House Approves $1 Trillion Budget Measure to Avert Shutdown
December 17, 2011, 12:53 PM ESTBy Brian Faler
(Updates with vote breakdown in sixth paragraph.)
Dec. 16 (Bloomberg) -- The House passed a $1 trillion spending bill to avert a U.S. government shutdown even as lawmakers remain at odds over what to do about an expiring payroll-tax cut.
The House voted 296-121 for the measure, sending it to the Senate for action as soon as today. A stopgap plan keeping federal agencies operating expires tonight. The government should be unaffected even if the Senate doesn’t complete work on the matter until tomorrow, said Majority Leader Harry Reid. Much of the government is closed tomorrow.
Lawmakers hailed the budget plan as a rare bipartisan compromise on spending in a year otherwise dominated by partisan and inconclusive debates over the budget deficit.
“After weeks of arduous negotiations on this package with our Senate counterparts, we’ve struck a fair, bipartisan compromise,” House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers, a Kentucky Republican, said today. “No party got everything they wanted.”
The spending panel’s top Democrat endorsed the plan, calling it the sort of compromise demanded by divided government.
“It reflects the fact that neither party can pass this bill on its own in either the House or the Senate,” said Representative Norm Dicks, a Washington Democrat.
Eighty-six Republicans voted against the bill; 149 Democrats supported it.
Funding Government Operations
At issue is a 1,200-page measure funding the day-to-day operations of hundreds of government programs across 10 Cabinet agencies. The bill had been snarled in an unresolved dispute over how to extend a payroll-tax cut into 2012 as well as expanded unemployment benefits, which also expire at year’s end.
Reid, a Nevada Democrat, said lawmakers are considering a two-month extension to buy more time for negotiations over a yearlong plan. Many House Republicans emerging this morning from a closed-door caucus meeting balked at the idea.
Lawmakers made some last-minute changes to the spending measure, including killing provisions targeting President Barack Obama’s Cuba policies. Republicans had included language blocking his decision to loosen restrictions on travel and sending money to the Communist country.
Florida Republicans such as Senator Marco Rubio blasted the decision, saying it would only shore up the Cuban government. “It limits access to hard currency to a really tyrannical regime,” said Rubio. Representative Mario Diaz-Balart said it would “sell out the long-suffering Cuban people to appease the ruthless Castro dictatorship.”
Other Provisions
Representative Jose Serrano, a New York Democrat, said “the U.S. government should not be in the business of restricting travel to any country, no matter what the issues we have with their government.” He said “it is surreal to think that five decades after he took power, Fidel Castro is still a driving force in our national conversation.”
Some lawmakers complained Republicans gave them two days to review the 1,200-page bill and did not release more than 1,000 pages of additional explanatory documents until last night.
“Not one of us has read every page in this bill,” said Representative Steny Hoyer, the chamber’s second-ranking Democrat. Representative Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican, said “we’ll be discovering for months to come what’s actually in it.”
Though lawmakers were unable this year to cut entitlement programs or raise taxes to reduce the budget deficit, they agreed to cut the roughly 40 percent of the federal budget that must be approved each year by Congress.
‘Real Cuts’
“Make no mistake -- there are real cuts here,” said Representative Rosa DeLauro, the ranking Democrat on the appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over education, health care and labor programs.
She said some of the hardest cuts for lawmakers came at the expense of Pell grants, which help low-income families send children to college. Though the legislation maintains the current $5,550 maximum grant, it tightens eligibility rules such as by requiring recipients to have a high school diploma, GED or be home-schooled.
The administration’s Race to the Top program, which awards competitive grants to schools, would be reduced by 20 percent.
Foreign aid would decline, with the U.S. Agency for International Development’s budget cut by 17 percent, according to the Republicans’ summary. The Environmental Protection Agency would be cut by 3 percent, on top of reductions approved earlier this year. The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, would see a 6 percent reduction. The Internal Revenue Service would be cut by 2 percent.
Republican Initiatives
Democrats fended off a number of Republican initiatives, including proposals taking aim at environmental regulations and cutting federal funding for Planned Parenthood and NPR, the syndicator of public radio stations.
Republicans prevailed with language barring public funding of abortions in Washington, D.C. They also killed a Democratic proposal to increase the security fees charged to airline passengers. Airlines are charging more for checked baggage, Democrats complained, which was prompting more travelers to bring carry-on luggage and increasing the workload for the government’s security screeners.
--Editors: Laurie Asseo, Justin Blum
To contact the reporter on this story: Brian Faler in Washington at bfaler@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Silva at msilva34@bloomberg.net
