from congressional nibbles as the number of earmarks in the Commerce, Justice, State, Judiciary, and Related Agencies Appropriations bill -- the one containing the Economic Development Administration -- jumped from 253 in 1994 to 1,722 in 2005, according to the Congressional Research Service.

And in addition to the specific projects that Congress designates for EDA funding, the appropriations bills include "ongoing" earmarks. Every year, Congress directs the agency to take care of folks affected by economic hardships in Northwest timber states, in coal-burning states, and in the Alaska fishing industry.

It is no coincidence that former Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Mark Hatfield, R-Ore., was from a Northwest timber state, ranking Senate Appropriations member Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., is from a coal state, and former Appropriations Chairman Ted Stevens is from Alaska.

Federal officials who administer competitive grant programs are also chafing under increased direction from Congress. In a January analysis, the American Association for the Advancement of Science said that while research-and-development funds have stagnated, R&D earmarks have soared 63 percent since 2003.

"Congressional appropriators make it their first priority to secure earmarked funds to ensure that at least some money goes to their districts, at the cost of dramatically reducing competitively awarded funds," the analysis concluded.

The drastic increase means that members of Congress -- rather than experts in the Energy Department or the Pentagon, for example -- set research priorities. "The topical areas of these earmarks might be very different than the topic areas that an agency might come up with," said Kei Koizumi, director of the Research and Development Budget and Policy Program at AAAS.

Earmarks have drastically increased at the Agriculture Department, for example -- up 38 percent from just last year, according to the study. But for 2007, the department is attempting to take a stand. Last year, the USDA's Cooperative State Research Education and Extension Service was the target of $196 million in earmarks; for next year, the department is projecting no such designations.

"Our budget is reallocating earmarks to reflect our higher-priority needs," said department spokesman Ed Loyd. He cites avian-flu research as one area that needs more money.

Department officials prefer competitive grants to earmarks because the grant process allows peer review, as opposed to congressional review, said Susan Frost, who was a senior adviser to Education Secretary Richard Riley in the Clinton administration. She added, "The problem with the competitive grant process is that you have to have enough money to compete."

She cited an Education Department program for postsecondary education that last year shut down its grant competition because all of its funds were earmarked. "I think the people who had to administer [earmarked programs had] a fair amount of frustration," Frost said. "In those cases, you simply were doing what you were told."

The Bush administration has asked Congress to enact a version of the line-item veto that would pass constitutional muster with the Supreme Court, unlike the line-item authority that President Clinton briefly exercised before the Court ruled that it violated the constitutional separation of powers. But since most earmarks are spelled out in committee reports, not in official legislation, officials at executive departments and agencies could claim the power to ignore them. They haven't -- because Congress protects its prerogatives carefully and would likely react harshly the next time the independent-minded officials come to Congress with their hands out. Four years ago, the Bush administration attempted to crack down on earmarks in the fiscal 2003 budget and called on Congress to cut the number of pork-barrel projects. In the Commerce Department budget, for example, the administration said, "congressional earmarks for noncompetitively awarded projects divert resources that could more effectively meet the mission of the department." But the anti-earmark campaign did little but strain relations between the appropriators and the administration, and the White House did not push the issue in negotiations over appropriations bills. This year, Congress seems to be acknowledging the reform pressure created by the Cunningham and Abramoff scandals. The House Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee this year is limiting members' requests for earmarks to five apiece, according to instructions sent to lawmakers earlier this month.

This is the first time the subcommittee has attempted to restrict member requests, according to panel spokesman John Scofield.

Of course, the subcommittee -- one of 10 on the House Appropriations panel -- could still be swamped by 2,175 requests. And senators are likely to demand an equal share of the booty.

Members of Congress are in the best position to make judgments about how to spend federal money, Scofield asserts. "Elected members going home every weekend know what the needs of their districts are better than someone stuck in an office in Southwest D.C.," he said. "The power of the purse rests with Congress."

And, appropriators note, department officials who are unhappy about legislation that ties their hands can try to persuade the president to exercise his veto. That hasn't happened yet during the Bush administration.

]]>

Army Corps officials too often acquiesced to Congress' wishes, critics claim

Brian Friel and David Baumann — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

But not since 1824, when Congress appropriated $75,000 for the Corps to remove snags and sandbars from the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, has the agency really been in charge of its own agenda.

This point was driven home on Monday, August 29, when the levees protecting New Orleans from the deadly waters of Lake Pontchartrain failed.

"The president's budget for fiscal 2005 is $3.0 million," explained a fact sheet on New Orleans-area hurricane-protection efforts updated by the Corps's New Orleans District this May. "We could spend $20 million if the funds were provided.... Several levees have settled and need to be raised to provide the [desired] protection. The current funding shortfalls in fiscal year 2005 and fiscal year 2006 will prevent the Corps from addressing these pressing needs."

The Corps has been predicting for decades that a massive storm could overwhelm the New Orleans levees, flood the city, and drown thousands of people. "There have been many times the Corps has asked for dollars and the money has gone elsewhere," said Lee Butler, a former Army Corps engineer. "From the time of Ronald Reagan on, administrations have not paid enough attention."

But when it comes to the priorities of the Corps, the White House is only part of the problem. It is Congress, using the power of the purse, that really sets the agency's priorities. And Congress, note numerous congressional watchdog groups, puts politics first when deciding which Army Corps projects to fund among the thousands of navigation, flood-control, shore-protection, and other water-management proposals from local officials each year. "There were high-priority Corps initiatives that were not funded as a result of member projects," said Scott Lilly, former Democratic staff director of the House Appropriations Committee.

"There are so many [congressional] mouths to feed, so everyone gets a little bit of the money," said Steve Ellis, vice president of programs at Taxpayers for Common Sense. He said that even in Louisiana, Corps money has gone to waterway and wastewater projects that should have been deemed lower priorities than levee protection.

Donald Sweeney, a Corps economist-turned-whistle-blower, said the Corps plays a role, too. "The Corps is basically incapable of saying no to projects," he said. "Every district recommends every project as high priority, and when everything's a high priority, nothing is."

Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, commander of the Corps, said the levees in New Orleans were designed to protect the city in 99.5 percent of storms. Katrina fell within the 0.5 percent that planners had deemed an acceptable risk. "The government of this country, from the local up to the national level, needs to reassess what level of risk is acceptable," Strock said on Sept. 2. But even if the nation adopts a more risk-averse approach to flood control and other natural disasters, the Corps's culture of acquiescence to Congress's wishes -- and Congress's unwillingness to discriminate between pork and necessity -- will have to change.

]]>

Appropriations process mired in same troubles as previous years

David Baumann — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Congress would be way behind in the drive to enact the annual spending bills by the start of the new fiscal year on Oct. 1. And conservatives would be grumbling that appropriators were rigging the system to spend more money. But not this year. The House was on track to pass all of its appropriations bills before the July 4 recess, and the Senate also began to get down to business last week. So far, the process has been relatively civil and orderly, and the bills have adhered to GOP-imposed spending limits.

Nobody has spiked the coffee. Instead, much credit goes to the new Appropriations Committee chairmen, Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., and Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., who are determined to avoid the usual train wreck that results in an 11th-hour omnibus spending package bulging with costly riders. "We have a commitment not to have an omnibus," Lewis told National Journal recently.

Unfortunately for the two chairmen and other Republicans intent on showing that Congress can get its budget work done efficiently, plenty of pitfalls still lie ahead. Many of the same old problems -- plus some new complications -- are looming.

For starters, although Senate floor action on appropriations began in earnest last week, the bills are bound to eventually pile up there because of the chamber's rules allowing lengthy debates and myriad amendments. And the Senate's always-crowded calendar could come unglued in the event of a Supreme Court nomination -- or if Republican leaders resort to the "nuclear option" to expedite consideration of any judicial nominee.

Long-standing differences in spending priorities between the conservative House and the more moderate Senate also threaten to derail the appropriations bills. This year, some Republicans are more intent than ever to demonstrate their fiscal conservatism, but achieving that goal will mean cutting popular government programs. Congress is working under a tight fiscal 2006 budget resolution that, heeding calls from President Bush, requires cutting appropriations outside of defense and homeland security by about 1 percent, a reduction not seen since the Reagan administration.

Reorganizations undertaken by the House and Senate Appropriations committees further complicate things. Both committees used to have 13 subcommittees; each had a jurisdiction that generally matched its counterpart in the other chamber. Now the House has 10 Appropriations subcommittees that wrote 11 spending bills, while the Senate has 12 subcommittees that are writing 12 bills. These differences make conference committee negotiations a nightmare.

Realistically, rolling unfinished appropriations bills into an omnibus package to ease their passage at the session's end may be inevitable, particularly given the differing jurisdictions of the subcommittees. "I think there's likelihood [of an omnibus] simply because of the logistics," conceded a Senate Republican leadership aide, who added that the Senate is concentrating first on passing spending bills that will easily match up along jurisdictional lines with the House versions.

In fact, omnibus spending bills have become the norm rather than the exception. During the past 20 years, Congress has had to bundle appropriations bills in 11 of them, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Dark clouds may be approaching, but some Republicans are praising the job that their new Appropriations chairmen have done so far, especially in the House, where appropriators are far ahead of where they have been in past years.

By July 1, Republicans most likely will have shepherded all 11 of their spending bills through the House. According to the House Appropriations Committee, the last time the chamber completed its appropriations work by the end of June was in 1988, when Democrats held the majority and Rep. Jamie Whitten, D-Miss., was the chairman. In 1994, when current ranking member David Obey, D-Wis., was the chairman, the House completed 12 of the 13 bills by the end of June; since then, the House has passed a low of zero bills by that date (in 1997) and a high of nine bills (in 2000).

House conservatives, who played a role in selecting the new Appropriations chairman and wanted assurances that he'd toe the conservative line, say that Lewis is responsible for the smooth sailing. "I think there's a commitment to fiscal discipline that I've not seen since I've been here," said Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., the chairman of the House Republican Study Committee, a conservative group that says it has more than 100 members.

Lewis said he has sought to change the perception of the Appropriations Committee as insular and unresponsive to other members. "I personally have spent a lot of time talking to various groups," he said. For now, Lewis seems content that he has met his goal of passing all of his spending bills by the July 4 recess. "Initially, everybody said, 'It can't be done,' " he said.

During the House's appropriations debates, Democrats offered amendments to reset the spending priorities and funnel more funds to domestic programs. But the chamber's strict rules and party discipline -- combined with the tight budget cap -- made it difficult for House Democrats to make much headway. "We're not going to make any significant changes in the bill, given what the budget has done to us," Obey conceded during recent debate on the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies appropriations bill.

Meanwhile, in the Senate, Cochran and Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., are intent on passing their 12 spending bills under the "regular order." "With new chairmen both in the Senate and the House, we have a real opportunity to greatly improve the appropriations process," Frist told CongressDaily recently.

Senate Appropriations Committee ranking member Robert Byrd, D-W.Va, shares those goals. "I hope the committee will approve 12 individual, fiscally responsible appropriations bills this year, and that we will press the leadership to find the floor time to send the president all of the bills," Byrd said in a statement when the committee began marking up its first measure last month.

"These omnibus bills are like an albatross, hung on the neck of the Congress," Byrd added. "While an omnibus bill may be an efficient means of moving appropriations bills through the Congress at the end of a session, there is nothing in our Constitution that says that the appropriations process has to be efficient."

Nevertheless, Byrd and other Senate Democrats are grumbling about the Republican-crafted budget -- and they have much more parliamentary flexibility to gum up the works than their House Democratic counterparts. Byrd told the committee that the budget "is a blueprint for shortchanging America's future." He added: "In many respects, from educating our children, to providing medical care to our veterans, to securing our homeland, inadequate funding is the glaring theme."

A senior Senate Democratic aide said that Democratic senators can be expected to try to reshuffle spending priorities during floor debate. "I would expect major issues to appear on the bills," the aide said, noting that as the year progresses and other legislative outlets to address pet causes diminish, "senators' dreams turn to appropriations bills." The aide, a longtime veteran of budget battles, warned, "Notwithstanding that there is one party controlling both houses and the White House, it's going to be difficult" to complete the appropriations process on schedule, as the Republicans would like.

As appropriations work continues, the new subcommittee jurisdictions can make it challenging to discern differences in the two chambers' approaches. For instance, the Senate Appropriations Committee gave its Commerce, Justice, and Science Subcommittee about $49 billion to work with, while the House Appropriations Committee gave its Science, State, Justice, Commerce, and Related Agencies Subcommittee $57.5 billion. (In the Senate, the State Department falls under the State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Subcommittee.)

Still, the differences and possible clashes are there: The Senate would give the Commerce Department's Economic Development Administration $315 million, while the House wants to spend about $228 million. On Amtrak, the House voted to restore money that GOP leaders had proposed cutting -- avoiding a possible conflict with Senate Democrats and Republicans. But by providing $626 million more than Republican leaders wanted, the House sets up a possible fight with the administration, which wants to slash funding.

Even as Republican appropriators and leaders push ahead with the spending bills, an unexpected crisis can stop them in their tracks. One big problem already has come up: The Veterans Affairs Department reported recently that its health care system will fall $1 billion short this year.

While the VA can make up the difference this year, the shortfall leaves the department underfunded in fiscal 2006. "This Congress will tolerate no diminution of services or reduced quality of care for our nation's veterans in this time of war," Rep. James Walsh, R-N.Y., the chairman of the House Appropriations Military Quality of Life and Veterans Affairs Subcommittee, said in a statement last week. "If we need more money, we'll find it." But fulfilling that promise is complicated by the fact that the House already has passed Walsh's bill for fiscal 2006 and that Congress will have to find the money from other programs.

Given the past history and the looming new complications, it seems likely that the Senate will bog down on the spending bills, that the two chambers will battle over a myriad of issues, and that Congress this fall ultimately will have to pass several stopgap continuing resolutions and then a large omnibus bill to keep the government operating. By then, nobody will care that the House passed its appropriations bills by July 4. Having lived through years of late nights and endless meetings, James Dyer, the former staff director of the House Appropriations Committee, said of the appropriations process: "It's not a sprint -- it's a marathon."

]]>

Bush's best-laid budget plans go awry

David Baumann — Fri, 18 Jun 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Confronted with that record, Bush administration officials and allies are quick to point out that the president has faced huge, unprecedented expenses that were beyond his control. The economy was already in a recession when Bush took office in January 2001, and the terrorist attacks in September of that year generated a tremendous financial burden. Government spending soared as homeland security suddenly became the nation's top priority, and as the United States launched military missions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"The American people understand that we've had serious challenges in this country," Joel Kaplan, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, said in an interview with National Journal. "We've had economic challenges, and we've had national security challenges."

At the same time, Kaplan insisted that Bush has curbed some federal spending and is committed to ratcheting up those efforts in the future. "In the nondefense, discretionary spending, the president has brought down the rate of growth," Kaplan said. He added that Bush remains determined to cut the deficit in half over the next five years.

But such explanations and promises mean little to some fiscal conservatives. Although they once were optimistic that the Republican president would oversee a government-wide belt-tightening, some conservatives are badly disillusioned as Bush campaigns for a second term amid sky-high deficit projections.

"Bush's record on spending restraint has been abysmal," Stephen Moore, the president of the Club for Growth, a conservative political action committee, declared in an interview. "There's been an across-the-board desire to just throw money at problems. There's just more money for everything."

And conservative analyst Veronique de Rugy, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, contended, "Republicans have clearly forfeited any claim of being the fiscally responsible party in Washington."

The grumbling from the Republican-controlled Congress has also grown louder, even though Capitol Hill has certainly aided and abetted -- even exacerbated -- the spend-a-thon over the past four years. Late last year and early this year, small pockets of conservative GOP lawmakers broke ranks with Bush and their leadership to oppose the Medicare prescription drug benefits legislation and the fiscal 2004 omnibus appropriations bill because they considered the measures too bloated.

Moreover, some congressional Republicans were less than impressed by the president's attempt in February to polish his conservative credentials by proposing an austere fiscal 2005 budget. Bush proposed big spending increases for defense and homeland security but called for boosting spending on other discretionary programs by only 0.5 percent. The Republican Study Committee, a group of about 90 House conservatives, complained that Bush's budget was still "overly generous." Rep. Sue Myrick, R-N.C., the group's chairwoman, said that while the president "showed restraint in several areas, the total spending is still too high."

Conservative pundits also began banging the drums of discontent more loudly earlier this year. "The Right is rumbling over the Bush administration's failure to put a lid on spending," columnist Robert Novak wrote in February.

Likewise, columnist George F. Will complained, "Republicans are swiftly forfeiting the perception that they are especially responsible stewards of government finances. It is surreal for a Republican president to submit a budget to a Republican-controlled Congress and have Republican legislators vow to remove the 'waste' that he has included and that they have hitherto funded."

Lofty Goals

Looking back at the budget proposals Bush made during his presidential campaign and his early days in the White House, it's hard to imagine how he could now be facing such dissension among fiscal conservatives. Back then, Bush envisioned a new era of budgetary restraint and shrinking government, akin to the ideals espoused by President Reagan.

During the 2000 campaign, Bush decried "Al Gore and Bill Clinton's attempt to dramatically increase spending during the last days of their administration." Bush said he was proposing "a responsible budget that's balanced," and he declared, "Big spending, as always, will slow the growth of our economy and return us to the days of debt.... My plan has spending discipline. [Gore's] just has spending. He's convinced the surplus is the government's money. I say the surplus is the people's money."

Bush planned to use half of the expected surplus to strengthen Social Security, and he proposed returning about a quarter of the surplus to taxpayers through tax cuts. He also campaigned on making "important investments in Medicare, education, the environment, and national defense."

Even then, however, some budget experts suggested that Bush's plans were unrealistic. After evaluating the budget proposals of both presidential candidates in 2000, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan watchdog group, warned that Bush's plan called "for much smaller discretionary spending increases than have prevailed since the government began running surpluses.... The discretionary spending restraint implied by the Bush plan could prove very difficult to achieve."

