September 12, 2005

Appropriations Season: Updates from Capitol Hill

Having just returned from its month-long August recess, the Senate is now facing a daunting fall schedule with many issues vying for priority status. Included in this line-up are several of the FY 2006 spending bills, not to mention consideration of a new Supreme Court Chief Justice and disaster relief legislation for the Gulf region. As a result of this bulky workload, timing remains unclear for many of the appropriations bills-regardless of the fact that these bills should (ideally!) be completed by October 1st, the start of FY 2006.

However, one Senate appropriations bill did see action during Congress' first week back in session: the Commerce-Justice-Science (CJS) bill. Because it includes some important Katrina disaster relief funds, Senator Frist brought the bill to the Senate floor late last week. Currently, debate on the bill continues and is not expected to conclude before Tuesday, September 13th at the earliest. Regardless, this is important news for the environmental education (EE) community since the CJS bill controls the budget for NOAA and its Environmental Literacy Grants Program.

Once the Senate passes its CJS bill, delegates from the Senate will meet with House delegates in a conference committee tasked with reconciling the differences in their two bills. This should prove to be a difficult undertaking since there are already major discrepancies between their two bills, including significant jurisdictional differences. In fact, one potential point of contention may be NOAA's budget; the current version of the Senate CJS bill would appropriate over $1 billion more for NOAA than the House version of the bill. Making matters even more delicate, the Bush Administration has already released a statement opposing the higher NOAA funding level.