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CQ NEWS – APPROPRIATIONS
Sept. 13, 2012 – 8:36 p.m.

Lawmakers Look to Lame-Duck Session With Hopes for Spending Bills

By Kerry Young, CQ Staff

Even before the House passed its much-derided but must-pass stopgap funding bill Thursday, the opening shots were under way to pressure Congress into finishing fiscal 2013 appropriations during the lame-duck session.

The fiscal 2013 continuing resolution (H J Res 117), passed 329-91, is meant to keep the federal government running Oct. 1 through March 27, 2013. The Senate is expected next week to clear the measure, which congressional leaders and the White House negotiated in advance. Under an agreement reached by leaders Thursday, the Senate is expected to hold a cloture vote on the motion to proceed to the measure Sept. 19.

About three dozen exceptions, or anomalies, were included in the CR to address some pressing needs, such as advancing weather satellites and fighting wildfires. But appropriators say this limited number of special measures doesn’t scratch the surface of the changes that need to be made in the fiscal 2012 appropriations law (PL 112-55, PL 112-74), which is being extended to cover half of the next budget year.

Even the Pentagon, which enjoys great favor with conservative Republicans, faces limits on its operations through the CR, said Norm Dicks of Washington, the ranking Democrat on both the House Appropriations Committee and its Defense Department (DoD) panel.

“The CR is stringent on defense,” Dicks said. “DoD requested limited authority for new starts and changes in production and procurement rates. Those requests were denied.”

Drafting a fairly “clean” CR may have served several purposes for the appropriators, however.

First, many House conservatives had said they would support a fiscal 2013 CR at the $1.047 trillion level set in last year’s debt-limit law (PL 112-25), which represents an increase of less than 1 percent over the current level of funding, so they could delay final spending decisions into next year, when they hope to control the White House.

In exchange, they demanded the measure not be used as a vehicle for many unrelated measures, a common practice with such funding measures.

A “Christmas tree” CR, laden with many extra provisions, may have had a tough time passing the House. A clean CR also may help appropriators get the final fiscal 2013 spending decisions made earlier than the conservatives want to see them done.

A spare CR also may bolster appropriators in their bid to do exactly what some conservatives fear — finish a fiscal 2013 bill after the November election. Appropriators and defense authorizers inserted only a handful of extensions of expiring Pentagon authorizations into the CR. That will maintain the pressure to complete work on the fiscal 2013 defense authorization (S 3254, HR 4310).

If lawmakers want to adjust budgets to reflect current needs, Congress must finish the spending bills soon, appropriators say.

“We intend to use the lame-duck session to the fullest extent. Just because this CR will last until March 27 of next year, we will not rest on our laurels until that time,” said House Appropriations Chairman Harold Rogers, R-Ky. “We will do as much as we can to allow ample time to complete that essential work.”

No Direction Given

Lawmakers Look to Lame-Duck Session With Hopes for Spending Bills

Appropriators also likely will remind colleagues that the CR provides only broad guidance on spending, while spending bills often carry suggestions and sometimes very specific directions for agencies to improve their operations.

In the Senate on Thursday, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, noted a six-month CR leaves agencies “without any real oversight or thought as to how that money would be spent.”

On the House floor Thursday, Peter J. Visclosky of Indiana, the ranking Democrat on the House Energy-Water Appropriations Subcommittee, cited the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which oversees the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile, as a case in point.

“The agency is plagued by dramatic cost increases on nearly every major cast under its jurisdiction,” Visclosky said. “The poster child of this inability to accurately estimate cost is a life extension program for the B61 bomb, the price which has gone from $4 billion to $10 billion.”

The House’s fiscal 2013 Energy-Water Appropriations bill (HR 5325) included a report (H Rept 112-462) that would have told the NNSA to report within 60 days on the total amount spent for development and experimental activity associated with the full option for the B61 life extension program. Under a CR, the agency will not get this order from Congress.

C.W. Bill Young, R-Fla., the chairman of the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee, said that he had provided funds in his fiscal 2013 Pentagon funding bill (HR 5856) for modernizing three cruisers that were scheduled to be retired. His bill also would have provided funding toward work on a Virginia class submarine in fiscal 2014 and a DDG-51 destroyer. None of this can proceed under the CR. “We are trying to persuade members of the Senate to go to their leaders and say ‘Let us do the defense bill,’” he said.

That was why even the lopsided vote for the stopgap funding bill prompted little in the way of congratulations on the House floor.

“The CR, some say, at least lets us keep the government open,” said David E. Price of North Carolina, the ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee. “But merely averting a shutdown is hardly an achievement.”

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