Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, Wednesday kicked off the fiscal 2000 appropriations season by calling for raising the discretionary spending caps established in the 1997 balanced budget law to accommodate increased defense and education spending.
Stevens also reiterated his commitment to getting the FY2000 appropriations bills finished on time, in spite of the Senate impeachment trial of President Clinton.
Speaking to reporters, Stevens said the spending caps for FY2000 are "very tight" and "substantially lower" than the FY99 caps, and said, "I think they will have to be raised. ... It is going to be a difficult year."
As revised by the OMB in October to adjust for the emergency spending added to the FY99 levels, the spending cap for FY99 was $565.5 billion, while the FY2000 cap is set at $536.2 billion.
Stevens predicted "a real fight on the budget resolution" this year over spending levels, but made it clear he is willing to raise the caps to beef up defense spending rather than cut defense in order to stay under the caps.
"We cannot live within the those caps and continue the [defense] modernization, even under the President's proposal" to increase military funding, Stevens said.
The chairman criticized the White House defense spending plan, saying there will be "a great clash between our committee and the administration" over how much of the requested $148 billion increase over six years is actually new spending.
Stevens also endorsed raising the statutory caps to increase spending on education, one of congressional Republicans' top agenda items for this Congress. He called for a "substantial" increase for education.
He said the committee will hold its first in a series of oversight hearings as early as Friday or next Wednesday, to look into how the administration is spending money already appropriated by Congress.
Hearings on the Y2K computer problem, the District of Columbia, emergency spending for Hurricane Mitch and defense readiness are among the oversight topics on the agenda. Stevens said that money being inefficiently or improperly used could be redirected to help fund defense and education increases.
Despite the potential workload and time constraints posed by the impeachment trial, which gets under way today, Stevens hopes to report FY2000 appropriations bills to the floor by May.
"Getting our work done is our number one objective, and I don't think we can do that if we sit around waiting for the trial to end. We can't afford to wait," he said. "We have 13 bills we've got to pass, and we've got to get them done to the maximum extent possible before the August recess."
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