New Senate panel to seek out budget savings

Mindful that Senators are feeling the squeeze created by the fiscal 2000 discretionary spending cap, the Senate Appropriations Committee, in consultation with the Republican leadership, Tuesday created a new subcommittee to locate potential budget savings and direct these funds toward the domestic accounts slated to be cut under the 302(B) subcommittee allocation numbers adopted Tuesday.

At Tuesday's full committee markup of the FY2000 Defense bill, Appropriations Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, announced that he, ranking member Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., and Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Thad Cochran, R-Miss., would constitute what Stevens dubbed the "Deficiencies Subcommittee."

That panel will be responsible for reallocating any savings or offsets under the cap into subcommittees responsible for non- defense discretionary programs.

But Stevens was under no illusion that reallocating some money to domestic accounts will solve the larger problem of how to pass appropriations bills with the statutory cap.

The savings identified to date, he told reporters, do not "solve it all. It solves a portion of it."

Byrd was more pessimistic, saying the "challenges before us are greater than I recall ever being faced with before ... in my 47 years" in Congress.

Byrd predicted, "It will be extremely difficult if not impossible for us to pass bills at these levels of funding." He added, "I believe it is imperative that the spending levels ... should be increased, the caps should be increased."

At the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee markup Monday, Stevens added language to the bill to accelerate into FY2000 broadcast spectrum sales requested by the administration; the $2.6 billion in anticipated FY2000 revenues from the sales already have been included in the 302(B) allocations the full committee adopted Tuesday.

Those allocations project significant cuts to the Labor-HHS and VA-HUD subcommittee spending levels, with Labor-HHS taking an $8.4 billion hit and VA-HUD losing nearly $10 billion.

Stevens also said he and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete Domenici, R-N.M., who also chairs the Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee, identified $3.1 billion in FY2000 defense savings available to relieve some of the pressure on domestic spending.

But that sum, of which $200 million is unspent money for Bosnia peace-keeping operations from the FY99 omnibus bill and $2.9 billion is advance FY2000 appropriations included in the FY99 defense supplemental, will be held by the Deficiencies Subcommittee until the leaders decide how to re-allocate it.

Also Tuesday, the committee fulfilled its obligation by voting out the steel industry and oil and gas industry loan guarantee programs that Byrd and Domenici, respectively, sought to create in the emergency defense supplemental.