During the 2000 campaign, Bush also proposed a series of reforms to the congressional budget process. He suggested that the budget resolution -- currently a nonbinding document that doesn't require a presidential signature -- should be signed by the president. "A joint budget resolution signed by the legislative branch and the executive branch would start the process on the right footing, encouraging cooperation and early agreement on fundamentals," Bush said. He also proposed to convert the annual budget process to a two-year process, which he said would allow more time for careful spending decisions and for thorough oversight of federal programs.

In his first budget, proposed in February 2001, Bush projected a $5.6 trillion surplus over 10 years, and he proposed to retire nearly $1 trillion in debt in his first term. "The arrival of budget surpluses in 1998 has led to an explosion in federal government spending," he said. "History has shown that -- unlike tax cuts -- spending increases, once made, are rarely reversed. This pattern cannot long continue without jeopardizing our nation's long-term goals."

Bush's budget called for reforming the budget process and eliminating the tradition of midyear supplemental spending increases. And the president vowed to curb the congressional practice of "earmarking" funds for pet projects. "Washington is known for pork," Bush said in April 2001. "This budget funds our needs without the fat."

In the spring of 2001, Bush won the passage of a $1.35 trillion tax-cut package, the largest in 20 years. Congress began the appropriations process that summer, but before it completed all 13 spending bills, disaster struck. The terrorist attacks on September 11 drastically changed the way that Congress spends money. And at least for the short term, the Bush administration's desire to restore order to the budget and appropriations process was shelved. Suddenly, the term "homeland security" was on everyone's lips and at the top of Washington's urgent priority list.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the same administration that had promised to stop sending supplemental spending bills to Capitol Hill suddenly sought a $40 billion emergency supplemental, which Congress quickly passed. Many more supplemental spending bills have followed, to pay for anti-terrorism efforts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Eventually, the Homeland Security Department opened its doors and Congress established House and Senate Homeland Security Appropriations subcommittees.

Spending on homeland security has doubled during Bush's term. The Congressional Budget Office recently reported that homeland-security spending has increased from $20.7 billion in fiscal 2001 to about $41.4 billion in fiscal 2004. The CBO estimates that Bush's fiscal 2005 budget proposal would increase that figure to $47.3 billion.

Excuses, Excuses?

Administration officials point to defense and homeland-security requirements as the primary reasons for increased government spending during Bush's tenure. In unveiling the administration's fiscal 2005 budget request on February 2, OMB Director Joshua Bolten contended, "Since September 11, more than three-quarters of the increase in the federal government's discretionary spending has been directly related to our response to the attacks, enhanced homeland security, and the war on terror." Moreover, Bolten's deputy, Kaplan, noted in the interview with National Journal that increases in discretionary spending have slowed under Bush. During fiscal 2001, the last year of the Clinton administration, nondefense discretionary spending increased 15 percent. Such spending increased 6 percent in fiscal 2002, 5 percent in fiscal 2003, and 4 percent in fiscal 2004. Some fiscal conservatives and budget watchdogs charge that such spending increases are still too high, and some dispute the administration's numbers entirely. These critics concede that Bush could not have controlled the need for more defense and homeland-security funding. But they complain that the president also chose to pursue other initiatives that greatly expanded the deficit. These critics suggest that, confronted with the national emergency of 9/11 and with an economic recession, Bush should have trimmed back his agenda. Instead, the president pushed additional tax cuts, a sweeping education reform bill, and a costly new Medicare prescription drug benefit. He also signed an expensive rewrite of the farm bill and numerous routine appropriations bills packed with spending he did not request and with pork for individual lawmakers. "Economic circumstances changed," said Robert Reischauer, who was a CBO director during the Clinton administration and now heads the Urban Institute, a liberal-leaning think tank. "The president didn't come back and modify his policies. They've doggedly pursued the original game plan." Bush's allies point to the president's determination to keep his campaign promises. "There were promises made," said Richard E. May, a former Republican staff director of the House Budget Committee who is now a legislative consultant at Brownstein Hyatt & Farber, a Washington law firm. "They were promises made during a time of surplus," May added, and to keep those promises, "we had to spend the money, even if we didn't have it." Yet other usual Bush allies disagree that continuing to spend money was the right approach. "The president and Congress got used to spending after September 11," said Brian Riedl, a fellow in federal budgetary affairs at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. "They became used to surpluses. There was a culture of spending on Capitol Hill." The Heritage Foundation has disputed the administration's contention that most funding increases during Bush's tenure can be attributed to 9/11. In a report late last year, Heritage claimed that only 45 percent of the spending spike between 2001 and 2003 was related to the war on terrorism or to homeland security. Riedl insisted, however, that the Bush tax cuts have not contributed significantly to the deficit. "Even if the tax cuts had not taken place, we would still be in deficit," he contended. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank, presents a different argument. "The cost of the tax cuts enacted since the start of 2001 significantly exceeds the cost of all defense, anti-terrorism, and domestic discretionary and entitlement increases combined," the center concluded in a February report. An Uphill Battle

In each year of Bush's term, Congress ignored his budget request and spent more money than he had asked for. Yet critics say that the administration can't just blame Capitol Hill for out-of-control spending, because Bush has not vetoed a single bill. "A veto is the most powerful tool the president has," said Moore of the Club for Growth. For many conservatives, the president's decision to sign the farm bill in May 2002 was particularly galling, and they say it signaled that the federal store was open for business. "It was a mistake to let the farm bill spiral out of control," said Sen. John Sununu, R-N.H. "That set a bad precedent. He had an opportunity to send a message to Congress." But during Bush's term, Republicans have held, at best, only a bare majority in the Senate. A Bush veto would have incensed lawmakers -- particularly Senate appropriations leaders, who are notorious for pushing spending increases. And some observers suggest that it would have been hypocritical for Bush to veto spending bills while he was pushing his own spending and tax-cut initiatives. "It's very hard to [veto] when you're showing no restraint on your own priorities," Reischauer said. OMB's Kaplan said that Bush has not had to veto any legislation because he has worked with congressional Republican leaders to make bills acceptable. "When necessary, the president has threatened a veto," Kaplan said. "The close and productive relationship [with congressional leaders] made vetoing those bills unnecessary." Apart from failing to meet his overarching goal of controlling federal spending, Bush has had no success in fulfilling his promises to overhaul the budget process and to cut down on earmarks. At bottom, his administration never aggressively pursued either cause. Whether the White House would have followed up on such efforts absent 9/11 is an open question. Moreover, even if Bush had pushed budget-reform and anti-earmarking campaigns, it's far from certain that Capitol Hill would have complied. Presidents and members of Congress alike have championed such reforms many times in the past, only to be blocked by other lawmakers intent on maintaining the status quo -- and thus their own power. In 2001, OMB identified some $16 billion in earmarks in the spending bills passed the previous year and proposed to stop funding for $8 billion worth of them. Yet according to Citizens Against Government Waste, a conservative budget watchdog group, the amount spent on earmarked projects for specific congressional districts has increased by some $4.4 billion during Bush's term, rising from $18.5 billion in fiscal 2001 to $22.9 billion in fiscal 2004. "Every administration loses that battle," said Tom Schatz, the group's president. "I think they've essentially conceded that there's going to be a certain amount of pork." Earmarks are inevitable when the partisan margins in Congress are so tight, said Diana Evans, a professor at Trinity College in Connecticut and the author of the forthcoming book Greasing the Wheels: Using Pork-Barrel Projects to Build Majority Coalitions in Congress. Evans noted that congressional leaders hand out pork projects when members' votes are needed on vital legislation. "The close margins certainly do increase the incentive for leaders to put pork into the bills," she said. The blame for Bush's failure to persuade Congress to spend less, overhaul the budget process, or curb earmarks falls at least partly on the shoulders of his controversial first OMB director, the hard-charging, blunt-talking Mitch Daniels. Although Daniels had been a Senate and White House aide, he used little tact in pushing the administration's positions, and he made enemies among both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill. During Daniels's tenure as OMB director, which ended when he resigned in May 2003 to run for governor of Indiana, he was at times barely on speaking terms with the lawmakers he was supposed to be dealing with on a daily basis. In late 2001, Daniels provoked animosity on Capitol Hill by telling The Wall Street Journal that the motto of members of Congress is, " 'Don't just stand there. Spend something.' This is the only way they feel relevant." In response to Daniels's hostility, veteran Senate appropriator Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, angrily told reporters at the time that the OMB director should "go back home to Indiana." What Matters? As deficit estimates have soared and criticism has mounted, the Bush administration has sought anew this year to demonstrate the president's fiscal conservatism. First, Bush sent Capitol Hill a tight budget proposal for fiscal 2005. Then the president issued veto threats against both the House- and Senate-passed versions of the highway bill, which he said are too expensive. And more recently, the administration has signaled that deep cuts in domestic spending are in store if there is a second Bush term. In late May, The Washington Post obtained an OMB memo -- "Planning Guidance for the [Fiscal] 2006 Budget" -- that appeared to direct federal departments to find savings in their programs for the president's next budget. The memo directs agencies to work under funding levels outlined in an earlier memo, which called for cuts of 0.56 percent. In response to the Post story, administration officials emphasized that the "planning guidance" does not represent a final policy decision. The success of such belt-tightening efforts by the Bush administration remains to be seen, of course. It's also unclear whether Congress will actually hold the line on spending in an election year. Recent history certainly suggests otherwise. For some, the question is whether voters care about the deficit and government spending, anyway. Recent poll results present mixed views. Asked in an Associated Press/Ipsos poll in March whether they would prefer balancing the budget or cutting taxes, 61 percent of respondents chose balancing the budget, while 36 percent said cutting taxes. But asked in the same poll whether they'd prefer balancing the budget or spending more on education, health care, and economic development, 62 percent said they favored spending more and 36 percent said they wanted to balance the budget. Meanwhile, a CBS News/New York Times poll conducted the same month found that 50 percent of the respondents considered the budget deficit a "very serious" problem, and 36 percent considered it a "somewhat serious" problem. Another survey showed, however, that Americans aren't particularly worried about the deficit. In a May Gallup Poll that asked participants to identify the most important problem facing the country, the top answers were the Iraq war (26 percent), the economy (19 percent), and unemployment and jobs (16 percent). Way down the priority list, after issues like education, health care, and fuel prices, came the federal budget deficit and federal debt, which only 2 percent of respondents called their chief concern. Political analysts disagree about whether dismay among Bush's conservative base over federal spending and the deficit is likely to hurt the president in the November election. Some observers have suggested that fiscal conservatives might stay home from the polls. In a Jan. 24 National Journal cover story, several Republican operatives expressed concern about the political impact of conservative anger over fiscal issues. Asked to name the GOP's No. 1 legislative priority for the year, a senior Senate Republican staffer said that nothing was more important than to show "fiscal restraint for our base." And Paul Weyrich, chairman of the Free Congress Foundation, a conservative think tank, contended: "There's a great deal of unhappiness on the part of grassroots conservatives about the spending problem." Others suggest, though, that the GOP will be united and energized to vote against Sen. John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. The Club for Growth's Moore said in the recent interview that conservatives believe that Kerry is such a dangerous candidate that they are rallying behind Bush. "Conservatives are very supportive of Bush, even though spending is out of control," Moore said. The political peril posed by the deficit might be hard to gauge, but experts certainly paint a bleak picture of the deficit's long-term economic impact. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has argued that continued deficits would drastically harm the economy. He testified on Capitol Hill this year that the government could find itself in a position where "rapid increases in the unified budget deficit set in motion a dynamic in which large deficits result in ever-growing interest payments that augment deficits in future years." The inability to handle those interest payments would slow the growth of living standards, Greenspan said. The Fed chairman also warned that the retirement of the Baby Boomers will place a huge burden on the federal government, swelling the Social Security and Medicare rolls. "The one certainty is that the resolution of this situation will require difficult choices," he warned. "No changes will be easy, as they all will involve lowering claims on resources or raising financial obligations." If Bush is re-elected, he has vowed to tackle Social Security reform in his second term. That task, and the drive to reduce spending and rein in the deficit, will require the difficult choices that Greenspan discussed. The OMB memo directing future budget cuts implies that the president is headed in that direction. But Bush's harshest critics would say that if his first term is any indication, when it comes to making tough choices in a second term, he might just punt.

]]>

Following the money on Iraq, homeland security not easy

David Baumann — Thu, 06 May 2004 00:00:00 -0400

First, there's the dispute over Iraq. Immediately following Sept. 11, Congress granted the Bush administration a great deal of discretion on how to spend parts of a $40 billion supplemental spending bill for homeland security and to help the victims of the terrorist attacks.

Congress did require that the administration submit quarterly reports on how the money was being spent. Late last month, however, Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., and Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., wrote the Office of Management and Budget stating, that during 2002, "We were provided no consultations by the White House, as required by law, about the use of the $20 billion of funds that were made available to the president for allocation."

Byrd and Obey also said that, based on Bob Woodward's new book, Plan of Attack, the administration used $700 million to prepare military bases in the Persian Gulf for a war with Iraq, without consulting Congress. After the Woodward book was published, House Appropriations Committee Chairman Bill Young, R-Fla., said the book's claims were so general, it was difficult to respond to them.

Just this week, OMB finally delivered an explanatory letter to appropriators, along with a six- to eight-inch stack of supplemental notebooks, a Democratic House Appropriations Committee aide said. He added that the appropriations staff had not yet had time to sift through the material.

But the administration's belated response could still have implications, as the appropriations season drags on. The aide said he expects the lack of information to "at least be discussed" as Congress writes the fiscal 2005 defense and homeland security funding bills.

A Republican House Appropriations Committee aide went a bit further, predicting that the administration may not be given as much discretion on spending in future supplementals. "You kind of know what you're getting into when you give them flexibility," he said. The aide blamed former OMB Director Mitch Daniels for the lack of response. Daniels, however, resigned nearly a year ago, and this week received the GOP nomination for Indiana governor.

The problem goes beyond administration secrecy, however. A new report by the Congressional Budget Office makes it clear that tracking homeland security money is easier said than done. Funding for homeland security "is split among 200 different appropriation accounts in the federal budget and involves many different functional areas of the government," CBO said. "That accounting arrangement makes it difficult for budget analysts to distinguish and track homeland security spending."

In many agencies, money for homeland security is not separated from accounts with different missions. Complicating matters is the lack of clear definition as to what homeland security really is. "Despite its name," CBO said, "the Department of Homeland Security's activities are not strictly limited to that mission."

Take the Coast Guard, for instance. Homeland security is part of the Coast Guard's mission, so it was included in the new department. But the guard's mission also includes marine safety and navigation support.

Such issues, members of Congress and their aides say, creates problems for anyone trying to monitor the huge sums of money devoted to the war on terrorism and homeland safety since Sept. 11.

]]>

Gulf between authorizations and appropriations hurts programs

David Baumann — Tue, 13 Jan 2004 00:00:00 -0500

How can Congress give with one hand and take away with the other? As with much of what happens on Capitol Hill, one hand pays little attention to what the other is doing. The 1998 Higher Education Act amendments that reauthorized the Pell Grant program called for providing $5,800 to the neediest students for the 2003-2004 school year. But congressional appropriators set aside only $4,050.

The problem is at least partly systemic. Authorizing committees with expertise in their particular areas write legislation creating programs and calling for certain amounts of money to fund them. Oftentimes, these authorizing bills are approved with great fanfare by members of Congress and the president. The public and the media pay less attention to what happens later in the process, when the Appropriations committees decide how much money to actually spend on programs in the 13 annual spending bills. Appropriators have limited pots of money to divvy up. And much of the time, the money appropriated for a program is far less than the amount first promised.

In the process, key federal initiatives can be stymied. For instance, following the voting problems of the 2000 election, Congress passed the 2002 Help America Vote Act. The legislation promised to provide states $2.16 billion in fiscal 2003 to revamp outdated voting systems, but Congress appropriated only $1.5 billion. The shortfall generated bad publicity, followed by intensive lobbying by election-reform proponents. So, in the pending fiscal 2004 omnibus appropriations bill, Congress provided the full $1.5 billion that experts said was needed to catch up. But Doug Chapin, director of the nonprofit Election Reform Information Project, said the money will come too late to help significantly fix voting procedures for this year's election.

Congress creates an "expectation" when it passes a high-profile authorization bill, said G. William Hoagland, budget and appropriations aide to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn. "It has taken on new attention in this day of unfunded mandates," he said. "There are a lot of authorizations that are not funded."

Appropriators contend that authorizing committees promise unrealistic amounts of money, since they don't have to balance funding for their programs against the other priorities that the Appropriations Committees must confront. Authorizers "do a big dog and pony show, but when it comes to the top line, we have open warfare about what the top line will be," James Dyer, staff director of the House Appropriations Committee, told National Journal last year.

Congressional Democrats acknowledge a long-standing disconnect between authorizations and appropriations. But they contend that the gulf between what is promised when programs are created versus the actual funding levels is much wider in the all-GOP government than it was when Democrats ran the show.

"It's spectacularly broader," House Appropriations Committee ranking member David Obey, D-Wis., told National Journal last year. "It has a helluva lot more to do with who leads the House than it does with process." Obey and other Democrats contend that Republicans are prone to slash funding for key programs to keep within conservative budget constraints and to account for the revenue lost from the Bush tax cuts.

Republicans respond that nothing is new. For instance, Congress failed to fully fund the Pell Grants during the 1993-94 and 1994-95 school years, when Democrats were in charge. In addition, while Congress and President Ford enacted a 1975 law pledging to pay 40 percent of the cost of programs to educate disabled children each year, that goal has never been reached. In fiscal 2003, the federal government provided only 18 percent of all special-education funds.

