House and Senate GOP leaders and budget chairmen Monday hammered out final details of the fiscal 2000 congressional budget resolution, agreeing to include Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete Domenici's Social Security "lockbox" provision and a combination of the House and Senate Medicare language. But the agreement includes no instructions on how to use any additional FY2000 on-budget surplus the CBO may project in its midyear update.
The budget conference report should be adopted by Thursday, the oft-missed statutory deadline of April 15, which GOP leaders pledged to meet this year. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., following a White House meeting Monday on the Balkans crisis, reaffirmed his intention to meet the deadline this week. Splitting the difference between the Senate's June reconciliation deadline and the House's September deadline, the final resolution will require the House Ways and Means Committee to report out a tax cut bill by July 16 and the Senate Finance Committee to do so by July 23.
Domenici said, "We thought that was an adequate amount of time" for the tax-writing committees to draft their bills, which according to the budget plan should provide up to $15 billion in tax cuts, fully offset, next year; $142 billion over the next five years; and $778 billion over 10 years.
House Budget Committee Chairman John Kasich said, "We believe we will get the August update [from the CBO] in June, so it's not as though the tax bill can't be bigger. ... It will just be put off to another day." GOP leaders expect the CBO's re-estimate to forecast an on- budget surplus in FY2000, which budgeters hope to use to beef up the size of their tax cut.
But with several Republicans and most Democrats hoping to direct some of the increase to more spending, Kasich said the final resolution "is silent" on the CBO re-estimate, "which means it could be fought out, and it will be, because there are real differences" over how to use those funds.
But Domenici added, "We don't think the re-estimate this year will be anything like we've had in the past. ... We've been asking [the CBO] how the tax take is coming in, and it's coming in as expected."
To finance Medicare reform, the resolution will take the House approach of making available the entire 10-year projected Social Security surplus of $1.8 trillion to shore up both Social Security and Medicare.
And it will keep Senate language providing a pot of $101 billion over 10 years in uncommitted on-budget surpluses that can be tapped to finance Medicare reform, and potentially pay for a Medicare prescription drug benefit.
Domenici said the Republican budget plan adequately addresses the coming insolvency of the Medicare trust fund, which is now expected to be depleted by 2015.
"I feel very confident that we're putting so much more in that trust fund than the president did," Domenici said. "I believe that is more than sufficient to take care of Medicare."
On Social Security, the congressional budget will contain sense of the Congress language calling for Congress to pass legislation requiring that Social Security surpluses be used only for debt reduction or Social Security, enforced by a Senate point order.
And it would create a statutory limit on the government's publicly held debt and mandate that it be reduced annually by the amount of the Social Security surplus, a proposal that has drawn a veto threat from the administration and strong opposition from Ways and Means Chairman Archer.
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