To get an idea of just how massively lame our
federal government’s budget arguments can be, it’s worth looking
over The New York Times’ coverage of the
budget wrangling that led up to the release last night of the $1.1
trillion “cromnibus” spending bill that’s now expected to pass,
keeping the government open while spending tons of taxpayer money
on Stuff Government People Like.
One Times
story, released late on Monday as the details of the deal were
coming into view, framed the budget deal as a sort of trade-off:
Republicans would agree to avoid a shutdown, but in exchange, they
would “extract a policy price from Democrats.” What did the GOP
want out of the deal? The relaxation of “standards on school lunch
content and the Environmental Protection Agency’s jurisdiction over
some bodies of water.” These fights, the story explained, were
“more contentious than the negotiations over money.” Forget overall
spending levels, right? These are the sorts of high-stakes policy
battles consuming the nation’s capitol.
The bill’s complete text was finally released last night. It
combines 11 appropriations bills (an omnibus) with a short-term
continuing resolution (CR) just for the Department of Homeland
security (omnibus plus CR=”cromnibus”).
I don’t recommend reading it. Those who do will find a 1,600-odd
page guide to how to spend more than $1 trillion other people’s
money (not like anyone in Congress really needs one).
Naturally, House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers
(R-Ky.) and his Democratic partner in the Senate, Barbara Mikulski
(D-Md.) released a joint statement of
self-congratulation. “While not everyone got everything
they wanted,” the pair
said, “such compromises must be made in a divided
government. These are the tough choices that we must make to govern
responsibly and do what the American people sent us here to
do.”
It’s not all terrible. But it’s not great either. Here’s a
roundup of some highlights and lowlights from the proposal:
The Good:
The bill reins in Obamacare’s risk corridors—widely known as its
insurance industry bailouts—requiring
them to be budget neutral. The Obama administration can still
pay insurers under the plan, but only from the insurer user fees
that are paid in, and not from slush funds like Obamacare’s public
health and prevention fund.
The bill cuts the budgets
for the Environmental Protection Agency by $60 million and the
Internal Revenue Service by $345 million. It holds the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) budget flat for the fourth year in
a row.
The Bad:
Technically, the cromnibus sticks to the spending caps in last
year’s Ryan-Murray budget deal, coming in at around $1.01 trillion.
That deal, however, was itself a way of subtly
weakening existing spending caps that had been put in place
through the sequestration process. But the bill also includes an
additional $64 billion in overseas contingency funding for the
military, as well $5 billion in emergency funding to pay for
recently ramped up military operations (war) against ISIS. There’s
also another $5.4 billion to fund Ebola operations.
Naturally,
with so much money in play, the bloated bill is packed full of
goodies—or, as Sen. John McCain
put it, it’s “jammed full of shit.” You can see for yourself by
perusing the Senate Appropriations Committee
summary: $25 million for “school meal equipment grants,” $1.7
billion in “water and waste loans and grants,” a $37 million
increase in funding for the Food and Drug Administration, $6.1
billion in ownership and operating loans to farmers, $871 million
for the Animal and Plant Health Inspection service (an increase of
$49 million), an $81 million increase in FBI salaries and a $21
million pay bump at the Drug Enforcement Agency, $7 million in new
anti-heroin funding, $3.2 billion to improve federal weather
prediction, $141 million for a “next generation computing” program
at the Department of Energy, a $53 million bump—up to $2.61
billion—for the National Park Service. There’s more, so much
more—1,603
pages worth, to be precise—and the rolled-into-one omnibus
approach means that Congress will be trying to pass it all at once
in
a two-day period.
The Ugly:
The spending bill shuts down the District of Columbia’s plan to
legalize pot, which the city’s residents overwhelmingly favored in
a November vote. According to a
summary released by the House Appropriations Committee, the
bill “prohibits both federal and local funds from being used to
implement a referendum legalizing recreational marijuana use in the
District.” There’s plenty of stupid, petty stuff buried in the
spending plan, but this might be the stupidest, pettiest item of
all.
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