Republican congressional leaders and appropriators are looking for additional budget savings to satisfy Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens' (R-Alaska) insistence that a proposed across-the-board budget cut be no more than 1 percent of total discretionary spending if it affects both defense and non-defense accounts.
"If forced to do it, I won't accept anything more than 1 percent," Stevens said.
The leadership needs only to finalize the percentage of the across-the-board cut-which must save $4.5 billion-to go to conference on the revised fiscal 2000 District of Columbia spending bill. Conferees plan to attach the Labor-HHS bill and the across-the-board offset to the D.C. conference report, and hope to file the report quickly.
But regardless of the size of the cut, it still faces other obstacles among House Republicans. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Bud Shuster, R-Pa., said it should not apply to the highway and transit trust funds because they are not purely discretionary accounts, but the leadership does not want to carve out any exemptions.
Republican Conference Chairman J.C. Watts of Oklahoma indicated a solution might be to allow Shuster to "try to find savings" on his own. "I hope we will give him that latitude to find the savings," Watts said, adding that he will fight to make sure the cut would apply to members' cost-of-living increases.