Small Victories

Roll Call reports that Senate appropriators are starting to look at reining in spending in supplemental/emergency appropriations bills (subscription required). Depending on who's doing the counting, these measures are not typically added into the calculation of overall spending levels, and year-to-year changes in federal discretionary spending. For this reason, there's great incentive to push spending and policy changes into supplemental bills, which typically get less scrutiny than the regular 13 appropriations measures. While Roll Call reports explicitly on forcing the Administration to limit its ambitions in these measures, the same should be true of Congress, which often uses these same 'emergency' measures for pork-barrel spending.

Senate Targets Supplementals
April 17, 2006
By John Stanton,
Roll Call Staff

Senate appropriators have inserted language into the fiscal 2006 supplemental spending bill chastising the Bush administration for using the now twice-yearly “emergency war” supplementals as a shadow appropriations and policy process, warning the Senate will not consider future requests that do not include a full budget justification to appropriators.
Although budget hawks in the House and Senate have long criticized using the supplemental spending process and its attendant waivers from spending limits to prosecute the war on terror and campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, Senate leaders and rank-and-file Republicans and Democrats also have soured on the process.

Noting longstanding Appropriations Committee concerns with supplemental procurement spending requests by the military, the committee for the first time puts the administration on notice that “Congress will not be able to fully support [future] supplemental requests unless it is provided with the same detailed justification and program materials that it receives with the annual request,” according to the committee report.

A senior GOP aide said last week that Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and other leaders support the Appropriations Committee’s decision to seek a full accounting for future supplemental requests from the administration.

In fact, both House and Senate appropriators have repeatedly expressed concerns with how the Defense Department’s use of supplemental spending bills — which Congress has traditionally held to a lower level of expected spending justifications — to pay for either routine maintenance and procurement costs or projects and policies that have not received Congressional approval. Additionally, Members in both chambers, as well as members of the Senate’s GOP leadership, have become increasingly unwilling to allow the White House to use the supplemental process to keep the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan “off budget” and are instead insisting that it be accounted for as part of the normal appropriations process, Senate aides said...

Additionally, in at least one case, the White House has sought to use the supplementals to affect a controversial policy change without Congressional approval or input.

Specifically, buried in the massive supplemental request was a series of DOD funding proposals to build permanent military installations in Iraq and Afghanistan — none of which has been approved by either country’s government and all of which violate an explicit U.S. policy that only temporary construction is allowed. The committee rejected all of the White House requests that were deemed to violate the prohibition on permanent construction projects.

The White House and the Appropriations Committee could not be reached for comment.