Sausage-Making

It is an old saying that no one should watch sausage or legislation being made. Given the way that the FY 2000 appropriations process has been conducted, this saying is an insult to sausage makers.

Congress and the Administration were full of self-congratulations when they passed the 1997 budget deal, proclaiming that the tight budget caps - conveniently scheduled to really take effect in later years - would solve the problem of the budget deficit. As if by legislative magic, government programs were to become less expensive in the future.

Everyone knows the caps are not viable. Instead of admitting that the magic did not and will not work, leaders in both Congress and the Administration cling to the rhetoric that the budget caps are to remain unbroken.

It is time to look beyond this charade. The amount that the government will spend in FY 2000 is larger than the 1997 deal allows. The Senate skirted this law by calling $7.4 billion in farm aid “emergency spending,” although it seems that almost every year some area of the farm economy suffers an emergency. The House leadership danced around the caps by agreeing that $4.5 billion needed to conduct the 2000 census should also be classified as emergency spending, notwithstanding the Constitutional requirement that a census be conducted every ten years. Taken together, these two items consume almost the entire budget surplus that is separate from Social Security.

Worse yet, in order to say that they passed twelve appropriations bills before leaving for vacation, the House leadership continually raided the money that had been set aside for the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education appropriations bill. The amount of money left for next year’s bill, which is not yet out of committee, is now $15 billion less than this year. Says one Republican moderate, “At this juncture, I don’t think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that [the] Labor-H [bill] will pass.”

All of this could be seen as just another political game if its impact had not been so serious on many science and technology budgets. Even after a last minute move to restore some NASA space science funding, the House voted to slash FY 2000 funding by 7.4% below this year. NASA’s Earth Science programs would be cut 16.9% from current levels. The overall National Science Foundation budget was cut (albeit slightly) by the House. The Advanced Technology Program was killed by the House.

Congress returns to work on September 8. The new fiscal year begins on October 1.

The conventional wisdom is that the public has no interest in what is going on in Washington.