A new front opened up last week on the budget enforcement wars in the House as Georgia Republican Tom Price tried to expand budget pay-as-you-go rules to a new venue — authorization bills.

Price offered floor amendments that would have required offsets for authorizations included in two bills. The two targeted bills authorize funding for the construction of wastewater treatment facilities, which the White House opposed because it said proposed funding levels were “unrealistic in the current fiscal environment.”

Democrats objected to the amendments as unnecessary since authorization measures don’t on their own result in any spending. In managing the first bill, Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman Oberstar said House pay-as-you-go rules apply only to increases in mandatory spending and that CBO reviewed the bill and found no such impact. Other Democrats noted the authorization and appropriations process is subject to its own spending controls. Democratic leaders urged their members to vote NO, calling Price’s amendments a “poison pill” that would “kill” authorizations.

Price countered that Democrats had campaigned last year on imposing greater budget discipline, arguing that “so much of the spending that we do here in Washington doesn’t come under this umbrella of PAYGO that has been adopted by the House.” The new House Democratic majority this year adopted the rules that require offsets for either tax cuts or mandatory spending increases — but Republicans dislike the rules because they say they will make it more difficult to extend Bush’s tax cuts. In an e-mail to Budget Tracker last week, Price said, “PAYGO on both authorizing and appropriating legislation is clearly the most effective and responsible method for gaining control of Washington spending.”

Pay-as-you-go rules have never applied to simple authorizations, and in fact were was first created partly because discretionary and mandatory spending had been lumped together under a prior budget enforcement mechanism, Jim Horney of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities told Budget Tracker. Horney, who has worked for GAO, CBO and Senate Budget, said the rules were created because under the old Gramm-Rudman system (where across-the-board cuts could be triggered if annual deficit targets were missed), discretionary spending would get punished just because the economy didn’t fare well — despite the fact appropriators had stayed within their limits.

“At the heart of the 1990 act [creating PAYGO] was the concept of ‘let’s assign responsibilities to committees for what they actually control,’” Horney explained. He said that was why the rules were specifically targeted to taxes and mandatory spending — but not discretionary spending. He added, “The idea of trying to extend the PAYGO rule to somehow cover appropriations, I don’t think, makes much sense.”

Although both amendments were handily rejected last week by largely party line votes, Price said he will offer them to other authorization bills “whenever the Democrats fail to demonstrate fiscal responsibility.” He added, “These amendments hold them accountable. Democrats who oppose the PAYGO amendments are hiding behind congressional doublespeak. Spending starts at the authorization level.”