(The Associated Press circulated the following article on July 18.)
WASHINGTON — Clashing with President Bush and House conservatives, Senate committees transferred $9 billion from Bush’s proposed defense budget Tuesday to domestic programs.
Subcommittees approved bills adding to Bush’s budgets for some domestic programs, including Amtrak, health research, and housing for the elderly and disabled. At the same time, the defense panel trimmed the Pentagon’s request for KC-130 tanker planes and for the overhaul of Army combat systems.
And Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, acknowledged that ”to a certain extent” he is using some of $50 billion that’s supposed to go directly for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan to ease cuts to the Pentagon’s non-war budget.
Such moves have already provoked a thinly veiled veto threat from the White House, which says they amount to a shell game that ultimately results in using emergency war funding bills to ease the crunch on domestic programs.
Given the White House’s stand, Tuesday’s gains for domestic programs may be fleeting. In fact, most of the domestic spending bills won’t come to the floor until after Election Day if at all. Many bills could get wrapped into a catchall bill during a postelection lame duck session colored by the November results.
The bills approved Tuesday by four Appropriations subcommittees demonstrate the Senate’s appetite for spending above Bush’s February budget, in which he vowed to freeze at or below current levels most domestic programs funded each year by Congress.
Taken together with a $2.4 billion cut to Bush’s request for foreign aid, domestic programs would receive a more than $11 billion boost from the Senate panels. Much of that money, however, goes to restoring politically impractical cuts demanded by Bush to programs such as grants to local community service agencies that provide assistance to the poor.
The increases still don’t do enough for supporters of a huge bill funding health, education and job training programs, which faced a cut of $3.4 billion under Bush’s budget, a more than 2 percent less than current levels. An Appropriations panel chaired by GOP moderate Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania instead essentially froze most programs, including grants to local schools and for special education.
The National Institutes of Health would receive a budget increase of less than 1 percent under Specter’s bill, far less than the increases of prior years.
And Specter restored the tradition of including hundreds of home state projects in the measure for local hospitals, colleges and health care and drug treatment programs, among other beneficiaries.
Amtrak was a big winner as the Transportation Subcommittee approved $1.4 billion for the financially ailing passenger railroad, $500 million more than allowed for in Bush’s budget. The panel also rejected Bush’s plan to cut community development grants by $1.7 billion and restored Bush’s proposed cuts to housing programs for the elderly and disabled.
Separately, the panel responsible for military construction projects and the Department of Veterans Affairs approved a $94.3 billion measure providing the president’s 12 percent proposed increase for the rapidly growing veterans medical care program.
The panel rejected $795 million in new, politically unpopular fees for prescription drugs and on better-off veterans without service-related conditions. That drew the ire of Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Larry Craig, R-Idaho, who said the VA’s health costs are growing at an unsustainable rate and that the fees represent a ”slight burden for access to quality health care.”
Dropping the fees meant lawmakers had to forage elsewhere in the subcommittee’s jurisdiction for savings, Craig complained, leading to cuts from the Pentagon’s request for military construction.