Mission Impossible
Later this week, the House and Senate will assign appropriators what amounts to a mission impossible: find a way in FY 2000 to fund current programs, give $13 billion more to defense and education, and spend $10-25 billion less than this year.
This assignment will come in the form of a final Budget Resolution, which is a spending blueprint that charts how much money will come in and how it will go out. There will be much talk that this plan remains within the spending limits, or caps, that were set down in a 1997 budget deal. There will be much talk about saving Social Security, preserving Medicare, and tax cuts. There will not be much talk about how this plan proposes to make cuts in the budget category funding the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy general science programs, and NASA -- proposing to spend (under the Senate plan) less in 2009 than what is being spent in 1999. States Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-Connecticut), “the small and declining accounts in research and development are a direct prescription for long term economic decline.”
The House and Senate appropriations subcommittee chairs warn that this year is going to be impossible. Said Senate Appropriations Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), hardly a liberal when it comes to spending, “I don’t think we can live under these caps.” Senate Transportation Appropriations Chairman Richard Shelby (R- Alabama) calculates he will have about $2.2 billion less that what the White House wanted to spend. Democrats predict he will have to zero out Amtrak, terminate the 8,500 member Coast Guard Reserve, cut the Coast Guard and FAA budgets by 11%, and stop the modernization of air traffic computer systems. House Energy Appropriations Chairman Ron Packard (R-California) warns that new dams, environmental restoration projects, and purchase of foreign weapons-grade plutonium to keep it out of the wrong hands are at risk. He did not say anything about DOE’s science programs.
The Senate Budget Committee faults the Administration, stating, ”...the President’s budget could not deliver those funding levels because the sum total of the President’s proposed levels would not be possible under current law. If enacted exactly as proposed in the appropriation bills, the President’s appropriation levels would require sequesters [automatic reductions] across the board to reduce them to the cap levels by nearly 8 percent. The [Senate] resolution hews to the caps without changing current budget rules, and because of this, necessarily but misleading appears to be less than the President’s levels on a functional basis.”
There is no one in Washington who believes that these funding caps are viable. But there is no rush on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue to admit that the math does not add up. Both sides are waiting for the other to call for adjustments to the caps, so that political points can be made. All are hoping that the economy will provide ever higher budget surpluses than were first projected to provide a rationale later this year for cap breaking. Meanwhile, appropriations bills have to be written, and under the caps, floor passage of these bills will be problematic and avoiding vetoes will be insurmountable. It is truly going to be a mission impossible, and unlike the old television show, it probably will not be very inspiring.