This election year, Republicans are sure to tout passage of the 2002 No Child Left Behind education law, which called for reforms such as student testing and better teacher training. But Democrats complain that Republicans haven't lived up to the promised funding levels.

Democrats contend that the fiscal 2004 omnibus spending bill shortchanges the No Child Left Behind Act by some $7.5 billion. "Republican-passed legislation abandons those promised resources, and the impact on students and teachers is devastating," House Education and the Workforce Committee ranking member George Miller, D-Calif., said in a report last month.

Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee ranking member Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., went even further, telling The Washington Post last month that Bush "clearly" lied to Democrats who supported the bill. "The president had indicated not only to me, but to [other Democrats], that we would have not only reform, but the funds to implement it," Kennedy told the newspaper.

But Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Education Committee, disputed the Democrats' claim. "There was never any discussion about fully funding to the authorized levels," Boehner said on the House floor in December. "The commitment was to adequately fund our efforts to renew American schools."

]]>

Reliance on continuing resolutions hinders budget planning process

David Baumann — Fri, 09 Jan 2004 00:00:00 -0500

Since then, nobody on Capitol Hill has called for allowing the government to shut down again. But that doesn't mean that lawmakers always finish the 13 annual appropriations bills by October 1, the start of the new fiscal year. Instead, Congress routinely passes continuing resolutions placing the unfunded parts of the government on autopilot, by supplying appropriations at the previous year's level.

In fiscal 2001, lawmakers approved 21 consecutive CRs until they finally finished their work in mid-December. And in the past two years, Congress didn't even finish in time for the holidays. The fiscal 2003 appropriations bills weren't completed until last February, while the fiscal 2004 appropriations bills still aren't done; the Senate will take up the House-passed omnibus bill upon reconvening on January 20.

In an interview, House Appropriations Committee Chairman Bill Young, R-Fla., said that rather than being routine, CRs should be a "last-ditch effort." He added that these stopgap measures are "not what the Constitution intended, and that's not the way the process is supposed to work."

Both Democratic- and Republican-controlled Congresses have had difficulty finishing the appropriations bills on time. Over the past three decades, going back to fiscal 1972, Congress has completed all of the appropriations bills by the start of the fiscal year only four times: fiscal 1977, 1989, 1995, and 1997, according to Vital Statistics on Congress, 2001-2002.

Government-by-CR has serious real-life consequences. In December, Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, said that "continuing to operate under a continuing resolution until late January will place an unnecessary burden on many Americans who receive benefits through programs funded in the omnibus bill." For instance, the omnibus calls for federal civilian employees to receive a 4.1 percent salary increase effective January 1. Those raises will be cut in half until the omnibus package is signed into law.

In addition, Stevens said that because the spending bills are not completed, the Veterans Affairs Department would have to curtail hiring new physicians, while programs funded through the Corporation for National and Community Service would have to delay enrolling new participants. Various other programs face similar problems, Stevens said.

Funding the government through a series of CRs "makes everything more difficult," said Alice Rivlin, director and senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution. From 1975 to 1983, Rivlin served as the founding director of the Congressional Budget Office, and she headed the Office of Management and Budget during the Clinton administration.

Rivlin said that if federal departments and agencies do not know their final budget for the current year, they have difficulty planning a budget for the next fiscal year. And since the president's budget is sent to Capitol Hill in early February, agencies begin preparing their budgets in the middle of the previous year. The problem is "mainly the uncertainty," Rivlin said.

Likewise, a senior Senate Democratic aide added: "It's difficult to prepare for the next budget year. You're giving [added] power to past decisions."

]]>

Delays in spending bills hamper agency planning

David Baumann — Thu, 06 Nov 2003 00:00:00 -0500

One sad reality of Washington is that CRs have become as routine as naming post offices after dead congressmen. But despite the routine way CRs are handled on Capitol Hill, they have a profound impact on the ability of federal departments and agencies to operate.

Since fiscal 1978, in only three years-fiscal 1989, 1995, and 1997-has Congress completed all of the appropriations bills on time and avoided resorting to a CR, according to data compiled by the Senate majority leader's office. The worst performance came in fiscal 1996, when then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., led congressional Republicans in a game of budgetary chicken with President Clinton, resulting in a 26-day government shutdown. Ultimately, 14 CRs were needed before the spending bills were finally finished in April, nearly seven months into the fiscal year.

Since the Gingrich era, lawmakers don't seem to have the stomach for such showdowns. "I think everybody's learned their lesson that nobody wins" when the government closes, said G. William Hoagland, the chief budget and appropriations aide to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and the former staff director of the Senate Budget Committee. "CRs have become a way of life around here," Hoagland added. As long as the Senate is closely divided, he said, "it's fair to say we have moved to a world of CRs for the foreseeable future."

What often gets lost in the shuffle as Congress scrambles each fall to finish the appropriations bills and adjourn is that the "world of CRs" isn't so great for the government. During last fall's spending battle shortly before the 2002 elections, House Appropriations Committee Chairman Bill Young, R-Fla., predicted serious consequences if the government had to run on a CR through February or March of this year-which was ultimately what happened.

"A long-term continuing resolution that funds government operations at [previous-year] levels would have disastrous impacts on the war on terror, homeland security, and other important government responsibilities," Young warned in his memo. "It also would be fiscally irresponsible. It would fund low-priority programs the president has proposed to eliminate."

Before President Bush finally signed an omnibus appropriations package completing the fiscal 2003 bills in February, "we came pretty damn close" to layoffs at federal law enforcement agencies because of funding shortfalls, said John Scofield, a spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee.

CRs also wreak havoc on federal departments' drafting of their budgets each fall and winter, in preparation for the release of the president's budget request in February. When operating in the limbo of a CR, in which departmental budgets are unresolved, "how do you know what your full-year funding will be?" asked Jack Lew, who was the director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Clinton administration and now is executive vice president of New York University. "On the program side, you can't look down the road," Lew added. He said that, in such cases, departments and agencies often decide not to fill vacancies.

During the government shutdown of the winter of 1995-96, administration officials developed only a "nominal budget" for the next fiscal year, since the funding for so many key domestic programs was up in the air, Lew said. "Unless you assume static government, it's very difficult to build a budget," he said. "In our years, the issues that were open were the things we cared the most about-the entire domestic agenda."

Absent congressional approval of the annual spending bills, federal departments have no "baseline" for building their budget request for the next year, said an agency budget officer who served in the Clinton administration. "The baseline will depend on what happens this year," she said. "It's hypothetical." Typically, agencies are "pretty far along" in developing their plans by early fall and will already have submitted their budget requests to OMB, she said.

In addition, when Congress completes its work late, any new initiatives that were included in the final funding package may receive short shrift in the next year's budget, the budget officer said. "In the national dialogue, [any such initiative] loses its focus," she said. "You can lose a lot of momentum."

Despite the difficulties that delays create for federal departments and agencies, Congress cannot seem to find a way to pass the regular appropriations bills on time. Democrats are taking a hard line on the problem, even though during the years that they controlled Congress, CRs were just as common. The repeated use of CRs is an "indication of the complete failure of the legislative process," said Rep. Charles Stenholm, D-Texas, a leader of the Blue Dog Coalition of moderate House Democrats. "It's a failure. You can't sugarcoat it."

But some conservatives see no real harm in CRs. "There's a strong disposition to getting the work done," said an aide to the conservative House Republican Study Committee. Plus, since CRs are generally written to keep the government operating at the previous year's funding levels until the appropriations process is completed, a CR "may be better than agreeing to break the budget," the aide added.

House Appropriations Committee ranking member David Obey, D-Wis., blames Republican leaders for the delays, particularly since the GOP now controls the White House and both chambers of Congress. "It ought to be somewhat easier to get the work done on time," Obey said on the House floor recently. "What we have today is the majority party fighting with itself." He complained that Republicans knew that the strict spending caps they included in the fiscal 2004 budget resolution this spring would make it impossible to write the appropriations bills. "When the first step in the process is a false one, then everything else is screwed up," Obey asserted.

Republicans, needless to say, cite other reasons for the delays. Congress should "start the [appropriations] process as soon as possible," said Sen. John Sununu, R-N.H., who contended that appropriators frequently do not use June or July effectively.

In addition, the $87 billion supplemental funding request that Bush submitted in September for the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan is taking up a great deal of Congress's time, making it more difficult to pass the regular appropriations bills, Hoagland said.

Speaking more generally, Hoagland said that it's the controversial "nonfiscal issues, in combination with the close Senate, that are keeping us from getting the bills done." For instance, he noted that the issue of school vouchers has delayed the District of Columbia appropriations bill and that differences on overtime regulations have held up the Labor-Health and Human Services-Education funding measure. The appropriations process "is doing what the authorizing folks can't get done," Hoagland said.

To make matters more dysfunctional, delays in the process often result in Congress's bundling numerous appropriations bills into one large omnibus spending package. Since fiscal 1977, Congress has passed 16 such omnibus bills, according to the Senate majority leader's office.

Sometimes more than a foot high, omnibus spending bills are vehicles for all sorts of late-night, end-of-session mischief. They are usually passed very quickly in the rush to adjournment, without many lawmakers' actually knowing what's in the package. And because so many spending measures are included in omnibus bills, members find it difficult to vote against them-and such bills make it difficult to criticize members for having voted for any particular provision.

"You never know until it's passed who slipped what into it that's embarrassing to the institution," Stenholm said. And Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a frequent critic of the appropriations process, noted that in any omnibus bill, "there will be many billions of dollars of pork-barrel projects."

Repairing the process is easier said than done. Most observers acknowledge it would take comprehensive budget process reform to solve the problem. But such efforts have languished on Capitol Hill for years, because any changes would ultimately diminish some lawmakers' power.

And so members of Congress are likely to continue to muddle through-passing CRs to keep the government open and then holding their noses while voting for huge spending packages. And members will continue to complain. "It's a terrible process," McCain said. And Stenholm asked, "How can anyone, with a straight face, claim this is good government?"

]]>

Rhetoric often at odds with reality of appropriations process

David Baumann — Mon, 04 Aug 2003 00:00:00 -0400

In his State of the Union address on January 28, President Bush asked Congress for $15 billion over five years to help fight AIDS in Africa. He called the plan "a work of mercy beyond all current international efforts." Bush's request stunned much of Washington, and earned him praise from AIDS activists and the editorial boards of major newspapers.

"Anyone who had forgotten the president's 'compassionate conservative' agenda was reminded last night of his ability to create bold and surprising initiatives that breach the gulf between left and right," declared a New York Times editorial. "There were some of those ideas in his agenda, particularly the most welcome proposal to [fight] AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean." And The Washington Post editorialized: "The most striking new proposal was Mr. Bush's welcome pledge to do more to combat the AIDS epidemic.... Congress should quickly embrace this plan."

Congress indeed moved swiftly to craft legislation authorizing $3 billion a year over five years for the AIDS effort. In fact, as the House passed the bill on May 21, International Relations Committee Chairman Henry Hyde, R-Ill., commented, "Rarely does Congress act with decisiveness for the benefit of so many suffering in the developing world."

Bush praised Congress when he signed the bill at a May 27 ceremony. He had urged lawmakers to finish the legislation before he left for the Group of Eight summit in early June, so he could "take it to Europe with me as a symbol of the great depth of compassion that our country holds for those who suffer." During the president's high-profile tour of Africa in July, he repeatedly touted the $15 billion AIDS relief program.

But it turns out that Hyde was right. Congress rarely acts with such decisiveness. Despite all the talk, Congress and the president won't likely live up to their commitment on AIDS. Appropriations bills moving through the House and Senate target only $2 billion-not the $3 billion promised-for the new AIDS program in fiscal 2004. And to provide cover for congressional Republicans, Joseph O'Neill, the director of the White House Office of AIDS Policy, has sent appropriators a letter stating that $2 billion is sufficient.

Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., the chairman of the Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee, which handles the relevant spending bill, said he is in a tight spot. "The president and his advisers didn't help when he went to Africa and talked about $3 billion," Kolbe told National Journal. "It made it difficult for me to explain." Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the chairman of the Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee in his chamber, agreed: "There is some confusion over this."

Once again, as is so often the case in Washington, rhetoric didn't match reality. The system is set up that way. In the first part of the legislative process, authorizing committees with special expertise in their particular areas write legislation creating programs and calling for certain amounts of money to fund them. Oftentimes, these authorizing bills are approved with great fanfare from members of Congress, followed by grand bill-signing ceremonies at the White House or at staged locales around the country. Reporters write stories about the bills, such as the AIDS legislation, and then frequently forget about them.

Later in the process, however, the Appropriations committees decide how much money should actually be spent on federal programs, when they write the 13 annual spending bills. Appropriators are forced to make tough decisions, because they have limited pots of money to work with and face intense pressure from members and outside interests to fund their favored initiatives.

Few reporters, and even fewer members of the public, follow the arcane appropriations process, which typically doesn't wrap up until the final frenzied days of a congressional session. And even when outsiders do try to follow what is going on, it can be difficult to plumb the massive funding bills, which are sometimes more than a foot tall. It can take a lawmaker days to find out how much money his pet program received.

Much of the time, though, the money appropriated for a program is far less than the amount that was touted at the Capitol Hill press conference or Rose Garden ceremony months before. In fact, James Dyer, the Republican staff director of the House Appropriations Committee, flatly acknowledged: "Appropriators traditionally have resisted the concept of fully funding anything." On the Hill, it's an accepted part of the system.

Robert Livingston, the former Republican chairman of the House Appropriations Committee who was slated to become speaker before he resigned in December 1998, explained that appropriations bills are not designed to meet the funding levels specified in authorization bills. Authorizing committees can pass their bills without any consideration of budget constraints, he said, while appropriators do not have that luxury. "Authorizers look at policy; authorizers spell out what policy is desirable," Livingston said. "Appropriators look at numbers."

The media is part of the problem, asserted former Rep. John Porter, R-Ill., who as chairman of the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Subcommittee from 1995 through 2000 faced difficult funding decisions every year. "The national media cover the president's budget," Porter said, and act as if money is actually being spent when Congress authorizes new programs. "The average American doesn't know the difference" between authorizing and appropriating, he said.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who was Education secretary under the first President Bush, has seen both ends of the legislative process. "This is a county of big dreams," he said. Reality sets in only when appropriations levels must be established, because "the appropriators have to operate under budgets." Alexander noted that while he was Education secretary, he took heat from lawmakers for sometimes requesting less money for education programs than Congress had authorized. "The departments have to operate under budgets" too, he said, while "the authorizing committees don't."

Dyer agreed, explaining that the annual congressional budget resolution sets a ceiling on spending that makes it impossible for appropriators to meet all of the commitments made by authorizers. "They do a big dog-and-pony show, but when it comes to the top line, we have open warfare about what the top line will be," he said. If you try to explain the way things work to most people, their eyes glaze over, Dyer said. Sitting in his Capitol office, he concluded, "The only people who understand that are within three square blocks of this building."

Even one House authorizing committee chairman conceded that he can authorize programs without seriously considering the bottom line. "It's easier for us who are authorizers," said Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y., chairman of the Science Committee. He acknowledged that chairmen like him give appropriators "an impossible task. Authorizers have to be realistic and work with appropriators," he said. "When we deal with authorizing legislation, we're dealing in isolation. The appropriators don't have the luxury of dealing in isolation."

Likewise, Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, the chairman of the Education and the Workforce Committee, admitted: "This dual process we have here is unfair, and it leads to bad behavior."

The problem may be systemic, but congressional Democrats contend that it has worsened recently under Republican control of the White House and Capitol Hill. Democrats complain that the gulf between the rhetoric thrown around when programs are created versus the actual funding levels is much wider than when they ran the show. "It's spectacularly broader," said Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., the Appropriations Committee ranking member. "It has a helluva lot more to do with who leads the House than it does with process."

Obey and other Democrats acknowledge the long-standing disconnect between authorizations and appropriations. Nevertheless, they contend that Republicans are more prone to puff up their accomplishments during the authorizing stage and then later slash funding for key programs to keep within conservative budget constraints and to account for the revenue lost from the Bush tax cuts.

Republicans respond that nothing is new. They argue that they are being blamed for underfunding authorized programs, when Democrats regularly did the same thing while they were in power.

"The Democrats have not lived up to their own rhetoric," House Appropriations Committee Republicans said in a recent statement. They contended that Democrats failed to meet promises on education in 1994, when President Clinton and the Democratic-controlled Congress reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Although the authorization bill called for $7.5 billion in federal grants to the states for the Title I program, which compensates schools for needy students, Congress ultimately appropriated only $6.6 billion.

AIDS Program in Need of an Infusion?

The fact that things were not so different during the Clinton era hasn't stopped Democrats from protesting vigorously over the level of AIDS funding. The new AIDS authorization law specifies spending of $3 billion a year for five years. But Bush's fiscal 2004 budget request sought only $1.7 billion for the AIDS initiative, $2 billion if related malaria and tuberculosis programs are included.

When Kolbe's subcommittee marked up its fiscal 2004 Foreign Operations appropriations bill in the House on July 10, ranking member Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., offered an amendment to restore the AIDS funding to $3 billion, but the panel defeated her proposal. "The Republicans have certainly talked the talk on AIDS," Lowey said in a statement. "Today, they showed that they simply are unwilling to walk the walk. In Africa, the president, the secretary of State, and the national security adviser left the distinct impression that $3 billion would be provided to fight AIDS in [fiscal] 2004. The reality, of course, is that the president requested only $2 billion and the Republicans in Congress are not willing to buck their leader in the name of saving lives."

Kolbe pointed to the letter from O'Neill, the White House's AIDS policy director, that requested only $2 billion this year but committed the administration to the full $15 billion over five years. "These efforts need to be coordinated, deliberate, and should scale up in stages to efficiently and effectively create the necessary training, technology, and infrastructure base to ensure the long-term success of this initiative," O'Neill said in his letter.

