APPROPRIATIONS CEILINGS SET; SPENDING BILLS PUT ON FAST TRACK

June11,2003

Although it may take a Harvard MBA to sort out the accounting methods that were employed, GOP leaders and appropriations committee chairmen met with President Bush June 9, and agreed in principle to spending allocations for the 13 appropriations bills. The agreement effectively shifts approximately $5.2 billion more into the discretionary spending pot for fiscal year 2004, enabling appropriators to begin marking up the spending bills.

With a deal in hand, the House appropriations committee is expected to schedule subcommittee mark-ups, beginning the week of June 16. The Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill, usually one of the last to be marked up, is tentatively scheduled for subcommittee mark-up June 19.

Although Congress passed a budget framework, the so-called budget resolution, two months ago, appropriators were stalled in their tracks because of an unrealistically low cap on discretionary spending. Under congressional rules, the appropriations committees cannot begin marking up individual spending bills until the discretionary portion of the resolution?set at $784.7 billion for fiscal year 2004?is allocated among the 13 appropriations subcommittees. The difficulty was that the discretionary pot of money was $2.2 billion less than what President Bush proposed, and at least $5 billion less than what?s needed to meet the assumptions of the budget resolution.

For the past several days, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and the two appropriations committee chairmen, Rep. Bill Young and Senator Ted Stevens, had been working on a plan to remove the spending impasse. Once agreement was reached, the four sought to have it ratified by the president, in large part to head off criticism from GOP budget hawks.

In order to avoid a train wreck over spending, the deal calls for shifting $3 billion appropriated in the fiscal year 2003 wartime supplemental into the fiscal year 2004 column. In addition, GOP leaders re-allocated $2.2 billion in advance appropriations made earlier this year for FY2004, back to FY2003. Together, these two maneuvers would free up $5.2 billion that can be spread among the discretionary spending programs.

Whatever headroom this deal affords the appropriators, however, is probably still not enough to accommodate the wide range of demands for discretionary spending, from education to social services to medical research. And much still depends on exactly how this "new-found" money is allocated.

But if all goes according to plan, expect several appropriations bills to be marked up by the House before the July 4th recess.