WASHINGTON — The drama continues for two widely popular proposals caught in the crossfire between the House and Senate.
The fights to protect AmeriCorps, the community service volunteer program, and to give the children of working poor families the same tax break that better-off Americans are getting have come down to power struggles across the Capitol.
In both instances, President Bush is — at least nominally — on the side of generosity, as befits a self-described "compassionate conservative." But there’s no sign he has put his muscle to work.
As part of the big tax cut the president signed into law several weeks ago, the tax credit for each child was increased from $600 to $1,000. Checks for the $400 difference are scheduled to go out this week.
A last-minute decision in the House-Senate conference on that bill eliminated the benefit for families making between $10,500 and $26,000 a year, saving the Treasury $3.5 billion. When a furor arose over the omission, the Senate quickly passed a measure restoring the benefit. The cost was offset by increases in some import duties.
But the House — whose Republican leaders initially opposed any remedial action — decided on a cute tactic: make the lower-income child credit a fraction of a new $82 billion, miscellaneous package of tax breaks. These would be financed by a further increase in the national debt.
Bush indicated he preferred the Senate version and wanted quick action on some kind of a bill. But more than a month later, nothing has happened, and efforts by Senate backers to move the process along have so far been futile. So at this point, the low-wage workers and their kids are left holding the bag.
The news is a little better for AmeriCorps, but it still faces severe damage. The program, which offers college scholarship money to those who volunteer to serve for a year in community organizations or schools — teaching, tutoring and helping in other ways with groups like Habitat for Humanity — has been praised by governors and mayors of both parties and business leaders who supplement the charity budgets. The president and Laura Bush are big fans, and he proposed early this year to expand its ranks from 50,000 to 75,000.
But bureaucratic accounting failures resulted in AmeriCorps overspending last year. Even after legislation was passed straightening out the accounting mess and Congress voted $22 million to make up for past errors, the program is facing major cutbacks. Last month, the agencies counting on AmeriCorps volunteers were told that many of them would receive token help — or none at all. Teach for America, a program that sends highly motivated college graduates into troubled schools, had 2,300 slots cut back to 575.
"It was a shock to us," director Wendy Kopp told me. "The president and the first lady say they love the program and have encouraged us to expand it, so we were ramping up to go to 3,300. Now we we have 1,800 in training and may have to tell two-thirds of them they have no place to teach."
Many in the volunteer world had hoped the president would back his praise for AmeriCorps by asking Congress this month for additional funds in a bill supplying emergency assistance to help several other agencies get through the final couple of months of the current fiscal year. He did not.
But the Senate, on a bipartisan 71-21 vote, recently added $100 million to the "supplemental" bill, enough to allow the hiring of an additional 20,000 volunteers.
The rescue effort may die in the House. The version of the supplemental bill scheduled to move on that side of the Capitol this week does not contain the $100 million for AmeriCorps. The chairman of the House appropriations subcommittee that handles the money, Rep. Jim Walsh of New York, has been a supporter of the program. But he balks at following the Senate lead, he told me, in part because the White House has not asked for the money and in part because he is not satisfied that agency officials have really repaired its fiscal management problems. "We should not be rewarding them for their failures," Walsh said.
Walsh is supporting a modest increase in AmeriCorps funding for next year, but by then, many of the programs that have lost current funding may be out of business.
The nation is paying a price for these House-Senate feuds — and for the president’s reluctance to resolve them.
David Broder can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200.
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