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Category: Budget

Congress: Issues to Watch this Week

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The House is back in session this week after a weeklong recess period. They will be in session for two weeks before taking another break during the first week in June. The Senate is in this week, but will recess during the week of Memorial Day.

Appropriations:  Appropriators appear to be adhering to their plans to move annual spending bills earlier than normal this year. Several of those measures are advancing this week – in both chambers. On Tuesday in the Senate, subcommittees will consider their Military Construction-VA and Agriculture spending bills with the hopes of moving them to full committee by the end of the week. Both bills have a history of bipartisan support and will be among the first the Senate considers on the floor in late June or early July. Meanwhile, the House will advance their Commerce-Justice-Science bill (HR 4660) for possible floor action by next week. House appropriators also plan to move two domestic spending bills this week: Agriculture and Transportation-HUD.

Sexual Assault Prevention:  Today Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) will hold her first of three roundtable discussions about sexual assaults on college campuses. The hearing will focus on federal reporting laws, including the Clery Act, which requires schools to report on a broad array of crimes that occur on and near campuses, and what is known as the SaVE Act, language included in last year’s Violence Against Women Act reauthorization that requires new training, including bystander intervention, for incoming students and new university employees, along with new reporting on stalking and domestic violence.

McCaskill is teaming up with Democrats Kirsten Gillibrand (NY) and Richard Blumenthal (CT) on the effort to combat sexual assault on college campuses, similar to their successful advocacy for a bill to overhaul the way the military deals with sexual assaults. Subsequent roundtables will focus on Title IX protections, and the campus administrative process and criminal justice system.

FIRST Act:  On Wednesday, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology will mark up the Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science, and Technology Act of 2014 (HR 4186), which authorizes spending levels and specifies policy objectives in allocating resources for the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Veterans in Higher Education:  On Thursday, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee holds a full committee hearing to learn about access and supports for veterans in higher education.

FY 2015 Appropriations Update

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Both the House and Senate are in session this week. The Senate could consider energy efficiency and tax extenders legislation, while the House considers charter schools legislation and contempt charges against former IRS official Lois Lerner.

Senate appropriators will learn about their committee allocations for their FY 2015 spending bills. This will allow them to begin drafting each of the 12 annual measures. The allocations, known as 302(b)s, won’t be official until approved by the full panel, which generally happens as the first appropriations markup for the year now set for May 22nd. Committee members will then have less than 90 days to mark up and debate as many of the 12 annual spending bills as possible before the August recess.

Meanwhile, House appropriators are about a month ahead of the Senate and are ready to move two more domestic funding measures: Transportation-HUD and Commerce-Justice-Science. House appropriators are due to back their allocations this week and have already moved their first two spending bills, Military Construction-VA and Legislative Branch, with temporary allocations.

Welcome Back Congress!

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Members of Congress return to Washington, DC today after a two-week recess period. Today marks a nine-week work period where at least one chamber will be in session. But the House will recess again in two weeks, the Senate will take off all of Memorial Day week, and the House will take another recess the first week in June. Then both chambers will recess for the week of Fourth of July. After that, there are just four weeks until the five-week August recess, which stretching through the first week in September. That break will be followed by maybe as few as a dozen working days before early October when the House leadership has promised members they can go home to campaign full time for the mid-term elections. The Senate is likely to follow suit.

That’s not much time for genuine legislating, especially given that both parties plan to spend much of the time using the Capitol as a sound stage for their political messaging.

This week, the House is expected to begin considering the first two FY2015 appropriations bills of the season: Military Construction-VA and Legislative Branch. The Commerce-Science-Justice measure will be next in the queue, with the House Appropriations subcommittee taking it up Wednesday. Senate appropriators are moving more slowly on their bills but we expect to see a lot of action on appropriations measures between now and the August recess period.

House Budget Resolution Emerging

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Congress returns work today after a one-week recess. They face a full agenda that includes figuring out how to respond to the situation in Crimea and deciding if a deal can be found to permanently address the “doc fix,” or if another short-term patch is needed (likely). Lawmakers have also scheduled a number of appropriations hearings. They will start with a trickle today but turn into a flood Tuesday and Wednesday. The FY 2015 appropriations season is officially underway!

In related news, the House Republicans are likely to propose a budget resolution in coming weeks that seeks deeper or accelerated cuts to entitlement programs and tighter constraints on discretionary spending as they aim to build support for the fiscal blueprint within the GOP. The budget resolution typically sets the stage for appropriations work, but the December budget deal already established spending caps for FY 2015 making the budget resolution moot. The plan taking shape in the House will almost certainly will stick with the higher FY 2015 discretionary cap of $1.014 trillion in the December budget deal, but will identify future cuts that could help to eliminate the deficit by the end of the decade. Budget experts say the most likely targets are reducing discretionary spending after 2015 and making deeper or faster reductions in entitlement and assistance programs such as Medicare and food stamps.

The House Budget Committee is likely to mark up their budget resolution during the first week of April, with the measure going to the House floor the following week.

Sequestration: We’re Not Out of the Woods Yet

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In his FY2015 budget request, President Obama is calling for replacing the sequester but Members of Congress see little reason to open that can of worms – at least for this year. Members from both parties are saying that the two-year budget deal Congress approved in December has reduced the urgency to address future mandatory and discretionary spending cuts due to take effect again in 2016. Many say they do not expect any major efforts to adjust or undo the sequester framework until closer to when the current agreement expires on September 30, 2015.

But the December budget deal set a precedent for chipping away at the deficit reduction law and sequestration, so many Members predict that Congress will eventually go back and undo the remaining years of the spending caps. Our very own Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), also the current Senate Budget Chairwoman who helped write the December budget deal, has said she is willing to forge another accord to eliminate the sequester entirely.

As a reminder, the December budget agreement brokered a short-term truce by boosting discretionary spending levels for FY2014 and FY2015. But the deal did not address the remaining years of tight spending caps, which stretch through 2021 for discretionary and 2024 for mandatory programs. The President’s FY2015 budget request proposes replacing those cuts starting in FY2016, using a combination of mandatory spending cuts, new tax revenue, and the enactment of immigration overhaul legislation but Congress is unlikely to act on those proposals this year.