Boxed-In: Congressional Outlook on Appropriations Bills
Members of Congress are on recess, and probably few of them are looking forward to returning to work next week. Congress, especially the members of the House of Representatives, left Washington with their leadership uncertain how to proceed on next year’s must-pass appropriations bills. Congress and the Administration have boxed themselves in on how to do more with less money, and how they will get out of this box is anyone’s guess.
This would probably be of interest to only inside-the-beltway Washington observers except that it could have serious consequences on federal support of science. Assuming across-the- board cuts necessitated by low budget numbers, the Office of Science and Technology Policy calculates that the $24 billion request for civilian R&D (excluding NIH) in FY 2000 would be cut by more than 20%, or $5 billion.
What would this $5 billion cut mean to research and development? In the case of DOE, OSTP predicts the cut would necessitate the “closure of research facilities at universities and national laboratories. On-going projects, such as the Spallation Neutron Source, would be stopped.” OSTP calculates NSF “would not be able to fund approximately 1,600 of the roughly 3,200 projected new individual research grants and would not achieve its performance goal of having 30 percent of its competitive research grants going to new investigators. NSF might not be able to support 2,700 of the 22,000 projected graduate student fellowships and traineeships in science, mathematics, and engineering education.” More than half of the new Advanced Technology Program grants would be shelved, and NIST’s proposed Advanced Measurement Laboratory would be delayed indefinitely. NASA would be faced with terminating the International Space Station and the delay or termination of an unspecified number of Earth and Space Science missions. Or, the space station could be continued, with NASA making a 35 percent cut in its science and technology programs. The IT2, or Information Technology for the 21st Century Initiative, would not be funded.
What accounts for these low budget numbers? These figures were mandated by a 1997 budget law that many predicted would never work. Those critics were right. In attempting to convince a skeptical public that Congress and the Administration could shrink government spending, the president and congressional leaders agreed to unrealistic annual spending caps. The caps do not work. Congress and the Administration broke these caps last year under the guise of an exemption for emergency spending, and they broke these caps again two weeks ago with a $14.5 billion emergency supplemental bill (that included money for “emergencies” such as livestock assistance, aid for Alaskan crab fishermen, and a new dormitory for House pages.)
Why don’t Congress and the Administration change the budget caps? That answer is easy: politics. Both are convinced that the American people will turn away from the first side calling for a change in the caps. It would be portrayed by the other party as a raid on Social Security, not an unknown tactic.
How will this end? No one knows. A White House/congressional budget deal could be brokered, accounting gimmicks employed, or the leadership could attempt to push through separate bills. Passing individual bills is going to be very difficult, with the House leadership hammered from both sides. The leadership started this year’s budget cycle with a sure bet, the FY 2000 agriculture appropriations bill. This bill was taken off the floor when a determined band of fiscal conservatives, displeased about this year’s spending projections, offered more than 100 amendments to the bill. As difficult as it will be to deal with this group, the outlook is even worse for the passage by the full House of underfunded appropriations bills.
The AAAS calculates that the House VA/HUD/Independent Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee will have 8.4% less money next year as compared to this year. This bill funds the NSF and NASA, and the subcommittee’s chairman James Walsh (R-NY), predicts “It’s going to be impossible to pass a bill with that allocation.” The House Energy and Water Development subcommittee has 10.2% less. The House Commerce/Justice/State allocation, which funds NIST, is down a whopping 13.2%, despite deep and very real concerns about embassy security, terrorism, and espionage. The House defense subcommittee enjoyed the largest gain, of 4.6%. How much of that will go toward R&D is unknown.
No one who can change the budget cap forcing these low subcommittee allocations is doing anything about it. Office of Management and Budget Director Jack Lew has been quoted as saying that he will “insist that the GOP resist the temptation to raise the budget caps this year.” House Appropriations Committee Chairman C.W. Bill Young (R-FL) fired off a letter to Lew saying “I am greatly disturbed when the President’s highest ranking budget official makes remarks that ignore the unrealistic nature of the President’s own budget and that would simply incite partisan confrontation.” Yet a spokesman for House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-IL) claims “The spending caps are part of reality.”
Given this lack of reality and leadership, what is the outlook for these spending bills? Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) marked up his FY 2000 Energy and Water Development bill before the recess. He seems to be sending a message to his colleagues about his allocation, since his bill is very hard on cherished water development projects. Other tactics include passing the easy bills first (although the House experience on the agriculture bill suggests there are no easy bills), and delaying action on big bills like the VA/HUD appropriations until late in the session. Most likely, the start of the new fiscal year on October 1 will roll around, with many appropriations bills incomplete. Then, like last year, all of these unpassed bills will be rolled together into a massive package that will be written by a few people, and read by practically no one.
House Speaker Hastert has sworn this will not happen again. He also told his colleagues on January 6, “We have an obligation to pass all the appropriations bills by this summer. We will not leave this chamber until we do so.”
The House is scheduled to go on its summer vacation on August 9.
