Good Senate NSF, NASA Funding Bill
While Hurricane Floyd was moving up the east coast yesterday, the full Senate Appropriations Committee approved an FY 2000 funding bill for NASA and NSF that was quite favorable. Working from a bill presented the day before by Senator Christopher Bond (R-MO) and Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), the Senate version of H.R. 2684, the VA, HUD, Independent Agencies Appropriations Bill, provides the administration’s request for the National Science Foundation and NASA.
This bill is far from complete. The House and Senate bills are out- of-sync, and an all-important conference committee must now produce a final version of the bill. Crucial to this final bill is agreement on the amount of money conferees have to spend. This will depend, of course, on what agreement the Clinton White House and congressional leaders reach about the spending caps. A report in today’s issue of the Washington Post indicates that more Members of Congress accept modifications of the caps.
The Senate recommendations for NSF and NASA are, for the most part, quite positive (final numbers and report language will be provided in a future FYI as they become available.) All of the following numbers are approximate:
NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION:
Total budget: The Senate provided the request; the House provided $275 million less than the request.
Research and Related Activities: The Senate provided $3 million above the request; the House provided $226 million less than the request.
Major Research Equipment: The Senate provided $15 million less than the request; the House $29 million less than the request.
Education and Human Resources: The Senate provided $11 million above the request; the House provided $51 million less than the request.
NASA:
Total budget: The Senate provided the request; the House provided $925 million less than the request.
Space Science: The Senate provided $125 million less than the request; the House provided $241 million less than the request. (Earth Science figure not yet available.)
Space Station: The Senate provided the full request; the House $100 million less.
It cannot be overestimated how important the conference committee will be in this process these committees are sometimes called the third house of Congress. Leading the committee will be Bond and Mikulski for the Senate, and James Walsh (R-NY) and Allan Mollohan (D-WV) for the House. They and their fellow appropriators must craft a bill that will pass both the House and Senate on a final up-or-down vote, and which will be accepted by the President. A White House official called the Senate bill a “great improvement” over the House bill, but said the administration still has problems with the HUD numbers.
Although it is impossible to say with complete certainty how House appropriators regard NSF and NASA, it seems safe to surmise that their lower figures were driven by an overall lower budget, and not because they placed a lesser priority on R&D. Walsh and Mollohan said good things about both agencies in committee hearings and on the House floor.
Many times conferees “split-the-difference” when arriving at the final figures in an appropriations bill. That may be less true this year, since the House and Senate started with different overall allocations. How the House-Senate conferees write this final bill will heavily depend on how much money they have to spend on the entire bill, and that is a number determined behind closed doors. The new fiscal year begins in 13 days.
