Your Tax Dollars: Senate Scrambles to Spend Them by the End of the Fiscal Year

With just ten legislative weeks left before the end of the fiscal year, there are a lot of spending bills waiting to be passed, especially in the Senate.

According to Majority Leader Bill Frist’s office, Senators won’t start debating appropriations bills until the week of June 23 at the earliest. That means passing twelve spending measures in seven weeks.

The tight schedule may be a deliberate partisan strategy. When lawmakers have to move bills quickly, there is little time for amendments, which can weigh down or kill legislation. And President Bush doesn’t want a delay in the enactment of his budget, which includes a tight $843 billion cap on non-military discretionary spending.

What is an appropriations bill?

An appropriations bill allows money to be released from the Treasury in order to fund a public program. These bills typically begin in the House of Representatives and then move on to the Senate, where changes to the House version, which can be proposed in the Senate Appropriations Committee or on the Senate floor, are considered as Senate amendments. Funding for all kinds of programs - everything from highways and schools to health care and foreign aid - must pass through the appropriations process.

Annual appropriations are not required by the Constitution but it has been the custom since the First Congress to make appropriations for a single fiscal year. The fiscal year begins on October 1 of each calendar year.

What is discretionary spending?

Roughly 20 percent of the budget - known as non-defense discretionary spending - is up for review by Congress each year, and represents the primary target for cutbacks in spending. The rest of the budget - nearly 80 percent - goes to the military and homeland security or to entitlement programs, such as Medicare/Medicaid and veterans benefits, whose spending levels are set by law.

Bush’s budget for fiscal year (FY) 2006 restrains the growth of non-defense discretionary spending to 2.1 percent, which is lower than the 2.3 percent rate of annual inflation. This means that many programs will have less money to work with in FY 2006 than they did in FY 2005.

Some refer to the controlled growth as a spending cap, an $843 billion limit for programs without mandatory funding.

The House moves along

In contrast to the Senate, the House is on track to pass eleven spending bills in time for the Fourth of July recess. However, House Appropriations Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis (R- California) has saved the most controversial bills for last, including the Labor/Health and Human Services/Education (HHS) spending bill.

This year, $830 million will be cut from President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act, although the President requested an increase of almost $1 billion. Both the House and Senate are sure to have lively debates over the funding cut as they attempt to reconcile the spending cap with bipartisan requests for extra education money.

What happens if some spending measures are not passed?

If an appropriations bill is not passed, such as the HHS bill that funds No Child Left Behind, any related programs will still get funding. Typically, such programs will be funded through an omnibus spending bill, a catch-all measure that covers anything not funded before the close of the fiscal year.

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