Hopes that eleven deadlocked FY 2003 appropriations bills might
be passed by a post-election Congress evaporated last week with
the decision to fund government programs until January 11, 2003.
Under this plan, a new Congress will take up the remaining bills
when it reconvenes, intending to clear this legislation before
President Bush sends his FY 2004 budget request to the Capitol.
The House of Representatives has essentially gone home until
January, and the Senate is expected to do so within the next few
days. Before leaving, the House passed a continuing resolution
providing funding at FY 2002 levels into January. Senate
Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Byrd (D-West Virginia)
had hoped to pass at least a few of the less controversial bills,
but the House's action forced Byrd's hand.
When the Senate returns, Byrd will no longer be chairman of the
appropriations committee, with that position being passed to
Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska). Although it might be expected
that Stevens' accession to the chairmanship would significantly
smooth the appropriations process - for both the current year and
next year - that may not be necessarily true. Stevens has had
some well-publicized clashes with the director of the Office of
Management and Budget, with Stevens at one time saying that
Director Mitchell Daniels could best defuse a spending conflict
by going home to Indiana. Daniels declined to do so, and will be
pressing Stevens and the other appropriators in the next two
months to adhere to President Bush's spending target for the FY
2003 bills.
This logjam will only be broken when the White House and the
congressional leadership agree on the spending target. Byrd and
Stevens were able to get all thirteen appropriations bills passed
on the Senate floor earlier this year, but only because they
"spent" about $13 billion more than the President had proposed.
When the House tried to pass these bills using the President's
number, the process deadlocked when it reached the very expensive
Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education appropriations
bill.
The plan is for the leadership and staff of the appropriations
committees and the White House to produce a spending agreement in
the next 55 days that Congress will vote on when it returns. The
thinking is that the end result may be in the form of one or two
massive omnibus appropriations bills that will take the remaining
eleven bills and bundle them into one giant package (defense and
military construction have been passed.) All parties will be
trying to clear the decks before the Administration sends its
next budget request to Congress, touching off another difficult
year in the appropriations cycle. Complicating the resolution of
this conflict will be fiscal conservatives wanting to hold the
line on spending, with other Members seeing the omnibus bill as
the last chance in the current fiscal year to increase spending
on favorite programs or projects.
Until this legislation is resolved, federal program managers will
be operating under last year's spending rate, trying to make
coherent plans for the rest of the year with an uncertain budget.
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