Senate OKs domestic spending bill

Fight likely as measure holds $10 billion more than president wants

WASHINGTON - The Senate voted Tuesday to spend billions more on education, health care and jobs programs than President Bush said he will accept, setting up a budget fight with the administration.

The chamber voted 75-19 to spend about $10 billion, or 7 percent, more than Bush requested for college-tuition aid, medical research, special education, worker safety, heating subsidies for the poor and a host of other initiatives. The administration, citing the cost, has threatened to veto the plan.

Democrats scoffed at the complaints, saying the additional spending is equivalent to what the government spends each month on the war in Iraq.

"For five years, we have poured untold billions of taxpayers' dollars into schools, job programs and human services in Iraq," said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who heads the appropriations subcommittee that wrote the legislation. "It's time we looked after those same needs here in America."

Republicans also said the programs were suffering from funding shortages.

"We are out of fat," said Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the top Republican on the panel. "We are to the bone and beyond."

The bill would steer more than $4 million toward a handful of Arkansas facilities, including Jefferson Regional Medical Center in Pine Bluff and the Community Health Centers of Arkansas in North Little Rock. It would fund curriculum development at the Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock and the University of Central Arkansas in Conway.

The UAMS money would go toward genetic counseling and other health-care programs, the UCA money for a technology initiative.

With Tuesday's vote, the Senate has passed seven of the 12 annual bills that set federal spending for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. The House has passed all 12, but none has gone to a conference committee.

Late last month, Congress passed a stopgap-funding resolution that will keep the government running through Nov. 16.

Bush has threatened to veto most of the bills unless Democrats drop plans to spend about $23 billion more than he requested in his February budget proposal. About half of that additional funding would come in the $606 billion measure approved Tuesday.

The legislation includes $152 billion in funding that must be annually approved by Congress; the remainder is so-called mandatory spending.

The bill, which is the largest and most politically popular domestic appropriations bill, funds the departments of Education, Labor and Health and Human Services along with 14 other related agencies.

Senate Democrats said the debate will highlight the differences between the agendas of the two parties.

"It deals with our priorities," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada. "President Bush's priorities are simply not those of the American people."

The House has approved its own version of the legislation, so lawmakers must now reconcile the two measures.

The administration proposed cutting spending on the measure by about $3 billion or 2 percent. The Labor Department would take the biggest hit, with its budget cut by 6 percent. Education programs would be pared by 2 percent while health-care initiatives would get 1 percent less than last year, under the administration's plan.

Lawmakers voted to increase funding for medical research at the National Institutes of Health by 3.5 percent. The legislation would boost funding for Pell grants, which help low-income families send their children to college, by 6 percent.

Community health centers that treat large numbers of uninsured patients would get a 12 percent boost. The Social Security Administration would get an additional $275 million to contend with a backlog of 660,000 disability claims awaiting approval.

Lawmakers agreed to cut funding by 26 percent for the administration's efforts to promote abstinence, saying the programs' effectiveness remains in doubt.

Democrats made some concessions to the administration, including dropping provisions which had drawn a separate veto threat that would have loosened restrictions on federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research.

"We took it out because it was one less excuse for the president to talk about vetoing this bill," Reid said.

Democrats also made no attempt to end long-standing provisions limiting the circumstances under which government programs such as Medicaid will pay for an abortion. The legislation also retains a Republican-backed provision that bars agencies from discriminating against groups that oppose abortion rights.

Lawmakers turned down an attempt by Sen. David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, to expand such restrictions by barring groups such as Planned Parenthood that perform abortions from receiving federal grants. His amendment was rejected by a 52-41 vote.

In order to kill a proposal to create "injection rooms" in San Francisco where drug users could inject themselves under the supervision of nurses, lawmakers unanimously approved an amendment barring any money in the measure from going to cities that create such a facility.

Information for this article was contributed by Arkansas Democrat-Gazette staff.

Front Section, Pages 8 on 10/24/2007

Upcoming Events