White House threatens veto of supplemental spending bill

Frustrated by a lack of progress on the fiscal 2002 supplemental--and a growing list of Republican amendments seeking to cut its price tag--Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., filed late Tuesday for cloture on the legislation. "This has been a very unproductive day," lamented Daschle. "We have no choice but to accelerate debate and to bring this bill to a successful close."

Complicating matters for Daschle was an official White House statement that President Bush would veto the Senate bill if substantial changes were not made. Speaking at an afternoon news conference with Minority Leader Lott, Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels said the House-passed $28.8 billion supplemental was "all the nation can afford" and chided Democrats for adding even more money.

Among the specific White House complaints is $2.6 billion in unrequested homeland security funds, the bulk of which the administration said could not be spent in the remaining four months of the fiscal year. The White House also blasted the Senate for labeling various components of the bill as emergencies, even if they had nothing to do with homeland security.

In addition, the White House criticized language that would force the president to accept all the nondefense emergency funds in the bill or get nothing at all. "The Senate would require the president to waste taxpayers' dollars on low-priority, nonemergency items in order to access vital, high-priority, homeland security and recovery funding," according to the Statement of Administration Policy.

The White House also complained about language that would force the administration to release $34 million to the United Nations Population Fund and language that would require the homeland security director to be confirmed by the Senate.

Meanwhile, negotiations among Senate budget and appropriations leaders appeared to make some progress on efforts to add a so-called deeming resolution to the supplemental.

Daschle said negotiators had basically agreed to an overall spending figure for fiscal 2003 of approximately $770 billion, but no final deal had been reached on the package, which would also include budget enforcement mechanisms.

But Daniels threw cold water on those talks as well. Speaking to reporters, Daniels said the White House would not go along with a spending figure that high, preferring instead to stick with a level of $749 billion, as provided under the House budget resolution.

The Senate number assumes that a $10 billion defense contingency fund in the House resolution will be spent, while also proposing to spend $9 billion that both the House and the White House budget request earmarked for an accounting change.

"We will not agree to spending that twice," Daniels said about the accrual accounting issue.

The overall price of the Senate bill rose Tuesday to $31.4 billion after the Senate adopted an amendment by Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., to eliminate language in the bill that would have delayed loan guarantees for airlines beyond the end of the fiscal year. The item would cost $400 million.

In other budget developments, Daschle said he would not rule out the possibility of adding a debt limit increase to the supplemental, though he reiterated he would rather move it as a stand-alone bill.

He also said he was amenable to moving a debt-limit bill above the $350 billion level he had mentioned before recess. He said at the time that he thought $350 billion would be enough to keep the federal government's borrowing authority in check through the end of the year. But now, "that unfortunately is not the case," he said.