Spending Caps and Politics
Neither the arithmetic nor the politics make much sense as Congress and the Administration begin the nine-month process leading up to the start of Fiscal Year 2000. A year ago, there was considerable unease - later reversed - about science and technology budgets for this fiscal year. It is even more difficult to predict the outlook for next year’s S&T budgets.
Congress and the Administration wrote a budget law in 1997 that is proving to be impossible to follow. Congress was unable last year - for the first time since the mid 1970s - to adopt an overall taxing and spending blueprint. That helped to set the stage for disagreements about tax cuts, surplus disposition, and the fate of Social Security, forcing an end-of-year 1,000+ page, $500 billion+ appropriations bill larded with pork. The mandated, and many would say, unrealistic, spending caps were overridden by leaders on both sides of the aisle and on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue by categorizing some over-the-top spending as emergency expenditures and through creative accounting. No one really has a handle on the budgetary implications of that bill on spending for the next fiscal year.
That same balanced budget law requires the Administration and Congress to keep FY 2000 spending more-or-less flat (some observers saying a small increase would be allowed, with others claiming a cut is required.) So far, no one has identified another tobacco settlement-like pot of money to ease the caps. Impeachment politics, intra party politics, and presidential politics are putting additional strains on everything Congress does this year.
A combination of forces led to research funding being favored last year by both the Administration and Congress. Whether that will be true again is a big question. A White House document issued last week praising the $76 billion surplus for 1999 said, “as spending has been cut in lower priority areas, President Clinton has dramatically increased funding in critical areas, such as . . . research and development.” In remarks that day, Clinton said, “while there are many needs out there in this country -- there’s still investment needs in education, investment needs in research . . . first we must save Social Security for the 21st century, before we consider new spending or other tax cuts.” The White House has not released information about any S&T initiative, as it has done for increased requests for low-income and disabled workers, a $12 billion boost for military readiness, prisoner drug testing and treatment, food safety and infectious diseases. These initiatives, all commendable, will have to be paid for under that flat budget cap, and the White House is not saying how it plans to do so.
Clinton did declare “we’ll have to figure out how to make the numbers add up, how to stay within our commitment to fiscal discipline, how to be as clever as we can in the use of our resources without going over the line and being so clever we endanger the fiscal responsibility the low rates, the economic success that has brought us to this point.”
The combination of new spending plans and old spending caps, politics, and a Senate trial will make this an interesting year. On Capitol Hill, new House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) told his colleagues, “we have an obligation to pass all the appropriations bills by this summer, and we will not leave this chamber until we do.”
