WASHINGTON (KRT) — House Republican leaders tucked a payoff into last week’s emergency anti-terrorism spending bill: $90 million in special Medicare reimbursements for hospitals in three congressional districts — two in Pennsylvania, the other in New York.
House Speaker Dennis Hastert, it turns out, ordered the payoff in exchange for the lawmakers’ votes to give President Bush greater trade negotiating powers.
For all the talk that the Bush administration would bring frugality to Washington, the truth is that spending — both large and in pork-barrel doses — is still the craze. And it shows: Government spending is back in the red, Congress has yet to pass a federal budget to discipline its outlays, and the nation’s legal debt limit — the maximum the government can borrow — is about to burst.
The government’s mounting deficits threaten such bipartisan goals as low-cost prescription drugs for the elderly and shoring up Social Security for the retiring baby boom generation. Bush’s commitment to end deficit spending in two years is proving elusive, alarming Wall Street investors.
They’re unlikely to be reassured when the Senate returns from its Memorial Day recess on Tuesday to take up its version of the emergency spending bill.
The Senate’s $31 billion assortment of defense and homeland security outlays is $2 billion more than the House passed in May and nearly $4 billion more than the president requested.
The legislation has become a test of fiscal discipline that both Congress and the Bush administration. Lawmakers are already tempting themselves by including an array of non-emergency pork-barrel goodies aimed at helping out select constituencies back home. And Bush, eager to get on with the war on terrorism, may be willing to pay the extra price.
At the White House, “They do a lot of talking about the need for reduced spending, but they’ve actually done very little to reduce spending,” said Joe Theissen, a former U.S. Chamber of Commerce lobbyist and now head of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan fiscal watchdog group. “In an election year, with clearly some of this money needed, the White House has been reticent to say it will veto the thing.”
Economists are worried, too, about this year’s likely budget deficit. Once, 2002 was expected to chalk up a small surplus. Now it’s expected to end as much as $140 billion into the red, pushed down by an unexpected slump in federal tax revenues.
Just last year, the Congressional Budget Office predicted a whopping 10-year surplus of $5.6 trillion. The latest forecast, issued in March, chopped that projection down to $681 billion and predicted at least three straight years of deficits. The reasons are Bush’s $1.35 trillion tax cut last year, the economic downturn and increased spending in the aftermath of Sept. 11.
The red ink promises political finger pointing, though neither side is exactly pure. Twelve Senate Democrats voted for the tax cuts last year. And when it comes to spending, Bush two weeks ago disappointed fiscal conservatives in his party by signing a Democrat-inspired farm bill that will cost $190 billion over 10 years.
The fiscal picture is gloomy enough that the administration wants Congress’ permission to borrow more money by raising the debt ceiling. No one doubts that Congress ultimately will acquiesce, but Democrats want to use the opportunity to mount a full-throated assault on Bush’s tax cut.
Still ahead is the annual rite of passing appropriation bills — the 13 pieces of legislation that finance all the major functions of government except for Social Security and Medicare.
But first, lawmakers would like to adopt a budget that sets spending limits for those appropriations. Right now the Republican-controlled House has settled on $759 billion, including $10 billion in anti-terrorism money that Bush could use at his discretion. Democrats, who control the Senate by one vote, want nearly $10 billion more.
Senate majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., would like to use the emergency anti-terrorism spending bill as leverage to secure that higher number. “If we can agree on numbers, and lock in place a ceiling, that would be real progress,” he said before leaving for the Memorial Day recess.
House fiscal conservatives, already wary of big spending on items such as the farm bill, are bound to balk, setting up a confrontation in the House.
“There’s more momentum on the part of fiscal conservatives since the farm bill passed,” said Rep. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., a leading budget cutter in the House. “We’re saying, ‘you know, what we really need to do is tighten our belts here.’”
Not everyone is buying it all the time.
The deal in which Speaker Hastert won three lawmakers’ votes to give Bush expanded trade authority, for example, sent Medicare bonanzas to hospitals in the districts of
Pennsylvania Republicans Phil English and Don Sherwood and New York Republican Sue Kelly.
The $90 million they’ll get comes from shaving Medicare reimbursements elsewhere, however. Initially, that was to have included hospitals in the district of Rep. Charles Rangel of Harlem, senior Democrat on the powerful Ways and Means Committee, balked.
“Is a child that is sick in one area more important than another child because of the political persuasion of their representative?” he protested on the House floor.
The New York and Pennsylvania payoffs survived after Hastert pledged “no deleterious affect for other hospitals in the New York City” metropolitan area. Everyone else will still have to pony up.
Self-described “pork busters” such as Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., are preparing to air other favors in the Senate’s counterterrorism bill, including $3.7 million earmarked for health-related institutions in the states of six Senate appropriators.
The bill had barely landed on the Senate floor before McCain went after Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, the ranking Republican on the Appropriations Committee, over the relevance of a $5 million loan program for fisheries.