Federal Spending Bill: Better Late Than Never

The end of the protracted and bitterly partisan federal budget impasse is in sight. After months of a frustrating stalemate, White House and congressional negotiators have reached agreement on an omnibus spending bill that would fund the federal government through the end of the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, about a month before the presidential election. Now all that is needed is approval by the House, the Senate and the White House. Agreement is likely today, the players in the final compromise say. It’s an illuminating commentary on the state of affairs in Washington that a deal on the current budget year’s spending, six months late, is cause for celebration. But that is exactly the case.

Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), the presumed Republican nominee for president, can live with the deal because it still cuts $23 billion out of spending. That ought to be good enough for other Republicans.

To get the deal, Republican negotiators agreed to spending nearly $5 billion more for President Clinton’s educational priorities, 100,000 additional police officers, job training programs and environmental protection legislation, all of which they had doggedly opposed. They also agreed to back off on some of their environmental positions and to repeal a new, and unfair, law requiring the discharge of military personnel infected with HIV. For their part, Democratic negotiators agreed to pay for new spending with cuts in other programs. The GOP eased demands for ceilings on a variety of social programs.

Democratic and Republican negotiators released few details, but the announcement of an agreement should be good enough to reassure a citizenry weary of the inaction. This impasse has lasted unreasonably long, nearly seven months. Most of nine Cabinet departments and many agencies have gone without spending authority since last fall. Washington’s negligent refusal to reach agreement shut down operations of much of the federal government twice and required 13 stopgap spending bills--including one approved on Wednesday--to keep the federal work force from literally running out of money. That’s no way to govern.

This nasty fight has been more about who will win the White House and who will reign on Capitol Hill than a reasonable debate over a fiscal policy. Still to come is a war over entitlements such as welfare and Medicare. But without further ado, this ugly budget battle should be put to rest.