Filling in the blank spaces from the August debt accords, Congress approved a far-reaching $1 trillion-plus budget bill Saturday morning that sets a new template for government spending through the 2012 elections ? and very well beyond.
Final passage came on a 67-32 Senate roll call which followed on a strong 296-121 bipartisan vote in the House Friday afternoon.
Continue ReadingThe action caps a year of remarkable turmoil in which the Republican-controlled House seemed forever the aggressor?and President Barack Obama one step behind. Very little real deficit reduction has emerged from all the bloodshed, but the bill now is an exception and testifies to a fragile political center that has begun to reassert itself and demand some level of order.
Filling over 1200 pages, the appropriations giant is remarkable for its reach ? touching thousands of accounts from Pakistan counterinsurgency aid to Pell Grants for low-income American college students. Ten Cabinet departments and the Environmental Protection Agency share in the core appropriations of about $917 billion and an additional $126.5 billion is provided in overseas contingency funds, chiefly for U.S. military operations in Afghanistan.
Overshadowed by the payroll tax fight ? and largely dismissed in the press as another anonymous ?year-end spending bill? ? the measure may be seen with time as a real turning point. Certainly for the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, enactment of the bill became crucial if they were ever again to be a force in the budget debate.
To reach this goal, the House committee chairman, Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) had to face down hostile tea party Republicans, who often seemed more intent on sinking the ?aircraft carrier? of government than steering it. At the same time Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) and his staff became crucial intermediaries between the House GOP and an angry, often distant Obama.
The end product is a real cut of about 10 percent from non-defense appropriations when compared to last January when the GOP took over the House. Allowing for inflation, domestic appropriations will have been rolled back to the level set in another pre-Christmas deal in 2007 at the end of the Bush administration.
Indeed, after the burst of bold spending at the beginning of his first year, Obama will now be leading a government that is very much retrenching. In a matter of months the president will submit his new budget plan for 2013. But the August accords allow him only a minimal increase in appropriations and the bill now defines the new reality facing the president ? a plateau stretching into the future with annual growth pegged below the rate of inflation.
After steady expansion under Bush and Obama, the Homeland Security Department faces persistent real cuts, for example. And just to keep up with commitments for frontline agencies like the Secret Service and Border Patrol, the bill now imposes a $1 billion or 30 percent reduction affecting the ability of state and local first responders to buy necessary equipment.
The Internal Revenue Service will be cut $305 million below current funding ? a $1.5 billion reduction from Obama?s request. The self-financed Securities and Exchange Commission emerges with a $136 million increase, but the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is largely frozen in place and Obama still faces an uphill battle to get the money he needs to implement Wall Street reforms.
Most sensitive for any Democratic president is the labor, health and education title of the bill. There, spending will come down by $1.4 billion from the 2011 program level, forcing a series of difficult choices that won?t go away after one year.
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