After striking a deal with the Office of Management and Budget earlier in the day, House and Senate conferees agreed Thursday night on the broad terms of a $69.6 billion fiscal 2000 VA-HUD spending bill.
Most significant, said conferees, is that the bill includes $1.7 billion above the administration's request for veterans' medical care and $2.5 billion in emergency aid for destruction caused by Hurricane Floyd, while restoring deep cuts in the House bill for HUD, the EPA, the National Science Foundation and NASA.
Most conferees lauded the bipartisan efforts of Senate VA-HUD Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Christopher (Kit) Bond, R- Mo., and ranking member Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., to craft a compromise measure President Clinton now appears poised to sign.
Just last Friday, the administration issued a strong veto threat against the bill.
Mikulski called the funding package "an outstanding framework we can be proud of ... and absolutely report on a bipartisan, bicameral basis with the concurrence of the White House."
House VA-HUD Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman James Walsh, R-N.Y., acknowledged the complaints of some that the conference was proceeding too quickly, but said members had no choice given that the new fiscal year is already under way.
The strength of the conference vehicle, he said, is that it contains real offsets to balance spending increases while staying within prescribed budget caps.
But House Appropriations ranking member David Obey, D-Wis., said while the measure contains more adequate funding for a number of initiatives, it does so in part because it includes $4.2 billion in delayed appropriations for Section 8 housing.
"Washington is the weirdest place in the world when it comes to the truth about numbers ... we've reached new heights this fiscal year," Obey added.
Bond countered that the White House had agreed to the Section 8 deferral and said it would be impossible to pass the measure without it.
By Thursday evening, some policy issues in the spending bill remained unresolved, according to committee staff. Most notable among those were riders prohibiting the use of funds by nonprofit organizations and other grantees to lobby or sue the federal government.
Half a dozen Senate Democrats, including Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who was a conferee, Thursday sent a letter to Bond urging those riders be stripped from the bill because of the "extremely dangerous precedent" they would set and because of the many unintended consequences they might have.
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