September 16, 2005
Appropriations Season: Updates from Capitol Hill
After a long week of deliberations, the Senate finally voted 91-4 to pass a
$52.4 billion Commerce-Justice-Science FY 2006 appropriations bill on Thursday.
Included was a $36.15 million appropriation for educational programs at NOAA,
with $10 million marked for the Office of Education and Sustainable
Development's (OESD) Educational Initiatives. (This $10 million provides funding
for the OESD's Environmental Literacy grants program.)
The House counterpart of this measure is the Science, State, Justice, and
Commerce bill (SSJC), passed three months ago in June with a total of $61.3
billion. A difference of $8.9 billion will certainly pose a formidable challenge
for House and Senate negotiators who will soon sit down together to reconcile
differences in their two bills. This funding gap is due partly to differences in
jurisdiction: the House bill covers spending for the U.S. Department of State,
while the Senate version does not. However, this is only one of the many
obstacles that will make for potentially rocky conference committee
negotiations. In fact, NOAA is expected to be one of those very obstacles: the
Senate allocation for NOAA is 31% greater than the House figure. Add to these
sticking points a few controversial amendments as well as differences in
emergency spending for Katrina relief efforts, and the result is two bills with
striking differences in policy, jurisdiction, and spending.
Interestingly enough, the Senate passed budgets for both NASA and the National
Science Foundation that are roughly equal with the President?s budget request.
NOAA, however, received nearly $895 million more than the President
requested--which is, perhaps, an indication that Washington is beginning to
acknowledge the need for a strong NOAA and its important contributions to the
field.
As previously alluded, the bill must next pass through conference committee
negotiations before arriving at the President's desk. In theory, the bill must
be signed into law before October 1st--the start of the federal fiscal year.
Doing so now seems nothing short of impossible, prompting decision makers in
Washington to begin discussions of passing a continuing resolution (CR), a
measure that will guarantee short-term funding for governmental agencies whose
budgets have not yet passed Congress. Unfortunately, use of these resolutions is
not an oddity; more often than not, they have been a consistent fixture during
the past ten years alone. Making a CR even more likely is the reality that
conference action is not expected to happen immediately. CEL will maintain a
close eye on the Senate schedule for indications of progress.
In the meantime, the Senate CJS conferees are listed below, while the House has
not yet announced its SSJC delegates. These Senators are:
Republicans
- Christopher S. Bond (R-MO)
- Sam Brownback (R-KS.)
- Thad Cochran (R-MS)
- Pete V. Domenici (R-NM)
- Judd Gregg (R-NH)
- Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX)
- Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
- Richard C. Shelby (R-AL)
- Ted Stevens (R-AK)
Democrats
- Robert C. Byrd (D-WV)
- Byron L. Dorgan (D-ND)
- Tom Harkin (D-IA)
- Daniel K. Inouye (D-HI)
- Herb Kohl (D-WI)
- Patrick J. Leahy (D-VT)
- Barbara A. Mikulski (D-MD)
- Patty Murray (D-WA)
