Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, a budget hawk, is trying to draft an amendment to retroactively make across-the-board cuts in all the fiscal 2000 appropriations bills to keep them under the statutory budget cap on total discretionary spending next year.
Speaking today at a budget process reform roundtable sponsored by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Barton called the idea of preserving the caps with massive cuts "all at one time" in the Labor-HHS spending bill instead of cutting deeper into all 13 appropriations bills "brain dead."
Barton said he has the Republican leadership's blessing to explore whether such an amendment is technically feasible, and is working with the Rules, Budget and Appropriations committees to that end, but acknowledged it may not work.
To be "intellectually honest," he said, the amendment would have to include most of the emergency spending both chambers have added to the Agriculture, Commerce- Justice-State and VA-HUD bills, excluding only "true emergencies."
Barton and Rep. Charles Stenholm, D-Texas, both called for more realistic budget caps than those set in the 1997 Balanced Budget Act. Stenholm, a leading Blue Dog Democrat, said he would favor adjusting the caps based on changes in the economy and "if the market judged we are being fiscally responsible" in those adjustments.
Rep. David Minge, D-Minn., said, "Maybe if we had made small adjustments along the way [in the 1997 BBA caps], we might have ended up spending less money" than Congress is on track to spend now. All the congressional panelists-Barton, Stenholm, Minge and Reps. Jim Nussle, R-Iowa, and Porter Goss, R- Fla.-said passage of the bipartisan budget process reform bill put together by Nussle and Rep. Benjamin Cardin, D-Md., would alleviate much of the budget gimmickry and political gamesmanship they say has eroded the credibility of the budget process.
They said they doubted the bill would come up before the end of this congressional session, but were hopeful that with the help of Senate allies such as Budget Chairman Domenici-and the specter of the train wreck this year's process could result in-the issue will gain momentum early next year.
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