House Busts Budget Cap to Fund Census

Moving closer to a showdown over spending with President Clinton, the House passed a bill Thursday that intentionally bypasses Congress’ own budget ceilings by classifying $4.5 billion in funding for the 2000 census as an “emergency” appropriation.

The measure, which provides $35.8 billion for an array of law enforcement, foreign affairs and scientific programs, also would slash Clinton’s funding request for legal services to the poor and would kill his plans to hire more police officers and finance high-technology ventures.

The legislation, approved by a vote of 217 to 210, has become a symbol of the fiscal bind lawmakers have created as they struggle to push through the GOP’s legislative agenda in the face of the current budget limits.

The budget caps, set by agreement between Congress and the White House as part of the 1997 balanced-budget accord, limit outlays for each major category of spending to a specific ceiling. The budget surpluses projected for future years depend on Congress’ staying within the caps.

But in appropriation bills passed by the House and Senate earlier this year, Republicans have added billions of dollars for defense, transportation and other spending categories, while making relatively few cuts to offset the additions.

As a result, GOP leaders have resorted to a spate of fiscal maneuvers to avoid breaching the spending limits. For instance, since emergency outlays are exempt from such ceilings, using that designation for the census, which the Constitution requires every 10 years, provides House leaders more leeway in the budget.

Despite such maneuvers, however, most analysts believe that lawmakers are almost certain to breach the limits as the appropriation process continues. And they may even have to dip into the surplus in the Social Security trust fund, despite their repeated vows to avoid that.

On Wednesday, the Senate passed a $7.4-billion farm aid package that also is designated as emergency funding, bringing the total amount of spending that bypasses the budget caps to almost $12 billion. The House is planning to approve a similar agricultural aid measure.

Robert D. Reischauer, former Congressional Budget Office director, said that the lawmakers, having already eroded most of the projected surplus in operating funds for fiscal 2000, are “moving rapidly toward the precipice” of having to dip into the Social Security surplus.

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) initially had hoped to push all 13 major appropriation bills through the House before the August recess, which begins at the end of this week, but he has had to alter those expectations. The measure that passed Thursday, which would fund the State, Justice and Commerce departments, is the 11th to be taken up by the House.

By far the biggest battle looms over one of the two spending bills yet to come to the floor: a measure affecting popular education and health programs. That bill is expected to bear the brunt of whatever remaining spending cuts the Republicans are forced to make.

In the budget resolution passed earlier this year, Congress allocated $77.1 billion for the Labor and Health and Human Services bill--$11.6 billion below the previous year’s spending levels and $14 billion below what Clinton requested.

Additionally, lawmakers have siphoned $4 billion from the earlier Labor-HHS allocation to help offset increases for medical benefits for veterans. Thus, private analysts figure that lawmakers will need to find $15 billion for the Labor-HHS bill just to maintain last year’s programs.

With the GOP leadership currently unwilling to come up with that money, the cuts that would be required would be so deep that the House Appropriations Committee has not even drafted the measure, for fear of setting off a backlash in both parties.

Clinton already has threatened to veto several of the appropriation bills that the GOP leaders have pushed through--as well as the massive tax cut measure that both the House and the Senate also passed Thursday--and the Republicans do not have the votes to override.

Although the tax bill would drain $792 billion in revenues from Treasury coffers over 10 years, most of the tax cuts are phased in gradually, so the bill would have only a marginal effect on the immediate dilemma over spending.

When Congress reconvenes in early September as the end of the current federal fiscal year (Sept. 30) approaches, all of the money bills essentially will be up for grabs. And in that situation, Clinton should have most of the leverage in negotiations with lawmakers.

Republicans desperately want to avoid another budget impasse, such as the one in 1995 that led to government shutdowns. That standoff sparked a voter backlash that hurt the Republicans in the following year’s elections.

The current budget clash--and the resulting howls--have been coming for months. Experts said that the caps for each spending category, which Congress set when it was still trying to reduce the budget deficit, are unrealistically low for the fiscal year 2000 budget.

Appropriations chairmen in both houses recognized the problem early and have been urging their colleagues to discard the caps. But GOP congressional leaders have not wanted to be the first to jump, and Democrats, eager to embarrass them, have insisted that the caps stay in place.

Even so, Republicans have been steadily breaking them over the year, approving sharp spending increases in defense and transportation. At the same time, they have proposed deep cuts for several science programs run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Weather Service.

Approval of the State-Justice-Commerce bill Thursday came after Republicans beat back an attempt by Democrats and a handful of GOP conservatives to stop House leaders from counting the census money as an emergency appropriation. That proposal failed on a vote of 257 to 171 Wednesday night.

Democrats and moderate Republicans defeated a GOP bid to halve the budget for the Legal Services Corp., which provides attorneys for the poor. Their amendment to restore the agency’s spending to last year’s levels of $300 million passed by a vote of 242 to 178. The level approved by the House, however, was $199 million below the level that Clinton had requested for fiscal 2000.