House Passes Transportation, Military Bills

The House voted Friday to spend more than $41 billion on dams, highways, airports and various military and university projects.

In a rush to finish its work next week and avoid having to return after the November elections, House members voted overwhelmingly in favor of a transportation spending bill and another energy and water spending bill, together amounting to $33 billion.

Also passed by voice vote was an $8.4-billion appropriations bill for military construction projects, including $3.3 billion to build new housing for families of military personnel and nearly $1 billion as the second installment in closing more than 80 military bases over the next few years.

The bills were produced by House-Senate conference committees that reconciled versions passed earlier by each chamber.

Rep. Robert S. Walker (R-Pa.), a member of the House Science and Technology Committee, complained that members of Senate and House appropriations committees had included about $90 million in projects paid for by the Energy Department for home-state universities.

“Eight of those 10 projects happen to be in states or districts of people who happen to be on the conference committee,” he said. “We’re allocating money not based on anything other than who’s in the room divvying up the money.”

But his motion to eliminate the projects was defeated, 308 to 108, as the chairman and top Republican on the House Appropriations Committee’s energy and water subcommittee said all the projects are justified.

“There’s nothing unusual about this,” Rep. Tom Bevill (D-Ala.), the panel’s chairman, said. “We need more labs; we need more scientists; we need more emphasis put on these programs.”

Among the 10 recipients of the funds are research centers at the University of Alabama and the University of Indiana.

Among the projects hurt in the deficit-cutting effort was one of President Bush’s favorites--the proposed $8-billion super collider atom smasher in Texas.

Bush’s request of $318 million to begin construction of the giant particle accelerator had been approved earlier by both the House and the Senate. But it was slashed to $243 billion by their negotiators last week.