Congress looks to provide $1.2 billion for VA in austere budget environment
Money is needed to achieve President Bush's amended funding request, announced this summer after embarrassing errors in VA budget projections were discovered.
Congress is moving to provide $1.225 billion for veterans' medical services outside fiscal 2006 discretionary spending limits, even as Republican leaders wrestle with the first serious effort to slow the growth of entitlement programs since 1997 and cut domestic appropriations below the previous year for the first time since the Reagan administration.
The new veterans' money is needed to achieve President Bush's own amended funding request, announced this summer after embarrassing errors in VA budget projections were discovered.
But Congress never adjusted its own discretionary spending cap to reflect the new numbers, making some budgetary sleight of hand necessary to remain within an $843 billion limit set earlier this year.
The $1.225 billion might end up with an "emergency" designation, meaning it would not be offset. How leaders handle restive conservatives on the matter will augur the debate over a much larger $7.1 billion avian flu preparedness bill in the next few weeks.
The White House did not include offsets for the bird flu request, over objections from House Budget Committee Chairman Jim Nussle, R-Iowa, and members of the conservative House Republican Study Committee, among others.
The addition would bring 2006 VA medical care spending to an estimated $22.5 billion -- or $2.5 billion more than Bush's initial February budget request.
"I think the House and Senate are very close to a final agreement on a budget number that would be significantly above the president's request," said House Military Quality of Life and Veterans Affairs Subcommittee ranking member Chet Edwards, D-Texas.
Many Republicans are still smarting over the massive VA funding shortfall that had the department and the Office of Management and Budget scrambling to cobble together a revised budget request.
Unanticipated numbers of veterans enrolling in the VA health care system, including those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, coupled with errors in estimating the costs of long-term care, led the White House to ask for an additional $2.952 billion.
Lawmakers appropriated $1.5 billion of that as part of the fiscal 2006 Interior spending bill, the first of 11 appropriations bills to be enacted this year.
Senate Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Appropriations Subcommittee Chairwoman Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, said negotiators are likely to include the remainder of the money in a $44.1 billion spending bill she will lead Senate negotiators on in conference, possibly on Thursday.
Final agreement is still pending, but talks were focused around designating $1.225 billion as "contingent emergency" funds, meaning they would not count against budget caps but the White House would have to certify the funds are necessary.
The rest of the money would be shifted from funds set aside for VA information technology accounts.
"That gets us to the $2.952 [billion] we promised," Hutchison said. Congressional aides said the real gap was closer to $3.6 billion, after factoring in unpopular legislative proposals the administration relied on in its budget estimates, such as new enrollment fees and co-payments for prescription drugs Congress has rejected.
Republican leaders are still plotting their budget endgame strategy, however, and there has been discussion of moving the $1.225 billion as a separate bill, perhaps as a vehicle for other, more contentious matters.
Similar calculations are slowing the $453.3 billion Defense appropriations bill, which has been discussed as a vehicle for items ranging from across-the-board cuts to the White House's request to reallocate existing funds for Hurricane Katrina-related costs.
But appropriators are pushing to move the Katrina bill separately, while avian flu funding might still hitch a ride on a $142.5 billion Labor-HHS bill. But that measure is attracting its own problems, such as the desire of Northeastern Republicans like Senate Labor-HHS Subcommittee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., to attach emergency low-income heating assistance funds.