House, Senate struggle to fund Labor-HHS bill

The House Labor-HHS Appropriations Subcommittee will likely mark up its fiscal 2000 bill next Thursday, even though no decisions have been made on how to pay for it, Subcommittee Chairman John Edward Porter, R-Ill., told reporters Wednesday.

Porter said he has "been provided with a list of possible offsets" by the Budget Committee to make up the nearly $16 billion budget authority hole between the bill's current allocation and last year's spending. But he declined to elaborate, saying he had not actually seen the list.

"I've got $16 billion to make up," Porter said. "I'm going to use whatever's available to me." Measured in outlays, the FY2000 allocation is about $10 billion less than for FY99.

Porter was planning to sit down with appropriations staff Wednesday night to go through the options and start to sketch out a chairman's mark, and he said that Republicans "are committed to passing the bill. The last thing we want to happen is to have the president write the bill."

Meanwhile, the Senate Labor-HHS Appropriations Subcommittee, which was expected to precede House action, still has not set a date for its markup, although Senate Appropriations Chairman Stevens has said it will be next week.

Finding offsets to plug the shortfall in the Labor-HHS bill will be crucial, because otherwise Republicans have little maneuvering room to cover FY2000 spending over the $538 billion statutory budget cap.

The largest source of additional money is the $14 billion non- Social Security surplus CBO projects for next year, although $2 billion to $3 billion is expected to be used to pay for extending various expiring business tax credits.

The remaining on-budget surplus will have to cover the various pending or anticipated emergency spending proposals, including $4 billion in the House's Commerce-Justice-State bill for the 2000 Census, $7.5 billion in the Senate's Agriculture bill for aid to farmers, $3 billion for continued operations in Kosovo, and as- yet untallied relief packages for earthquake victims in Turkey and the victims of Hurricane Floyd, as well as for peace-keeping operations in East Timor.

But GOP leaders are talking to the White House about designating as FY99 spending as much of the emergency farm aid money as possible, so that amount would not eat into the $14 billion surplus.

And House Chief Deputy Majority Whip Roy Blunt said Wednesday the leadership expects that as appropriations conference reports "get finished, they'll produce a little money" that can be plowed back into the other spending bills.