Kolbe said no one should be surprised that Congress is appropriating only $2 billion for the AIDS program in the first year. "Tell me, how many authorizations match appropriations?" he asked. "You just don't appropriate all of the money. It shouldn't have been a big deal. But it was made a big deal for political reasons."

When the full House considered the Foreign Operations spending bill on July 23, Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, D-Mich., offered an amendment to boost the AIDS funding by $300 million, but the effort was defeated. The lower spending level is apparently fine with the Bush administration: In its "statement of administration policy," the Office of Management and Budget declared, "The administration is pleased with the [Appropriations] Committee's strong support of the president's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief."

Asked about the AIDS program at his July 30 news conference, Bush emphasized that he wants to provide a total of $15 billion, but said he did not commit to providing $3 billion in the first year. "We sent up something less than $3 billion because we didn't think the program could ramp up fast enough to absorb that amount of money early," the president said. He added that OMB has come up with a plan to increase the funding as it can be used: "It ramps up more in the out years as the program is capable of absorbing a lot of money."

During the Senate Appropriations Committee markup of the Foreign Operations spending bill on July 17, subcommittee ranking member Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., made clear that he will offer an amendment to boost the AIDS funding from $2 billion to $3 billion when the legislation reaches the floor. But, despite the strong support of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., for the new AIDS law, the Senate is likely to defeat such an amendment.

McConnell argued that $2 billion is all the administration needs this year for the AIDS program. "The goal here is to get to $15 billion over five years," he said. "If we can only use $2 billion in the first year, that is full funding."

The AIDS initiative is just one example of the mismatch between rhetoric and reality in Washington. Some other recent cases follow.

Inflated Grades on Education?

Not long after Bush signed the No Child Left Behind education bill, keeping a pledge that had been a centerpiece of his 2000 presidential campaign, critics began to charge that he and congressional Republicans were shortchanging the initiative. Not surprisingly, most politicians claim to be good guys when it comes to funding the nation's schools, and sorting out the truth can get dicey.

To be sure, the rhetoric was lofty when Bush went to an Ohio high school on January 8, 2002, to sign the bill, which increased funding for education while at the same time requiring states to develop accountability plans and make other major reforms.

"Today begins a new era, a new time in public education in our country," the president said. "As of this hour, America's schools will be on a new path of reform, and a new path of results." And he went on to promise more money. "So in return for federal dollars, we are asking states to design accountability systems to show parents and teachers whether or not children can read and write and subtract in grades three through eight."

Members of Congress were no less effusive in their praise of the bipartisan legislation, with Democrats and Republicans joining hands in support. "Never before in the history of Congress has there been a bill that will do so much to strengthen our nation's schools and help our children excel in their classes," said House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., a former high school teacher.

Calculating exactly how much money the No Child Left Behind Act authorized-and how much subsequently was appropriated- is difficult, Republicans argue, since the bill had no total authorization level, but instead included funding proposals for numerous individual programs. Nonetheless, the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union, estimated that for fiscal 2003, the No Child Left Behind Act authorized programs totaling $29.26 billion, while the Bush administration proposed $22.10 billion, and Congress ultimately appropriated $23.83 billion.

As Congress works on the next round of appropriations bills, Democrats complain the Republicans are underfunding education once again. House Democrats have produced a report contending that the fiscal 2004 Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill approved by their chamber on July 10 falls some $8 billion short of the education funding that they say was pledged in the No Child Left Behind Act.

Here is a look at how three key programs authorized in the act are faring as Congress works on its fiscal 2004 Labor-HHS appropriations legislation.

For needy students, the House-passed spending bill and the version approved by the Senate Appropriations Committee on June 26 both proposed a $666 million increase, to $12.35 billion, the amount that Bush had requested. By comparison, the No Child Left Behind law had authorized far higher spending for the program- $18.5 billion-in fiscal 2004.

In programs for improving teacher quality, Bush requested $2.8 billion for fiscal 2004, and the House and the Senate committee obliged. No Child Left Behind authorized more-$2.9 billion-for fiscal 2003, and for the years beyond that, instructed Congress to "spend such sums as necessary."

For reading programs, Bush requested $1.5 billion in fiscal 2004, which the House approved, while the Senate committee called for $1 billion. No Child Left Behind had authorized $900 million for fiscal 2003, but appropriators actually went above that level, to $993.5 million. The act did not specify a funding level for fiscal 2004 and beyond.

Democrats in both chambers are incensed, because they claim that in order to win their votes for the No Child Left Behind Act, the White House vowed to seek even more education money than was written into the statute.

Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., the ranking member on the Education and the Workforce Committee, is now one of Bush's harshest critics on education, even though Miller worked closely with Republicans on the No Child Left Behind legislation during 2001, earning the nickname of "Big George" from the president. Miller contends that the White House sold the legislation by promising additional education funding. "The president said, 'You give us the reforms and we'll give you the resources,' " Miller said in an interview.

Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, the ranking member on the Senate Labor-HHS Appropriations Subcommittee, agreed, saying: "It's frustrating for me, because I voted for No Child Left Behind based on the White House's promise that they would push for funding for the program."

Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, also said that Bush linked votes for the authorization bill to increased funding for education. "It was one of the commitments," Snowe said. "It leaves us open to the charge of unfunded mandates."

Boehner, the House Education chairman, denied that Bush and other Republicans made direct promises of additional education funding during negotiations on the authorization law. "I don't think anybody had any expectation that we would meet those numbers," Boehner said in an interview. "The commitment on the part of the president and the Republicans was to provide the money to make this work. And that's what we did." Boehner added, "Anyone who argues that we're not doing enough education funding either hasn't looked at the numbers or is trying to develop a political issue."

Nevertheless, the NEA is preparing to file suit, claiming that Congress and the president are failing to live up to their promises to provide all of the funds needed to implement the No Child Left Behind Act. "NEA is working to get clarity on the huge disconnect between the reality of law and the rhetoric used in promoting it," NEA President Reg Weaver said in early July, as the union prepared for its annual meeting.

Strong disagreements about overall education funding persist, but no one can deny that the federal government has failed to meet its commitments on funding special education for disabled children. Back in 1975, Congress and President Ford signed off on a law pledging to pay 40 percent of the cost of programs to educate disabled children. That goal has never been reached. In fiscal 2003, the federal government provided only 18 percent of all special-education funds.

"Congress has to live with the fact that a program is unfunded," said Sen. James Jeffords, I-Vt., who as a House member sat on the 1975 conference committee that wrote the special-education bill. In fact, Republican reluctance to fund special education at a level acceptable to Jeffords drove him out of the party in 2001-temporarily giving Democrats the majority in the Senate.

Stuffing the Ballot on Election Reform?

After the 2000 presidential election exposed serious weaknesses in the nation's vote-counting systems, Congress responded by passing legislation to reform the election process. The Help America Vote Act authorized $3.86 billion from fiscal 2003 through fiscal 2006 to help state and local governments upgrade their voting systems and meet certain federal standards.

"The administration of elections is primarily a state and local responsibility," Bush said at an October 29, 2002, signing ceremony, surrounded by members of Congress who pushed the legislation. "The fairness of all elections, however, is a national priority. And through these reforms, the federal government will help state and local officials to conduct elections that have the confidence of all Americans."

Because the bill was not enacted until the fall of 2002, Bush had not included funding for it in the fiscal 2003 budget that he released in early 2002. Congress, however, came up short in meeting its commitment to election reform in the very first year of the program: The Help America Vote Act authorized $2.16 billion in fiscal 2003, but Congress appropriated only $1.5 billion.

For fiscal 2004, the election-reform act authorized $1.05 billion, with $1 billion targeted to training poll workers, providing voter education, and generally improving the federal election system. But Bush requested only $500 million-half of what was authorized-for election-reform efforts in fiscal 2004. The House Appropriations Committee set aside $500 million in the fiscal 2004 Transportation-Treasury funding measure it approved on July 24; the Senate has not yet written its spending bill.

Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., an appropriator and one of the key sponsors of the Help America Vote Act, said that states really need $1.5 billion in fiscal 2004. "Most of the states have to have the money," he said. "It means that we need the money now, or it's going to be another unfunded mandate."

On the other hand, Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, another of the law's key sponsors, is more upbeat. He said appropriators might produce as much as $1 billion. "So far, the direction is going well," he said.

But Doug Chapin, director of the Election Reform Project, a nonprofit group funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts through the University of Richmond, said that states and localities have little chance of getting all the money that Washington promised.

"The question is whether they will appropriate everything that is authorized," he said. "That's unlikely." Asked about the impact on state and local election officials who have to meet certain mandates, Chapin said, "If the federal government doesn't come through with the money, they have problems."

Code Red for First Responders?

In the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Democrats have repeatedly complained that Bush and congressional Republicans are failing to fully fund homeland-security initiatives. Federal aid for "first-responder" emergency workers, such as state and local police, fire, and hospital officials, is a particular point of contention.

For fiscal 2004, Bush requested $3.5 billion in funding for first responders. The Homeland Security appropriations bills approved by the House on June 24 and the Senate on July 24 met that request. Administration officials and GOP lawmakers boast that the funds will prepare communities to respond to emergencies more effectively.

"The First Responder Initiative will help ... brave Americans do their jobs better," the Homeland Security Department stated in a summary of the program. "Building on existing capabilities at the federal, state, and local level, the First Responder Initiative provides an incentive to develop mutually supportive programs that maximize effective response capability."

But the issue of funding for first responders highlights another way that the rhetoric in Washington doesn't match the reality. In this case, some experts contend, the White House and congressional Republicans are far off the mark of what first responders really need. An independent commission recently reported that pending federal funding levels are totally inadequate.

"If the nation does not take immediate steps to better identify and address urgent unmet needs of emergency responders, the next terrorist incident could have an even more devastating impact than the September 11 attacks," according to a report from the Independent Task Force on Emergency Responders, sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations.

The commission estimated that the federal government would spend some $27 billion over five years on first responders. But it cited $98.4 billion in unmet emergency-responder needs throughout the nation over that period.

"Covering this funding shortfall using federal funds alone would require a fivefold increase ... to an annual federal expenditure of $25.1 billion," the report concluded. The $3.5 billion pending in Congress is nowhere near that figure.

Insufficient Support for AmeriCorps?

AmeriCorps, a hallmark of the Clinton administration, provides college funds to young people who perform public service work. House Republicans have persistently tried to eliminate the program, but the Senate has always managed to save it. In fact, much to the chagrin of many House Republicans, Bush embraced AmeriCorps, especially in the wake of 9/11, and even pushed reform legislation when the program discovered that it had enrolled more than 20,000 people it could not afford.

"The president believes in AmeriCorps," then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said at a June 26 press briefing. "The president thinks AmeriCorps is doing good work across America, helping communities, and providing valuable outlets for people to make contributions and to work hard for different communities across the country."

Bush's fiscal 2004 budget requested sufficient funds to raise the number of AmeriCorps volunteers to 75,000. But the budget increase does not solve the program's immediate problem, which is how to make up for funds lost to mismanagement.

On June 26, a wide variety of corporate leaders purchased a full-page ad in The New York Times calling for an immediate $200 million supplemental appropriation for AmeriCorps. "Last week, because of a series of bureaucratic missteps, hundreds of highly effective AmeriCorps programs were eliminated or drastically reduced," the ad said.

As a fiscal 2003 supplemental appropriations bill worked its way through Congress in recent days, however, neither the White House nor Capitol Hill seemed likely to come through with the level of funding that AmeriCorps supporters say is urgently needed. The White House said it wants a supplemental bill that focuses on disaster relief and aid for fighting forest fires, and that is "clean" of any add-ons. An OMB spokesman declined to comment when asked about the White House's position on any new money for AmeriCorps.

Shortly before the House departed on July 25 for its August recess, it approved a supplemental bill that included no emergency money for AmeriCorps. In the Senate, the Appropriations Committee included $100 million for AmeriCorps in its supplemental, which at press time was awaiting a vote on the floor.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., the ranking member on the Veterans Affairs-Housing and Urban Development Appropriations Subcommittee, which funds AmeriCorps, said the president seemed to be talking out of both sides of his mouth. "I'm extremely frustrated," Mikulski said. "The president called for increased national service and more civic involvement. We've got to match resources with rhetoric."

Clearly, the real success of a federal program is not its creation, but whether it receives the money it needs. As Hoyer said about the election-reform bill, "When we passed this bill, I said this is a good bill, but the real test is whether we're going to fund this bill."

But the system is unlikely to change anytime soon. Authorizers love their power to create programs, while appropriators relish their power to decide how much money those programs should receive. As House Appropriations staff director James Dyer put it, "It's an old and painful tale."

]]>

Cash Clash

David Baumann — Tue, 01 Jul 2003 00:00:00 -0400

The Bush administration is pushing hard for flexibility in spending appropriated funds. Congress is pushing back.

any members of Congress carry around copies of the Constitution just in case they need to quote from it. In fact, some special interest groups have produced handy pocket copies for members that make it even more convenient to find the Constitution when they need it.

Members of the House and Senate Appropriations committees have a favorite section-the one that makes them among the most powerful folks in Washington. Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7 reads: "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time."

While the language may seem straightforward, that section of the Constitution has provoked a long and bitter fight between the Bush administration and key members of Congress. Appropriators claim the administration is demanding more flexibility in deciding how to spend money than the Constitution allows and is providing less information than Congress needs to make spending decisions. The administration responds that it is simply trying to streamline the spending process and better respond to emergencies. The fight has dragged on for two years, shows no signs of ending and carries huge stakes for both branches of government.

The bitterness occasionally has spilled over in public. Consider this March 14, 2002, exchange between Wisconsin's David Obey, ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee and Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels.

"This is a little book," Obey said, waving around his copy of the Constitution. "It's not very impressive when you look at it, but it happens to run the show. . . . Can you tell me where in the Constitution does it state that the Congress is a branch of government which is inferior to the executive?" Daniels, of course, replied that Congress is not an inferior branch. But Obey was not satisfied. "Now this Congress has an obligation," he told Daniels. "No information, no money."

Daniels attempted to justify the flexibility in using appropriated funds the administration was requesting, saying it is unfortunate when "one of our departments cannot close a regional office or reassign even a handful of people without some sort of firestorm or legislative authority." He attempted to reassure appropriators, saying, "We don't seek unlimited license." But the lawmakers seemed extremely dubious. And the battle continued.

Fights between the two branches over federal spending are hardly new. "All administrations want more flexibility than Congress-and particularly the appropriators-want to give," says Robert Reischauer, president of the Urban League and former director of the Congressional Budget Office. But the Bush administration has taken the demand to new heights, congressional aides charge. "They request more flexibility in anythree-month time period than any administration has requested in its full term in office," says Scott Lilly, Democratic staff director of the House Appropriations Committee. "It's simply breathtaking."

But Sen. John Sununu, R-N.H., an administration ally and a former member of the House Budget Committee, has a different perspective. "It's the age-old tug of war," he says. "You can find examples in every congressional session. It's nothing new. Perhaps what's new is that the administration is pushing back and not backing down." And, he added, "There is nothing unconstitutional in giving some discretion to the administration."

Administration officials argue that they are simply attempting to build on successful experiments at all levels of government in allowing agencies flexibility in spending federal funds. "It's just an approach that has worked," says OMB spokesman Trent Duffy.

NO 'SLUSH FUNDS'

The anger over the flexibility issue is particularly intense in the Bush administration because of the strained relationship between the Office of Management and Budget and congressional appropriators. Daniels was bluntly critical of the congressional spenders during his tenure, once going so far as to say that appropriators do not believe they have a purpose unless they are spending money.

This latest dispute has played out over two years. In its fiscal 2003 budget, the administration requested that appropriations for the Executive Office of the President be lumped into one fund and the administration be given wide latitude in deciding how the money should be spent. OMB argued that within the Executive Office of the President, there are 20 accounts for 11 offices. "The president cannot move even $100 between the Council of Economic Advisors and the Council on Environmental Quality," the administration said in its budget request. The ability to do so would enable the White House to "eliminate redundant staff and improve managerial efficiency," the budget request said.

Congress, however, refused to authorize a shared account. The administration repeated its request for flexibility in its fiscal 2004 budget, and also requested authority to transfer up to 10 percent of the funds in several other accounts. "This initiative provides enhanced flexibility in allocating resources and staff in support of the president and vice president, and permits more rapid response to changing national needs and priorities," the administration argued.

The administration also asked for authority for the Homeland Security Department to transfer up to 5 percent of its money without congressional approval. Congress has given Homeland Security limited authority to transfer funds from agencies that existed before it was created to organizations formed when the department was launched.

Then there was the recently passed fiscal 2003 supplemental spending bill for the war in Iraq and homeland security. Even before the supplemental was released, Congress and the administration clashed because the Pentagon did not send Congress an estimate of how much the war would cost. Such an estimate couldn't be made until the Pentagon figured out when and how to strike, Bush administration officials said. "The people have a right to know," Senate Appropriations Committee ranking Democrat Robert Byrd of West Virginia replied on the Senate floor on Feb. 26-a full month before the administration sent the supplemental request to Congress. "They are going to suffer the costs. Congress must not accept the answer 'not knowable.' The American people, I say, deserve to know."

On the evening the supplemental finally was released, a senior Defense Department official told reporters that the administration wanted 96 percent of the defense funds to go into an emergency response fund that the administration would control. "The reason you do that is that it gives you the ability to transfer funds from one account to another," the Pentagon official told reporters. "If you lock them into particular accounts, you may be overfunding one account, underfunding another account, and then you can't move the monies around."

On April 7, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put it this way: "Whatever is put forward by the Congress by way of money will be expended in a way that the president decides [it] should be expended."

The administration also asked for flexibility in managing homeland security funds, arguing it would be impossible to determine in advance where emergencies might occur.

