Congress confronts year-end budget decisions

[December 07, 2010]  WASHINGTON (AP) -- Democrats controlling the House are proposing to freeze the Pentagon's budget in a massive $1 trillion-plus measure that would wrap most of Congress' unfinished budget business into a single catchall spending bill.

The draft document, by House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., would deny the Pentagon the $23 billion budget increase requested by President Barack Obama in February, making exceptions in only a number of cases, such as for the Pentagon's Tricare health care program.

Most other agencies would also face budget freezes at current level.

The House is expected to pass the measure as early as this week -- over Republican protests that it still spends too much money. It combines the annual operating budgets for every federal department or agency since not a single one of the 12 annual spending bills has passed Congress in an unprecedented collapse of the federal budget process.

There are numerous exceptions to the freeze, such as additional funding to maintain the maximum Pell Grant for low-income college students and for veterans accounts. The freeze in personnel accounts could be seen as a de facto endorsement of the federal worker pay freeze announced by Obama last week.

It also contains $624 million to implement the new nuclear weapons treaty with Russia, known as START, that's pending before the Senate.

In the Senate, Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, backed by Democratic leaders, has fashioned a $1.1 trillion "omnibus" spending measure that he wants to substitute for the measure being drafted by Obey in the House. It's likely to contain thousand of senators' pet projects, known as earmarks, such as road projects and mass transit grants, clean water plants and community development projects, among many examples.

Republicans in both the House and the Senate have promised to give up earmarks, though the Senate pledge applies only to the next couple of years -- and not to the current budget cycle.

Such omnibus measures have been a routine but oft-criticized way for Congress to wrap up its unfinished work. Only two spending bills have passed the House -- the other 10 have not been made public -- and not a single one has passed the Senate.

Inouye's bill is at spending levels endorsed by the Republicans on the Senate Appropriations Committee -- including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky -- and the old-school chairman has been working on the measure for weeks, even after McConnell came out in opposition to the idea. But Inouye has been working with a handful of old-school Republicans like Thad Cochran of Mississippi in hopes of getting enough votes to defeat a GOP filibuster.

Enactment of either bill is opposed by Republicans set to take over the House, who want a short-term measure to punt the unfinished budget business into next year, when they would have more leverage in battles with Obama over spending cuts. But Senate GOP leaders are amenable to a full-year, earmark-free funding measure along the lines proposed by House Democrats.

[Associated Press; By ANDREW TAYLOR]

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