Bush calls congressional appropriators to White House

As the Republican-led Congress prepares to enter its first appropriations cycle in more than 40 years under a Republican President, President Bush called House Appropriations Committee Chairman Bill Young, R-Fla., and Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, to the White House Wednesday evening for an appropriations strategy session aimed at keeping the fiscal 2002 spending bills as close as possible to the $661.3 billion total limit set in the budget resolution, sources said.

Also said to be under discussion was the timing and content of the fiscal 2001 supplemental spending bill; while the budget resolution raised the fiscal 2001 cap by $6.5 billion for additional defense expenses, the administration wants to keep a lid on any non-defense funding that could get attached to what will be the first appropriations bill of Bush's presidency.

Bush, who has made restraining government spending a central theme of his campaign and first budget, will need the support of Young and Stevens to make good on his pledges of fiscal discipline.

Although the Senate Appropriations Committee has yet to draw up a game plan for moving next year's spending bills, the House Appropriations Committee has mapped out a preliminary plan under which it would push a total of four fiscal 2002 appropriations bills--Agriculture, Interior, Energy and Water and Transportation--as well as the fiscal 2001 supplemental through the House by the end of June.

The first week back from the Memorial Day recess, the House Agriculture and Interior Appropriations subcommittees are scheduled to mark up their bills, and send them to full committee for markup the following week. Also during the week of June 11, the full committee plans to mark up subcommittee spending allocations--the so-called 302(b) allocations--for fiscal 2002, as well as the fiscal 2001 supplemental, while the Transportation and Energy and Water Appropriations subcommittees plan to mark up their respective bills.

During the week of June 18, the Transportation and Energy and Water appropriations bills are slated for full committee markup, while the supplemental and Agriculture bills are penciled in for floor votes. The week of June 25, the Interior, Energy and Water and Transportation spending bills are all scheduled for floor action while the VA-HUD, Foreign Operations, Commerce-Justice-State and District of Columbia appropriations measures are expected to be marked up in subcommittee. Appropriators also hope to file the supplemental conference report that week.

An equally breakneck pace is envisioned for July, as legislators return from the Independence Day recess the week of July 9 to face full committee markups of the Foreign Operations, VA-HUD, Commerce-Justice-State and District of Columbia bills, and subcommittee markup of the Treasury-Postal bill.

The week of July 16, the Treasury-Postal bill should go to full committee markup and the Legislative Branch bill to subcommittee markup, while the VA-HUD and Foreign Operations bills should head to the House floor.

The week of July 23, the House is scheduled to complete action on the Foreign Operations bill and then move to the Commerce-Justice-State and District of Columbia bills; the full committee plans to mark up the Legislative Branch that week. The last week before the August recess, the week of July 30, the Treasury-Postal and Legislative Branch bills are slated to be on the floor. Left until September are the Defense, Military Construction--neither of which can move until Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's review is completed this summer--and Labor-HHS bills.