It immediately became clear that the White House would gain little flexibility. "We have an obligation to the Constitution," House Appropriations Chairman C.W. "Bill" Young, R-Fla., said during his committee's markup of the supplemental spending measure. That responsibility, he added, included "the accountability of the people's money." The House bill allocated funds to specific Defense accounts, rather than granting the administration the flexibility it wanted. "We didn't just create huge slush funds for agencies," Young bluntly declared. "We are trying to be supportive of the president, while maintaining our constitutional responsibility."

In the report on the supplemental bill, congressional Republicans said that during the Persian Gulf War, the first President Bush requested wide discretion on how to spend war money. Ultimately, Congress gave the president and Defense Department "some degree of flexibility in dealing with unknown and unpredictable costs, but also ensured that Congress would establish parameters in terms of both appropriations allocations and notification requirements."

The request for flexibility met even more strident opposition in the Senate, where Byrd is particularly protective of Congress's powers. "Count me out when you ask for these additional flexibilities," Byrd told Rumsfeld at a March 27 hearing. "I think Congress will respond to the needs whenever the case is made, but we can't afford to give this administration or any other administration a blank check." Byrd noted that Congress did not give Rumsfeld such power when he served as Defense secretary in the 1970s and said he would not get it this year.

Byrd's prediction proved to be largely accurate. The House-Senate conference report on the supplemental spending bill did not establish a Defense emergency response fund, but instead allocated money to specific accounts and purposes. Congress also refused to give the president authority to use foreign contributions without congressional approval, to allow the Homeland Security Secretary to spend $1.5 billion, to create a $250 million homeland security account for the president, or establish a $500 million counterterrorism account for the attorney general's office.

The bill did create a $16 billion fund for the Defense Department to use to cover combat costs and other expenses, but required the Pentagon to report on any money spent from the fund five days in advance. Democrats immediately argued that the Constitution won over flexibility. "They got more than I'm comfortable with, but they got less than 10 percent of what they asked for," Lilly says. One budget analyst says he was surprised that the administration got as much as it did. "The fact that they got any kind of flexibility was extraordinary because Congress didn't want to give . . . any," says Stan Collender, managing director of the federal budget consulting group at Fleishman-Hillard Inc.

INFORMATION DEFICIT

Aside from the flexibility issue, congressional appropriators also contend that the administration has failed to provide sufficient specific justification for its budget requests. At one point this spring, Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Harold Rogers, R-Ky., ended a hearing because officials at the Homeland Security Department had not yet provided documents making a case for their budget requests.

"We have no justification for the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, and that for Immigration and Customs Enforcement was only received on Monday," he said at a March 27 hearing. "If such funding is urgently required, as I believe it is, the details, plans and specifics to back up the request should have been available long ago."

Last year, House Treasury-Postal Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Ernest Istook, R-Okla., told Daniels the administration needed to be more forthcoming. "I am dissatisfied with the quantity and quality of information coming out of the administration, as it relates to homeland security," Istook said. "This is a major issue. It involves billions of taxpayer dollars; more importantly, it involves millions of lives."

Despite complaints from members of Congress about the lack of specific information about how money will be spent, Congress has approved several large and loosely controlled accounts in recent years. Immediately after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the House and Senate took swift action in passing a $40 billion supplemental spending package for homeland security and New York. Appropriators, wanting to avoid the usual parochial fights over such bills and attempting to respond swiftly to the attacks, granted Bush tremendous authority over how to spend the money. The next year, Congress gave Bush authority to reject $5.1 billion contained in a $29 billion supplemental spending bill. Bush did exactly that.

The flexibility and information issues are related, Collender says. "It's part of an overall attitude toward Congress. It's not just flexibility. They just don't want to deal with Congress at all."

Reischauer says the administration's efforts to win spending flexibility aren't much different than those of previous administrations, just more intense. The executive branch typically argues that flexibility allows it to operate more efficiently, while Congress regards the administration's request as a license to spend money however it wants. The problem is particularly acute at times such as these, when the federal government is shifting priorities and attempting to restrain spending.

OMB's Duffy contends that the administration simply wants the kind of flexibility that has worked at other levels of government. For example, he says, the welfare reform law passed in 1996 provided the nation's governors with wide discretion over how money is spent, resulting in a drop in the welfare rolls. "Flexibility for governors resulted in real success for government," Duffy says. The administration now is requesting that states be given flexibility in Medicaid and housing, proposals that he says would result in "fewer strings, with accountability." The administration simply wants some of that flexibility for itself, he says.

Duffy says the results of the war in Iraq graphically demonstrated the need for flexibility. "The combat lasted less [time] than was budgeted for, but there were other challenges," he says. Congress did grant the administration discretion in how to spend $500 million dealing with Iraqi oil fields. "There were not as many oil fires [as anticipated], but distribution has been more difficult," he says. The flexibility built into the oil-related funds allowed the administration to spend the money in areas where it was needed. "You're going to have unanticipated blessings and curses," he says. "You've got to be prepared for both."

Duffy also says the administration has attempted to be very careful in how it asks for homeland security money to be spent, which may have resulted in slow information being conveyed to Congress. "It's necessary to proceed cautiously so that money is spent wisely," he contended, especially since the homeland security budget is increasing rapidly. He says news organizations have documented areas in which local governments could have spent money better than they did.

In addition, Duffy says, "This is a real-time world. Things happen awfully quickly." He says that is not only true for homeland security, but also for foreign aid, where the federal government must be able to make decisions on assistance outside the regular budget cycle. Decisions are now being made about what may be needed in fiscal 2005-an impossible task, says Duffy.

Nonetheless, budgeters say it is unlikely that the administration will get much more. "In a way, I'm not sure the administration would want it to be different," Reischauer says, adding that if the federal departments got what the administration wants, Congress would have to monitor department operations more closely to ensure that the money was being well spent. "The administration will not win every one of these fights," Sununu says.

Lilly says the White House has already overplayed its hand. "They've reached the point where the more they ask for . . . the less they're going to get," he says. Dyer says the fight does little for the relationship between the executive branch and Congress. "It's bad karma," he concludes.

David Baumann is a staff correspondent at National Journal.

]]>

'Homeland security' becomes buzzword for justifying budget requests

David Baumann — Mon, 07 Apr 2003 00:00:00 -0400

All of the arguments were made in the name of "homeland security." These days, it seems that anybody seeking federal money throws around that buzzword to try to push pet concerns to the front of the line. House Appropriations Committee Chairman C.W. "Bill" Young, R-Fla., has seen the technique firsthand as his panel begins to sift through members' requests for projects in the fiscal 2004 spending bills.

"It is amazing how people can relate anything to 'homeland defense,' " Young said in a recent interview. "I don't think I have received any '04 request that has not been related to 'homeland defense.' "

The lawmakers who are requesting the money see their needs as genuine, and they believe that their effectiveness will be judged on their ability to deliver. But to critics of federal spending, like Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the situation is nothing short of "war profiteering."

The nation's security needs-and and the government's willingness to meet them-have moved to the forefront again as Congress works on a fiscal 2003 supplemental spending bill to answer Bush's request. More than $62 billion would go toward fighting the war. But while the president sought an additional $4.2 billion to "enhance the safety and well-being of Americans at home and abroad," as the Office of Management and Budget put it, the funding level for homeland security is growing by the day.

In fact, the congressional debate over the supplemental appropriations bill is only the opening round in what is shaping up to be a huge bidding war over homeland security. The House and Senate Appropriations Committees each now have a separate subcommittee on homeland security, and appropriators will be devoting one of their 13 fiscal 2004 funding bills to the issue.

Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Ky., chairman of the House Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee, admits that he's flying by the seat of his pants in trying to judge what to fund. In comparison with two other Appropriations subcommittees that Rogers formerly chaired-Commerce-Justice-State and Transportation-the new panel has a "much larger and undefined" mission, he said in an interview. "There's no pattern for us to follow. We're having to set the rules as we go along."

Rogers said it remains unclear whether his subcommittee will provide general funding for homeland security needs, or if it will instead earmark funds for specific projects-a practice the Bush administration has consistently condemned. Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., chairman of the Senate Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee, said in an interview that he would try to avoid including earmarked projects in his bill. But Cochran admitted with a smile that he might not succeed.

One thing is clear: The demand for homeland security dollars is great. The U.S. Conference of Mayors recently reported that since 9/11, cities have spent more than $2.6 billion on homeland security. "As a group, we find that we are spending over $21.4 million per week in additional homeland security costs attributable to the war and the increased threat alert," the mayors said in their report. If the war and the current domestic security alert were to continue for six months, cities would spend almost $2 billion more, the mayors said.

"Cities cannot bear these costs alone," they said. "They need an effective and cooperative partnership with Washington on homeland security-and that means financial assistance." The cities are asking for direct aid, rather than funding that is funneled through the states.

According to Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley, Bush's latest request for homeland security won't cover the cities' costs. "The administration's proposal contains insufficient funding, given the tremendous security expenses our cities face during the war and ongoing high-alert threat," said O'Malley, the chairman of the mayors' conference homeland security task force. The mayors said that while Bush proposed providing $150 million, through the states, for overtime pay for emergency first responders, cities are spending that amount in just two weeks.

Congressional Democrats have also taken up the call for more Homeland security money, both in the supplemental spending bill and beyond. Rep. David R. Obey, D-Wis., the House Appropriations Committee's ranking member, said the government should be spending at least $10 billion more on homeland security in the supplemental-not the $4.2 billion Bush requested. "We are seriously at risk, and we're not doing nearly enough," Obey told reporters recently.

Obey identified $10.5 billion in homeland security needs, including $5.5 billion to improve protections for civilians and $1.2 billion to boost security at U.S. military installations. During the House Appropriations Committee's April 1 markup of the supplemental funding bill, he proposed adding just $2.5 billion more than Bush for homeland security, but was defeated on a party-line vote.

In the Senate, Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle, D-S.D., announced on April 1 that the chamber's Democrats would try to boost homeland security funding in the supplemental bill to $9 billion. "States, cities, and towns remain extremely vulnerable to terrorist attack and are ill-equipped to deal with this challenge," Daschle said. "Due to the worst fiscal crisis in decades, state and local budgets are stretched to the breaking point, and police and firefighters are struggling just to maintain peacetime staffing levels." Even if Democrats do not get all the homeland security money they want in the supplemental, they are sure to renew the efforts during the fight over the fiscal 2004 Homeland Security appropriations bill.

In the House, Republicans committed themselves to holding the amount of the supplemental spending bill at close to what the administration had requested. But the Senate Appropriations Committee approved an extra $400 million for homeland security on April 1. And both chambers have tacked on a bailout package of some $3 billion for the airline industry.

"We need to have something in this for aviation," said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, an appropriator. She added that airlines have faced greatly expanded security costs in recent months, but warned, "We're not just going to throw money at the airline industry."

The airlines are not the only ones demanding attention. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., pushed for at least $7 billion in the supplemental bill to establish a Domestic Defense Fund that would include $1 billion for high-threat areas such as New York City and Washington, D.C. She said that New York's security plan, "Operation Atlas," will cost $5 million a week. "You cannot win the war on terrorism with a good offense only," added Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y. "You also need a good defense."

But Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge told a House Appropriations subcommittee recently that the administration does not want to set aside funding for specific communities. Ridge also argued that the "primary responsibility for public safety" lies "with the state and local governments." He said although the federal government has a role to play in increased security costs, it will not assume a huge responsibility for law-enforcement costs.

Congress, however, was unwilling to give the administration the wide latitude it wants to decide how money in the supplemental bill is spent. Bush had asked for several pots of money and the power to decide how to use them. In response, appropriators issued a reminder that they hold the power of the purse.

"We didn't just create huge slush funds for agencies," Young said during his committee's markup of the supplemental. "We are trying to be supportive of the president, while maintaining our constitutional responsibility." Young earmarked $700 million in the bill to assist "high-threat, high-density" urban areas, with New York and Washington being the two most often mentioned.

Young's action came despite the administration's continuing crusade, led by OMB Director Mitch Daniels, against congressional earmarks. At a March 28 breakfast with reporters, Daniels urged Congress to resist the temptation to set aside money for specific communities. "If there's one area where one would hope for some restraint, it is homeland security," Daniels said. "There's not enough money in the galaxy to protect every inch of America from every threat by every fanatic."

Demands like that from the administration-coupled with lawmakers' demands for more homeland-security money-leave appropriators in the hot seat. Rogers conceded that he is going to have to say no to a great many members over the next few months. "I don't blame the members," Rogers said, "but there's a limit to what we can do." Cochran is likewise feeling the heat. "There are too many pressures across the country for more money for good reasons," he said.

Cochran added that Congress will have to define the federal responsibility, even as cities and states constantly have their hands out for more. "They want as much money from the federal government as they can get," he said. "I don't blame them."

At the same time, conservatives and other critics of congressional spending will be watching closely to see if members indiscriminately try to use the guise of "homeland security" to seek pork barrel projects for their hometowns. "It's called war profiteering," McCain said. "You saw it on the [fiscal 2003] omnibus appropriations bill. It was obscene."

]]>

New Congress faces unfinished fiscal business

David Baumann — Fri, 03 Jan 2003 00:00:00 -0500

The new Congress is going to be forced to spend at least the next several weeks cleaning up the massive mess left behind by the last Congress. In some way, shape, or form, the House and Senate have got to pass the remaining 11 fiscal 2003 appropriations bills. Even though fiscal 2003 began on October 1, only the Defense and Military Construction appropriations bills have been approved by both chambers and signed by the president. The remainder of the federal government has been operating on a series of continuing resolutions.

The White House and congressional Republican leaders want fiscal 2003 discretionary spending to total no more than $750.5 billion, the amount that Bush had requested in his budget last February and the amount that House Republicans had agreed upon. But the Democratic-controlled Senate had proposed spending about $10 billion above that level. Now that Republicans control both chambers of Congress and the White House, GOP leaders insist they'll find a way to pass the appropriations bills. But that may be easier said than done.

The $750.5 billion cap means that spending on federal programs, apart from defense and homeland security, will increase by only 2 percent in fiscal 2003, which is far less than Congress is accustomed to. In fiscal 2001, spending grew by 8.6 percent under former President Clinton. And in fiscal 2002, Bush and congressional leaders in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 agreed to an 8 percent spending boost.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman C.W. "Bill" Young, R-Fla., conceded that keeping federal spending at $750.5 billion will be a challenge. "This isn't going to be easy," Young told reporters in December. The ranking member on Young's committee, Rep. David R. Obey, D-Wis., agreed that cutting $10 billion from the Senate's spending bills "will be very difficult to do."

A key interest group in the budget debate recently warned of the cuts that would be necessary to maintain the spending level that Bush prefers. Assuming the president's increases for homeland security and defense are enacted, funding for domestic programs would have to be cut by between $9 billion and $14 billion, when adjusted for inflation, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

To further complicate matters, Congress will have to move quickly to finish the fiscal 2003 appropriations bills to avoid throwing the budget process into even more chaos, because Bush is scheduled to send his fiscal 2004 budget to Capitol Hill on February 3. Bush and Republican leaders have said they want to finish the fiscal 2003 bills by January 28, when Bush plans to deliver his State of the Union address. But Congress expects to be in session for only about six days in January. "It's going to be very difficult to meet that timetable," Obey said.

It's likely that Congress will bundle the remaining 11 fiscal 2003 appropriations bills into one omnibus bill. More than a few pet programs will have to be squeezed in the process. "To make the bill equitable, everybody's got to give at the office," said James Dyer, the staff director of the House Appropriations Committee. "Members are really going to have to swallow hard."

House appropriators intend to wait for the Senate to make the cuts necessary to meet the $750.5 billion target, according to Dyer. But passing an omnibus spending package in the Senate could pose a huge problem for the new Republican leadership team headed by incoming Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., because it has not had much time to focus on the issue.

The Senate Republicans' slim 51-48 majority means that any small group of members could derail an omnibus spending bill if it believes funding is too high or too low. Moreover, Senate Democrats are likely to use the debate on the bill to highlight their own agenda. "I think there's plenty of opportunity for mischief," said a senior Senate Democratic aide. "I hope there's some resolve in our caucus to provide some. It's a great opportunity to debate some things that matter-Democratic priorities-at the start of the session."

Meanwhile, in the House, where Republicans enjoy a 229-204 majority, passage of an omnibus spending bill may not be a done deal. House GOP moderates will insist that social programs shouldn't be shortchanged, according to Rep. Michael N. Castle, R-Del., a key moderate. Still, Young predicted that House members will agree that they must complete work on the fiscal 2003 funding measures. "While there may be some who hold their nose when they vote for it," Young said, "I believe we will have the votes to pass it."

]]>

Tension between OMB director, lawmaker could impact budget

David Baumann — Fri, 22 Nov 2002 00:00:00 -0500

If Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., the director of the White House's Office of Management and Budget, decides to run for governor of Indiana in 2004, he might have a powerful ally-incoming Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, who happens to be a native Hoosier.

It's not necessarily that Stevens thinks Daniels would make a fine governor. It's just that Stevens already has said he'd like it if Daniels would get out of his hair and go home.

Over the past two years, the two men have had a stormy relationship, as the short-fused Stevens has sought to protect his turf in the face of efforts by the blunt-talking Daniels to curb congressional spending. Now that the Republicans are poised to take back control of the Senate, the intramural GOP feud between Stevens and Daniels could lead to some serious budgetary problems. House Appropriations Committee Chairman C.W. "Bill" Young, R-Fla., is also no great fan of Daniels, but Young is much more soft-spoken than the fiery and stubborn Stevens.

During November 13 interviews with National Journal, both Stevens and Daniels were upbeat about their future relations. "We're in the majority now," Stevens said. "It's our duty to get along."

He said that because Senate Republicans will have the majority, "we'll have the opportunity for more input on decisions" at the White House. Stevens even added that he'd "be happy to assist Mitch Daniels if he decides to run for governor of Indiana." And Daniels said of Stevens, "I admire him a great deal. He deserves to be with the legends of the Senate.... You always know where you stand with the senator."

