By Nathan Hurst and Kerry Young, CQ Staff

House lawmakers this week will reach the halfway point in moving appropriations bills through the chamber, even as Senate leaders try to identify which spending bills they will try to move alongside the House efforts.

Senate Appropriations Chairman Daniel K. Inouye, D-Hawaii, said no decision has been made on which of his committee’s bills will move first. The Senate is facing a tight calendar, but a Democratic leadership aide said Monday that there still are plans to bring some fiscal 2013 spending bills to the floor next month.

Dan Coats of Indiana, the ranking Republican on the Senate Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, remains pessimistic about the chances that more than a couple of spending measures will reach the chamber’s floor this summer.

“I try to keep my expectations low because I don’t want to be too disappointed,” Coats said.

The House is showing no such uncertainty and is set to take up a Transportation-HUD appropriations bill (HR 5972) on Tuesday that will be its sixth spending measure of the year. The bill would make major program changes in the Transportation Department.

The spending plan would zero out the department’s popular TIGER grant program, which allows state and local officials to compete for transportation money to expedite projects, as well as high-speed rail, an early priority of the Obama administration that Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has been trying to keep alive via discretionary grants despite disapproval from many House Republicans.

Complicating the process has been the bill’s timing: The current extension of Transportation Department programs and taxing authority for the Highway Trust Fund (PL 112-102) is slated to expire on June 30, and conference committee negotiations on meshing a two-year, $109 billion measure (S 1813) with policy provisions House GOP leaders endorsed in an extension bill (HR 4348) are ongoing. Since 2005, Congress has extended its last major surface transportation bill (PL 109-59) nine times.

House appropriators also would eliminate the White House’s “Choice Neighborhoods” program, which seeks to establish socioeconomically diverse neighborhoods with affordable housing components.

The House GOP bill is a little more generous to the Community Development Block Grant program, proposing an increase to $3.3 billion.

Different Paces

If it can get through the Transportation-HUD measure, the House this week may start work on its seventh appropriations bill, Agriculture (HR 5973).

The House already has passed five fiscal 2013 spending bills: Commerce-Justice-Science (HR 5326), Energy-Water (HR 5325), Homeland Security (HR 5855), Legislative Branch (HR 5882) and Military Construction-VA (HR 5854). All of these measures drew some Democratic support, ranging from the 17 votes from the minority party for the Homeland Security bill, to which several partisan provisions were added on the House floor, to the 181 Democratic votes for the Military Construction-VA bill.

The White House has threatened to veto each of the bills, in part because the House is working from a level for overall discretionary spending that is $19 billion lower than the Senate’s $1.047 trillion level, which was agreed to in last year’s Budget Control Act (PL 112-25).