Congress struggles with spending bills as recess looms

House and Senate leaders need to make several crucial decisions-quickly-if they want to act before the Independence Day recess, as planned, to provide emergency supplemental funds for pressing fiscal 2000 defense, foreign aid and disaster relief expenses.

Also on hold until Congress moves a supplemental package is the conference report on the FY2001 Military Construction appropriations bill. That measure includes language to raise the statutory budget caps that must be enacted for the Senate Appropriations Committee to mark up, and the full Senate to consider, most of the remaining FY2001 bills.

Until legislative language is passed to raise the spending caps set in the 1997 Balanced Budget Act, a point of order would lie against any FY2001 bill brought to the Senate floor that would push the total amount of money appropriated for FY2001 beyond the cap. For that reason, the Senate Appropriations panel has not scheduled additional markups of FY2001 spending bills beyond those it already has reported out.

That leaves the Senate with the FY2001 Labor-HHS spending bill it is currently debating and the FY2001 Interior and Agriculture appropriations bills to move to the floor before the point of order could be invoked-unless legislation to raise the caps is signed into law.

Equally time sensitive is the pending FY2000 supplemental appropriations measure.

House and Senate leaders repeatedly have said they want to officially convene the conference committee today, and get the conference report adopted before leaving for recess Friday.

The House passed a $12.7 billion stand-alone supplemental in late March. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., broke that package into three parts.

Although pre-conference meetings have yielded progress in reconciling the two chambers' versions of the FY2001 Military Construction spending bill and FY2000 defense supplemental legislation, little headway has been made on either the disaster relief or Colombia segments.

Indeed, the House and Senate are at a fundamental impasse over how to handle the Colombia aid.

While the anti-drug initiative is a top priority of both House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and President Clinton, Senate Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has refused to allow the Colombia supplemental to be detached from the FY2001 foreign aid bill, in order to exert more leverage over Clinton on the bill.

Instead, McConnell has floated the idea of putting the entire FY2001 Foreign Operations spending bill into the conference report-which has met with stiff resistance from all quarters in the House.

GOP congressional leaders announced after a bicameral leadership meeting last week that they set a price tag of $12 billion for the FY2000 supplemental, with $1.3 billion to go to Colombia. But they have yet to decide what to do with language by Senate Appropriations ranking member Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., to condition further funding for Colombia on congressional approval.

Other open questions include rebuilding after the Los Alamos fires; the type of helicopters to send to Colombia; legislative riders concerning patent extensions; and new mining regulations, among others.