Things started out fine between Daniels and Stevens. In fact, the Appropriations chairman was thrilled when President Bush selected his OMB director in early 2001. During Daniels's Senate confirmation hearing, Stevens gushed, "I'm delighted that you have the experience in the government that you have, and that you have the experience in business that you have. We need both right now."

But by the end of 2001, after a series of disagreements over federal spending, the two were barely speaking. Daniels had prompted animosity on Capitol Hill by telling the Wall Street Journal editorial page that the motto of members of Congress is, " `Don't just stand there. Spend something.' This is the only way they feel relevant." And Stevens angrily responded in NJ that the OMB director should "go back to Indiana."

This summer, appropriators accused Daniels of trying to kill a deal on a supplemental spending package for defense and homeland security. After Daniels declared that the package's price tag-some $30.4 billion-was too high, Stevens and Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., stridently attacked the budget director on the Senate floor.

"We have such a blind mind-set down there [at the OMB] about top lines that we are unwilling to look at reality," Stevens said. "It is time we had an understanding of what the role of the Congress is with regard to appropriations.... The president is ill-served by what is going on, in my opinion."

The Stevens-Daniels relationship may not matter if some Indiana Republicans get their way. During the state GOP convention in June, Daniels was the most-talked-about possible candidate for governor, according to The Indianapolis Star, which reported that some 200 convention-goers wore "Mitch" buttons. In an August letter to The Star, former state GOP Chairman Gordon K. Durnil concluded, "Hoosiers ... can only pray that Mitch will decide to run." For his part, Daniels has said he told party leaders that he would think about running for governor as long as they left him alone, for now, to do his job.

When the new Congress convenes, Daniels will have to be able to negotiate with Stevens and Byrd, who works closely with Stevens no matter which party holds the majority. Stevens, meanwhile, will be walking a fine line between the wishes of his own committee and those of new Senate Budget Committee Chairman Don Nickles, R-Okla. (who is much more conservative than outgoing Chairman Pete V. Domenici, R-N.M.), the Senate Republican Conference at large, House Republicans, and the White House.

Relations between Daniels and Stevens are unlikely to improve, according to Stanley Collender, managing director of the federal budget consulting group at Fleishman-Hillard, because Daniels will continue to play the bad guy in negotiations with appropriators. "He's going to be telling Byrd or Stevens `no' constantly," Collender predicted. "It would be good if they can make an improvement [in their dealings], but I don't think they can."

]]>

Bush administration faces performance pressure

David Baumann and Carl M. Cannon — Mon, 11 Nov 2002 00:00:00 -0500

For two years, Democrats seethed noisily over the convoluted Florida election returns that ultimately-with the help of a 5-4 Supreme Court decision-put Bush in the White House. The Democrats' plan was to start exacting their revenge in Florida, where they would retire Jeb Bush, and then go from there. It didn't happen. Jeb won convincingly, with considerable help from his elder brother, who campaigned there-and everywhere-with determination and exceptional effectiveness. After the election, the Republican Party held half the governorships in the country, expanded its margin in the House, and, most significant, recaptured the Senate. Moreover, Democrats and Republicans alike gave George W. Bush most of the credit.

The victory capped quite a sojourn. In January 2001, Bush had taken office with no coattails, no consensus, no majority, no mandate, and no margin for error on Capitol Hill. All of that changed on Tuesday, if barely, in an election that was at the same time exceedingly close and quite decisive. Suddenly, Bush's 10-gallon hat was holding 12 gallons-so much so that he could afford to be gracious. Asked at a White House press conference Thursday if he thought he now had a "mandate," a confident-sounding but self-effacing Bush demurred: "I think candidates win elections because they're good candidates, not because they may happen to have the president as a friend-or a foe, for that matter."

Whether or not he has a mandate, he certainly has an advantage. The question now is what he will do with it. When the 108th Congress convenes in January, Republicans will control the levers of the federal government. And leaders of both major political parties agree on the implications: Bush and his fellow Republicans must generate results. "If there's a mandate in this election, it's that people want something to get done. They want people to work together in Washington, D.C., to pass meaningful legislation to help their lives," Bush said Thursday.

"The burden of leadership rests squarely on his shoulders," said Democratic National Committee Chairman Terence R. McAuliffe. "The president got what he asked for, and now he'll have to produce.... No more blame game. No more nonsense about a dysfunctional Senate. This is his sputtering economy; he must take responsibility for it.... The Bush era of responsibility starts today."

It actually begins Tuesday, when Congress returns for a lame-duck session. Sen. Trent Lott, the Mississippi Republican in line to resume his former post as majority leader, downplayed expectations for that session, saying he wanted to keep it short and sweet. "I've never seen [a lame-duck session] that serves the American people well," Lott said.

But because Congress has completed only two of the 13 annual appropriations bills, the returning members will have to decide whether to fund individual programs bundled into one or several omnibus spending measures, or simply to pass another continuing resolution lasting until sometime next year. The very makeup of the lame-duck session is unclear. If Republicans are in charge, Congress could deal with bankruptcy reform and establishment of a Homeland Security Department, which Bush on Thursday called his "single most important bit of unfinished business." If not, they might have to wait until next year.

Long before then, however, both major parties in both houses will meet to reorganize themselves. House Republicans will select a new majority leader, almost certainly current GOP Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas. And the abdication of House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt, D-Mo.-perhaps for a 2004 presidential bid-set off a power struggle between Democratic Whip Nancy Pelosi and Caucus Chairman Martin Frost to succeed him. The contest foreshadows a larger clash that will occupy Democrats for the next two years: Will the defeated party retreat leftward, toward the ideological homeland of their staunchest special-interest groups and voting blocs? Or will the Democrats try to meet Republicans, who suddenly were spewing talking points that were all conciliation and compromise, somewhere in the middle? One hint is that the favorite is Pelosi, a California liberal who was the only member of the congressional leadership in either party to vote against the Bush-backed Iraq war resolution. Frost, who represents a swing district from Dallas-Ft. Worth, is more of a centrist.

What Really Happened on Election Night?

If Democrats don't have a consensus on where they're going, it might be because they don't have a consensus on where they've been. As recently as last weekend, McAuliffe predicted that on November 5, voters would be focused on pocketbook issues such as job security, the uncertain state of their pensions, and the rising cost of health care and prescription drugs.

"The numbers do not lie," McAuliffe said while ticking off negative economic statistics of the past two years.

After Tuesday's results were in, the party line switched seamlessly. The public was focused only on Iraq and the war on terrorism, Democrats said, and Americans rallied to their commander in chief the way they always do. "This election was a referendum on a popular wartime president," insisted Rep. Nita Lowey, chairwoman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "The debate on the war in Iraq kept us from shifting the agenda to the domestic front."

But Tuesday's election returns revealed that this analysis is incomplete. It's now apparent that Bush is an uncommonly popular president who can transfer that goodwill to other Republican candidates. This suggests that the president's popularity, rather than being at an artificial high (Sept. 11 occurred 14 months ago), owes much to swing voters who took their measure of the president in the aftermath of the attacks and formed a lasting impression. "He's had the longest sustained approval ratings of any president in modern history," McAuliffe conceded.

One implication of this phenomenon is that Bush promises to remain a potent adversary for Democrats. At a time of economic stagnation, not to mention legislative gridlock, Bush was able to control the national discourse. It's hard to make the case that if the economy improved and gridlock was broken, his popularity would necessarily decline. Moreover, the truth is that on the campaign trail, Democrats talked about the economy incessantly-often vastly outspending Republicans in individual races while doing so. The problem was that the Democrats weren't offering much in the way of solutions. Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle, D-S.D., for instance, blamed the Bush tax cuts as one of the reasons for the tepid economy, but declined to call for their repeal. Lacking the votes to pass it, Senate Democrats didn't even bring a budget resolution to the floor. In the House, Democrats criticized the GOP budget, but never offered an alternative.

In other words, a national preoccupation with war, and terrorism, and the potent power of the presidency are not the only barriers between Democrats and the voters. That's the bad news for the Democrats. The good news is that the pressure is now squarely on the Republicans to perform. Voters will have objective standards by which to judge the GOP, because in his recent political travels Bush told Americans precisely what he'd do if they gave him a working majority in Washington.

`The Happiness Will Fade Quickly'

Bush insisted that he'd make "permanent" the 2001 tax cuts he shepherded through Congress. He called for flexibility in reassigning federal workers while fighting terrorism. He promised energy legislation combining futuristic research on renewable resources with more oil exploration. He took a swipe at trial lawyers, along with their Democratic allies in organized labor, for holding up a homeland security bill-and for good measure, he advocated tort reform. He said a Republican Senate would confirm his judicial nominees and pass a prescription drug benefit. In this stump speech, Bush outlined the GOP strategy for the next two years.

But as Democrats can tell him, having your party control Congress is no guarantee of presidential success. In his first term, Bill Clinton made little headway with a Democratic Congress. His great victories came later, after Republicans had captured both houses in 1994. This lesson may be lost on Republicans euphoric over this week's results, but those who worked for the previous president remember it well.

"Bill Clinton might say in a moment of candor that Republican control of the Congress-and Newt Gingrich!-were a big help when re-election time rolled around in 1996," says Mike McCurry, Clinton's former press secretary. "The Bush White House might come to lament [the] GOP sweep.... because they will be responsible for it all from now on."

University of Virginia political scientist Larry J. Sabato foresees a brief second honeymoon for Bush, in which he'll enjoy some success on his pet legislative projects. "But the happiness will fade quickly," Sabato adds. "Bush and the Republicans will be responsible for absolutely everything on their watch. If the economy and the war with Iraq and terrorism go well-fine and dandy. If the worm turns, though, the president will truly be Bush II, facing re-election with the electorate in a surly mood."

For now, congressional Republicans and White House strategists see opportunity, not potential disaster. With Lott setting the Senate calendar instead of Daschle, Bush expects quick votes on such issues as his faith-based-initiatives proposal and a new homeland security department. Republicans are also thrilled that every Senate committee chairmanship will change hands, starting with the Judiciary Committee, where Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., gives way to Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah, who chafed at Leahy's habit of savaging-and stalling-many of Bush's judicial nominees.

This might be the issue Bush cares about most. He's not alone. Contemplating the likelihood that Bush will fill one or two Supreme Court vacancies, Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Way, pronounced the makeup of the federal judiciary the top domestic issue facing the nation. McCurry noted that because of the high number of judicial vacancies, winning Congress was tantamount to a GOP takeover of all three branches of government.

But change will come in all the Senate committees. The basic pattern is that liberal Democrats from the East and Midwest will be replaced by Sunbelt conservatives sympathetic to Bush's priorities. Particularly sweet for the White House will be the new order at the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, where Leahy's fellow Vermonter, James M. Jeffords, will be succeeded by dependable Oklahoma conservative James M. Inhofe. It was Jeffords's defection from the Republican Party four months into Bush's presidency that gave control of the Senate to the Democrats. And with memories of that drama still fresh, some have speculated that other Republicans might jump ship. The obvious suspects were liberal Republican Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island and perennial maverick John McCain of Arizona, though both have dismissed the idea.

In any event, with only 51 Republicans in an institution tailored for consensus-it takes 60 votes to shut off debate-some veterans of the Senate were signaling that Republicans shouldn't get too jazzed up over their newfound majority status.

"The majority leader is not a ruler," cautioned Lott. "The Senate is a place that is difficult to get moving." He added, in words that can easily apply to the federal government itself, "The Senate was designed by our forefathers to be slow and deliberate to move. And boy, did they succeed. Some people say, `Full steam ahead. Let's get it done.' That's easier said than done."

]]>

Army Corps chief quits amid flap over agency's budget

David Baumann — Thu, 07 Mar 2002 00:00:00 -0500

Parker told the panel that when he was a member of Congress from representing Mississippi from 1989-98, "I always looked at OMB and never had those warm and fuzzy feelings. Now that I've been in the administration, I still don't have those warm and fuzzy feelings."

In a separate interview with National Journal, Parker also split with the administration's position on earmarked projects. "Congress has a legitimate right to make decisions about what's best for their states and districts," he said.

OMB has called on Congress to stop earmarking. But an OMB official said OMB Director Mitch Daniels had no role in Parker's ouster. "Mitch has not been occupied with personnel outside OMB," the official said.

House Republican appropriators blasted the Bush administration for forcing the resignation of Parker. "What a national tragedy that petty politics in the Pentagon and in the lower levels of the White House could cause such character assassination," House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Sonny Callahan, R-Ala., told CongressDaily. "I'm devastated by this decision."

While members of Congress said Parker was fired, the Defense Department said in a brief statement that Parker resigned. "The department appreciates Mr. Parker's contributions and wishes him the best in his future endeavors," the statement said.

Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., who described himself as a friend of Parker's, said the administration "felt that Mike's comments at this point in the process were inappropriate." Lott added, however, that Parker "told the truth that the Corps of Engineers budget, as proposed, is insufficient."

Callahan agreed that Parker was being punished for telling the truth.

"Up until this year, everyone came to our committee and saluted and said the Army Corps was not important," Callahan said. He contended that Parker "did not say anything that anyone in the Corps of Engineers wouldn't say privately."

But Callahan said although the Bush administration claims to oppose earmarking, "they earmarked their own projects" in their budget. And he said Parker had widespread support among members of Congress, although some Pentagon officials had opposed his selection.

A colleague of Parker's when he was in the House said he could have helped the administration push its priorities. "I think Mike Parker was in a unique position to bridge a gap between the OMB bean counters and the elected representatives of the people," said Rep. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., an Appropriations Committee member.

Parker's ouster is likely to aggravate already strained relations between House appropriators and OMB.

Indeed, House Appropriations Staff Director James Dyer told CongressDaily: "Mike Parker is a damn good guy. The fact that he understands how the Congress works should not be held against him."

There was negative reaction to the move in the Senate as well.

Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., said that when Parker testified before the Budget Committee: "He answered questions honestly, which people are expected to do, and for that he gets fired. That is a black mark not on him, but on the administration."

Conrad said the firing has a "chilling effect" on other officials who testify. "What are we to expect now from future witnesses?"

Sen. Christopher (Kit) Bond, R-Mo., said he had already spoken to the White House about Parker's resignation. "This is going to provide impetus for Congress to do what we were going to have to do already, which is to increase the budget for the Corps over what was recommended," Bond said.

]]>

Budget debates leave White House with foes in both parties

David Baumann — Fri, 15 Feb 2002 00:00:00 -0500

National Journal. "Some of these people in this administration come to town, and they've never held office and they've never been elected to anything, and they chafe at the rules," Byrd said. "Some of these people have complete disdain for Congress. They are contemptuous of Congress, and that's bad." The sour relations come as Congress and the administration already were facing a difficult year on the budget because of the increased demands for defense and homeland security, the lingering recession, and the return of federal deficits. Little wonder that the mood is one of uncertainty and apprehension, especially with the midterm elections approaching. "I think it's because the tectonic plates under the budget have shifted, and the major players aren't sure of their standing," said Robert Reischauer, president of the Urban Institute. "The political atmosphere is going to determine everything." The first big confrontation is expected to come over a fiscal 2002 supplemental appropriations bill for the war and homeland security. In his budget, Bush did not request such a supplemental spending bill, possibly because it will increase the deficit even more. But Capitol Hill insiders are certain there will be a supplemental. House Appropriations Committee Chairman C.W. "Bill" Young, R-Fla., said he has discussed the issue with Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels and expects that Congress will consider the bill in March. Much of the supplemental money will be for defense, but appropriators are likely to want to steer funds to homeland security as well. New Yorkers, for their part, want a share for recovery efforts in their state. Rep. John Sweeney, R-N.Y., said he has spoken with Young and intends to remain "forceful" in pushing for funds for New York. Daniels, who repeatedly ticked off key appropriators last year, recently had to apologize for suggesting that New Yorkers are involved in a "money-grubbing game"--a comment that Sweeney said "hasn't been helpful in keeping people focused." At the same time that Congress begins work on the supplemental, it will have to pass legislation to increase the federal debt limit. The effort may be fraught with political mischief and mayhem, as members may seek to attach pet proposals. "It provides another must-pass vehicle for a minority of Senators," acknowledged a senior Senate Democratic aide. Reischauer noted that "the real danger is that some crazy procedural requirements are attached to the [debt-limit] bill." For instance, the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit reduction plan that guided budgeting for years was originally an amendment to a 1985 debt-limit bill. After completing the debt-limit legislation, both chambers will work on a fiscal 2003 budget resolution, which would serve as a guide for appropriators to craft the 13 annual appropriations bills. But insiders have been predicting for months that the divided Congress probably won't be able to agree on a budget resolution this year. In the Senate, the budget resolution could get tied up in the Budget Committee, where Democrats have only a one-vote margin, or on the floor, where Democrats have the same problem. The two parties have plenty of disagreements that could prevent the Senate from passing a budget. (Remember, Sen. James M. Jeffords, I-Vt., left the Republican Party last year over the fiscal 2002 budget resolution.) House GOP leaders also face problems in passing a budget resolution. Some Republican conservatives are demanding a balanced budget, now that extra money is available because of the failure of economic stimulus legislation. "If we can't enact a strong stimulus package that would help create jobs, then we not only can--but must--balance the federal budget," said Rep. John Shadegg, R-Ariz., chairman of the Republican Study Committee. Bush's budget would result in an $80 billion deficit in fiscal 2003, while the stimulus package would have cost $77 billion, so a balanced budget seems within reach. Reischauer said, however, that when the Congressional Budget Office estimates the cost of the Bush budget, another $50 billion will likely be required to balance the budget. Even if both chambers approve their own budget resolutions, the chances are not good that a conference committee could reconcile the differences. If Congress finds it impossible to approve a budget resolution conference report--as was the case in 1998, when Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici, R-N.M., and House Budget Committee Chairman John R. Kasich, R-Ohio, could not agree on a tax cut--the leaders of each chamber would provide their own spending levels to appropriators. In even the smoothest of years, that situation could cause chaos. And this is far from the smoothest of years. Sure, Republicans and Democrats are likely to agree on spending for the war against terrorism at home and abroad. "When it comes to waging and winning the war against terrorism, the President has our total support," said Rep. John M. Spratt Jr., D-S.C., the House Budget Committee ranking member, in a recent letter to colleagues. "We are united, determined to win, and unstinting about paying the necessary cost." Yet Spratt added that Democrats "don't think national security and homeland security need to come at the expense of Social Security and other national priorities, as the President's budget proposes." Democrats have yet to outline how they would maintain war and homeland security spending, while still supporting their priority domestic programs. Meanwhile, bipartisan opposition is mounting against the Bush administration's continued effort to end earmarked projects. "We did say last year, we say again this year, that we think the long-term practice of special projects and earmarking by Congress has gotten out of hand," Daniels said at a budget briefing. "It's multiplied eight times in the last four or five years. We now have entire programs of the federal government for which every penny has been earmarked for somebody's special pet project." To make its point, the administration released a long list of Education Department earmarks that could be rescinded to pay for a shortfall in the Pell grant program. The Bush budget featured some color pictures of earmarked projects, including an ice-rescue sled that House Appropriations Committee ranking member David R. Obey, D-Wis., gained for Ashland, Wis. In his defense, Obey said that three people died after falling through ice on the lake on which the rescue sled will be used--something Bush's budget did not mention. He also said the budget included the wrong picture and the wrong price for the sled, and he questioned Bush's motives. "It's a diversion," Obey said in an interview. "He's trying to get you guys to write stories about the Congress, rather than his budget." Young, for his part, fired off a letter reminding Daniels that under the Constitution, Congress decides how money is to be spent. "The power of the purse resides solely with the Congress," Young wrote. "Unless the Constitution is amended, Congress will continue to exercise its discretion over federal funds, and will earmark those funds for purposes we deem appropriate." Young, of course, is not the only member of Congress in recent days to question whether Bush administration officials know their civics. Byrd, in his emotionally charged exchange with O'Neill, attacked the administration for including in its budget a drawing of Gulliver tied to the ground, with the caption, "Many departments are tied-up in a morass of Lilliputian do's and don'ts." That caption echoed comments that O'Neill had made in an earlier speech to a business group. Byrd charged that O'Neill was referring to congressional rules, one of which is known as the Byrd Rule and restricts what can be attached to budget reconciliation bills. "These administration people who keep talking about Lilliputians don't really understand Jonathan Swift's master satire," Byrd said in the interview with National Journal. "They are the type of men who Jonathan Swift was making fun of. They need to be held in check." The barbs traded between Byrd and O'Neill may not seem like a big deal. And for now, the administration--still soaring on Bush's high approval ratings--seems emboldened to continue tweaking Congress and to pursue its own budget prerogatives. But at some point late in the congressional session, the administration will probably need the cooperation of lawmakers it had earlier alienated. Among those members could be the 84-year-old senior Senator from West Virginia, and he has a very long memory. ]]>

