Democrats saved key priorities in spending showdown
By Stephen Dinan-The Washington Times
Updated: 12:19 p.m. on Tuesday, April 12, 2011
The final 2011 spending deal has more fingerprints of Democrats' successful defense against cuts than it does House Republicans' effort to slash federal deficits and rewrite the rules on spending.
Instead of expansive cuts the GOP originally pushed for, the agreement President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, reached with House Speaker John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican, makes use of the scalpel Mr. Obama favored, slicing from programs but overall avoiding the giant cuts to environment, education, job training and public broadcasting.
Also gone are the major billion-dollar cuts to public housing, the Corporation for National and Community Service, the National Institutes of Health and job-training grants — all of which passed the House but did not survive in the final deal.
Instead, the discretionary spending cuts come in large part from savings that would have happened anyway — $6.5 billion in recapturing unspent money from previous years and another $6.2 billion reduction in Census Bureau spending, which was artificially high already because of the 2010 census.
Those details emerged early Tuesday morning after House Republicans posted their 459-page, year-long spending bill online a little before 2 a.m.
"It's more than we've ever done, but when you look at what's ahead and what we're going to have to do, it's pretty small," said Rep. Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican and budget hawk who said he has not decided how he will vote, but who said Republicans should have pushed harder on the front end.
"We should have gone in with $100 billion [in cuts]. You know you're going to meet somewhere in the middle, then by golly, go in with a big number," he said.
The rumblings of discontent among conservative Republicans are matched by apprehension among liberal Democrats who say the cuts that are included still go too far.
Rep. Norm Dicks, Washington Democrat, who is his party's ranking member on the House Appropriations Committee, said Democrats should be relieved to be able to protect their top priorities. But he acknowledged that the final package does include cuts that many in his caucus can't support.
"The entire compromise legislation is thus presented to the House membership this week, and each member must consider all of the ramifications before casting a vote," he said.
The bill calls for the government to spend $1.049 trillion in 2011, which is $37.7 billion lower than 2010 levels.
Still, the size of those cuts is dwarfed by the projected deficit, which is expected to be about $1.5 trillion this year. And the deficit for March alone was $189 billion, or five times the cuts made in the full-year bill.
Republicans, though, insisted they have managed to change the conversation in Washington, shifting from how much spending Congress should approve to how much cutting.
"The ground shifted," said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican. "Spending reductions Democrats recently described as 'extreme' and 'draconian,' they are now calling 'historic' and 'common-sense.' The debate has turned from how much to grow government to how much to reduce it."
Both the House and Senate must approve the package before midnight Friday to avert a government shutdown.
The bill does accept a House-passed amendment that would end funding for a second engine production line for the F-35 jet fighter. For the past several years Congress had funded the alternate engine over the objections of the Pentagon.
While the bill cuts funding carried over from previous years' earmarks, some powerful lawmakers' pet projects were preserved — including one for former Rep. John P. Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who died last year.
The House had approved an amendment stripping all funding from the National Drug Intelligence Center, which Mr. Murtha championed, basing it in his home district in Pennsylvania and providing hundreds of jobs — despite critics' charges that the center lacked a mission. The final agreement restores all but $10 million in funding to the NDIC.
And House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, scored a win when the agreement restored funding for the Presidio Trust, a park in her district that is slated to see dwindling money but that the House had voted to defund entirely as of this year.
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