WASHINGTON – Liberals looking to Democrats for big spending increases in the new Congress – in education programs such as Head Start, for example – will come away disappointed with some of the choices being made in dividing up money for the rest of this year.
They will find an essentially tightfisted Republican-tilting bill coming from the Democrats who now are running Congress and picking up the pieces of what the GOP left undone in 2006.
Military veterans will be OK, as will health researchers, the FBI and food inspectors. But there will be many losers, including President Bush, as a $463 billion-or-so catchall spending bill advances through the House and Senate over the next three weeks.
Bush’s “competitiveness initiative” boosting basic research and improving training and recruitment of math and science teachers won’t fare as well as he’d like. Pentagon requests for implementing a 2005 round of military base closings are likely to get short shrift.
The bill wraps together the budgets through September for 13 Cabinet agencies. All of the budgeting work was supposed to have been completed months ago, but Republicans didn’t want to make some of the tough choices before the election and made no serious effort to complete the work after it.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey would have preferred boosting spending by $13 billion on education, health care and science programs – but doesn’t have the money.
Instead, most federal accounts will be frozen at 2006 levels. There are, however, scores of exceptions for agencies and programs that simply must have increases to avoid imposing furloughs and hiring freezes, or cutting critical services such as housing assistance for more than 200,000 poor people.
Lobbying has been furious, with lawmakers, agencies, interest groups and even the rock star Bono weighing in. Pressing for a $1 billion boost to fight AIDS, malaria and poverty in Africa, Bono wrestled with Obey in a meeting last month – with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., looking on – only to emerge without a commitment.
“This isn’t over,” Bono said in a statement issued after the meeting.
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