Experts fear homeland security windfall could be misspent

David Baumann and Siobhan Gorman — Fri, 08 Feb 2002 00:00:00 -0500

Hastings's story is not unique. Lawmakers returned to Capitol Hill this month from their holiday recess with a myriad of security concerns. And those concerns are not amorphous; they involve specific water plants, power plants, seaports, airports, and railroad tracks near their constituents' neighborhoods. In other words, homeland security has struck home. "There's no question that it is something that comes up," Hastings said. "It is something that is resonating."

This week, President Bush tried to respond to those concerns in his fiscal 2003 budget. He proposed to double spending for homeland security--to $37.7 billion--with a heavy concentration in the areas of border security, bioterrorism, emergency response, and intelligence-sharing. While experts and advocates applauded the increased focus on homeland security as a whole, some fear that the money could be misspent--or earmarked for specific congressional pet projects--because there is no overall national plan.

"I don't get any sense of strategy or priorities coming from the budget," said defense analyst Frank Hoffman, a former aide to the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century. "Without a comprehensive national plan, additional resources may not contribute to any real domestic preparedness."

But coming up with a national strategy has already proved to be politically difficult. Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge's proposal for consolidating several federal border agencies met with resistance, so the plan was tabled until March to give officials in certain departments time to develop their own ideas. Ridge will release a final proposal by summer. So far, he has simply articulated broad goals that a national strategy might address.

In the absence of a plan, the extra money will give Congress the opportunity to fund pet projects, rather than national needs, said Hoffman, now a Marine Corps consultant. "The Hill's going to piecemeal this thing to death, unless they have a comprehensive strategy," he said. "You'll get something that will be less than the sum of its parts." As the money trickles down, Hoffman said, a lack of direction from Washington could mean that state and local governments spend federal dollars on programs they would have otherwise funded themselves, or on programs that have little to do with homeland defense.

Some members of Congress also worry about whether funds will be used efficiently if there is no plan to guide the spending. "As we implement and as we spend this money, I do have some concerns that it's coordinated, that it's spent the right way," said Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, who last year introduced a bill to consolidate the Border Patrol, the Customs Service, and the Coast Guard into one agency. But Thornberry is also pragmatic: "You can't let the perfect defeat the good."

The biggest share of Bush's proposed homeland security money goes to border security, $10.6 billion, even if only to place the borders in a sort of reinforced holding pattern. The President's proposal of approximately $712 million for immigration personnel would pay for 570 new border-control agents, split evenly between the northern and southwestern borders; and 1,160 new immigration inspectors for land, air, and sea entry ports. The Customs Service would get $255 million more to pay for 800 new inspectors and for equipment. The Coast Guard, which has assumed most port-security duties, would get an additional $73 million.

Bush's budget proposal shows that he "understands the symbolic value of throwing some more money at the border," said Demetrios G. Papademetriou, co-director of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, based in Washington. "What disturbs me is, I don't know what the direction is. It's the difference between playing chess and playing checkers. You have to think two or three steps ahead."

Stephen E. Flynn, a former aide to the National Security Council, suggested that in the long term, the focus should be on finding ways to let border inspectors concentrate their efforts on the most-suspicious people and products. Flynn said while he recognizes the need for more inspectors, he would like to see a simultaneous movement toward a grand plan for border security.

Although border security is a priority, the Administration proposed little additional funding for investigating people and goods before they reach the United States. Bush asked for $100 million for the State Department to hire 399 more Foreign Service staffers and 98 additional consular officers to process visas. But the bulk of the State Department's proposed anti-terrorism budget--an additional $1.4 billion--would be focused on securing U.S. facilities overseas, spreading the gospel of America, and bolstering countries that enlist in the war on terrorism.

Meanwhile, the bioterrorism component of the homeland security budget drew largely favorable reviews from public health experts. Often relegated to the back of the budget, public health is front and center now, thanks to Bush's proposed $5.9 billion bioterrorism effort-a $760 million boost from last year's spending, which included a $3.7 billion supplemental appropriation after September 11.

"We are now on the threshold of a new era," said Margaret Hamburg, who is a former assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at the Health and Human Services Department, and a former New York City health commissioner. She lauded the $1.2 billion proposal to help state and local officials bolster their public health infrastructure to better respond to a terrorist attack.

Research would get the biggest slice of Bush's proposed bioterrorism funding, with about $2.4 billion going toward creating new vaccines and developing better threat-assessment technology. Still, one key critic-Lawrence O. Gostin, co-director of the Center for Law and the Public's Health, founded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention--said that the emphasis on research reinforces the "very badly skewed" priorities responsible for what many people say is a dilapidated public health system.

The President's budget would also provide $1.8 billion for medical equipment and vaccines for use in case of a biological attack. But some doctors, notably Sandro Cinti, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), worry the money will be spent on tools that look good but are unproven-such as rapid tests for anthrax.

The largest proportional increase in homeland security funding would be targeted to assist the fire, police, and emergency medical personnel who are the first to arrive on the scene of a disaster. The $3.5 billion in the President's request is more than a threefold increase from last year. The money would go to equipment, training, creation of response plans, and emergency simulations. The biggest portion of that money, $1.4 billion, would focus on enhancing communication.

While they say the Administration has the right approach, some intended recipients of the money are cautious. "The challenge is always the translation of words into reality, and the fire service--routinely, in those kinds of discussions--we get lip service," said Garry Briese, executive director of the International Association of Fire Chiefs. He noted that firefighting money has been folded into Bush's overall budget for "first responder" programs. "If there's $3.5 billion out there, there will be a lot of people out there who identify themselves as first responders," Briese said.

The perceived need among cities is huge, and the question is whether Bush's proposed funding levels will be sufficient. The nation's mayors recently reported that between September 11 and the end of 2002, they will have spent an additional $2.6 billion on security. "Tightening security in the aftermath of September 11 threatens to break the bank for many city budgets," New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial, president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, said in releasing the report last month. Half of that amount will be for equipment-items that the Administration plan might cover. But 23 percent will have gone for backlogged overtime payments-an area the Bush budget would not cover.

The mayors have asked Congress to create a block-grant program that would provide funds directly to cities for "police and fire overtime, additional training, communications and rescue equipment, and security measures to protect airports, waterways, utilities, public transit, and other public infrastructure." To longtime Washington insiders, the proposal might sound a bit like the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, a now-defunct Justice Department program that was established in the 1960s to fight crime and urban riots-and that was plagued by anecdotes of police departments spending the money on such items as tanks and deluxe, overpriced police cars.

Still, some skeptics charge that it would be difficult to make wise use of all the new money for first responders. "Whatever they say, you just have one hell of a time spending that," said Richard Stubbing, former deputy chief for national security at the Office of Management and Budget. "You're going to end up turning the spigot on and filling up whatever demands happen to show up."

Stubbing said he'd spend money on improving information-sharing among domestic and international security agencies. Nevertheless, the proposed funding for this area makes it the smallest component of Bush's homeland security budget, with $722 million proposed-up from $230 million last year. More than half of that money would be spent on establishing a system to register foreigners as they arrive and leave. The rest would go largely toward "cyberspace security."

Bush would provide little money to actually help agencies communicate with each other-the effort is relegated to one unexplained line item of $20 million for the Commerce Department. The FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service each would get about $100 million to improve their existing databases and intelligence-gathering, but only a small portion of that money would go toward developing new intelligence-gathering methods. The INS, for example, would spend just $6 million on new domestic investigators and $10 million on new overseas agents.

Of course, Congress will not simply accept Bush's homeland security budget without leaving its imprint. Many members have their own ideas about where to spend the money, often starting with their own states and districts. James Dyer, staff director of the House Appropriations Committee, said that the panel will spend February and March talking to lawmakers and experts to "get some sort of assessment to find out what we need."

For Rep. Robert Andrews, D-N.J., the need involves the Salem nuclear power plant, 20 miles from his district. "People are concerned about the lack of security at those installations," Andrews said. "They weren't panicked, but they wanted to know who was watching it. The answer is, the New Jersey National Guard. When they heard that, they were reassured." But National Guard protection does not come cheap.

Even remote North Dakota is not immune from worries over homeland security. A recent railroad derailment near Minot released some 200,000 pounds of anhydrous ammonia and sent a poisonous cloud over the city. "It left all of us thinking about railway security and hazardous chemicals," said Rep. Earl Pomeroy, D-N.D. "It was a point of exposure that hadn't been focused on. Railway security will have to be addressed."

The concern over security is bipartisan, as is the feeling that the federal government should help to pay for protection. "I don't know how many things in the last several months that I have been told that I either must do, or I better not do, or the terrorists are going to win," said House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas. The challenge will be how to meet lawmakers' genuine needs, while weeding out pork barrel requests cloaked as "vital" projects. Armey vowed that House Republican leaders will be particularly diligent in trying to evaluate members' requests.

Still, a huge increase in federal spending on homeland security is inevitable. And in an election year, with constituent fears heightened, members will be looking for ways to allay those fears and tout their own success. As Congress decides how best to distribute the money, block grants may not have enough strings attached to satisfy some. On the other hand, Congress must be careful not to go overboard in earmarking the money for specific projects in specific cities. Dyer said the House Appropriations Committee will fight that inclination. "We're trying very hard to stay away from earmarks," he said.

But Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a longtime critic of congressional pork, already is expecting homeland security spending to run amok. Citing some questionable costs at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City as an example, McCain noted, "In the name of security, they have put in pork barrel spending."

Indeed, plenty of lawmakers and advocacy groups realize the convenience of attaching a "homeland security" tag to their pet project. "I notice that some people are repackaging what they wanted in August of 2000 as `vital homeland security,' " said a senior Senate Democratic aide. "And it still looks the same."

]]>

Budget, appropriations agreements could be elusive

David Baumann — Tue, 22 Jan 2002 00:00:00 -0500

Already, insiders are predicting that with each party controlling one house, the odds are good that Congress will fail to agree on a budget resolution this year.

"It's going to be a difficult year," said a senior Senate Republican aide. "There's a good chance we may not have a budget. It may be impossible."

In an election year, the aide noted, each party will be "seizing on the economy to find some political advantage."

Without a budget resolution, House and Senate appropriators will have to rely on informal guidance from congressional leaders in dividing up the spending pie. And looming large over any budget decisions is the federal deficit, which could reach $179 billion in fiscal 2002, if Social Security funds are excluded.

The two parties are blaming each other for the disappearance of the budget surplus: Democrats say that Bush's $1.35 trillion tax cut is the culprit. But the White House says that the deficit stems from the recession, which it says started before Bush took office, and from the war against terrorism. Moreover, the White House argues that any economic recovery can be attributed to the effect of last year's tax cuts in jump-starting the economy.

Bush is expected to send his budget request to Capitol Hill on Feb. 4. The President acknowledged on Jan. 7, the day that he returned to Washington from his Texas ranch, that it would not be a balanced budget. And Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels already has warned that federal programs not related to the war effort or to homeland security could be targeted for large cuts.

Of course, Congress may not be willing to make those cuts when appropriators begin working on their fiscal 2003 funding measures. Congress is likely to want to boost spending on defense and homeland security, as well as on its favorite programs and pork projects. At this point, it's hard to know how much lawmakers will want to spend and how willing Bush will be to use his veto pen.

Congress faces difficult budget decisions far earlier than usual this year because lawmakers are expected to craft soon after they reconvene a fiscal 2002 supplemental spending bill doling out billions of dollars for homeland security and defense.

"I don't know when to expect it, but I'd like to see it as soon as possible," said House Appropriations Committee Chairman Bill Young, R-Fla. And ranking member David R. Obey, D-Wis., added, "We're in a race against time."

]]>

OMB director tries to repair damaged relationship with lawmakers

David Baumann — Fri, 30 Nov 2001 00:00:00 -0500

To put it bluntly, Daniels's current relationship with key members of Congress stinks. For weeks, the usually calm chairman of the House Appropriations Committee refused to take phone calls from the director of the Office of Management and Budget. The ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee has angrily suggested that Daniels ought to get out of Washington. And these two lawmakers are Republicans, who are supposed to be Daniels's friends.

OMB directors often have rocky relations with Capitol Hill because of competing legislative priorities. But as one veteran budget analyst put it, Daniels "is going above and beyond the call of duty." For instance, The Wall Street Journal's editorial page recently quoted Daniels as saying that the motto of members of Congress is: " `Don't just stand there. Spend something.' This is the only way they feel relevant."

Talk like that doesn't make you any friends on the Hill, where many members are thin-skinned. Asked how his relationship with Daniels might be improved, Senate Appropriations Committee ranking member Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, said that Daniels should "go back home to Indiana. I can't do anything about that relationship." Stevens added that Daniels owes Congress an apology.

Daniels, who is 52, said he now realizes that he may have gone too far in his drive for fiscal restraint. "It happens to us all," he said in a November 26 interview. "At least one sentence I uttered [about Congress] was not constructive, and I wish I had it back."

In fact, as the endgame approaches in this appropriations season, Daniels is doing some damage control. He is attempting to contact appropriators to smooth things over. (In the interview, he emphasized that he has the "greatest personal respect" for the lawmakers he works with regularly.) Daniels also gave a November 28 speech at the National Press Club to make his case on budget issues, although he said that address had been scheduled for quite some time.

Ironically, Administration officials touted Daniels's knowledge of Capitol Hill when he was nominated for the OMB job in January. He was a top aide to Sen. Richard G. Lugar, R-Ind., from 1977-82, and then was the executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee before joining the Reagan Administration as a political adviser. Later, he headed the Hudson Institute, an Indianapolis-based think tank, and he went on to work at Eli Lilly and Co., where he was a senior vice president until this year.

Even though Daniels had no full-time job experience related to the federal budget, his Senate confirmation hearing was a bipartisan love fest, and his first few months in office seemed to go smoothly. The first danger signs came during the summer, when the Bush Administration proposed setting an overall discretionary spending level for the 13 fiscal 2002 appropriations bills at $679 billion, including an extra $18.4 billion for defense.

Budget hawks in the House quickly noted that spending that much money when the economy was going south would require Congress to dip into the so-called Medicare trust fund--something they had vowed not to do. Daniels responded that there really is no such thing as the Medicare trust fund. Lawmakers acknowledged that while Daniels's argument was technically correct, it was politically flawed, since it left them vulnerable to charges of spending Medicare money on other programs. Daniels refused to back down, even after being called on the carpet by Republican members of the House Budget Committee.

That summertime skirmish paled in comparison to the battles that Daniels has fought this fall. Shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks, key appropriators sought a quick agreement with the Administration on an overall discretionary funding level. The idea was that with such a deal in hand, Congress could finish the 13 spending bills without the usual bitterness and brinksmanship, which the country seemed in no mood for.

