DEPARTMENTS OF VETERANS AFFAIRS AND HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT, AND INDEPENDENT AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS BILL, 2000

ADDITIONAL VIEWS

If presented to the President in its current form, the fiscal year 2000 VA-HUD appropriations bill would surely and deservedly be vetoed.

The bill appears to be little more than a crass political statement designed to allow the House majority leadership to say they have passed 12 of the 13 annual appropriations bills by the start of the August break--when, in fact, they have accomplished far less than those numbers would indicate.

 What the action on this bill demonstrates more than anything else is that the Republican majority in the House of Representatives still has no coherent strategy that will result in successful completion of the appropriations process by October 1st, or by anytime near that date. There are many shortcomings in this bill, but the damage is not limited just to the VA-HUD bill. To try to garner support for House consideration, the section 302(b) allocation for the VA-HUD-Independent Agencies Subcommittee was increased last week by more than $3 billion in budget authority. That increase came at the expense of the Labor-Health and Human Services-Education Subcommittee, the allocation for which now is $16 billion (or nearly 20 percent) below the enacted level. Apparently the majority believes that dropping any pretense to the facade that there was a chance to move the Labor-HHS bill is preferable to deeming $5.5 billion in the VA-HUD bill as `emergency spending', as the subcommittee had originally recommended.

 Even after the improvements made possible by the raid on the Labor-HHS-Education Subcommittee, however, there are many problems remaining in the VA-HUD bill.

The basic problem is that the VA-HUD subcommittee was required by the majority leadership to comply with a total funding level that is seriously inadequate to meet the needs this bill is supposed to cover. Overall, leaving aside the various one-time rescissions and offsets used to hold down the apparent spending levels, total appropriations under this bill are about $3.2 billion below the actual 1999 level. They are even further below the levels that would be needed to keep up with inflation and rising program costs.

The VA-HUD appropriations bill funds agencies and programs with missions of great importance to the American public--meeting our responsibilities to war veterans, providing relief and promoting recovery after natural disasters, protecting the environment, helping to meet housing needs, and undertaking basic and applied scientific research. Yet somehow the Republican leadership has decided that the appropriate funding level for this bill is $3.2 billion less than would be needed just to maintain the 1999 dollar level.

These cuts are particularly incomprehensible because they come not at a time of fiscal crisis but rather a time of unprecedented prosperity, when the federal budget is in the best shape in decades. The federal budget deficit has declined steadily every year since 1992, and last year it turned into a surplus for the first time in three decades. Every projection shows that surplus continuing to grow. Just a couple of weeks ago, the Majority Leader declared that the federal government is `wallowing in surplus'. The majority is so convinced that massive budget surpluses are assured that they are insisting on an $800 billion tax cut.

But despite all this prosperity and plenty, the Republican leadership has evidently decreed that we cannot even spend the same amount as last year on housing assistance for low-income elderly people and families with children, or on research funded by NASA and the NSF, or on community service by our youth, or financial support for building businesses in impoverished urban and rural communities. If we can't adequately meet these needs during the current period of prosperity and surplus, when will we ever be able to do so? …

NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION

One of the most insidious reductions reflected in this bill is the one for the National Science Foundation. The committee's recommendation is $275 million below the President's request, reducing the Foundation to less than the amount provided in 1999. It is difficult to predict exactly how and where a reduction of this magnitude in our nation's premier science agency will be felt. But everyone should be able to understand and appreciate the comment of the NSF Director after hearing of the committee's recommendation: `We are able and ready to do 21st century science and engineering--but we can not do it on a 20th century budget.'

One program that would be especially damaged under the committee's action is the Administration's Information Technology for the 21st Century Initiative. The National Science Foundation is leading a six-agency multi-year effort to prepare the groundwork for continued American leadership and innovation in computing and software systems. The committee's recommendation to provide only $35 million of the $146 million requested for the initiative will delay investment in fundamental, long-term information technology research. With the information technology industry employing millions of Americans and contributing $700 billion to the U.S. economy, this action is terribly shortsighted. Another troubling reduction that would result from the committee's recommendation is the 30 percent cut in the Foundation's biocomplexity initiative designed to study the interdependencies among elements of specific environmental systems.