The four top appropriators--House Appropriations Committee Chairman C.W. "Bill" Young, R-Fla., and ranking member David R. Obey, D-Wis.; and Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., and Stevens--agreed on the figure of $686 billion. That amount would have allowed for the President's defense increase, as well as a substantial boost for education. But Daniels would not budge beyond the $679 billion the Administration had offered during the summer. "If those boundaries were respected, we were amenable to shifts in priorities, within reason," Daniels said in the recent interview. "We felt, and continue to feel, strongly that we need to keep control of spending."

Appropriators were incensed. They reasoned that if the four of them could come to a bipartisan agreement on a spending level that they felt could pass both chambers, the Administration should quickly embrace it. An ugly standoff ensued for several weeks, and rumors even circulated that Stevens had called Daniels a particularly vulgar name, a claim that Stevens denied.

Finally, a deal was announced on October 2 allowing appropriators to indeed spend $686 billion--about 4 percent more than allowed under the budget resolution approved in the spring, and about 8 percent more than was spent in fiscal 2001. A Senate Republican leadership aide said that the administration only agreed to the deal after Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., went over Daniels's head and appealed to Vice President Dick Cheney to intervene.

Daniels denied that Cheney was sent in to rescue him. "The Vice President has always been in the [legislative] mix," Daniels said in the interview. "We did try to negotiate some middle ground, but [appropriators] were unyielding, and we agreed."

In recent weeks, the Administration and Congress have been arguing over funds related to the terrorist attacks. Shortly after September 11, Congress approved $40 billion in emergency supplemental aid for repairing the damage in New York City, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, and for homeland and national security programs. Under the legislation, Bush could spend $20 billion immediately and with no strings attached; on October 17, he sent Congress a detailed request, still pending, for the other $20 billion.

In light of the anthrax scare and the funds federal agencies say they need for homeland security, key appropriators, members of the New York congressional delegation, and top Senate Democratic leaders decided that the $40 billion was insufficient. Daniels has vehemently disagreed.

In an October 16 speech to the Conference Board, Daniels said: "If the popular fictional producers on Broadway had wanted to write a truly boring show, they might have chosen to call it Springtime for Spenders. Well, that show has opened in Washington, and the fact that very few of us are really interested in matters of government spending doesn't mean that it can't have a long run in Washington." He added: "With a little imagination, almost anybody's pet project can be redefined to fit under the very welcoming headings of `war' or `recession' or `emergency.' "

Given those comments and others from Daniels about congressional spending patterns, it's easy to see why his relationship with the appropriators has soured. Young said it was difficult to understand the OMB director's "public criticism of the very people he has to have a good working relationship with."

Moreover, James Dyer, the staff director of Young's committee, contended: "This Congress is not sitting around dreaming up ways to spend money." Dyer added: "I think [Daniels] has decided he would rather attack the committee than work with it. His comments were reprehensible. I don't know how we can work with a guy who thinks we're irrelevant. In fact, I don't think we can."

With Christmas fast approaching, the dispute over spending on homeland security has stalled progress on the appropriations bills and on the economic stimulus package. Bush, so far, is standing by his budget director's call for fiscal restraint. The President threatened on November 6 to veto any measure exceeding the $686 billion cap on the 13 regular appropriations bills and the $40 billion emergency supplemental spending bill.

Daniels also has his defenders among budget hawks on the Hill. "He's a voice of sanity in a sea of spending in these appropriations bills," Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said in an interview. "I'd say they're spending money like a drunken sailor, but I've never known a sailor with that kind of imagination." And Rep. John Shadegg, R-Ariz., chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee, said Daniels is not being too blunt. "In this town, you have to be that way with whomever if you want to achieve your goals," Shadegg said. "The appropriations process is a rough-and-tumble process in which the timid get rolled."

Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., agreed that Daniels is simply doing his job. And Upton has a unique vantage point, having worked for OMB Director David Stockman in the Reagan White House. "The Administration always has to play a little good cop, bad cop, and the OMB director traditionally does play [bad cop]," Upton said. He recalled that President Reagan told Stockman in 1980 that "he was offering him the toughest job in Washington, and that's certainly what it is. There's not a big constituency in saying `No.' "

Daniels agreed. "There's a built-in tension between my duty and the goals of some members of Congress," he said. "The word people least like to hear is `No,' and there are times when that is my assignment." He contended that it has been many years since a White House tried to clamp down on spending as much as this White House has tried to do. He added that, during the Clinton era, "this time of the year, the line was always to spend to get out of town. It's been a while since there's been some line-drawing done."

Reflecting on his recent budgetary pronouncements, Daniels said, "My comments have been institutional, unlike some that have come in the opposite direction," from Capitol Hill. He acknowledged that the Bush Administration's early attempts to decrease lawmakers' fondness for "earmarking"--or setting aside money in bills for specific pet projects--were unsuccessful. "There is an institutional tendency to spend," Daniels said of Congress. "It makes for better press at home."

Daniels said his job is not going to get any easier as next year's budget process approaches. Facing a war and homeland defense needs, the budget will be a "fascinating test of the maturity of this government. We will see if we can shift priorities to where they are so plainly needed."

Still, despite the bumps and bruises this year, Daniels said nothing has surprised him, even the rumors that he is taking his hard-line positions in preparation for running for the Senate from his home state of Indiana. He called that rumor "a joke." And he concluded: "We say in Indiana, `We were born at night, but not last night.' I knew what I was getting into." While Daniels may have known what he was getting into, it remains to be seen if he can get out of the trouble he seems to be in and rescue his relationship with Capitol Hill.

]]>

New Senate budget chair quickly makes waves

David Baumann — Mon, 16 Jul 2001 00:00:00 -0400

Passing spending bills may not be as hard as it looks

David Baumann — Mon, 02 Jul 2001 00:00:00 -0400

Education vs. Defense President Bush tried to lay down a few early markers when he sent his full budget to Capitol Hill in April. First, taxes had to be cut by some $1.6 trillion. Second, discretionary spending had to slow from the 8 percent it increased in fiscal 2001 to a boost of just 4 percent in fiscal 2002. Third, defense and education had to remain high priorities. And finally--something that really made members of Congress sit up and take notice--the number of earmarks for pork barrel projects had to be drastically cut. Democrats complained loudly that Bush wanted to underfund priority domestic programs in order to pay for his tax cut. Republican appropriators themselves conceded that it would be difficult to tighten the belt to the degree that Bush requested. Nevertheless, House and Senate Republicans--with some support from conservative Democrats--gave the President largely what he wanted. The final fiscal 2002 budget resolution approved by both chambers in early May indeed allowed for only a 4 percent increase in discretionary spending, although pressure from Senate moderates reduced the tax cut's 10-year price tag to $1.35 trillion. But what went mostly unnoticed was that Congress included in the budget resolution several gimmicks designed to make it easier for appropriators as they struggle to write 13 spending bills that adhere to the tight--some said unrealistic--spending limits. Although the budget resolution officially sets overall discretionary spending at about $661 billion for fiscal 2002, it also gives the House and Senate Agriculture Committees the leeway to spend money beyond that limit by designating the spending as part of agriculture entitlement programs. "We've added this in the past in the appropriations process," said a senior Senate Republican aide. "It removes pressure from the appropriators." In addition, budgeteers acknowledged that some funding for natural disasters might have to be declared "emergency" spending--and therefore also outside that $661 billion budget cap. More important, the budget resolution created the "reserve fund." The idea was that Rumsfeld needed time to develop his strategic review and would not be able to estimate how much was needed for defense until that study was completed. The budget resolution put no set dollar amount on the reserve fund. Budgeteers relied on January estimates from the Congressional Budget Office to figure that the fiscal 2002 budget surplus would total $218 billion, which would shrink to $47.7 billion once the Social Security and Medicare trust funds were removed. When other re-estimates are figured in, budgeeters currently predict that the available reserve fund could total between $24 billion and $38 billion. The money in the reserve fund can be released to the appropriators now that Rumsfeld has sent his additional defense request to Congress. But the two chambers disagree on how the money can be used. The House version of the budget resolution conference report stated that House Budget Committee Chairman Jim Nussle, R-Iowa, is allowed to release the reserve money for defense or other urgent needs. (On June 27, Nussle--citing concerns that the Pentagon has not yet completed its strategic review--said that Rumsfeld would have to justify the need for the $18.4 billion before he'd release it.) By contrast, the Senate version of the budget resolution conference report states that Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., can release the reserve money only for defense. As is always the case, however, the Senate can waive that budget provision if 60 Senators vote to do so. New Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., has been highly critical of the spending limits in the budget resolution, but has said he'll live with them--for now. "The limits are there. The budget resolution has been enacted," Byrd said, while adding that all bets were off once Rumsfeld submitted his spending request. "We'll roll up our britches when we get to the creek," Byrd has vowed. Already, plenty of lawmakers from both parties are saying that they want to devote additional money to education, as well as to defense. At his panel's first markup on June 13, even House Appropriations Committee Chairman C.W. "Bill" Young, R-Fla., indicated his interest in doing so. "With the exception of additional allowances that may be requested for education and defense," Young said, "it is my intention to report spending bills that adhere to the spending limits proposed by President Bush and ratified by Congress" in the budget resolution. Recently, both chambers overwhelmingly approved sweeping education reform legislation, which technically was a reauthorization of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act. A conference committee will reconcile the two bills. The Senate education bill would cost an estimated $37 billion in fiscal 2002 and the House version would cost $23 billion, while the White House requested $21 billion. Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle, D-S.D., has said that Democrats will insist that education funding run close to what is prescribed in the Senate's education reauthorization bill. And he said that before agreeing to any conference report on the education bill, Democrats will seek a specific funding guarantee from the Bush administration. "Education reform is not possible without the resources, and we will continue to push for the resources," Daschle recently told reporters. "We want a commitment from the administration on resources, and so far, we have not been able to come to an agreement." Likewise, House Democrats are pushing for a quick deal that would dedicate between $3 billion and $4 billion for education from the reserve fund. Appropriators acknowledge they may be swept up in a tidal wave of congressional sentiment to show a strong commitment to schools. "If the [final education] bill passes on a bipartisan basis, there will be tremendous pressure on the Appropriations Committee to fund it," said James Dyer, the House Appropriations Committee's staff director. But the Appropriations Committees seldom actually fund education programs, or many other programs, at the levels requested by other committees in their authorization bills. In an interview, Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., director of the Office of Management and Budget, said that it will be difficult to meet the education spending levels included in the pending authorization legislation. "The authorizers go wild," Daniels said. "It's kind of a free gesture. Our point of reference is the budget resolution." The administration has acknowledged that some money will have to be made available for defense spending later in the year from the reserve fund. But Daniels said that the President included a large enough increase for education in his regular budget request. Moreover, any attempt to tap the reserve fund, ostensibly set up for defense, to fund education programs will meet with opposition from some Republican conservatives in Congress. "I think the conservatives have always been concerned about diverting any money from national security," said an aide to the House Republican Study Committee, formerly known as the Conservative Action Team. "Going in and raiding defense will cause a lot of concern and angst among members." After all, "tapping the reserve fund" is really a nice way of saying that Congress--yet again--is busting the pie-in-the-sky spending limits set out in the annual budget resolution (albeit in a way sanctioned in the budget resolution) and spending part of the surplus. Conservatives concede that it would have been impossible to set a defense funding level in the budget resolution before the Rumsfeld request was submitted. But they have made clear that they oppose any further gimmickry. "We have a President who is not going to spend more than the budget resolution allows them to spend," DeLay has insisted. And a group of 35 Republican Senators recently sent Bush a letter calling for fiscal discipline. "We strongly encourage you to veto any appropriations bill containing imprudent increases in spending, or bills that rely on gimmicks to mask their true cost to the American taxpayer," the group wrote. Among the Democrats, there is certainly some sentiment that, if the surplus remains large enough for the reserve fund to be tapped, it would be a convenient way to settle end-of-year battles over the appropriations measures without touching the Social Security or Medicare trust funds. But other Democrats are warning that if the economy goes south, the entire reserve fund could disappear. Conrad has said in recent days that he believes that by the time the fall rolls around, and new CBO estimates are released, there may be no surplus money left for either defense or education. "I think we're in significant trouble in terms of raiding the [Medicare] trust fund," Conrad said in an interview. In May, the CBO estimated that the surplus available for the reserve fund in fiscal 2002 is $24 billion. But Conrad predicted that, with the slowing economy, the budget office this summer could decrease that estimate by as much as $20 billion. Rumsfeld asked for $18.4 billion in additional defense spending for next year. That means that the additional defense spending, and the $3 billion to $4 billion in education spending that many Democrats want, may not be possible without drawing from the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. Conrad insisted that he is not willing to tap those trust funds to pay for defense and education programs. "I'm not playing," he flatly declared. "I'm saying it early. I'm saying it often. I'm saying it plainly." If Conrad's scenario comes to pass, and there is little or no "reserve fund" to tap, an end-of-year spending deal becomes much more difficult. "The endgame is going to be a race between education dollars and defense dollars," said a House Republican leadership aide. "The only thing that's going to stop you from spending more is the Social Security trust fund. At the end of the day, it's going to be very expensive." Stuffed Pig Before Congress gets to that endgame, however, there are hundreds and hundreds of other spending decisions to make. Some involve front-burner national issues; others deal with the parochial interests of one lawmaker's home district or state. Any one of them could stop a spending bill dead in its tracks. In June, the House and Senate Appropriations Committees divvied up the overall pot of $661 billion in fiscal 2002 discretionary money in slightly different ways among their 13 subcommittees. For instance, the Senate Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee was allocated $25.1 billion to write its spending bill; the House Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee got $23.7 billion. In most cases, the differences in allocations between the House and Senate subcommittees is less than $1 billion. But just because the House and Senate committees penciled in similar overall dollar amounts for the 13 appropriations bills doesn't mean there won't be fights over how those dollars are spent. As Obey put it: "The allocations won't be a problem. That doesn't mean they will be good bills." Many of the same old perennial partisan battles can be expected to play out this year as Congress debates the 13 spending bills. For instance, Democrats are likely to try to increase funding for federally financed family-planning clinics, something conservative Republicans will try to block. Democrats are also likely to bring the battle over funding for the arts and humanities to the floor. And Democrats are likely to continue to push for more money to help Californians and other Westerners cope with high energy prices. The fights won't all be Democrats versus Republicans, however. House and Senate Republicans are not in perfect agreement with the Bush administration on federal spending. In fact, in the very first appropriations markup of the year, the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee restored funding for energy research that Bush had wanted to cut as part of the Interior appropriations bill. Intraparty fights also loom over any attempt to designate additional spending as "emergency," and thus exempt from the budget resolution's spending caps. Republican leaders have used this gimmick in past years, over the strong objections of some GOP fiscal conservatives. Of course, not all of the fights will involve money. Time and again, appropriations bills become controversial because lawmakers use them as a vehicle to try to set federal policy-by attaching legislative riders dealing with everything from abortion, to gun control, to the environment, to international relations. House Democrats are closely watching the Treasury, Postal Service, and General Government Appropriations Subcommittee, where conservative Rep. Ernest J. Istook Jr., R-Okla., has taken over as chairman. During the previous Congress, when Istook chaired the District of Columbia Appropriations Subcommittee, he used his perch to push a string of ideological riders. Traditionally, the Treasury-Postal Service spending bill that Istook now oversees serves as a battleground over the issue of whether health insurance plans for federal employees should cover the cost of contraceptives. Democrats are also watching to see whether Republicans will try to add a rider to a spending bill to codify the White House's highly controversial proposal to allow drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Bush included the authority to drill in his budget request, but the House and Senate ducked the issue this spring by not including it in the budget resolution. The Clinton administration successfully insisted that many of the riders that congressional Republicans added to appropriations bills be stripped out. And interestingly, OMB's Daniels said that the Bush administration is continuing the Clinton policy of encouraging "clean" appropriations bills free of policy initiatives. "I think the Clinton people had a good idea," he said. That clearly will please House Republican moderates, who in past years have been pressured by the GOP leadership to support appropriations bills containing conservative riders that they opposed. "We're going to be far less inclined to do that," contended Rep. James Greenwood, R-Pa., a key moderate. "We're going to dig our heels in." Meanwhile, the Bush administration faces a decidedly uphill battle in trying to cut back on the number of earmarks for lawmakers' home-state pork projects in the spending bills. Earlier this year, OMB identified some $16 billion in earmarks for members of Congress in the fiscal 2001 budget, and proposed cutting approximately $8 billion of them. But lawmakers love earmarks because they allow them to claim credit at local ribbon-cutting ceremonies for bringing home the federal dough to pay for roads, bridges, community centers, and the like. Daniels says he realizes the enormity of what the administration is asking. "We do think this trend ought to be reined in, but we're realistic," he said. "To the extent that this is a lubricant to the [legislative] process or a bipartisan process, we realize that a lot of it will go on." Already, Congress has made clear that the administration should mind its own business when it comes to pork projects. Take this hands-off language that the House Appropriations Committee included in its report on the Interior appropriations bill: "When congressional instructions are provided, the committee expects these instructions to be closely monitored and followed. In the future, the committee directs that earmarks for congressional funding priorities be first allocated to the receiving units, and then all remaining funds should be allocated to the field based on established procedures." In other words, fund our earmarked projects first--and use any money left over for other priorities. And when Senate Appropriations Committee ranking member Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, an acknowledged pork master, was asked what he is doing about Bush administration attempts to cut pork, he responded curtly: "I'm saying, `Thank you very much. I'll do what I can.' " To make its point that pork must be pared back, the House Appropriations Committee has sitting on a table in its office a small, pink stuffed pig that walks--and oinks--when wound up. "He's currently reviewing all of the projects," quipped Staff Director Dyer. "That pig has to go public. It takes some of the heat off the committee." ]]>